Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [129]
Right-wing leaders have been steadily chipping away at such stigmas in several ways. First, they employ subtle and ambiguous language to indirectly skirt America’s political taboos. They attack health care “reparations,” for example, rather than saying, “Undeserving black people will steal white people’s benefits.” Similarly, if Glenn Beck were to baldly present his conspiracy theories as fact, he would be dismissed by everyone as a paranoid lunatic and drummed back out to the fringe. So instead he employs indirect language. He speculates and describes worst case scenarios.
Second, right-wing leaders have been gradually pushing the limits of permissible mainstream discourse. Wayne LaPierre shocked the nation in 1995 when he called ATF agents “jack-booted government thugs.” But with media stars and members of Congress now comparing Obama to Hitler, LaPierre’s language seems tame and a little quaint by comparison.
Third, the right wing has increased its constituency, its media presence, and its political muscle, all of which boost the perceived credibility of its paranoia. When the House majority leader alleges a Soros-led conspiracy to oust him, and one of America’s favorite media figures is Glenn Beck, you know that paranoia has hit the mainstream.
Thus, if we want to control the wild growth of persecution politics, the American community must banish the worst excesses of the right to the fringe. We must use our freedom of speech to fortify our society’s faltering stigmas by declaring that the right wing’s fantasies of persecution have no place in American politics or national dialogue.
Connecting with Others
The psychological nature of persecution politics actually makes that job easier. As we’ve seen, right-wing persecution paranoia is a form of rationalization. Those who indulge in political paranoia do so not because of any reliable evidence but because of the psychological benefits that it offers. The powerful stories that they hear on Fox News and talk radio offer them a fantasy world that turns their bigotries into virtues and transforms ordinary men and women into heroes and heroines of the republic. The stories scare the hell out of them, and it feels great. Often paranoid believers go to great lengths to preserve their convenient fantasies, filtering out contrary information and inhibiting their critical faculties. Their desire for righteousness trumps their discomfort with self-deception.
But here’s the key. The desire for righteousness may lead people to suppress the psychological discomfort of self-deception, but it cannot completely eliminate it. Most of the Americans who fall for the right-wing conspiracy theories are not insane. Their grasp of reality is firm enough for them to function perfectly well in ordinary life. Their political paranoia is an exception to the way that they normally make sense of the world. On some level, they know that they’re lying to themselves, and that doesn’t feel so good. The fantasies produce cognitive dissonance between what they want to believe and what they know to be true.
And so, like the UFO cultists that Leon Festinger studied, the right-wing conspiracists seek affirmation from others. They turn on their televisions and radios to let the soothing scare stories of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh reassure them that their dark fantasies are real. They go to the Internet to read angry bloggers telling them that what they fear is true. They attend Tea Parties to find kindred spirits who also believe that Obama is a fascist Marxist from Kenya, much as the previous generation of paranoid conservatives once met in local restaurants to warn one another of the peril of secular humanism. Glenn Beck himself described the Tea Partiers’ hunger for mutual reinforcement:
This is an opportunity for