"Teabagging," "Paranoid Rightwingers" and poking the wolverine with a sharp stick.

OK, folks, first go here and be sure to read the whole thing, though you may gag.

Then, go here. to see how such language is employed against you.

Finally, here is the link to the piece below, and you will find my response to it after that.

September 13, 2009 at 19:06:16

The Paranoid Rightwing

By James Brett



For all the hoo-rah generated by the back-bencher Joe Wilson of South Kallikacky this past week one might think that there is a vast movement afoot, some kind of new (old) politics spreading around among Americans, unsuspecting and otherwise. In the aftermath of Wilson's "You lie(, ... boy)!" outburst during the speech of President Obama to a Joint Session of Congress on Health Care Reform, you will have read how utterly wrong about his facts was Rep. Wilson, or, if you were reading closely, you might have read comments on pundits who said that overriding public health concerns will dictate that federal funds will be spent on illegal aliens, if they are posing a health risk to the rest of us, particularly in the food processing industry and in public schools. The real issue about Wilson was the inappropriate anger and consternation that overcame him, although a cursory review of his past suggests that Wilson's best mental efforts were never much to crow about. Wilson does represent a strain of American thinking that is highly concentrated in his home locale and gives rise to authentically bad behaviors from time to time.

But, the movement afoot is nowhere near a mass movement and it is not a new form of politics. It is a retread version of an old politics as journalist Max Blumenthal in his new book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party points out in a quotation from Eric Hoffer's The True Believer ...

"A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises," he wrote, "but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence." The true believer was at his core an ineffectual man with no capacity for self-fulfillment. Only the drama provided by a mass movement gave him purpose. "Faith in a holy cause," Hoffer wrote, "is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves."

The weakness of the human spirit portrayed by Hoffer was the engine used for the rise of the Brown Shirt Nazis in Germany.

Blumenthal goes on to describe this weakness and willingness to trade the anxieties of freedom for something else less demanding. He quotes Eric Fromm

Ten years before Hoffer published his book, a social psychologist and psychoanalyst named Erich Fromm identified and analyzed the character structure of people "eager to surrender their freedom," who sought personal transcendence through authoritarian causes and figureheads.

In fact people whose routine lives are overturned by their own inattention to the progress of change, who wake up one day and find that a person of mixed black and white blood has become President of the United States and that cotton is no longer king, that "separate facilities insure inequality," and that their own current financial situation is iffy at best, like

"... millions of ordinary Germans "instead of wanting freedom . . . sought for ways of escape from it."

The question arises in the current situation about multiple causes of anxiety and, I believe, any cure for the situation must address the Brown Shirts on multiple fronts. Racism and economic instability count high on the list of issues, but beneath virtually all of the causes there is a fundamental problem with external authority, in most cases (I would be willing to bet), resulting from primordial, that is, "childhood", abuse and unsuccessful attempts to declare and achieve personal freedom from an abusive parent or other adult. Students of the "rape complex" of the American South understand how insidious and pervasive that horror was for the white population that "lost everything" in the Civil War. Nothing could have done more damage than the self-righteous reconstruction imposed on that wasted land, but having said that, the ground was fertile with the guilt of pervasive human slavery, a congenital deformity of the body politic which leaves us with a movement centered on the very region where human values were sold down the river and native Americans forced down a trail of tears that will not dry.

Rep. Wilson is heir to all of this. He may think himself a 21st century politician, but like all people who hold tight to a familiar grief and trauma, he is most clearly a 19th century person, trapped in his paranoia about progress, fundamentally a hollow tree, understanding that the winds of change will soon enough knock it down. But Wilson is different from Jindal in Lousiana, whose tradition is a more cynical use and abuse of the proto-Brown Shirts of the region and elsewhere. Sarah Palin, like Jindal, believes half the stuff she says, and is willing to exaggerate for effect. People like Beck and Limbaugh, on the other hand, are mayflies feasting on a riot of money that comes from the most cynical folk of them all, the wealthy corporatists (yes, Fascists) whose interest in American democracy is to keep it at bay, consuming its own, freeing them up to insulate themselves as completely as possible from the vagaries of normal economic life.

The modern American Brown Shirts are a rabble, in other words, a mixed bag of people with a common belief that history does not favor them, that natural law is writ by tooth and claw, that people who participate in the building of a newer, better future are damned fools. Beck is a Brown Shirt, who will be a Black Shirt in the new order he envisions. Limbaugh already has his Black Shirt and has passed from merely feeding from the situation to an arrogance of pretense. He imagines his role to be righteous now, misunderstanding the hesitancy of the real politicians to disturb his audience of paranoid, mentally crippled, traumatized, and hopeless.

The point of Blumenthal's "Gomorrah" is that the rise of the Brown Shirts is partly the result of a failure on the part of liberal Republicans to deal with their fringe and partly that, now it is a part of the Republican Culture, its virulence could shatter the Party once and for all.

Then there are people like you and me and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC who are uncomfortable with the idea of there being no "loyal opposition." We hope (sort of) that the Republican Party will not be let by its saner members to crumble of its own internal rot. But, like every other person who faces an unknown, we (and millions like us) will choose that familiar "Republican" label for genuine conservatism together with the horrors of the inheritance from the current Party, rather than trusting someone from the real conservative middle to start again. If there is a reason to resurrect real conservatism with appropriate controls over its root metaphor—FEAR—then it will happen, spontaneously and not without trauma, like any birth (or rebirth).

James R. Brett, Ph.D. taught Russian History before becoming an academic administrator in faculty research administration. His academic interests are the modern period of Russian History since Peter the Great and the history of science
history of ideas, particularly Marxism and classical liberalism, but also psychology and consciousness studies. He has just established a new website-Iron Mountain. He is a frequent contributor to other liberal and progressive blogs and is the founder of and contributor to The American Liberalism Project.

The business end of a wolverine.

I posted this at Brett's website.

Let me introduce you to the Three Percent.

Herr Doktor Brett,

“Cherish your enemies. They teach you the best lessons.” — Ho Chi Minh.

I used to have a dog that, when confronted by a mirror, saw an enemy and growled and barked at his own image. It is interesting how the collectivist left looks in a mirror and sees characteristics that it imputes to its opponents.

To me, it is the height of irony that a collectivist should quote Eric Hoffer and Eric Fromm in trying to explain individualists who merely want to be left alone by a predatory government on the make.

It is you who have selected a Fuhrer to follow, not us. We have no cult of personality for a leader, for indeed we have no leader. What GOP "leaders" commanded our lukewarm allegiance at the voting booth have long since discredited themselves. We worship no one but the God Who gave us the Judeo-Christian ethic that the Founders' Republic was based upon.

If we are united by one idea it is the very uncollectivist notiom, LEAVE US THE HELL ALONE. "Eager to surrender their freedom"? Where in the hell do you get the data to deduce that about us? We are now to the point of demanding our freedom ourselves. And we are very cognizant that with liberty comes the responsibilty for, as Jefferson put, "the fatigues of supporting it." We do not seek to tell you what to do. I wish I could say that it wasn't the other way around, though.

Take gun rights for an example. Your side has been pushing us back from the free exercise of our traditional right to bear arms for 75 years now. But let me tell you something. We are through being pushed back.

And when you call us "paranoid" or your intellectual buddies call us "teabaggers," that makes us all the less likely to conform to your next demand upon us.

Insulting us with a name that is a crude sexual innuendo is in itself stupid, for as you must know, our side is the one with the firearms.

My Michigan farmer grandfather once told me, when trying to explain why he did not argue too vociferously with my grandmother:

“Son, let me tell you something. You don’t poke a wolverine with a sharp stick unless you want your balls ripped off.”

This is good advice for anyone, but especially for you, yes, you personally, right now.

This is a conflict of world-views. It will not end until one side or the other prevails in its vision of what we view as our inalienable, God-given rights to liberty, property and the Founders’ republic of the rule of law, not man.

It happens that your side won the last two federal elections and thus you believe you can now dictate to the rest of us what we shall do regardless of the Constitution or the rule of law as hitherto understood. But you mistake, this is not about donkeys versus elephants. We despise the GOP almost as much as you do. What you are seeing in the Tea Parties, the town halls and in the 9-12 march is a true bottom-up mass movement of people who have seen the corrupt failure of the GOP for what it is and are now making their own arrangements to protect their liberty and their lives.

The fact that the GOP is desperately trying to parachute into the locomotive cab of a train which has left them behind at the station should tell you something. If, that is, your world-view allowed you to pay attention to facts that contradict your cognitive dissonance.

The thing is, we’ve been studying your side for years in a futile attempt to get across our POV by arguments concerning fact, history, logic, law, common sense, even appealing to your own self-interest. (That business about having your balls ripped off, don’t you know.)

We understand your side far better than you understand ours, reduced as you seemingly are to juvenile sexual innuendo, ascribing our positions to mental illness, and conflating our positions to suit your world-view.

One other thing Ho Chi Minh could have told you. Don’t expect your enemies to be the stupid cartoon cardboard cut-outs that you create in your own imaginations. And don’t expect them to react as you do.

You believe that just because the government tells you to do something upon pain of arrest, that it will happen. This is because you extrapolate from your own cowardice, knowing that you yourself have no principles that are worth dying for.

You will find with us that this will not work as you expect.

We are the Three Percent.

We will not disarm.

You cannot convince us.

You cannot intimidate us.

We are not going away.

Indeed, we will not be pushed back one more inch.

You may try to kill us, if you think you can.

But remember, we’ll shoot back.

You may think that this is paranoid and crazy.

But if we are crazy, we’re still armed to the teeth so that just complicates your problem.

The next move is yours.

I suggest you back away slowly, unless you want your balls ripped off.

But, if you are not smart enough to ascribe what I have said to a fair statement of an honest difference of opinion, then I suggest you buy a firearm.
You’re gonna need it.

And if you think civil war cannot come to this country again, you are whistling past the graveyard of history.

Mike Vanderboegh
Pinson, AL