The loony right: Fake working-class populism
A dozen or so years ago, conservatives in Great Britain and their American friends complained that a ‘loony left’ had become a dominant factor in political discourse in the United Kingdom. Positioning themselves as the rational right against what they portrayed as a lunatic left that demanded excessive political correctness in words and policies was a clever way for those on the right to undermine progressive causes and leaders.
In the intervening years, the debate in the UK has moved on to other issues like Brexit and the antics of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, which have included large drunken parties attended by Conservative Party elites at a time when the Conservative Party government had banned regular people from holding such events to combat Covid-19. In Britain, the lunatic left, if it ever existed, has faded from view.
Today, lunatic politics is overwhelmingly on the right, and its center of gravity is the United States. The loony right is waging what looks like a desperate last-ditch effort to “take back America.” But who stole it? This ‘taking back’ means two separate but related things. One is taking America back to an era when there were no Black presidents and no female Black vice-presidents, and presidential elections were not decided on the strength of Black voters in cities like Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. Beside the turning the clock back aspect, taking back America means wrestling it away from the hands of those who have illegitimately acquired some control over it, namely ‘people who don’t belong here’ or who ‘have forgotten their place’. In simple terms, it means disempowering Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, and anybody else who is not white, Christian, and straight, including Jews.
Violence, physical and institutional, plays a big role in the fantasy of recovering America from “those people.” Lynching is rare today, but violence and fear are not. People who are part of the “outgroups” I listed above have reason to fear. Fear what? A police bullet in the back, a police officer’s knee on the neck, or a chokehold around your throat. A vigilante’s bullets fired into a crowd of protesters or the body of a man jogging while Black. A fanatic’s bullets tearing into worshipers in a Black church or a Jewish synagogue. A racist’s bullets aimed at a Latino crowd outside a Walmart. A man pushing an Asian in the back onto the subway track to her death.
Mass incarceration, deportation, capital punishment, denial of the right to vote and even the right to live by anti-vax lunatics are just some of the significant forms of institutionalized violence. None of this is brand new. In 1964, the year of the Barry Goldwater campaign, Richard Hofstadter published ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics.’ Since then, what was a style became a standard for a big chunk of the political spectrum and the mass media. The tumor grew, metastasized, and rode all the way into the White House in 2016.
That year Hillary Clinton was the personification of evil in the eyes of the right. The mantle was passed on to Joe Biden in 2020. But demonization today includes a vast number of other people. Biden is not a good target because he cannot be confused with a socialist or even a progressive. More importantly, the right today is so pervaded and consumed by hate and delusion that it needs more witches to burn. America, as it is in 2022, is for the right what in military-speak is called a target-rich environment. There are all kinds of monsters to slay: a brainy epidemiologist who tells power and the people the truth; a progressive woman of color in Congress presenting many objects for hatred as they are several in America 2022.
The latest lunacy on the right is the effort by a small minority of truckers financed by the right to paralyze the economy to hurt Joe Biden and the Democrats politically (Ottawa was a sideshow, collateral damage). This is no novel working class rebellion, although its mouthpieces play the part on television. Having exhausted even the patience of the Canadians, and being driven out of the city by the police, they are now focusing openly on their real target: Joe Biden and America 2022. The group probably includes fewer truckers than right-wing, anti-vax, conspiracy theory “I want my country back” types. They plan to converge on Washington, DC, in time for Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1.
They may want to party like it was January 6, but this time they don’t have a fan in the White House and as big a fifth column in Congress. They also lack the element of surprise. The police and the National Guard will be ready for them. I wish them the worst of luck.
