Republicans face even more losses in 2010; the complex electoral math is not in their favor. The year 2012 is becoming their Last Stand. They are already adopting Lost Cause rhetoric to lay the groundwork of future insurgency. Any movement that sees a high birth rate as a military strategy has long-term planning in mind. Their leaders are bringing Teh Wacky™ into the mainstream; so are their media pundits. This is not a recipe for social peace.
I’ve said all of that before; all the links in the previous paragraph take you to previous posts on this blog. But there’s more to come, including things I haven’t blogged about, and we must be prepared. Instead of hoarding freeze-dried food, we must hoard facts. Instead of shooting guns, we must shoot off our mouths — early and often. Each conspiracy needs debunking and ridicule. Instead of questioning the purveyors’ motives, we must question their sanity.
First is the rise in shootings. As I’ve said before, there is a pattern to these incidents. But here’s the perverse upshot of each and every shooting: they only increase the speculation about a ban on guns. Yes, with every new massacre there is a wave of talk about scrapping the Second Amendment — but it doesn’t come from the left. It comes from the tinfoil-hat right. For them, everything is a part of the conspiracy.
Second is the reaction to globalization. The counterintuitive reality of the post-9/11 era is that globalization has actually accelerated; and now we have the most global president in our nation’s brief history. Barack Obama has set out a course for disarmament, peacemaking, and multilateralism, firmly rejecting the galloping cowboys of the last fourteen years (the trend began before Bush, with the election of the GOP Congress in 1994). When we talk about the reactionary right, we have to remember that these people are suspicious of global warming not because of the science, but because of the word ‘global.’ The process of globalization is unstoppable, and I would argue it has passed the point of no return. Every step forward brings out ever more of Teh Wacky™ from these people.
Last, at least for this column, is the Red Dawn scenario. For anyone who hasn’t encountered it on late-night cable, Red Dawn is a rather bad, apocalyptic popcorn flick. Produced as right-wing propaganda during the Reagan administration, it portrays American gun owners as partisans fighting for freedom after an invasion of the United States by the USSR and Cuba. The terrorists-among-us fearmongering of the last eight years can claim direct descent from this movie. It’s about to be remade by MGM — just in time for the 2010 elections, and reimagined for the age of terrorism. To this day, a startling number of people beleive this scenario is possible; as I’ll demonstrate later in exhaustive detail, however, it can only happen in a movie.
The fearmongers are more determined than ever. Their culture wars are not over. I am not content to let them dig trenches unchallenged.
