Fox News Continues to Hallucinate About a Socialist/Fascist Menace -- And It's Causing Real Damage

Last week, conservative factions within the Republican National Committee circulated an e-mail urging party leadership to brand as a "socialist" anyone who advocates even moderate changes to the government's role in society.

It's clear that the overlords at Fox News Channel already got that memo and decided to ratchet the volume up a notch -- to 11.

According to Politico, RNC member James Bopp Jr. proposed a resolution that would acknowledge that President Obama wants "to restructure American society along socialist ideals" and call upon the Democratic Party to rename itself the "Democrat Socialist Party."

"Just as President Reagan's identification of the Soviet Union as the 'evil empire' galvanized opposition to communism," Bopp wrote, "we hope that the accurate depiction of the Democrats as a Socialist Party will galvanize opposition to their march to socialism."

Red-Baiting Redux

And indeed, this has been a season of red-baiting the likes of which we haven't seen since the reign of a certain senator from Wisconsin. The week before Bopp's memo, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) insisted that "some of the men and women I work with in Congress are socialists." Bachus says he has already counted 17 of them but that there may be more.

Also keeping a list is Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who in the final days of the 2008 election season questioned then-candidate Obama's patriotism and called for an investigation of Democratic members of Congress for "anti-American views."

Bachmann didn't rest there. During an appearance late last month with Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity, she reiterated her call for a revolution against the tyranny of President Obama and congressional leadership.

"This is economic Marxism," Bachmann said of their economic stimulus plan. "[Obama] is moving the United States away from free-market capitalism and instead he's imprinting socialism deep into our centralized economic planning."

Like most of Bachmann's ranting in the media and on the Hill, these allegations make zero sense. But reality hasn't stopped her from assembling a political career out of comments that fan the flames of fear among the most militantly conservative.

When Socialism Isn't Bad Enough

Bachmann is by no means America's sole demagogue. That she's been given a national stage to insult our collective intelligence, though, is cause for notice.

Bopp, Bachus and Bachmann's rhetoric has been taken up by the tele-pundits of the right -- especially those prophets of doom who have made Fox News Channel their base of operations. But these knuckle-draggers aren't satisfied with fighting mere socialism.

"We're into socialism now. That's not our final destination," Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck said during his radio broadcast. "Our final destination is happy-faced fascism." In another segment on his cable program, Beck repeated this charge over a video backdrop of marching Nazis.

The 'Fox Effect'

This Beck-Hannity obsession has triggered the "Fox Effect," a media phenomenon whereby the repetitive news framing of one 24-hour cable network seeps into the coverage of other outlets -- and, frighteningly, into the political discourse of society as a whole.

Before long, the cable talent at CNN, CNBC and MSNBC had fallen into step, booking right-wing guests intent on pressing the Marxist fear button.

On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," host Joe Scarborough has suggested that the Obama administration favors "European-styled socialism." CNBC's Larry Kudlow has made our "march to socialism" a centerpiece of several interviews on his evening program.

For its part, CNN dedicated several news shows to sage analysis of America's political shift, including a segment in which Quinn Hillyer, the editor and columnist of the conservative Washington Examiner and American Spectator, compared Obama's actions in his first hundred days to those of Mussolini in fascist Italy.