Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America

by John P. Avlon

  Bush Derangement Syndrome, though, was slower to boil than Obama Derangement Syndrome. In the wake of 9/11, the far left’s insatiable appetite for moral equivalency made little impact, but, of course, the blame-America-first crowd did their best. Two weeks after the attacks, nearly 10,000 assembled for a protest in Washington, inevitably titled the Anti-War and Anti-Racist Rally, to imbibe Wingnut wisdom from such as the Reverend Graylan Hagler, senior minister of the Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, D.C. (“Today we do not stand with any terrorists, whether it is the United States or foreign terrorists”22), or Stephanie Simard from the Women’s Fight Back Union (“Millions of women and children around the world wake up to this kind of terror every single day. And this terror is made in the United States. . . . Bush’s program is anti-women, anti-gay, and anti a lot of us.”) I wonder how she would have liked the Taliban by comparison.

  The Iraq war proved a potent recruitment tool. Michael Moore’s 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11 mixed provocative footage of Bush’s missteps and malapropisms along with a full range of conspiracy theories concerning the Bush family’s ties to the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family, documenting a case of blood for oil. It won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2006, the movie Death of a President, a mockumentary of sorts, purported to follow the investigation of the unsolved assassination of George W. Bush and the subsequent expansion of the Patriot Act by President Dick Cheney. It won the International Critics Prize at the Toronto Film Festival.

  The left-Wingnut netroots paraded their Bush hate, such as this post at the leading left-wing political Web site Daily Kos: “I know hate is a strong word. But I do hate the man. I hate him.”23 Groups like Code Pink staged “die-ins,” screamed during congressional hearings, protested military recruitment stations and attempted citizen’s arrests of administration officials. A collection of memorable signs from the anti-Bush protests gives you a sense of the derangement: “Bush = Satan,” “Save Mother Earth, Kill Bush,” “Hang Bush for War Crimes,” “End the Illegal Occupation in the White House,” “Bush is the Disease, Death is the Cure,” “Bush is the only Dope worth Shooting,” “Death to Extremist Christian Terrorist Pig Bush,” and “Kill Terrorists, Bomb There [sic] House, Kill Bush, Bomb His F—-in House.” The “s” in Bush’s name was routinely turned into a swastika on protest posters and the tell-tale tiny mustache drawn upon his image.

  But Bush-as-Hitler comparisons did not just gain currency on protest placards—this was Café Society stuff. The 2005 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, British playwright Harold Pinter, penned a statement saying, “The Bush administration is the most dangerous force that has ever existed. It is more dangerous than Nazi Germany because of the range and depth of its activities and intentions worldwide.”24 Liberal author and one-time Al Gore clothing consultant Naomi Wolf offered comparisons of the Bush administration to the Nazi regime in her book The End of America (an assertion benignly recounted in an interview on NPR titled “Naomi Wolf Likens Bush to Hitler”25). MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann called Bush a fascist on air,26 while Moveon.org took heat for an online advertising contest where two contributors offered Bush = Hitler comparisons.

  Legendary singer, civil rights leader and Hollywood elder statesman Harry Belafonte traveled to visit Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez and announced: “No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we’re here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people . . . support your revolution.”27 Antiwar protester and mother of fallen soldier Cindy Sheehan became a brief media sensation for camping out near Bush’s Crawford ranch—a status not considerably diminished when she followed Belafonte’s lead by calling President Bush “a bigger terrorist than Osama bin Laden.”28

  When Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams of Northern Ireland gave the keynote speech to the International Women’s Peace Conference in Dallas, she said, “Right now, I could kill George Bush, no problem. No, I don’t mean that. I mean—how could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that.”29 She chuckled a bit in her confessional Irish brogue, and members of the audience laughed. Not that Dallas has any history with presidential assassinations.

  Democrats didn’t seem allergic to these outbursts, they seemed instead subtly to encourage them for partisan gain—just as they accuse Republicans of doing now. Bush Derangement Syndrome was so widespread on the left—and Bush so broadly unpopular by the end of his term—that it failed to inspire much mainstream media outrage. It wasn’t considered news.

  But after one Bush-bashing protest in September 2005, Fox News host Sean Hannity had an admirable if unusual moment of clarity: “The president was called every name in the book—from a terrorist to the Führer,” he said, shaking his head, and then turned his attention to one of the protest’s liberal organizers. “If you really believe what you’re saying, you need to distance yourself from the extremists that are running this thing.”30

  It was good advice—then and now.

  We are caught in a pendulum swing of hyper-partisanship. The extremes echo and incite each other, confirming their side’s worst stereotypes while providing the most potent recruitment poster for the other party. Politics follows the lines of physics—every action creates an equal and opposite reaction.

  Wingnuts on the right are intimidating responsible Republicans into silence. The hunt for heretics has become a hobby for right-wing activists in an effort to drive all centrists out of the GOP. They are burning down the big tent. The roots of this new radicalism can be found in the anger of an increasingly regional party facing a deep diversity deficit, reflecting an historic irony: Republicans are now captive to the southern conservatives their party was founded to oppose. The Party of Lincoln is in danger of becoming the Party of Limbaugh.

  But Democrats have their own extremes to contend with, and they’re in control of Congress, provoking a backlash by pursuing a more liberal and narrowly partisan agenda than President Obama promised in the campaign. Invigorated by the unprecedented growth of government spending, the liberal House leadership and their netroot allies are pressuring the president to abandon any outreach to Republicans—despite the fact it was this hyper-partisan approach to politics that caused independents to abandon President Bush.

  As the two parties become more polarized, the ranks of independent voters have rocketed to a historic high since Inauguration Day—reaching more than 40 percent 31—while Democrats and Republicans have declined dramatically. Independents are now the largest and fastest-growing segment of the electorate.

  Independents are fiscal conservatives but social progressives. They more accurately reflect centrist national attitudes than either party’s base: the 11 percent of Americans who describe themselves as liberal Democrats or the 15 percent who call themselves conservative Republicans.32 Independents care more about the country than the success of any one political party. Their growth amid a bailout backlash is evidence that President Obama’s election did not represent a liberal ideological mandate, as House Democrats and their partisan cheerleaders might wish—there is no blank check for spending or the unlimited growth of government.

  But it also shows that rejection of the Republican brand has accelerated since Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin became the most prominent public faces of their party. It is a sign of Americans’ persistent demand for non-ideological problem solving even in this us-against-them era. We are not as divided as we think we are.

  Our politics are being hijacked by a comparatively small number of people who seek to dominate the debate by screaming the loudest. They see the world as an urgent struggle between true believers and nonbelievers. They attempt to impose strict litmus tests and insist on conformity. They demonize dissent and consider all political opponents their enemies. Fear is their favorite tactic as they try to divide and conquer.

  At a time when America is fighting a war against extremism a
broad, we are confronting extremism at home. We should know the dangers of demagogues, politicized religion and ideological absolutists by now. The cultivation of rage and resentment for political gain or personal profit has real costs that can affect us all.

  The attack of the Wingnuts is an assault on the idea that what unites us is greater than what divides us as Americans, which the Founding Fathers enshrined in our national motto, e pluribus unum—out of many, one. The moderate majority needs to stand up to the extremes before they spark a season of violence. We have done this before and we can do it again, remembering what the old warrior President Eisenhower once said: “The middle of the road is all the usable surface. The extremes, left and right, are in the gutters.”33

  OF TEA PARTIES AND TOWN HALLS

  It started with the rant heard round the world.

  CNBC’s Rick Santelli was railing against President Obama’s mortgage bailout plan from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It was February 19, 2009—one day short of the president’s first month in office. And Santelli was pissed.

  “This is America!” Santelli screamed. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise your hand.” The question was met with a motley chorus of boos from the traders, kicking Santelli into high-gear capitalist evangelist mode: “President Obama,” Santelli shouted straight into the camera, “Are you listening?” 1 There was a roar of recognition from the floor.

  “This is like mob rule, I’m getting scared,” blow-dried co-host Joe Kernen joked nervously. He hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.

  “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July,” yelled Santelli. “All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organ - izing.”

  Within twelve hours ChicagoTeaParty.com was live.

  There had been Tea Party protests as part of libertarian Republican Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. And a protest over “Porkulus” (a Rush Limbaugh-coined word combining “pork” and “stimulus”) had been held a few days before in Seattle at the suggestion of a blogger who went by the name Liberty Belle. But the call for a Tea Party on live television, with all its American Revolution imagery was immediately resonant.

  On February 27, some 300 people gathered in Chicago’s Daley Plaza to protest the stimulus bill and government spending, with gatherings in forty other cities. People in parkas stood alongside protesters dressed in Revolutionary-era outfits wielding “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. There was also the first post-election protest sighting of an Obama poster with a Hitler mustache pasted on. The word “change” now read “chaos.”2 A spark had been lit.

  Congressional Democrats fanned the flames, voting to spend an unprecedented 1.2 trillion in taxpayer dollars in the first 100 days of the Obama administration. Their plans promised to double the public debt in five years, equivalent to all the debt accumulated by every U.S. president from George Washington to George W. Bush combined.3

  It seemed to validate every slumbering “socialist” accusation leveled at Obama during the campaign, but liberal House Democrats didn’t care—they hadn’t enjoyed unified control for fifteen years. This was their chance to run the table with a long-delayed wish list of pork barrel projects. They thought the economic crisis and Bush’s backing of the first bailout round gave them perfect political cover. Keynesianism was suddenly cool again, and with it they could justify a smorgasbord of spending. It would all pay for itself, after all.

  They had forgotten that hypocrisy is the unforgivable sin in politics. Obama had campaigned on a commitment to be a post-partisan president and restore fiscal responsibility. But the $787 billion stimulus bill passed along narrow partisan lines, with Republicans shut out of the negotiating process. Despite the president’s hopes of gaining Republican support, the House bill received no GOP votes and lost the support of eleven centrist Democrats. 4 Weeks later, when an additional $410 billion supplemental spending bill was passed along partisan lines with 9,000 earmarks,5 Obama’s campaign promise of transparency seemed to have been abandoned as well.

  Bailout backlash was in full effect. It didn’t matter that the giveaway had started under Bush—the man left holding the bag got the blame. The economy had been in free fall for four months when Obama was inaugurated. Then it got worse, with the stock market hitting a twelve-year low on his fiftieth day in office, March 9th. With unemployment rising, 401(k)s decimated, but billions of taxpayer dollars going to banks and Wall Street bonuses, Americans began to have a collective Howard Beale moment—they were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

  The deep deficit spending seemed only to add insult to injury. After watching the jet-set excesses of the Bernie Madoff class from afar, middle-class families were left with less and still asked to clean up the mess. While they were struggling to pay their bills, big government and big business had their debts forgiven through billion-dollar backroom deals on the taxpayers’ backs. Big mistake. In 1992, independents protested the bipartisan deficit spending they considered generational theft by backing the independent presidential candidacy of Ross Perot. By March of ’09, independents began to break decisively with Obama, surpassing Democrats as the largest segment of the electorate. They were sending a clear message: It’s the Spending, Stupid.

  On Tax Day, April 15, Tea Party protests were held in 346 towns and cities, drawing more than 300,000 people. 6 The largest gathering was in Atlanta, where 15,000 showed up. Liberal columnists and MSNBC hosts joined with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in trying to downplay the events, dismissing them as artificial “Astroturf” protests rather than a genuine grassroots movement. True, groups like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks helped fund organizational costs,7 while Fox News helped make the protests a national conservative happening by airing more than 100 commercial promotions for the protests in the ten days before Tax Day,8 but these were the equivalent of conservative public service announcements. For all the “Astroturf” asides, the crowds were home-grown. They may have been pumped up by partisan interests, but they were not purchased.

  I went to the New York City Tea Party, where given the city’s Democratic dominance I expected to see a few hundred people clustered under a gray sky. Instead, 3,500 people, a kaleidoscope of the modern conservative movement, lined both sides of Broadway beside City Hall Park, a few blocks from Wall Street. There were libertarians, traditionalists, free-marketers, middle-class tax protesters, the more-patriotic-than-thou crowd, conservative shock jocks, frat boys, suit-and-tie Buckley-ites and more than a couple of requisite residents of Crazytown.

  The Tax Day Tea Parties offered a perfect confluence for conservative populism: a Founding Fathers- sanctioned rebellion against big government combined with the age-old frustration of paying taxes, especially during a recession. And compared with the average G-20 or WTO protests, the New York rally was a model of civil disobedience. Instead of anarcho-punks leaving broken windows in their wake, there were American flags, country music and repeated reminders to pick up trash before leaving the site. There were whole families on parade, such as the father carrying the American flag with an image of John Wayne emblazoned on it, followed by three children with pint-size “Don’t Tread on Me” flags (a sentiment that also doubled as a crowd-control notice).

  The founder of the New York Tea Party Patriots chapter was a soft-spoken twenty-seven-year-old aspiring architect named Kellen Giuda. A New Hampshire native, he’d never been active in politics before, but the spending spurred him into action, coordinating the initial rally over Facebook. Kellen define the overall Tea Party message as “fiscal responsibility and government accountability,” adding, “In New York, we’re strictly fiscal responsibility but if the Morristown, New Jersey, Tea Party wants to be anti-abortion then that’s their prerogative.” He stressed that “there is no Tea Party leader” and that both parties have failed when it comes to fighting for the taxpayer. “That’s why a lot of Tea Parties aroun
d the country have considered starting a political party.”

  But while speaker after speaker hammered home the apparently poll-tested line that these rallies were not about Republicans or Democrats, their appeal was self-evidently partisan to the extent that it was strenuously anti-Obama.

  “What’s the Difference Between Obama and Chavez?” asked one sign, referring to Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela (Answer: “Nothing”). Others went after “Ali Obama and the 40 Thieves,” “Free Markets not Free-Loaders,” and “Hitler was a Socialist Too.” Some messages stood out, such as the Ron Paul acolyte whose sign read “Obama = Bush lite.” When I asked about the underlying logic, he explained, “Obama was elected with the promise of change and then pursued the same failed policies of Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility.”

  When speakers extolled the virtue of “individual responsibility,” the crowd roared—the billion-dollar bailouts blocked any memory of the president’s call for a “new era of responsibility” in his inaugural address. Democratic stereotypes about being an over-spending party of the welfare state had reasserted themselves. Old scripts felt fresh again, even when they were straw men. When one local radio host asserted, “We are told that if the few prosper, the many will suffer,” he was reflexively riffing off old anticommunist playbooks, not anything said by Obama. And when Christian conservative radio personality Jordan Sekulow decried “cutting funding for our troops,” he hadn’t bothered to read the budget he was busy attacking.