The hunting of liberals

Seattle journalist David Neiwert riffs on this image sent to him by a reader.



From Orcinus:

But there should be no real surprise that Rove made these remarks. They've been a long time coming. I mean, Ann Coulter published Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism two years ago. Sean Hannity's Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism came out a year ago. Michael Savage published The Enemy Within: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Schools, Faith, and Military last year too. Meanwhile, there's been a steady drumbeat on the airwaves from Rush Limbaugh and his thousand little imitators making the same charges.

This is how propaganda is supposed to work: Circulate ideas on the popular level first, perhaps disguised as "humor" or "edgy commentary," until they become part of a broadly popular "conventional wisdom." Seemingly "outrageous" ideas gradually gain broader acceptance, leveraging the populace toward the movement's agenda. Then, when these notions are enunciated at the official and most powerful levels of government, any outrage that might be voiced is easily ignored. (Indeed, Rove's remarks are notable for being the embodiment of a panoply of propaganda techniques all rolled into one.)

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I've personally heard Michael Savage on the radio referring to liberalism as a "mental illness" and liberals as "vermin." I'm not expecting progressives to be rounded up and put in camps any time in the near future, although I admit that anything could happen these days, but this right-wing rhetoric is pretty damned irresponsible in that it invites the wild eyed members of the conservative persuasion to turn these words into reality. That's not unthinkable, either: violent anti-abortion rhetoric in the 80s and 90s definitely morphed into bombings of abortion clinics and murders of abortion providers. There is a very real danger here, and it's not at all pleasant to think that some right-wing wacko might whack me or any other American for publicly speaking out against the war or any other favorite conservative idea.

This doesn't even get into the notion that attacking liberals themselves is not at all the same thing as attacking liberal ideas: such rhetoric only worsens the sorry state of public discourse, and consequently, the state of American "democracy."

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