It has been the continuing obsession of this writer that we are entering an Interregnum, best summarized by Gramsci's description.

The old is dying and the new cannot be born;in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.

The economic collapse that we chronicled here for almost two years has exacerbated the morbidity. Demagogues like Glenn Beck have played on the confusion and uncertainty of the working class--chanelling their anger away from the capitalists and towards a young Black President--"the other". So this anger in the general populace manifests itself in strange ways--racial animus; thuggishness that leads to fame; a general anomie best described almost a century ago by Yeats.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

I've been writing a book called Outlaw Blues about the century long culture war between America's artistic avant-garde and the radical right, and so I can say with some confidence that this current culture war is not new. It's been an ugly battle for 110 years since Mark Twain was denounced by the New York Times editorial page for saying, "I am an anti-imperialist. I'm opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land." Sometimes the artists have just left the country like in the early 1920's--escaping to Paris to avoid the religious bluenoses, the KKK and prohibition. Sometimes the artists have gone to jail, like the Hollywood Ten in 1950. But in each of the earlier periods of rising right wing repression and paranoia, the fever abated in three or four years when responsible Republican's stood up and denounced the dangerous paranoids within their ranks

Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican rose to denounce Joe McCarthy in June of 1950 and was soon joined by six other Republican senators. McCarthy called them "Snow White and the six dwarfs", but within two years his reign of terror was over as he was censured by the whole Senate. In the late 1950's, the John Birch Society's Robert Welch denounced Republican President Dwight Eisenhower as "a dedicated conscious agent of the communist conspiracy". But it was only in 1962 when William Buckley and Barry Goldwater decided the Bircher's were going to destroy the Republican conservative movement, that Welch's paranoid ravings were pushed out of the national conversation.

So what distinguishes this consensual paranoid hallucination sponsored by Fox News from the witch hunts of 1918, 1950 and 1962? To begin with, the Republican leadership is so afraid of the power of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, that they refuse to take them on. But the second problem is the nature of the balkanized world of 21st Century media. It is quite possible that the nature of modern social media choices can sustain irrational behavior far longer than would have happened in a world where everyone tuned in to watch the evening news on one of three channels in 1962. Two social scientists have been studying health outcomes in a well surveyed population in Framingham, Massachusetts. They noted how the number smokers dropped over time and then stabilized, no matter what the evidence or advertising that it was bad for you.

When Christakis and Fowler mapped out the way Framingham people quit smoking during roughly the same period -- 1971 to 2003 -- they found that the decline was not evenly distributed across the town. Instead, clusters of friends all quit smoking at the same time, in a group. It was like a ballroom emptying out one table at a time. But this meant that by 2003, the remaining smokers were also not evenly distributed: instead, they existed in isolated, tightly knit clusters of like-minded nicotine fiends. Worse, those clusters had migrated to the edges of the social network, where they were less interlinked with the mass of Framingham participants. In their everyday social lives, Christakis and Fowler say, the town's remaining smokers are thus mostly surrounded by people who still smoke, and they rarely have strong connections with nonsmokers. Nonsmoking may be contagious, but the smokers don't appear to be close to anyone from whom they could catch the behavior.

The people who are angry and paranoid listening to Glenn Beck are like the smokers--they don't associate with happy people and they only listen to media that keeps them riled up. The social contagion of anger is catching and they spread the virus to all of their friends. Glenn Beck knows this. He says his hero was Orson Welles and he cites Welles's ability to create mass hysteria with his War of the World's radio drama of a Martian attack as evidence of the power of radio. He even named his company Mercury after Welles' perhaps not understanding that Welles was a passionate anti-fascist who was denounced by right wing Senators for being an agent of the communists. Now Beck makes $23 million per year and Limbaugh makes even more. As they ride around the country in their private jets they may be laughing at how they are able to get the poor crackers all riled up about an imminent invasion of martians or socialists or Nazis while they take it to the bank.

While Beck and Limbaugh may view the current interregnum as a gravy train, the anger virus will keep spreading for two reasons. There is no reason to believe that unemployment won't continue to rise and so while the capitalists may be happy with the 40% rise in the stock market, the working class only sees things getting worse. But because they have no means to turn their anger towards capital--(what are you going to do, take your money out of the bank?)--they direct it towards the party in power and the President. And as Gary Wills points out in an important essay, the President is trapped by the facts on the ground of the National Security State--the "entangled giant".

the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the "war on terror"--all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941-2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order...

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that turning around the huge secret empire built by the National Security State is a hard, perhaps impossible, task. After most of the wars in US history there was a return to the constitutional condition of the pre-war world. But after those wars there was no lasting institutional security apparatus of the sort that was laboriously assembled in the 1940s and 1950s. After World War I, for instance, there was no CIA, no NSA, no mountain of secret documents to be guarded from unauthorized readers, no atomic bomb to guard, develop, deploy, and maintain in readiness on land, in the air, and on (or in) the sea.

Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated one thousand military bases in other countries. I say "estimated" because the exact number, location, and size of the bases are either partly or entirely cloaked in secrecy, among other things to protect nuclear installations.The secrecy involved is such that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy did not even know, at first, that we had nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey.

Here is the irony. Reagan and the neoconservatives managed to convince their followers that the only thing the government knew how to do well was fight wars. All the rest--building the Interstate Highway System, running Social Security and Medicare--the government must be incompetent. But it is the financing of the National Security State that prevents us from providing a world class universal health care and K-College education system. Nothing else. And until the Democrats are willing to provide a counter-narrative to Glenn Beck's vision of what's wrong with America--one aimed at the working class and not Wall Street--the social contagion of the interregnum's morbid symptoms will continue to spread.