"The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes."
"And in the one or two instances when it looked like somebody was about to go off the rails, I could hear the reporters’ puckered sphincters clench with excitement."
"It was a Republican, the lawyer Joseph Welch, who delivered the coup de grâce to Senator McCarthy when he said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Where is the Republican who would dare say that to Rush Limbaugh, who has compared the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler?"
"What’s happened now is the technology of protest has metastasized, and it threatens to overwhelm the relationship between members of Congress and their constituents."
The shit going on at “town hall” meetings in the US is, of course, crazy. But, as
this article notes, it can be pretty easily understood as the next logical phase in the evolution of US politics, as things get more polarized, more dumbed-down, more manipulative, and less like anything anyone was thinking about when they started thinking about democracy.
"I can take you to places in eastern Kentucky where community services were hampered because of a lack of flat space — to build factories, to build hospitals, even to build schools. In many places, mountain-top mining, if done responsibly, allows for land to be developed for community space."
