The American right has taken to attacking Obama in a manner fitting of what the late historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics.” Within this framework, extremists on the right (and some on the left) appropriate conspiracy theory as their primary lens through which to view the political system. Nowhere is this clearer than in recent attacks on Obama and the Democrats for their secret “socialism.” Rush Limbaugh is one of the leaders in this charade. He recently warned that a failure to vote Republicans into a majority status for the House and Senate will result in the end of America as we know it. In Limbaugh’s words: “you can either have Obama and the Democrats or America. You can’t have both.”
His website warns of the administration’s policies, which threaten to “destroy the U.S. private sector… And, look, in just a little over a year and a half, look at what's happened to jobs, look at what has happened to the creation of wealth, look at what has happened to economic activity, innovation, entrepreneurism.”
Limbaugh is fond of citing Karl Marx as an inspirational figure for the Obama administration. Limbaugh explains that, when it comes to the Obama administration’s policies and their roots, “Karl Marx did all the heavy lifting here. There's no innovation in this theory. It's all from the communist manifesto. It's all from the socialists. They haven't had to do anything but try to implement it.”
Limbaugh has clearly never bothered to read Marx, something that should surprise no one familiar with the classic theorist. Had he engaged in works like the Communist Manifesto, Limbaugh would know that Marx predicted communist revolution could not take place without a major social revolution accompanied by the crumbling of the capitalist system. Clearly, no such revolution has taken place, as anyone with a pulse can say. What Americans got, rather than a grassroots uprising (or even an elite directed one), was a reinstatement of corporate capitalist interests in the form of the bank bailout, corporate friendly (and health care industry supported) health care reform, and a series of “financial reforms” that are largely supported by Wall Street, and constructed by an Obama economic team that themselves came from Wall Street. Admittedly, some social welfare programs were passed as well, but the intensity of the Democrats’ commitment to strengthening social welfare programs is clearly on the decline when compared to past regimes (a la FDR and LBJ). What is socialist about the decline of the welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism (as a foundation for both parties’ policies) is anyone’s guess, although this hasn’t stopped Limbaugh and others on the right from warning about Marxist Armageddon.
Limbaugh is so ignorant about the definition of socialism (a position he shares with the Tea Party) that he actually thinks FDR’s New Deal is synonymous with Marxism and Leninism, as he recently claimed on his radio program. Of course, those who know anything about FDR are aware that he was the savior of capitalism, rather than its destroyer. As capitalists go, he was truly insightful, understanding that basic social welfare concessions such as Public Works, Social Security, the right to unionize, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children were absolutely necessary to prevent further disenfranchisement of the masses with a system that had little to offer them at a time when unemployment neared one third of the population.
FDR understood that progressive social welfare based initiatives were needed, not only to stimulate economic demand (through the providing of monetary subsidies to the working class, which would then be pumped into the economy), but also to ensure that these individuals did not violently rise up to overthrow capitalism because they had been forgotten by the system. Limbaugh, the classic example of an ignorant capitalist (contrasted with FDR’s relatively forward looking capitalism), obviously doesn’t understand any of the lessons learned by FDR. If he did, he would understand that social welfare capitalists are the greatest friends of capitalism at times when the economy is in crisis, unemployment is on the rise, and people are being thrown out of their homes in record numbers.
Hofstadter understood very well the paranoid delusions that drove many on the American right (and the right abroad). He warned of the “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” driving the minds of many in conservative America. He spotlighted the “systematized delusions of persecution,” and the demagoguery of those screaming about attempts “by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government…the modern right wing…feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals, the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers.”
These insights, although written in the 1950s, are as relevant today as they were in Hofstadter’s day. While Hofstadter was worried about the extremism of McCarthyism and Goldwater Republicans, his concerns can just as easily be applied to today’s Tea Party and Republican supporters, who drone on about how they “want their country back” and how the country “can’t last another year” with Democratic “socialists” in control of the White House and Congress.
No one with any knowledge of history should be surprised at the ignorance emanating from right-wing circles today. Just as the right of yesteryear attacked FDR for his “socialism” (a.k.a. his rescue of capitalism), today’s reactionaries warn about Obama’s dissolution of the private sector, conveniently and ignorantly ignoring the fact that there may very well not be a private banking sector if it were not for the dramatic interventions of Obama (along with other Democrats in Republicans) in saving the “too big to fail” banks in 2008. Such is the way of things with ignorant ingrates. When education becomes a vice in American culture, one is bound to see a growing intertwining of arrogance, ignorance, and extremism among those who view facts not as essential in understanding reality, but as unnecessary roadblocks getting in the way of their hate and fear mongering.
The great travesty is that the American right can't read the writing on the wall: Obama will not go down in history as the menacing "socialist" threatening to destroy capitalism. Rather he'll be remembered as the quintessential corporate socialist. As a vulgar (corporate) socialist, he doesn't believe that the point of government is to redistribute resources from the top down, rather the flow is the other way. American taxpayers' proper role is funding the power of a state that redistributes resources from the bottom up. This may have been far less the case in the past, with officials such as FDR, JFK, and LBJ supporting genuine reforms that took tax dollars from the rich and provided for social welfare programs from the poor. But those days are mostly gone. Obama's no FDR or LBJ. His modest expansion of Medicaid was over shadowed by major boons for the pharmaceutical, hospital, private health practioner, and insurance industries. He has talked about cutting Social Security, rather than strengthening it. He abandoned the Employee Free Choice Act, rather than strengthening the right of workers to organize. If this is socialism, I'd hate to see what capitalism looks like.
Political Scientist Larry Bartels argues in his book Unequal Democracy that there are signfiicant differences between the Democratic and Republican Parties in light of the formers' willingness to strengthen social welfare programs and the latters' complete contempt for them. Historically there was much truth to Bartels' claim, but it is become relatively less tenable in recent years, with the rise of "Blue Dog" conservative Democrats and Clinton and Obama administrations committed to "ending welfare as we know it" and "governing from the center." Such approaches explicitly admit to disinterest in strengthening the welfare state.
While programs benefitting the masses under these regimes are passed (in the case of the minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credit under Clinton and the expansion of Medicaid, the 2009 stimulus, the extension of unemployment benefits, and the recent $26 billion in aid to state schools under Obama), they are increasingly difficult to get through Congress and are fewer and further between than past expansions of the welfare state. The minimum wage has been allowed to deteriorate in recent decades, for example, while the stimulus was far weaker than many economists were calling for due to Democrats' opposition to "big government" spending.
In short, the Democratic Party is moving further to the right, rather than lurching toward "socialism." Not that we should have expected anything else from America's neoliberal bi-partisan system. Expecting that any real move toward socializing health care or nationalizing the banks would come from the top down or from Obama and Congressional Democrats was always naive. Such initiatives need bottom up, grassroots support to become reality. Still, having conceded this basic truth, we should be careful to reject conservative falsehoods on the nature of Obama and corporatist Democrats. Americans should be vigilant in spotlighting Democratic moves to the right whenever they hear propaganda warning about impending Democratic doom and the dissolution of the private sector and capitalism.
Enter the Right Wing’s “Revolutionary” Politics
Closely associated with the conspiratorial paranoia of the right on “Obama socialism” is the increased advocacy of bottom up “revolution” from the reactionary right. Reactionary media pundits are playing with fire when they call on reactionaries to rise up against the Democratic Party and its “Marxist” agenda. Conservative radio and television hosts are increasingly warning of a grassroots rebellion and uprising – one that is being led by those supposedly disenfranchised with liberals’ and Democrats "encroachment" upon private property in the pursuit of "leftist revolution." The “solution” provided by these pundits is an equivalent revolution, but one led by the NRA, militia groups, and other right-wing extremists.
The support for renewed civil war comes in many forms. Rush Limbaugh has argued in opposition to the Los Angeles Arizona boycott that this “is the kind of stuff that starts civil wars,” and that such provocations are “not coincidental. It is not accidental” in that it fits into the larger agenda of liberal America.
Reactionary radio host Michael Savage warned in a racist diatribe to his listeners that “we’re going to have a revolution in this country.” He condemned the creeping assault of liberal America, which is “pushing the wrong people around…this is not going to go on in this country much longer…the rage has reached a boil.” In typical right-wing racist flare, Savage explained that revolution was inevitable “if we keep having these schmucks running for office catering to the multicultural people who are destroying the culture of this country.”
Perhaps most disturbing was Glenn Beck’s mid-year appeal to NRA members to rise up against the alleged threat of liberal Democrats. Speaking at the NRA convention, Beck’s comments were a classic example of Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” in right wing politics. Beck complained that he was tired of the American public “not getting’ it” when it came to recognizing the dangers they face. In serving up his audience “a touch of the truth,” Beck blamed “the Marxists and the unions” for America’s economic woes.
Beck attempted to create outlandish associations between Nazi Germany – which he referred to as a “national socialist workers union” – and “giant government” in the U.S. and Western Europe, as defined through social welfare spending for the poor and union protections for American workers. These attempted links are of course absurd to anyone even remotely familiar with German history (Beck apparently isn’t). Hitler’s national agenda was explicitly based upon eliminating the threat of the left to the authoritarian state and the capitalist system. Hitler himself was fond of warning that Marxism was “systematically” committed to “hand[ing] the world over to the Jews.”
As explored in great detail in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Nazi Germany was openly contemptuous of the existence of labor unions. The Nazi “Charter of Labor” for example, stated that total power over workers was to be held by employers and private business owners. That charter created a system whereby employers were expected to “make the decisions for the employees and laborers in all matters concerning enterprise.” Trade unions, unsurprisingly, were abolished, as was any sort of legal state protections for the right to strike and collective bargaining.
None of this apparently matters to Beck, who warned of an already existing Nazi-esque, labor union-run, socialist promoting, welfare supporting Democratic Party system. Beck cautioned NRA members that “this country will never fail by an outside force” but will “only be destroyed if we destroy ourselves.” He lamented the “free love, smoking dope, having sex in the mud hippies” who “are running our country now” and who are “putting pressure on our country from the inside.” These individuals, Beck shouted, “are not Democrats, these are Marxist revolutionaries.” The American party system, he ranted, is “being rotted from the inside” by Obama’s campaign for “change.”
Presenting himself as an everyday joe, Beck rolled up his sleeves; shedding his jacket, he reminded his audience of the importance of maintaining “a well-regulated militia." He followed that comment up by informing his audience that “you might need one because the government’s not doing its job.”
We should be careful not to overestimate the threat present in the theatrical rhetoric above. No sane American (or person for that matter) thinks that Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, or Glenn Beck are going to be playing a cutting edge or leading role in a violent conservative uprising and revolution. Still, their ranting and raving may yet incite enough militia fundamentalists and other militants on the right that individual acts of violence may become more common in protests of Obama and Democratic “socialism” and “encroachment” on individual property rights. More than one-quarter of Tea Partiers, it should be remembered, claim that the use of violence is acceptable in promotion of conservative change.
Right-wing pundits are fond of linking redistribution of wealth with Marxism. The claim itself is pure ignorance, considering that progressive taxation (in which the rich pay a larger percentage of taxes) is not the same thing as expropriation of private property and centralization of the means of production by the state (two central tenets of Marxism). Redistribution in the form of a few percentage point increase in taxes for the wealthy – to be used for increased welfare spending for the poor through programs such as food stamps and Medicaid – is not the same thing as socialism, and anyone who tries to convince you that it is doesn’t know anything about revolutionary leftist politics.
Still, we should not discount the reality that many on the right are willing to believe most anything said by reactionary pundits, no matter how absurd. Repeat a lie long enough and with enough passion, and many who don't know any better will accept it. This gullibility on the part of rightists in “middle America” is a cause of major concern for those worried about the growth of political extremism and violence in the U.S. today. Sadly, the paranoid style on the right is as strong as its ever been.
Anthony DiMaggio is the co-author of the forthcoming Crashing the Tea Party, with Paul Street (from Paradigm Publishers, spring 2011). He has taught U.S. and Global Politics at Illinois State University and North Central College, and is the author of When Media Goes to War (2010) and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008). He can be reached at: [email protected]
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