The Right Is Wrong and Has Been Since the Great Depression

Listening to Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opening remarks at his Senate confirmation hearing two weeks ago, I heard a roar of vitriol toward liberals, Democrats and “the Clintons” that reminded me of a book by Anne Coulter, arch liberal hater and basher, a rage-intoxicated screed of Rush Limbaugh, or a time-lapse explosion of a year of Fox News condensed into a minute of conspiracy paranoia and livid fury directed toward what they define as the “radical left” in America.

Kavanaugh’s loathing had such a familiar ring to it that I almost dismissed it, as I always do these days, with a wave of contempt. But then a friend directed me to a July/August 2018 piece in Washington Monthly called “How the Right Wing Convinces Itself That Liberals Are Evil.” The lede of author David A. Walsh’s essay reads:

“If you spend any time consuming right-wing media in America, you quickly learn the following: Liberals are responsible for racism, slavery, and the Ku Klux Klan. They admire Mussolini and Hitler, and modern liberalism is little different from fascism or, even worse, communism. The mainstream media and academia cannot be trusted because of the pervasive, totalitarian nature of liberal culture.

“This belief in a broad liberal conspiracy is standard in the highest echelons of the conservative establishment and right-wing media.”

For years, that line of thinking seemed like a pile of nutty rubbish from kooks in three-piece suits who were sons and daughters of the Confederacy and found dread subversives lurking under every bed and in every toilet stall. Utterly whacko and utterly dismissible.

But to hear a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court mouth those insanely partisan sentiments in the U.S. Senate, that made me realize once again how profound the culture war is in America, and how it’s been that way, I’m tempted to say, since the Civil War.

Right wingers hate Americans who don’t agree with them. They hated Roosevelt and the New Deal with such venomous intensity they accused him of being a “traitor to his class.” And today we’re hearing Trumpian neo-Nazis loft accusations against some of us as being traitors to our race.

This has all become insidiously dangerous. While we don’t want to become like our enemies, as the Buddha warns, I looked at Kavanaugh addressing the Senate and it made me think long and hard on why I consider the hard right to be wrong 10 times out of 10.

Let’s just take the 90 or so years from 1929 to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a week ago. In that time frame most every great domestic catastrophe in our country can be placed at the feet of the mean-spirited bad thinking of the hard right.

Oh, come on, you might say, is that fair? What does fairness have to do with it? It’s about accuracy vs. cruel fantasy. Is it fair to associate liberals with subversives and all that implies? This is not about political parties, either. It’s about the hard right, wherever it falls, most often I have to admit with Republicans of late, but not always.

So let’s survey what the hard right in American has wrought. Financially we have two bookends — the Great Depression of 1929 and Hooverism, and bank deregulation and the Great Recession of 2008, which we are still living through, not to mention Trumpian trade wars which will stoke inflation and put an end to low unemployment in America. Associated with these disasters is the right’s endless and intractable war against a higher quality of life for the disadvantaged, the infirm, the aged and the poor and their children. This includes trying to diminish Social Security, upon which so many of us depend, Medicare and Medicaid, welfare and food stamps, literally taking food out of the mouths of children.

I would put America’s contribution to global warming, and its refusal to go all out to end it, on the backs of hard-right climate change deniers, their major political backers in the petroleum industry and their scientists for hire. Despite clean air and water initiatives by President Nixon, which the hard right resented, its adamant opposition to Rachel Carson and her findings in Silent Spring, which would eventually lump chemical companies and tobacco companies as saboteurs of public health, prefigures the hard right’s opposition to environmentalism and the science of climate change. And here we are with the UN Climate panel giving us a mere decade to get it right, or watch the world’s major cities drown. It’s not too much to say hat the collusion of the Bush/Chaney administration with Big Oil slowed America’s efforts to curb climate change almost to the point of no return. It didn’t help either that Bush stole the 2000 election against climate change opponent Al Gore with the help of the hard-right partisan Supreme Court and its leader Antonin Scalia.

The hard right also brought us the excruciating war against American citizens known as “McCarthyism,” and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which forced Americans to testify before it under the threat of contempt of Congress and the jail time that goes with it. The hard right terrorized American educators, tried to force loyalty oaths on American professors and ravaged the acting and directing communities, all on the suspicion of so-called subversion. Many accused teachers and actors never worked in their professions again.

Jim Crow and segregation, American xenophobia from the Chinese Exclusion Acts to Trumpian anti-immigration witch hunts, have all been spawned in hard-right resentments and paranoia, as the deeply troubling reality of the American surveillance state, the Patriot Act, and Big Botherism in general.

And lately, the threat to de-fund Public Television and Public Radio have shown us, once again, the hard-right’s contempt for education and the arts.

Laissez-faire capitalism, or what’s good for business is good for us, even if it’s poisoning us or crushing us or stealing our land and turning our air to poison, is also a hard right phenomena which replaces inherited aristocracy with an aristocracy of wealth and patriarchy. And I would have to say, with the performance of Justice Kavanaugh, that it is not beyond the pale to associate the hard right with a virulent form of misogyny, though no part of our society is free of it.

Many of us who have taken abuse from the hard right for years, and who are loathe to stereotype, are coming to feel more poignantly than ever the target that’s getting pinned on our backs, and the little red dot that follows those of us who do not ascribe to the hard-right view of the world. They’ve turned our culture into something close to a political conflagration. We may be learning how to avoid inhaling their smoke and getting caught behind their fire lines, but we have more to learn and we better learn it fast.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it