The Far Right's First 100 Days: Getting More Extreme by the Day

By Sara Robinson, Campaign for America's Future. Posted May 6, 2009.

This overweening humiliation is growing every day that the Democrats and their new president stay in power. It's a pain that will not go away, and it's likely to curdle into something far more venomous in time.

The result, unfortunately, is probably going to be more violent attacks on government authority like the one in Pittsburgh last month.

Fourth: There's that new sense of urgency. Groups heading for violent confrontation are often pushed past the brink by the belief that the apocalypse is unfolding before their very eyes and that they have no choice but to seize the moment and act.

For many on the right, Jan. 20 was the day the trumpet sounded. Obama is going to turn the country over to the commies. He's going to take away your guns. He's going to open the borders, turn the country into a welfare state and give all our tax money to lazy minorities.

And it's no idle threat -- they're quite convinced that he's going to do all this any day now. This panic is new, and it's palpable. It's also worrisome, because these would-be revolutionaries have been preparing themselves for years for just this moment.

Fifth: The demagogues have seized conservatism's center stage. Violent groups typically organize around a leader who promotes the apocalyptic visions, the dualism, the persecution complex, the eliminationist fantasies -- and the sense that True Patriots can no longer wait another minute to act.

In some groups, this leader exerts total control over every aspect of their followers' lives, like David Koresh and Jim Jones did. In others, the leader is simply a figurehead who puts the ideology out there, leaving the followers to figure out how to implement things on their own. (The followers also bear full responsibility for the results, leaving the leader relatively unscathed.) Osama bin Ladin runs his show this way.

Either way, these leaders are invariably amoral, ego-driven, high-social-dominance men who gain power by hijacking their followers' moral systems.

When they succeed -- which is to say, when they finally override the ethical ballast provided by tradition, customs, laws and conscience to become the dominant moral authority in their followers' lives -- they can gain a stunning degree of influence and lead people into doing things they'd never have considered on their own.

The right wing has never been short of these guys. Still, in the past, the paranoid stylings of media ideologues like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck were simply background ranting to the more reality-based lead vocal of the party's actual politicians.

But now the election is over. The candidates have all gone home. And the GOP's party structure is in tatters. There are no credible political leaders left to drive the conservative conversation. That leaves a power vacuum on the front line that the right-wing hate talkers are now rushing forward to fill.

When Limbaugh is considered the GOP's spiritual leader, and Beck is its leading prophet, the conservative movement's entire discourse is now driven by whatever outrageous rhetoric seems most likely to boost Fox News' ratings. The moral hijacking of the movement has begun, and nobody should be surprised when these folks finally end up in the same moral abyss these kinds of leaders always bring their followers to.

Sixth: They're putting themselves in direct opposition to state power -- and identifying that power as their primary enemy.

All groups headed for a violent confrontation eventually come to believe that their enemies are somehow aligned with the government -- and the government is out to get them. Conservatives are coming up hard against this one now that they no longer control the government themselves. Back when they were gleefully dismantling the Constitution and building a surveillance state, it never occurred to them that they might someday be out of power.

Now, of course, they're terrified to find all that unleashed, unaccountable power in the hands of Libruls and That Black Guy.

Weirdly, they seem to have almost total amnesia about their role in all this. To hear them tell it, Barack Obama seized all this power for himself in just the past three months. Given that epic memory failure, there's not much hope that they'll draw the right lessons from this reversal.

It's far more likely that their newfound terror of government power will lead them to resent -- and eventually overreact to -- even casual encounters with government authority.

Seventh: They're arming up. Back in 2006, right-wing watchers warned that white-supremacist groups were encouraging their members to join the military in order to get the weapons training they'll need to execute their racial holy war. And for the first time ever, the recruit-starved military wasn't doing much to cull them out.

See more stories tagged with: obama, right-wing, extremism, backlash

Sara Robinson is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006 and is a founding member of Group News Blog.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »