Open Left

Or... (4.00 / 2)

What Digby (sort of) said:

For all its apparent freshness, however, the Tea Party movement is neither new nor novel, historians and political scientists say.

It is firmly rooted, in its ideology, rhetoric and - there's no polite word for it - its paranoia, in the post-World War II American right.

Every few years, usually though not always during a Democratic administration, the movement reappears, with a similar set of grievances: The expansion of government is moving us toward socialism; there's been a dangerous weakening of the national security apparatus but also, paradoxically, the threat of police state provisions at home; an alien subversive of nefarious intentions, composed of cosmopolitan elites and corrupt "one worlders" has infected the government.

In the 1950s, conservatives were angered when their champion, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, was shoved aside by Republican elites in favor of the moderate Dwight Eisenhower.

Kathy Olmsted, a University of California, Davis historian of the period, notes that they accused the one-time Supreme Allied Commander of being a communist agent, an allegation made repeatedly by candy tycoon Robert Welch.

Consider the far-right rallying cry during the presidency of Bill Clinton: Jackbooted government thugs were on the loose; American soldiers were fighting under the U.N. flag; the 1993 tax increase - and yet another failed attempt at health care reform - the marks of a closet socialist.

The most fitting parallel, however, may be the early 1960s, when right-wing activists believed the civil rights movement was the work of the Soviets and, as Ronald Reagan alleged, Medicare a push for socialized medicine.

"The tropes, the rhetoric, the cultural profile - there are profound similarities," says Rick Perlstein, who has completed two books of a trilogy on the history of the conservative movement and is widely viewed by conservatives and liberals alike as its key chronicler.

Plus ca kook...

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton

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by: kovie @ Tue Jan 26, 2010 at 03:54:50 AM CST

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Actually It's Much Older Than That (4.00 / 1)

Post WWI is more like it, with the the 1919 Red Scare.  Except that was a bipartisan affair, with Democratic Attorney General Palmer getting into it with gleeful abandon, thinking he could get elected President as a result.

But Republican business elites were the driving force, just as they are now with Fox and Freedomworks.

Go back much further than that, and the parties get reversed, and it was the Southern conservatives who committed fucking treason when Lincoln was elected.

Yeah, they were committing treason in the name of fighting big government.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Tue Jan 26, 2010 at 05:55:49 AM CST

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the most interesting things about the red scare (4.00 / 1)

1. it targeted on the basis of ideology as well as identity (immigrant, southern and eastern european, jewish, etc.)
2. immigration was in the DoL then, not the treasury or the DoJ or the new DHS.
3. the Secretary of Labour individually reviewed the deportaitons and overturned countless of them (compare to Ashcroft and Special Registration in 2003 and 2004)
4. set precedents
5. followed precedents
6. contributed to the rise of jay edgar hoover
7. i'm not sure about this last one, but i think a mitchell palmer was a quaker :)

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by: dr anonymous @ Tue Jan 26, 2010 at 08:04:10 AM CST

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Yup. There's a reason why "it can't happen here" was written in the 30s. (4.00 / 1)

Sinclair Lewis wasn't only transporting the rise of the Nazi movement into the US, he could dig into more than sufficient evidence of similar populist extremism in the US in the past years. And he obviously used this for his book. That's what actually makes his story so believable.

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by: Gray @ Tue Jan 26, 2010 at 08:19:31 AM CST

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