The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [3]
A parallel phenomenon was a growing lack of faith in the mainstream media on both sides of the spectrum. Conservatives and liberals alike accepted unquestioningly the proposition that the stories put out by network news broadcasts and major daily newspapers amounted to little more than a stream of untrammeled, insidious deceptions.
In the 2006 senatorial primary contest between the Jimmy Stewart–esque do-gooder millionaire Ned Lamont and the archetypal Washington whore Joe Lieberman, the fault lines were outlined with crystal clarity: the “People” boosted Lamont with blogs and YouTube broadcasts, while the entrenched political mainstream circled the wagons around Lieberman, with the major news mags and dailies blasting the blogger phenomenon and the likes of asshole New York Times columnist David Brooks ascribing the antimedia bias to “moral manias” and a “Liberal Inquisition.”
On the right, similar fault lines were appearing. Whereas before conservative anger toward the “liberal media” had been usefully directed against the Democratic Party by Republican strategists, the failure of the Iraq war and also growing disillusionment on the part of Christians who had supported George W. Bush led more and more of those voters to seek out their own enthusiasms. For the first time I started to see and hear people at Republican events who sounded very much like the dissidents on the fringes of American liberalism. The Ron Paul supporters who began to collect around the rallies of assembly-line establishment-blowhard candidates like Mitt Romney were almost indistinguishable from the followers of liberal candidates like Dennis Kucinich; they were similarly against the war, similarly against the conspiracy of business interests that dominated Washington, similarly fed up with standard-issue campaign stumpery. At these events I heard some of the same theories about “peak oil” and the nefarious influence of institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission that dominated 9/11 Truth rallies. But they weren’t liberals. They were ex-Dittoheads and dropouts from the Republican revolution.
The Ron Paul candidacy was an extreme example of outsider politics on the left and right merging; for the most part, the period covered in this book describes left and right retreats from the mainstream that traveled in opposite directions but were parallel in substance. Specifically, I spent time down in Texas with a group of churchgoers who were loyal to an apocalyptic theory of world events, one in which 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq were part of an ongoing march toward a final battle between the forces of Satan and an army of God. At the same time, I found myself involved, at times involuntarily, with the 9/11 Truth Movement.
The similarities between both of these groups were striking and should be clear to anyone who reads this book. Both groups were and are defined primarily by an unshakable belief in the inhumanity of their enemies on the other side; the Christians seldom distinguished between Islamic terrorism and, say, Al Gore–style environmentalism, while the Truthers easily believed that reporters for the Washington Post, the president, and the front-line operators of NORAD were equally capable of murdering masses of ordinary New York financial-sector employees. Abandoned by the political center, both groups ascribed unblinkingly to a militant, us-against-them worldview, where only their own could be trusted. What made them distinctly American was that, while actually the victims of an obvious, unhidden conspiracy of corrupt political power, they chose to battle bugbears that were completely