OK. Maybe I’ll leave Al out of this one.
Rove says that any person to the left of the right wing of the Republican Party is a person who gives aid and comfort to terrorists. Bill O’Reilly calls for the tepid liberals at Air America to be locked up as “traitors.” And the eliminationist rhetoric from the right grows, gaining acceptance and credibility.
I think every leftist goes through a period of thinking the fascist clampdown is just around the corner. I did. I was 14 years old. After I grew out of it, I derided people who thought that way.
But watching Dick Durbin go down in mild flames this week, I decided -reluctantly – that the over-under for the arrival of the crisis is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of October 2005. (You can all come back and mock me when I’m wrong. I’d be delighted.) There is a kind of ugliness gathering on the right that I have not seen in US politics before.
Then again, I have never seen as energized an opposition to the ruling party either.
I am no huge fan of the government of the United States of America. I love my country, but the government could vanish or be radically transformed and it would likely leave what I love about my country essentially intact. The culture, the landscape, the more-or-less good nature of the the average resident.
The people in power are pushing to eliminate all those things, however, and they thus compel my reluctant support for the US government as it was before they seized power. It was an evil, lying, murderous institution with a legacy of slavery and genocide, but it was my evil, lying, murderous institution with a legacy of slavery and genocide. And it had a Constitution that enabled people like me to work to ameliorate the worst of the evil, to correct the worst of the lies.
Here is my source of hope. The right is going after the targets of opportunity. It is a Darwinian process. One by one, they attack the opponents who will cave. Who will be left?
Those of us who will not cave.
It occurs to me that the endless infighting on the left may well serve to make us stronger after all. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond opines that one of the reasons Europe conquered the world is that Europeans had spent the previous two millennia in warfare between adjoining towns. They were just damned good at it by the sixteenth century.
All that time we leftists have spent in circular firing squads must have sharpened our aim.
I won’t go so far as to say that I look forward to the right taking on an actual fighting left activist, rather than labeling moderates as “leftists” and dogpiling them. But I will say that when they do, I suspect they are in for a rather spectacular bloody nose.
(Cross-posted at Creek Running North.)