Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [40]
I don’t mean to suggest that rage plays no part in persecution politics. There is no denying the angry tone of right-wing paranoid rhetoric, and Thomas Frank is entirely correct in his description of Bill O’Reilly’s plen-T-plainting exploitation of conservative ire. Economic anxieties may also play a contributing role. But we should question the received wisdom that persecution paranoia is founded on the misdirected resentments of the economically deprived—especially when there is a much more straightforward explanation at hand.
Fear Leads to Anger, Anger Leads to Hate
To see the alternative, let’s briefly return to the Red Scare. The most obvious contributing factor to the paranoia of the day was not an economic downturn but the very real threat from the newly powerful Soviet Union and its communist allies. The Soviets developed the nuclear bomb in 1949, the same year that Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. North Korea invaded South Korea the following year with assistance from China and the Soviets, and the United States intervened to counter the spread of communism. Meanwhile, back home, the country reeled from a series of high-profile spy cases including those of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. These events catalyzed the Red Scare, which exploded in 1950 for the obvious reason that communist aggression scared the heck out of Americans.
It’s worth noting that what we often call the Red Scare was actually the Second Red Scare. The First Red Scare, from 1917 to 1920, also occurred during a period of economic growth. It was provoked by the Russian Revolution and a series of bombings and attempted bombings by anarchists in the United States—anarchists being a subspecies of communists in the eyes of old-school commie-haters.
In each case, conservatives soon whipped reasonable fears into a hysterical hateful frenzy, but the fear preceded the hate. Indeed, it is natural to suppose that the fear produced the hate. If you believed that your fellow Americans were conspiring to incite a violent revolution or provide nuclear weapons to a ruthless enemy, you’d probably hate them too. Similarly, given the fear of many conservatives that “gay and secular fascists” sought to indoctrinate their children and outlaw their religious beliefs, is it any wonder that they got angry? Perhaps Frank and others have got it backward. The rage hasn’t caused the paranoia; the paranoia has caused the rage.
This order of precedence jives with the rhetoric of persecution politics. While conservative voices often express indignation and sometimes fury, the most evident emotion associated with persecution narratives is not anger but fear. Except at the extreme fringe, right-wing leaders do not call for the imprisonment of secular humanists or the stoning of homosexuals; they call for protection. They paint pictures of enemies that are as powerful as they are evil, and they raise the possibility of imminent defeat, perhaps even the extinction of their race, religion, or culture. As I mentioned before, the roar of the paranoid right resembles that of a cornered animal.
Paranoia for Fun and Profit
But there is something funny about the fear. The people who promote persecution politics tend to behave in the exact opposite manner from what one would expect from folks who were genuinely afraid. The defeat of the IRS desegregation proposal did not give conservatives confidence that