3:AM Magazine

By Max Dunbar.

Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, John Avlon, Beast Books 2010

Anyone who believes in a total separation of the political and the personal should read David Brock’s confessional autobiography Blinded by the Right. The book charts Brock’s rise from a Berkeley contrarian to warrior of the 1990s conservative attack machine. Rightwing newspapers and thinktanks were enraged at the existence of a successful Democratic administration and tried to implicate Clinton in everything from drug running to assassination. Plotting and wheeling through the dark and empty corridors of the Washington conservative elite, Brock eventually had something of a breakdown:

All the attacks, the hateful rhetoric, the dark alliances and strange conspiracies, an eye for an eye, nuts and sluts, defending Pinochet, throwing grenades, carpet bombing the White House, Bob Bork, Bob Tyrell, Bob Dornan, Bob Bartley, Bob Barr – it all led right here: I lost my soul.

Brock now runs a liberal media watchdog, Media Matters for America, which charts the resurgence of the lunatic American right. The first year of the Obama presidency has seen the Republican Party becoming steadily cop-opted by fringe personalities and raving secessionists. On the movement’s broadcasting arm of Fox News, President Obama is compared regularly to Stalin and Hitler and accused of planning to herd Americans into concentration camps. The movement apparently has the ability to conjure demonstrations out of the air. Congressmen were subjected to shouts of ‘nigger’ and ‘faggot’ as they walked into Capitol to vote for Obama’s healthcare bill. Tea Party demos have become a regular event with morons waving racist placards (‘Obama’s Plan - White Slavery’, ‘Hey Hussein - Go Back to Kenya’) and demanding to examine the presidential placenta. American security services are working overtime to stop assassination attempts. An anonymous fed told the Huffington Post that ‘all it’s lacking is a spark. I think it’s only a matter of time before you see threats and violence.’

John Avlon’s book is an overdue and comprehensive investigation of the fringe that is eating into the centre. Avlon used to write speeches for Rudi Giuliani and he begins from a position that the moderate way is the best and that extremism is never an option. But conventions change and anyone against slavery in the 1800s Deep South or for universal suffrage in Victorian Britain would be considered an extremist. The premise also obliges Avlon to devote much of the book to attacking the far left. Now I love to have a go at the far left, there are people on it who are deeply cynical, stupid, boring and evil, but the American far left simply doesn’t pose the threat to the free society that the American far right does: it doesn’t have the media exposure or the firepower and Avlon’s book feels lopsided because he won’t acknowledge that in this instance the Chomskyites and Taliban enthusiasts are not the issue.

Overall, though, this is an essential tour of the political swamps. Avlon has a fascinating chapter on the decline of the Republican Party. Lincoln freed the slaves and his party elected black people to Congressional and gubernatorial office. The Democrats were the party of southern segregationists and the Ku Klux Klan: historian Eric Foner wrote that ‘In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.’ Post Civil War the Republicans surged ahead as the party of industry and commerce, driving the Northern cities that Sarah Palin would denounce as godless liberal hellholes.

During the twentieth century, the plates began to shift. Southern Carolina Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond walked out of the national convention after it proposed to back civil rights laws. Other Southern Democrats would cross the floor to the GOP. Later, Republican candidate Barry Goldwater opposed President Johnson’s civil rights legislation not from a racist but a constitutional standpoint: ‘It may be just or wise or expedient for Negro children to attend the same school as white children,’ Goldwater mused, ‘but they do not have a civil right to do so which is protected by the federal Constitution or which is enforceable by the federal government.’ Signing the Act, LBJ told his press secretary that ‘I think we delivered the South to the Republican Party for your lifetime and mine.’

So it went. By 2008 ‘the political party that long defended slavery and racial segregation became the first to nominate an African-American for president, while the Party of Lincoln, which fought for Union and advanced civil rights from Reconstruction and Little Rock, has been left with a pathetic lack of diversity on its political bench.’ As Brock noted, a conservative philosophy that was supposed to be about pragmatism, responsibility and individual liberty was now best known for derangement, prejudice and white male self-martyrdom.

Sarah Palin told an audience in Greensboro, North Carolina that ‘the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.’ In the ultimate multicultural democracy and a supreme economy built on immigration, Palin saw the best of her country in homogeneous rural towns. Deep down it’s the hatred for difference and cosmopolitanism that drives the wingnut movement in America and places like it: that urge to shrink the world and cut off the parts that don’t fit.

For American political junkies Avlon’s book will tell them little they don’t already know. But British observers will read Wingnuts with profound interest and surprise - plus, I think, a growing sense of weary familiarity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is reviews editor of 3:AM.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, July 18th, 2010.