The revelation that McCain/Palin campaign volunteer Ashley Todd mutilated herself in an apparent race-baiting attempt to draw white voters away from Barack Obama again raises troubling questions about the McCain/Palin campaign and many of its most zealous supporters. By her own admission to Pittsburgh police, the 20-year-old Texan chose to submit a fictional report that she was attacked and robbed at an ATM the night of Oct. 22 by a tall black man who became enraged, beat her, and carved a "B" into her cheek after seeing a McCain-Palin bumper sticker on her car. Todd said the man told her that he was going to teach her a lesson for supporting McCain, and that now she was going to be a "Barack supporter." To support her claim she apparently blackened her own eye and carved a backward "B" on her own face in a mirror (see AP, KDKA, Huffington Post).

Unfortunately, I am not the least bit surprised by Ms. Todd's actions. I would never suggest that all McCain/Palin supporters are crazy, but a significant number particularly of Sarah Palin's most zealous supporters have exhibited behavior sufficiently extreme to suggest that some form of social pathology is indeed taking root in the grotesque traveling circus the McCain/Palin campaign has become. McCain/Palin rallies, and particularly Palin rallies, have turned into festivals of hate as attendees shout "Terrorist!" and "Kill Him!" at each mention of Obama's name and vent their rage at the media by attacking reporters. Numerous written accounts and video clips now circulating online attest to the rabidly hateful behavior of many supporters at McCain/Palin rallies, as well as to their insistence on believing that Obama is a secret Muslim, a terrorist, and perhaps even the Antichrist, even though such rumors have been denounced as lies by Republicans as well as Democrats. Presented with the facts of Obama's American roots and Christian faith, these zealots prefer to hide behind paranoid theories of an unholy, foreign Obama no rational person would take seriously.

Comparisons with Nazis and other historical extremes are all too often facile and gross overstatements of one's case, and are usually best avoided. It is worth noting, however, that the rise of the Nazis in Germany and other examples of extreme demagoguery from history such as the Cultural Revolution in China under Mao Zedong and the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia contained elements common to many such movements, if in less extreme forms. The Nazis, Mao's Red Guards, and the Khmer Rouge all made use of xenophobia and anti-cosmopolitanism, hatred of intellectuals, disdain for cities and the people who inhabit them, and other forms of divisive populism and "anti-elitism" to build working-class and peasant support and to fashion scapegoats at which popular anger might usefully be directed. Infamously in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, even possessing the soft hands of an educated urbanite was enough to get one executed; and at Chinese universities during the Cultural Revolution professors were thrown from their classroom windows to their deaths on the pavement below. Hitler's Nazis are known not only for the death camps they operated, but also for the persecution of artists and intellectuals as well as for festive book-burnings before cheering mobs of working-class Nazi supporters.

John McCain, Sarah Palin, and other Republicans today are cynically making use of these same forms of demagoguery in their attempt to frighten voters away from Barack Obama and the Democrats. Cultural buttons are pushed in ads and speeches inflaming fear and hatred of the "Other." Attendees at McCain/Palin rallies are told that they are the only "real Americans," and that liberals and other enemies are out to subvert their values and destroy their way of life. They are invited to spew hate at Democratic politicians and news reporters. They are whipped into a frenzy and then sent out to spread the McCain/Palin message of irrational fear and hatred among their fellow Americans. Just as these methods produced extreme results in Nazi Germany, Mao's China, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, so they are producing extreme results today across Sarah Palin's America, if not so very extreme.

American writer Sinclair Lewis wrote, "When fascism comes to America, it'll be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." A McCain/Palin rally today is not quite the same as those at Nuremberg in the 1930s or on Tiananmen Square in the 1960s, and most McCain/Palin supporters aren't exactly Brownshirts or Red Guards. A significant number particularly of Sarah Palin's most zealous supporters do, however, seem to have drifted into comparable forms of thinking and behavior, convinced that as the last bastion of "the real America" they are surrounded not only by foreign enemies but by domestic enemies as well: liberals, big-city news editors, university professors and their brainwashed students, arugula-eaters, latte-drinkers, immigrants, "uppity" blacks, socialists, gays, secret Muslims. Sarah Palin seems to have awakened something in certain members of the Republican base that John McCain has not, and this is something far darker than mere "enthusiasm." Palin has lit a xenophobic fuse among her most ardent fans, has drawn out all the ugliest hatreds and fears that can take root among people in hard times, and has convinced them that even among their fellow citizens walk mortal enemies.

Ergo, Ashley Todd: An obviously disturbed young woman, willing to use racist tactics in a sick attempt to make white voters nervous about Obama, Ashley Todd is precisely the type of personality I would expect to be drawn to Sarah Palin. Indeed it isn't hard to imagine the 20-year-old Todd as a younger, less fortunate mirror image of Palin herself, and I wouldn't be surprised if Todd identified personally with Palin in ways a psychoanalyst would find fascinating. Her willingnes to mutilate herself suggests anything but good mental health, and the pathological feelings about African Americans her actions reveal put her in good company with others we have seen turning up at Palin events. Sarah Palin's own behavioral history - in particular an apparent fixation on power, delusions of grandeur, and obsessive vindictiveness that as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska has led her to committ impeachable ethics violations - suggests an outlook on life scarcely healthier than Ms. Todd's.

It seems likely that Ms. Todd had emotional problems long before Sarah Palin came along and illuminated her reason for living. It is obvious also, however, that there is a political and racial element in her recent actions that can only be fully understood, if at all, within the context of the McCain/Palin campaign, its alarmingly negative cultural messaging, and the behavior of many of Ms. Todd's fellow McCain/Palin supporters, particularly those who identify most intensely with Sarah Palin. John McCain's campaign might have been in ill health even before Palin's arrival, but her coming has since brought something truly sick to the campaign, truly pathological. Of this, Ashley Todd is but a poster child.