Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [71]
You’re not quite evil enough. You’re semi-evil. You’re quasi-evil.
You’re the margarine of evil. You’re the Diet Coke of evil, just one
calorie, not evil enough.
—Dr. Evil
DESPITE THE INTRINSIC psychological appeal of the right wing’s tales of oppression and calamity, one glaring defect strains the creditability of such stories, a defect so defective that even most steadfast culture warriors cannot ignore it: Democrats. A party that is so bumbling and fractious that it can barely pass a watered-down health care bill—even with a large legislative majority, a popular president, and that ineffable force of political energy known as a mandate—can scarcely be expected to pull off the eradication of Christianity or the subjugation of the white race. Think of what it would do to Democrats’ approval ratings.
Moreover, when Bill O’Reilly first led the Fox News posse into the lawless land of persecution politics, the Democrats were not only bumbling but powerless. Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, and the Supreme Court was tilting right. There was no one remaining in the federal government for a nervous conservative to fear.
But Bill O’Reilly is a resourceful man, and he wielded a formidable weapon. His superior analysis cuts through political spin like a Ginsu knife through an overripe tomato. Beneath all that pulpy red mush, virtually unseen among the namby-pamby red splotches that passed for liberal leadership, O’Reilly found a bona fide villain—rich, powerful, cunning, and unscrupulous, with the will and the means to aggressively pursue his radical agenda unhindered by public opinion, moral constraints, parliamentary protocols, or the U.S. Constitution.
In the game of persecution politics, one of the right’s chief tactics is to select a vulnerable representative of the left, present that person as the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, and then caricature him or her as the epitome of savagery and evil in order to scare the crap out of Americans. You could call it the bogeyman formula. O’Reilly didn’t invent the bogeyman formula. Conservatives have been using it since the Red Scare, if not before, and they aggressively pursued a bogeyman strategy (or rather, bogeywoman strategy) against Hillary Clinton in the 1990s. But O’Reilly innovated by linking the bogeyman formula to the persecution formula, preparing a blueprint for the deluge of persecution paranoia that was to follow. O’Reilly’s bogeyman-in-chief was a billionaire investor named George Soros.
“The Jewish Problem”
O’Reilly’s selection of Soros as evil incarnate was no accident. To see what made the man such an attractive target, we need to travel back to his roots. Soros was born in Budapest in 1930 with the name György Schwartz. His father changed the family’s last name to the less Jewish-sounding “Soros” when George was six years old because Hungarian Jews suffered from a degree of persecution that American Christians can only dream of. As an ally of Nazi Germany, Hungary instituted a number of anti-Jewish laws starting in the late 1930s that restricted where Jews could work and whom they could marry. Young György’s school had segregated classrooms.1
Fortunately for the Soros family, Hungarian premier Miklós Horthy, a.k.a. His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary, was only moderately anti-Semitic compared to other Hungarian politicians and their Nazi allies. In one letter, he urged his prime minister to move slowly on solving Hungary’s “Jewish problem.” The letter offers a sample of what counted as moderation in 1940 Hungary:
As regards the Jewish problem, I have been an anti-Semite throughout my life. I have never had contact with Jews. I have considered it intolerable that here in Hungary everything, every factory, bank, large fortune, business, theater, press, commerce, etc. should be in Jewish hands, and that the Jew should be the image reflected of Hungary, especially abroad. Since, however, one of the most important tasks of the government is to raise the standard