Fear and the teabaggers

The only thing to fear is becoming like them, the violent fringe that is.

I couldn't agree more, though some of them do bear watching. I'm hopeful that the Southern Poverty Law Firm is doing just that, so I'm keeping an eye on their website for updates

Yesterday, in the right's wake of bricks hurled and epithets spewed at pols of a progressive bent, Doris Kearns Goodwin, on ABC's "This Week," strained to introduce some historical perspective -- but she did so in a rather peculiar way that, to me, underscored the left's ambivalence.

First, she reminded the audience that today's polarization is, if you will, a proverbial tea party compared to the catastrophic breakdown of the American political system in the 1850s, a time when mere bricks would have been an atmospheric improvement. Goodwin then noted the right's hostility to various 20th-century social legislation, as it arose, yet she further noted that such hostility would indeed spike, then quickly exhaust itself.

Finally, she approvingly referenced Frank Rich's column of yesterday morning -- that today's "Rage Is Not About Health Care"; that it is, rather, in Rich's own words, merely "the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964."

Which is to say, today we're within the final phase of an American demographic makeover, politically expressed, in which "a dwindling and threatened minority," continued Rich, is frightfully reacting to the representative ascendance of a black president, a female speaker, a Chicano justice and a gay congressman.

For the frightened, their battle against health care reform as a socialist plot is but a convenient, euphemistic proxy war waged on behalf of much deeper but now socially unacceptable fears.

What Goodwin omitted, however -- and this is what I deem as the left's aforementioned ambivalence -- was any approving reference to Rich's rather over-the-top conclusion: that because GOP politicians are "frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base" -- so frightened "that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers" -- then "the rest of us have reason to fear them too."

I find this a fascinating divergence. Rich was emphasizing that Congressional Republicans "can’t pretend that we’re talking about 'isolated incidents' or a 'fringe' utterly divorced from the G.O.P.," while Goodwin was emphasizing, Sure they can -- to the extent, that is, that the fringe makes little difference; that it's but an exotic collection of malcontented humbuggers and bogeymen who've always been with us, and always will be.

Rich's loophole, I suppose, lay in the term "utterly divorced," which of course the brick-hurling right-wing fringe cannot be, any more than the elemental left-wing fringe of, say, 9/11 Truthers could ever be utterly divorced from the Democratic Party. Both groups are an incorrigible embarrassment to responsible liberals and conservatives, but hey, whatcha goin' to do? Paranoia isn't illegal.

Rich's evidential proof of a permanent courtship -- some vague, romantic coalition of the violent fringe and the GOP? This came in a logically spectacular sleight of hand: "A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents."

Which in itself sounds ominous, but proves ... absolutely nothing. (In the passage not only was there an inexplicit transition from violent fringe to "Tea Party members," there is no way to know what percentage of the 74 percent is actually violent. Statistically speaking, correlation is often an empty assurance.)

Here, above the cries of liberal horror, I should hasten to add the standard disclosure: I love Frank Rich. As a progressive columnist he's unsurpassed, yet at times -- and this is all, I think, that progressive historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was getting at yesterday, in her own muted manner -- Rich himself, as a preeminent voice of modern progressivism, goes to the gratuitous extreme.

In his admonition to fear the "Tea Party-Glenn Beck base," as Rich advised, the fundamental danger lies in becoming like them -- of paranoically blowing an essentially dismissable opposition into a kind of Hofstadterian "amoral superman" of unconquerable powers.

Let me shortcut to the point by quoting from a mass email I recently received from TeaParty.org: "Isn't it ironic that the beginning of this nation, 'The United States of America' was founded by a courageous 13 colonies? Now, another assault, every bit as great as that faced when 'The Declaration of Independence' was completed and it now is 2010.... Our beloved nation has tasted the bitter poison of Global Marxism. The poison has reached our veins, if it reaches our national will, we shall die a slow convulsing death."

Quite aside from the insufferably poor writing of that missive, quotation-marked proper nouns and all, its frantic call to arms isn't to be feared. It is, in all its profound ignorance, merely to be pitied.

It also merely represents the authentic fringe, as Goodwin reminded us -- and the last thing we should do is empower it by fearing it.

Let The Sun Shine In......