More GOP Paranoia

As part of its push back after the stinging electoral set backs it experienced in November, 2008, the Republican Party has tried to depict the Democrats as a party controlled by extremists. Barack Obama has similarly been depicted as not an American and as somewhere between a communist and a Nazi in his political leanings. Truth be told, of course, it is the GOP and not the Democrats who are the ones controlled by extremists. In the GOP's case, it has largely become a group dominated by religious extremists and racists - which is a large part of the reason moderates defected from the party in droves. A new column by George Packer in the New Yorker accurately looks at the more pervasive mental derangement and paranoia that are now prerequisites to being a Republican. Here are some highlights:

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A few days ago, I wrote that the “paranoid style” has been a continual temptation and danger for modern conservatives (whom Hofstadter called “pseudo-conservatives,” owing to their radicalism in wanting to overturn existing laws and institutions). Several readers expressed disbelief that I didn’t mention their left-wing counterparts, . . . There’s plenty of criticism of Klein, Moore, Nicholson Baker, and other paranoid stylists of the left. . . I didn’t mention them in discussing Hofstadter and the current reaction to Obama for this reason: Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck have far more power in the Republican Party (it sometimes seems to include veto power) than Klein, Lee, and Moore have in the Democratic Party.

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The reasons are complex, but I would list these: the evangelical and occasionally messianic fervor that animates a part of the Republican base; the atmosphere of siege and the self-identification of conservatives as insurgents even when they monopolized political power; the influence of ideology over movement conservatives, and their deep hostility to compromise; the fact that modern conservatism has been a movement, which modern liberalism has not.

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Goldberg would have even more basis for his complaint if I were the author of a book called “Conservative Fascism” and he were not the author of a book called “Liberal Fascism.”