Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America

by John P. Avlon

  I am not a Democrat. I am not a Republican. I’m an American. I believe the far left and far right are equally insane. But in the opening years of the Obama administration, the Wingnuts on the right have been screaming the loudest.

  In some ways, this was predictable. Parties out of power are often dominated by their most extreme voices. Without the responsibility of governing to ground them, ideological activists preach absolutism. They try to demonize and delegitimize the new president from day one—there is no constructive assumption of goodwill, only a permanent opposition campaign. We saw this destructive dynamic at work during George W. Bush’s administration, when far-left protests erupted into Bush Derangement Syndrome, comparing Bush to Hitler and calling for impeachment. Now the far right is out of power and, for some of them, losing an election feels like living under tyranny.

  Obama Derangement Syndrome is proliferating—pathological hatred of the president posing as patriotism. The people afflicted believe there is a sinister socialist plot to undermine our Constitutional Republic. It’s a hyper-partisan message hammered home on our airwaves and the Internet with apocalyptic urgency.

  The presence of the first African-American president is driving another anxiety—the change from a traditionally white to minority-led federal government. Race has been a core wound in American politics since the original sin of slavery, but I don’t believe that simple racism is motivating most opposition to Obama. Instead, there is a fear that our national heritage might be eclipsed by the rise of a non-white majority in America by mid-century. We are witnessing the birth of white minority politics.

  As I’ve traveled across the country interviewing the luminaries and low-lights among the Wingnuts, I’ve heard a consistent refrain: Armageddon days are here again.

  On a Saturday morning in October 2009, I joined the Oath Keepers for their first annual meeting at the Texas Station Hotel and Casino, on the fringe of the Las Vegas strip. In a ballroom beside slot machines and frontier town façades, nearly 100 current and former military and law enforcement officers met to reaffirm their constitutional oath.

  On the side tables, there were images of a black-masked storm trooper standing behind the presidential podium with a skull imposed on the U.S. Capitol dome. There was talk of an H1N1 vaccine conspiracy, false flag operations and concentration camps—all part of a carefully planned descent into fascism and then communism.

  Former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack—a militia hero in the 1990s and advisor to the Oath Keepers—feels the anger is justified. “The very people who promised us that they would protect our Constitution are the ones destroying it.” He believes President Obama violates his constitutional oath “on a daily basis . . . probably two or three times a day.”

  Billy Glassberg, a Nevada deli owner, counts Sheriff Mack among his heroes. He’s sporting a bright yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt with a snakeskin cap pulled across his head and headphones around his neck, and tells me earnestly: “There is a fascist takeover of America happening right now. They’re trying to destroy the Constitution, enslave the American people and create a one-world government.”

  Garrett Lear, the so-called Patriot Pastor, nods his head. Dressed in navy blue eighteenth-century regalia, complete with a tricornered hat, the frequent speaker at Tea Party protests believes that “Mr. Obama” is a “domestic enemy” as set forth by the U.S. Constitution and should be impeached. “I have a hard time calling him president though I do want to pay him respect as a human being,” intones the six-foot-seven-inch Mayflower descendant, “but I don’t personally believe that he’s legitimately president of the United States.”

  The Oath Keepers’ first meeting had been held just six months before at Lexington, Massachusetts, on the date and site of the start of the American Revolution, on what is also the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Now there are more than 3,000 dues-paying members. They are far from the only folks singing from this hymnal. There are other Hatriot groups like the Three Percenters—who take their name from the questionable statistic that only 3 percent of the American population during the Revolutionary War participated as combatants—who are dedicated to staying armed and ready for the next civil war while Tenth Amendment activists, known as Tenthers, make constitutional cases for taking another stab at secession.

  This is not just a fringe festival. There are prominent voices fanning the flames. Former Republican House majority leader Dick Armey has taken a lead role organizing the Tea Party protests, and he rallies crowds by first reaffirming their worst fears: “Nearly every important office in Washington, D.C., today is occupied by someone with an aggressive dislike for our heritage, our freedom, our history and our Constitution.”4

  Popular broadcasters amp up the outrage to increase their ratings. Fox News host Glenn Beck announces that America is on the road to socialism, fascism and communism—take your pick—with the kicker: “The country may not survive Barack Obama.”5 Conservative talk radio show host Mark Levin, whose book Liberty and Tyranny topped the best-seller list, ups the ante by telling his audience, “Obama is literally at war with the American people.”6 Protest signs echo Rush Limbaugh’s on-air riffs: “If al-Qaeda wants to demolish the America we know and love, they better hurry, because Obama’s beating them to it.”7

  All this anger can have an impact. At Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, twenty-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Kody Brittingham wrote a letter explaining his intention to assassinate Barack Obama: “My vow was to protect against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. I have found, through much research, evidence to support my current state of mind. Having found said domestic enemy, it is my duty and honor to carry out by all means necessary to protect my nation and her people from this threat.”8 He called his plan Operation Patriot.

  By pumping up hate in the service of hyper-partisanship, our country is playing with forces that can easily get out of control. We are giving cover—and sometimes a sense of purpose—to the crazy among us. We are encouraging a culture of extremism.

  American political history has been marked periodically by eruptions of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy” that Richard Hofstadter famously characterized as “the paranoid style in American politics.”

  The Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic while waving the American flag. President Teddy Roosevelt coined the term “lunatic fringe” to describe the Wingnuts of his day, like the left-wing anarchist who assassinated his predecessor, William McKinley. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had nearly four million members dedicated to hating not just African-Americans and the prospect of racial “mongrelization” but also Catholics and Jews and the modern Sodoms and Gomorrahs of American cities that violated the Sabbath. During the Great Depression, divisive demagogues like Huey Long on the left and Father Charles Coughlin on the right were hugely popular. Wingnuts surfaced in the militant anti-communism of Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society. They were flapping their wings when far-left liberals got misty-eyed talking about “Uncle Joe” Stalin. In the ’60s, there were pro-segregation White Citizens Councils in the South and more than 1,000 shootings, arsons and bombings from left-wing radical groups like the Black Panthers.9

  Past presidents have also been the target of unhinged anger. Lincoln was not the first to be called a tyrant, though he was the first to be assassinated for it. FDR was called a communist and a socialist on the floor of the Congress. Eisenhower was accused of being “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” by John Birch Society founder Robert Welch. Before his murder, John F. Kennedy was accused of treason, being soft on communism and surrendering the sovereignty of the United States to the United Nations. Ronald Reagan was compared to Hitler by some on the far left at peace protests.

  The old Wingnut themes re-circulate and endure through enthusiastic new dupes. Hofstadter identified their core complaints a half century ago: “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are d
etermined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers; the old security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen seated at the very center of the American power.”10 These claims are echoed in Wingnut protests against President Obama today: America is in rapid decline from an idealized past, subverted by a secret socialist plot, directed by disloyal elites at the heart of the U.S. government.

  There are plenty of rational reasons to oppose President Obama’s policies and a real need to propose alternative solutions, but Wingnut politics is not about solving problems. Armed with ideological certainty, they come to protest and polarize. Wingnuts are addicted to their drug of choice—a righteous indignation that makes them unable to see any perspective other than their own.

  Wingnuts are sometimes dismissed as simply crazy or eccentric color on the fringes of the political landscape. Some partisan leaders play to their fears but consider them useful idiots who can be deployed to attack opponents while maintaining plausible deniability. In the past, Wingnuts’ anger and absurdity have been barriers to mainstream acceptance, but their influence is growing.

  As our political parties have become more polarized, the Wingnuts have gotten more powerful. The Internet has made it easier for Wingnuts to communicate and congregate, forming online armies. At the same time, the rigged system of partisan redistricting has pushed power from the center to the margins of our politics. This combination has amplified the voices of the extremes and given them disproportionate influence, making them, in effect, the loudest lobbying bloc and creating real leverage on party leadership.

  The fringe is now blurring with the base, enforcing a bitter and predictable partisanship. The most influential figures are political entertainers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck—they are leaders without the responsibility of governing, a combination that encourages the demonization of difference and the condemnation of compromise. Now elected officials are starting to follow their model, mimicking talk radio’s confrontational style in an attempt to achieve Wingnut folk-hero status.

  So Republican Congressman Trent Franks calls President Obama “an enemy of humanity.”11 And Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson calls Republicans “the enemy of America.”12 No matter how indefensible their comments, they are reflexively defended by partisans on their side of the aisle—“My party, right or wrong” is replacing “My country, right or wrong.”

  It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Think back to 2008.

  Barack Obama campaigned as the antidote to the polarized politics of the past, promising to transcend the old divides of left and right, black and white, red states and blue states.

  He introduced himself to the American people in 2004 by saying, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.”

  His first ad for president began by professing “We are one people” (an implicit dis to John Edwards’ “two Americas” riff) and then went on to establish his bipartisan bona fides, claiming that “In Illinois, he brought Republicans and Democrats together, cutting taxes for workers and winning health care for children,” followed by a testimonial from a Republican state senator.13

  In his stump speech during the run-up to his Iowa caucus victory, Obama hammered home the same themes: “We have the chance to build a new majority of not just Democrats, but Independents and Republicans. . . . We can change the electoral math that’s been all about division and make it about addition.”14

  While his rhetoric tacked toward the center, his voting record veered left. In this, Obama became something of a Rorschach test—people could project whatever politics they wanted onto him. But even his Gen X biography reinforced the centrist message: His baby boomer mother married a Kenyan; his grandparents voted for Nixon—Barack tried to bridge the divide. To his supporters, Barack Obama embodied an ability to unite the nation.

  On the right, John McCain’s nomination was a repudiation of the world according to Karl Rove. Instead of pursuing a play-to-the-base strategy, courting evangelicals and conservative activists, the maverick Arizona senator stressed his record of independence from the Bush administration, his consistent commitment to fiscal responsibility and his appeal to independent voters. With the incumbent Republican president polling at 25 percent and 81 percent of Americans believing the nation was moving in the wrong direction, McCain was facing an uphill fight. But that was nothing new: The man was a walking profile in courage—a top-gun fighter pilot shot down over Vietnam and a defiant survivor of five years in a POW camp. McCain’s political profile was forged in opposition to the Bush 2000 campaign, as much as it was in the Hanoi Hilton. The religious right had never forgiven him for this statement during that bitter primary fight: “Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.”15 McCain’s independence made him suspect to conservative activists—they considered him a collaborator when he formed bipartisan coalitions in the Senate and disloyal when he dared to criticize conservatives in Congress for pork barrel spending. Despite the long odds against winning the Republican nomination, the old gambler proved that there was still strength in the center of the GOP.

  But even with nominees who campaigned on reaching out across partisan divides, the ugly outliers of politics found a way to weasel back in. Candidate Obama was prescient when he predicted that “they’re going to try and make me into a scary guy.”16 The seeds of hate were sown during the late innings of the election, with Sarah Palin’s “palling around with terrorists,” “socialist” and “real America” rants. The specter of race bubbled up ugly from the grassroots while anonymous e-mail campaigns trafficked in Muslim rumors. Of course, unhinged anger was not exclusive to the right. On the Democrats’ side, the “God damn America!” tape of Reverend Jeremiah Wright validated many fears. Madonna juxtaposed images of McCain and Palin with Hitler and Idi Amin in her concert tour. Sarah Palin was hanged in effigy as part of a Hollywood Halloween display without much media outcry.

  But on Election Day, Obama won virtually every swing state and independents by eight points. He won 90 percent of liberals, 60 percent of centrists and even 20 percent of self-described conservatives.17 Obama’s 53 percent of the popular vote was more than any president in twenty years and more than any twentieth-century Democrat except Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.18 It seemed to be a clear mandate for change away from the harshly polarized politics of the past.

  There was just one problem—the hard-core partisans were not about to abandon their positions without a fight. They like play-to-the-base politics. They profit from it personally and professionally. And they were going to perpetuate the “us against them” era by any means necessary.

  Neither side was in the mood for compromise. They had partisan networks and netroots dedicated to their cause that could be deployed almost at will. With liberal Republicans extinct and conservative Democrats an increasingly endangered species, there was no internal big tent counterbalance. Like-minded groups are always more likely to move to the extremes. The new president’s post-partisan vision was dismissed as naïve, if necessary, campaign rhetoric. A few weeks in Washington would teach him how things were done—post-partisanship would be DOA in D.C.

  And so a guerrilla war broke out in American politics, organized on the Internet and fought out on the airwaves and in town halls, cultivating the wounds of the 2008 campaign and pouring gasoline on the embers of the culture wars. To some in the conservative resistance, President Obama is anti-American, pushing us toward National Socialism; to others—the so-called Birthers—he is un-American, literally ineligible for offi
ce according to the Constitution. A July 2009 poll found that 58 percent of Republicans either thought Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States or weren’t sure.19

  We saw this destructive dynamic at work during the previous administration, when far-left protests erupted into Bush Derangement Syndrome. Obama haters always eventually say the same thing: “They started it.” The prevalence of Bush Derangement Syndrome on the left gave the right the green light to escalate. Coinage credit goes to conservative columnist and trained psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer, who in 2003 had diagnosed the condition as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.”20

  It began with the left’s belief that Bush was an illegitimate president, rooted in the bitterly contested results of the 2000 election. He’d lost the popular vote and won with an assist from the Supreme Court. Fresh from the Florida recount—where 97,000 leftist protest votes for Ralph Nader helped deliver the Sunshine State to George W. Bush by a 537-vote margin21—Inauguration Day protesters wielded “Hail to the Thief” signs and chanted “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Bush and Cheney go away!” “We want Bush out of D.C.” and “You’re not our president.”