Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [70]
To what extent do these pundits and politicians really believe the ideas they promote? Are they motivated by discomfort with their own intolerance, or is it all just rhetorical strategy? There is no way to know and, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that their rhetoric appeals to people who are uncomfortable with their own intolerance; the constant repetition of assurances and accusations soothes their doubts.
But how can we demonstrate the insecurities of the rank and file? Festinger insisted that it was important to observe the proselytizing activity of a group’s ordinary members, since the leaders may have motives other than their personal convictions. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, for instance, earn more money when they grow their audiences, so of course they proselytize. Likewise, politicians like George Wallace gain more votes and donors when they win converts, so they have strong independent reasons to proselytize as well.
Sure enough, it is easy to find a steady stream of passionate grassroots proselytizers of persecution politics. In the days of the secular humanist scourge, citizens’ protection groups and concerned parents’ organizations distributed warning pamphlets and screened informational movies to warn their fellow citizens of the danger to children’s tender minds (and stomachs). Local anti-gay rights groups popped up around the country in the wake of Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign. The religious right is famous for its powerful grassroots machinery. And, in 2010, the mantle of persecution politics is worn by the Tea Parties, a disorganized and leaderless collection of enthusiastic proselytizers. In short, grassroots evangelism runs through the heart of persecution politics.
The insecurity of persecution theorists offers an explanation for the curious phenomenon whereby the right wing’s successes seem to inflame its fears, while its failures seem to dampen them. When Jesse Helms led the successful congressional charge against the secular humanists at the IRS, he validated the right’s persecution theories, giving them confidence in their paranoid ideas. Conversely, when the Supreme Court threw out Judge William Brevard Hand’s ruling, it undercut the right’s shaky conviction that secular humanism was in fact a religion. Similarly, Anita Bryant’s success showed paranoid conservatives that the majority of people in Miami agreed with them, bolstering their confidence, whereas the nation’s growing acceptance of homosexuality undermined their certainty that protecting homosexuals from job discrimination would enable gay recruiters to turn the United States into the next Sodom and Gomorrah.
The intellectual insecurity of political paranoiacs is the Achilles heel of right-wing persecution politics. True victims of psychotic paranoia are virtually immune to external challenges: they can absorb any criticism into their paranoid worldviews. Their minds simply don’t work right. In contrast, political paranoiacs may put up a good fight against their critics, but the fact that they are, in Richard Hofstadter’s words, “more or less normal” means they are capable of seeing through their own delusions and thus susceptible to external stimuli. Indeed, whereas the true victim of paranoia lives in a solipsistic world of his own making, the political paranoiac depends on a constant stream of affirmation from the world outside. Without it, the paranoia withers and droops.
But we’re not quite ready to investigate solutions yet. There are more pieces to this puzzle.
8
RETURN OF THE INTERNATIONAL JEW
The Making of George Soros,
Global Supervillain of Right-wing Persecution