Persecution Politics: Paranoia Rules the Right
In early August, I began working on a book to document a growing sense of paranoia among right-wing conservatives. At the time, the media was fairly quiet on the subject. With the exception of liberal blogs (ahem), no one paid much attention to the wild rhetoric of the tea parties and occasional paranoid outbursts from commentators like Rush Limbaugh and politicians like Michelle Bachman. Then Sarah Palin loosed her "death panels" broadside, and the floodgates opened. Health care paranoia spewed from the orifice every conservative media outlet, Lou Dobbs embraced the "birther" conspiracy, Limbaugh raged about Obama's Nazi agenda, Glenn Beck launched a week-long tour de paranoia in which he accused Obama of preparing for a fascho-socialist revolution, and D.C. roiled as rabid conservative activists congregated in the Mall. Suddenly, the mainstream media took notice, and articles about the new "paranoid style" of the American right rolled across major newspapers, magazines, news sites, and talk shows. TIME Magazine even put Glenn Beck's tongue on its cover.
Now, as TPM's Eric Kleefeld has documented, the consulting firm of James Carville and Stan Greenberg has validated the thesis of my Persecution Politics series: there is a very large, very determined block of conservative voters who have thoroughly embraced paranoid extremism. Based on the results of a series of focus groups, the organization concluded:
The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America...First and foremost, these conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a 'secret agenda' to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years.
