Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America

by John P. Avlon

  As president, Reagan gave amnesty to illegal aliens in a comprehensive immigration reform. He closed tax loopholes that today would be attacked as raising taxes. He negotiated with the Soviet “evil empire” and withdrew troops from Beirut after a terrorist attack. He worked amiably with Democrats in Congress and constantly courted their constituents, creating the Reagan Democrat. In fact, as early as 1981, coalition conservative activists were complaining about Reagan, with the director of the Conservative Caucus saying, “He sounds like Winston Churchill and acts like Neville Chamberlain,” 29 while the editor of the Conservative Digest reached absurdity by writing, “Sometimes I wonder how much of a Reaganite Reagan really is.”30

  Today, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are among the chief critics of the big-tent philosophy. Beck attacked South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham for saying the GOP can’t be the party of “angry white guys” by sarcastically asking, “Who’s left?”31 How about the 85 percent of Americans who don’t identify themselves as “conservative Republicans” or the vast majority of non-white citizens who feel unwelcome in what used to be the Party of Lincoln?

  Mike Huckabee appears to be building his prospective 2012 campaign around attacking the very idea of a big tent: “One of the things that concerns me is that in the United States there is real talk of maybe we need to have this big tent and accommodate every view. . . . That will kill the conservative movement.”32

  He’s playing to grassroots groups like Connecticut’s Right Principles that sum up hostility to the big tent: “How long will they accept the fiction of a party that is a ‘Big Tent’? . . . How long will it tolerate being politically debilitated by a disease caused by an internal enemy consisting of a disloyal collection of ideological subversives who are, for all intents and purposes, looking to either mutate its host body beyond all recognition or to kill it outright?”33

  When RNC chair Michael Steele advocated a more inclusive approach to pro-choice Republicans and increased tolerance for gays and lesbians, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins countered by saying that if Steele was trying to create a big tent for the GOP, the Republican Party would find that it’s nothing but an “empty big tent.”34

  There is a core contradiction at the heart of modern conservatism. The party’s proudly stated belief in expanding individual freedom is at odds with the agenda of the religious right. A collectivist streak runs through much of social conservatism—a desire to have the government make decisions for individuals, especially on questions of reproductive and sexual freedom.

  There’s also a secret hiding in plain sight: The far right is far more loud than powerful. The few big-tent Republicans who are left are among the party’s most powerful vote getters, even as they are attacked as politically impotent. John McCain won re-election to the Senate in 2004 with 76 percent of the vote. Olympia Snowe won in liberal Maine with 74 percent of the vote and Dick Lugar won with 87 percent in Indiana during the Democratic year of 2006, while social conservative senator Rick Santorum lost in Pennsylvania with 41 percent. In 2008, Lamar Alexander won re-election with 65 percent in Tennessee while conservative senate minority leader Mitch McConnell squeaked by with 53 percent in neighboring Kentucky. And when talk radio advocated a new conservative coalition based on anti-immigrant fervor, two of the border-state candidates backing that approach, Arizona’s J. D. Hayworth and Randy Graf, lost their 2006 congressional campaigns.

  Joe Scarborough, former GOP congressman and host of Morning Joe on MSNBC, provides a conservative’s view on the hunt for heretics.

  I hear these freaks screaming and yelling about how they’re the true believers, they’re the true conservatives. They’re the ones that are going to root out the heretics. . . . It’s madness. These are the same people that took a $155 billion surplus when I left Washington in 2001 and turned it into a $1.5 trillion deficit. These are the same so-called conservatives that took the national debt from $5.7 trillion to $11.5 trillion. So when I hear people say the Republican Party’s become too conservative, you know what my answer is: they haven’t become too conservative. They’ve become too radical. They stopped being conservative when it came to spending our money. They stopped being conservative when it came to foreign policy. They stopped being conservative in their rhetoric. They have been radicalized by people who don’t know what it means to be a small-government conservative.35

  National Review editor Rich Lowry looks to the future and tells me, “For decades, the way for the Republican Party to grow was to become more conservative and to draw away conservatives from the Democratic Party. But there are various demographic trends that make the Republicans’ job tougher and they’ve sort of tapped out to a large extent that strategy. So now the growth strategy, I think, has to be something different, not to be less conservative but to ensure conservatism is addressing people’s current concerns and anxieties.”36

  For the Republican Party, a return to its historic principles of individual freedom, fiscal responsibility and national security—with renewed consistency—would not only lead to the GOP’s political resurgence, it could help unite our nation. But it will require that social conservatives embrace the big tent again—and not treat allies with libertarian opinions on social issues as loyalty suspects or second-class citizens.

  However, when you hear the far right invoking the big tent these days it’s often because they are being forced to defend the indefensible signs that dot the Tea Party and town hall protests. There is a reluctance to repudiate for fear of dividing or demoralizing their partisan forces. Instead, Joe Wierzbicki, one of the GOP operatives organizing the Tea Party Express, contorted himself to avoid judging the occasionally extremist rhetoric and signs amid his crowds: “People who choose to embrace your message or your movement are not the people that you embrace. They have chosen to embrace you.”37 In other words, the big tent should extend as far to the right as necessary to fire up the base. The real disloyalty is not doing violence to civil society but to criticize a fellow traveler. No one is accountable for the mob they incite. It’s a sign that the inmates are running the asylum.

  From RINO Hunting to DINO Hunting

  While the far right set out to eat their own during Obama’s first year in the White House, the far left started to indulge the same impulses. But while the far right’s constant drumbeat held that Obama was a socialist, the far left attacked him for not being radical enough.

  As with the right, the furor started on the fringes even before the inauguration. In early January 2009, the folks at Revolution Books in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood weren’t even trying to restrain their disgust with liberal excitement over the president-elect. “A lot of people got taken with Obama,” the clerk at the checkout counter grumbled, “but it’s just the same Bush program rebranded.” Instead of the near-ubiquitous Obama buttons adorning overcoats in that area, Revolution had a window display selling bottles of “Obamalade” for a buck each. It was an oddly entrepreneurial way for them to make a point. Each plastic bottle’s wrapper contained a tiny political screed:INGREDIENTS: Massacres in Gaza, Rick Warren, escalation of the Afghanistan war, Hillary Clinton, bailout of big business, Rahm Emanuel, blaming Black people for problems the system inflicts on them, “coming together” with those who hate gay people, Robert Gates, whitewashing torture by the Bush regime, and the Patriot Act.

  SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Obamalade causes massive loss of life in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Pakistan and many other countries; continued attacks on Black people, women, immigrants, gays & lesbians; political cowardice that is dangerous to the health of humanity. If, after drinking Obamalade, you find yourself accepting the crimes of this system—you should immediately take 2 doses of reality and report to the nearest movement of resistance against these crimes.

  Peel off the Obamalade wrapper and you’d have a perfect pocket-sized reminder of the far-left Wingnut worldview: America as the world’s prime oppressor.

  The professional protesters at a group called “The
World Can’t Wait” weren’t too thrilled about the Obama agenda either. They were formed “to repudiate and stop the fascist direction initiated by the Bush Regime.” After Inauguration Day ’09 they launched “Obama Watch.”

  The new president’s first sin was the choice of evangelist Rick Warren to give the inauguration invocation: “To say that’s a bad start would be a colossal understatement,” wrote the organization’s director Debra Sweet, going on to describe “Warren’s overall Christian fascist program.”38

  Nor were they willing to make adjustments in the oft-cited struggle against the racist imperialism of the U.S.A.: “Having a Black man at the head of a white supremacist government doesn’t mean that white supremacy is over!”39 Hasta la victoria siempre.

  But the biggest criticism was reserved for Obama’s continuation of what they call “the War OF Terror.” Here the list of grievances is long: U.S. troops still in Iraq, an expansion of the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, striking at targets in Pakistan and support for what they call Israel’s “occupation” of Gaza. Guantánamo is still open, rendition still practiced and as for torture, well, they’re selling stickers with an Abu Ghraib silhouette over the Obama campaign logo saying, “Yes We Can Cover Up Torture.”40

  As Obama’s realpolitik agenda—a surge for Afghanistan, a cautious exit from Guantánamo, pragmatism on health care—began to clash with left-Wingnut ideals, Obamalade fervor began leaking into more mainstream voices.

  “Right now, Mr. President, your base thinks you’re nothing but a sellout—a corporate sellout at that,” bellowed MSNBC’s Ed Schultz.41 “Can you really say this White House is on the side of the American people?” asked Arianna Huffington.42 Obama, they complained, was too quick to compromise, too eager to horse-trade for a single elusive Republican vote and, most of all, too slow to overturn Bush’s foreign policies. The activist Web site Democratic Underground conducted an online poll concluding that Obama was a Democrat in Name Only, while a photo showing Bush’s face morphing into Obama’s was circulating among the netroots. Some were already suggesting that progressive former presidential candidate Howard Dean challenge Obama in the 2012 primaries.43 The newly emboldened left was taking on the embattled center. The era of DINO hunting had begun.

  Bipartisanship doesn’t sell to Wingnuts, left or right. Obama had promised to appoint a “Team of Rivals”- style cabinet if elected, and when he followed through, the Wingnuts weren’t happy. Tapping Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state was on the outside edge of acceptable, despite her hawkish positions on the Middle East, but the real news was the selection of former McCain advisor and marine general Jim Jones to be national security advisor and the re-appointment of Bush’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates. As the executive director of Moveon.org, Eli Pariser, told the AP: “If they turn out to be all disappointments, we’ll have a good three years to storm the gates at the White House.”44 For the far left, the reflexive rhetoric of Ramparts always lives on.

  With sixty votes in the Senate and a 258-seat majority in the House, liberal leaders viewed Obama’s election as an ideological mandate. Congressman Barney Frank quipped, “When Obama said he was going to be a post-partisan president, I got post-partisan depression.” 45 Columnist Thomas Franks argued that “bipartisanship is a silly Beltway obsession,” writing that “promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric”46—trying to absolve Obama of the obligation to govern as he’d campaigned. It was a classic case of situational ethics: Critics of conservative hyper-partisanship couldn’t wait to get their equal and opposite revenge.

  Each centrist policy enraged the far left even more. On Afghanistan, congressional liberals like Dennis Kucinich reflexively deployed Vietnam metaphors while Bush nemeses like Code Pink took to the streets to protest Obama’s “imperialist war against Afghanistan.” Even Cindy Sheehan—the self-styled “peace mom” who declared W. a “bigger terrorist than Osama bin Laden”47—came out of semi-retirement to protest President Obama on his summer vacation, just like old times: “The body bags aren’t taking a vacation and as the U.S.-led violence surges in Afghanistan and Pakistan, so are the needless deaths of every side.”48 She later led protests in Oslo opposite Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance ceremony.49

  The larger problem for liberals wasn’t just Afghanistan but Obama’s decision to change the style but not the substance of the Bush administration’s War on Terror policies. Obama’s expansion of detention for terror suspects spurred nationally syndicated ultra-liberal cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall to erupt in a Wingnut call for Obama’s resignation titled “With Democrats Like Him, Who Needs Dictators?”: “Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now—before he drags us further into the abyss. . . . Obama has revealed himself. He is a monster.”50

  On the domestic front, the Wingnuts turned the health-care debate into a circular firing squad. Moveon .org started targeting centrist Democrats in the Senate with issue ads in their districts, essentially threatening them if they did not back the “public option.”51 The newly formed Progressive Change Campaign Committee aimed to be a liberal corollary to the Club for Growth, targeting ten conservative Blue Dog congressmen for their “Betrayal of Democrats.”52 Joe Lieberman emerged as an especially ripe target for DINO hunters. Al Gore’s 2000 VP nominee had emerged as a hawkish “9/11 Democrat.” His support of the War on Terror led liberals to successfully primary him with antiwar candidate Ned Lamont in 2006, but Lieberman won the general election as an Independent by 10 percent. Lieberman continued to caucus with the Democrats in the Senate, but he inflamed old wounds by campaigning for John McCain in 2008.

  Now with Lieberman a health-care holdout, liberal activists started to play “hunt for the heretic” in exceptionally ugly terms. Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein reached for mass murder metaphors, writing, “Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.”53 Victor Navsky, former editor of the Nation, accused Lieberman of “the betrayal of his Jewish heritage.”54 Jesse Jackson also wielded the identity politics machete in an attack on centrist Democrat Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama, saying, “You can’t vote against health care and call yourself a black man.” Ralph Nader went so far as to call President Obama “an Uncle Tom groveling before the demands of the corporations that are running our country” because the healthcare bill was not liberal enough.

  Ultimately, healthcare passed the House and Senate along narrow party lines. This not only failed to fulfill the president’s post-partisan campaign promises, it broke with precedent. Every major entitlement expansion or reform in America’s past enjoyed broad bipartisan support. FDR’s Social Security Act earned the support of 81 House Republicans and 16 GOP senators.55 LBJ’s Medicare Act in 1965 had the support of 70 House Republicans and 13 Senate Republicans.56 Even the Newt Gingrich-led 1996 Welfare reform enjoyed the support of 98 Democratic votes.57

  All this Wingnuttery had an impact. Approaching the end of Obama’s first year in office, the Democratic-controlled Congress’ approval rating was down to 21 percent 58—lower than President Bush’s approval rating when he slunk out of office. They had undercut President Obama’s post-partisan promises to such an extent that while he began his term identified with centrist policies, by year-end most Americans saw his agenda as liberal.59 In November, Democrats lost the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, swing states Obama carried in 2008. Amid signs that Americans were reverting to their preference for the checks and balances of divided government, liberals were convinced that the problem with their popularity was that they hadn’t been liberal enough. The anger erupting from this disconnect was captured in December ’09 when Democratic pollster Peter Hart asked
a Pennsylvania focus group to write down the word that came to mind when he said “Congress.” A retired auto executive named Bill, an independent who had voted for Obama fourteen months before, wrote down “Satan.” When Hart asked why, Bill answered, “Because I wasn’t sure of the correct spelling of ‘Beelzebub.’”60

  THE BIG LIE: BIRTHERS AND TRUTHERS

  Somewhere beyond right and left lies the fright wing of American politics: a place of paranoia where diabolical plots are hatched by opponents in power and only true patriots with special knowledge of these conspiracies have the courage to ask the tough questions.

  The Big Lie can be seductive. It masquerades as reason, but it leads down a path confirming your worst fears about your worst enemy. In the first decade of the twenty-first century there have been two Big Lies that that have preoccupied the fright wingers—the ideas that Barack Obama was not born in America (the Birthers) and that 9/11 was an inside job (the Truthers). On the surface they seem like opposite sides of the same coin—an anti-Obama conspiracy theory for Wingnuts on the right and an anti-Bush conspiracy theory for Wingnuts on the left. But nothing is that simple among the fright wing. As I dug around this dark, dank basement, I discovered that the Birther claims were first circulated by Obama’s opponents on the far left during the 2008 primary campaign. And the Truther myths are now most aggressively promoted by anti-government activists on the far right.