<
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2018/how-the-right-wing-convinces-itself-that-liberals-are-evil/>
"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. The
Russia investigation is dismissed, from the president on down, as a
politicized witch hunt. George Soros supposedly paid $300 to each
participant in the “March for Our Lives” in March. (Disclosure: I
marched that day, and I’m still awaiting my check.) What is less well
appreciated by liberals is that the language of conspiracy is often used
to justify similar behavior on the right. The Russia investigation is
not just a witch hunt, it’s the product of the real scandal, which is
Hillary-Russia-Obama-FBI collusion, so we must investigate that. Soros
funds paid campus protestors, so Turning Point USA needs millions of
dollars from Republican donors to win university elections. The liberal
academic establishment prevents conservative voices from getting plum
faculty jobs, so the Koch Foundation needs to give millions of dollars
to universities with strings very much attached.
This did not begin with Donald Trump. The modern Republican Party may be
particularly apt to push conspiracy theories to rationalize its
complicity with a staggeringly corrupt administration, but this is an
extension of, not a break from, a much longer history. Since its very
beginning, in the 1950s, members of the modern conservative movement
have justified bad behavior by convincing themselves that the other side
is worse. One of the binding agents holding the conservative coalition
together over the course of the past half century has been an opposition
to liberalism, socialism, and global communism built on the suspicion,
sometimes made explicit, that there’s no real difference among them."
Via Jennifer Freeman.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
