The Brownshirting of America

[Guest guest]

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts10152004.html

 

October 15, 2004

Where Did These Conservatives Come From?

 

 

The Brownshirting of America

 

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

 

James Bovard, the great libertarian champion of our freedom and civil

liberties, recently shared with readers his mail from Bush supporters

(Lewrockwell.com, October 12). For starters here are some of the

salutations: " communist bastard, " " asshole, " " a piece of trash, scum

of the earth. " It goes downhill from there.

 

Bush's supporters demand lock-step consensus that Bush is right. They

regard truthful reports that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass

destruction and was not involved in the September 11 attack on the

US--truths now firmly established by the Bush administration's own

reports--as treasonous America-bashing.

 

As well, Bovard is interpreted as throwing cold water on the

feel-good, macho, Muslim butt-kicking that Bush's invasion of Iraq has

come to symbolize for his supporters. " People like you and Michael

Moore, " one irate reader wrote, " is (sic) what brings down our country. "

 

I have received similar responses from conservatives, as, no doubt,

have a number of other writers who object to a domestic police state

at war with the world.

 

In language reeking with hatred, Heritage Foundtion TownHall readers

impolitely informed me that opposing the invasion of Iraq is identical

to opposing America, that Bush is the greatest American leader in

history and everyone who disagrees with him should be shot before they

cause America to lose another war. TownHall's readers were

sufficiently frightening to convince the Heritage Foundation to stop

posting my columns.

 

Bush's conservative supporters want no debate. They want no facts, no

analysis. They want to denounce and to demonize the enemies that the

Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Savages of talk radio assure them are

everywhere at work destroying their great and noble country.

 

I remember when conservatives favored restraint in foreign policy and

wished to limit government power in order to protect civil liberties.

Today's young conservatives are Jacobins determined to use government

power to impose their will at home and abroad.

 

Where did such " conservatives " come from?

 

Claes Ryn in his important book, America the Virtuous, explains the

intellectual evolution of the neoconservatives who lead the Bush

administration. For all their defects, however, neocons are thoughtful

compared to the world of talk radio, whose inhabitants are trained to

shout down everyone else. From whence came the brownshirt movement

that slavishly adheres to the neocons' agenda?

 

Three recent books address this question. Thomas Frank in What's the

Matter With Kansas, locates the movement in legitimate conservative

resentments of people who feel that family, religious, and patriotic

values are given short shrift by elitist liberals.

 

These resentments festered and multiplied as offshore production, jobs

outsourcing, and immigration took a toll on careers and the American

dream.

 

An audience was waiting for rightwing talk radio, which found its

stride during the Clinton years. Clinton's evasions made it easy to

fall in with show hosts, who spun conspiracies and fabricated a false

consciousness for listeners who became increasingly angry.

 

Show hosts, who advertise themselves as truth-tellers in a no-spin

zone, quickly figured out that success depends upon constantly

confronting listeners with bogymen to be exposed and denounced: war

protesters and America-bashers, the French, marrying homosexuals, the

liberal media, turncoats, Democrats, and the ACLU.

 

Talk radio's " news stories " do not need to be true. Their importance

lies in inflaming resentments and confirming that America's implacable

enemies are working resolutely to destroy us.

 

David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine lacks the insights of

Thomas Frank's book, but it provides a gossipy history of the

rightwing takeover of the US media. Brock is unfair to some people,

myself included, and mischaracterizes as rightwing some media

personalities who are under rightwing attack.

 

Brock is as blindly committed to his causes as the rightwing zealots

he exposes are to theirs. Unlike Frank, he cannot acknowledge that the

rightwing has legitimate issues.

 

Nevertheless, Brock makes a credible case that today's conservatives

are driven by ideology, not by fact. He argues that their stock in

trade is denunciation, not debate. Conservatives don't assess

opponents' arguments, they demonize opponents. Truth and falsity are

out of the picture; the criteria are: who's good, who's evil, who's

patriotic, who's unpatriotic.

 

These are the traits of brownshirts. Brownshirts know they are right.

They know their opponents are wrong and regard them as enemies who

must be silenced if not exterminated.

 

Some of Brock's quotes from prominent conservative commentators will

curl your toes. His description of the rightwing's destruction of an

independent media and the " Fairness Doctrine " explain why a recent

CNN/Gallup poll found that 42% of Americans still believe that Saddam

Hussein was involved in the September 11 terrorist attack on the US

and 32% believe that Saddam Hussein personally planned the attack.

 

A country in which 42% of the population is totally misinformed is not

a country where democracy is safe.

 

Today there is no one to correct a lie once it is told. The media,

thanks to Republicans, has been concentrated in few hands, and they

are not the hands of newsmen. Corporate values rule. If lies sell,

sell them. If listeners, viewers, and readers want confirmation of

their resentments and beliefs, give it to them. Objectivity turns

listeners off and is a money loser.

 

In his book, Cruel and Unusual, Mark Crispin Miller, professor of

media studies at New York University, explains how rightwing influence

has moved the media away from reporting news to designing our

consciousness. " The Age of Information, " Miller writes, " has turned

out to be an Age of Ignorance. "

 

Miller makes a strong case. His description of how CNN and Fox News

destroyed the credibility of Scott Ritter, the leading expert on

Iraq's weapons, reveals a media completely given over to propaganda.

Ritter stood in the way of the neocon's invasion of Iraq.

 

CNN's Miles O'Brien, Eason Jordan, Catherine Callaway, Paula Zahn,

Kyra Phillips, Arthel Neville, and Fox News' David Asman and John

Gibson portrayed Ritter as a disloyal American, a Ba-athist stooge on

the take from Saddam Hussein, and compared him to Jane Fonda in North

Vietnam.

 

With this, the rightwing talk radio crazies were off and running.

Anyone with the slightest bit of real information about the state of

weapons development in Iraq was dismissed as a foreign agent who

should be shot for treason.

 

By substituting fiction for reality, the US media took the country to

war. The CNN and Fox News " journalists " are as responsible for

America's ill-fated invasion of Iraq as Cheney and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz

and Perle.

 

With a sizable percentage of the US population now addicted to daily

confirmations of their resentments and hatreds, US policy will be

increasingly driven by tightly made up minds in pursuit of unrealistic

agendas.

 

American troops are in Iraq on false pretenses. No one knows all the

fateful consequences of this mistaken adventure. Bush's reelection

would be seen as a vindication of aggression, and more aggression

would likely follow. A continuing expenditure of blood, money,

alliances, good will, and civil liberties is not a future to which to

look forward.

 

Paul Craig Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for

Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He

is a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the

co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.