Friday links! We’ll be running the asylum now, Dr. Adler edition

Remember last summer, when the Tea Party emerged as a suspiciously nationwide coalition of the laughably uninformed dedicated to defeating health care reform through yelling? Fifteen months later, many of the morons are poised to become senators. What, to quote Mary Todd Lincoln, the fuck happened? The Tea Party went from a national joke to a presumed congressional force, with no attendant increase in sensemaking or even a beer hall putsch. It’s as if the responsible elements of this country unanimously agreed to cede control to the stupid and crazy, not because it’s a good idea so much as because they demanded it so loudly. The lunatics’ plan of shouting and refusing to participate in group has worked perfectly, and now they are ready to assume managerial control of the asylum. If you think I’m overstating the case, have a look at this Friday’s link roundup. It’s chock full of evidence to suggest that the closest we’ve ever come to an American fascist party is working, and it’s the perfect way to blast into your weekend on a jet of pure rage.

Let’s begin with the persuasive technique that lost the attention of the American electorate in the first place: quantitative analysis. According to the New York Times, 33 Tea Party candidates have a chance of winning seats in the House, and eight have a decent shot at becoming Senators. These predictions come from the same media who told you in advance that health care was dead and Mitt Romney was the front runner for the Republicans in 2008, but it seems that Michele Bachmann’s Tea Party Caucus will become some sort of reality. The good news is that, all other things being equal, these people will only comprise about 5% of Congress. The bad news is they have some great ideas for the future of this country, all of which are based on their imagined conceptions of the 19th century. Take Paul Gosar, House candidate from Arizona, who has suggested that the Department of Education, Social Security and Medicare might all be unconstitutional. Or Steve Stivers of Ohio, who advocates returning to a “constitutionally pure” government by eliminating the departments of Interior, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation and Energy. In addition to requesting control of government, the Tea Party has also asked to borrow your Ming vase and your hammer.

Of course, you can’t get to Washington just by promising to destroy it. You also need people to convince everyone that it must be destroyed, and has in fact posed a dire threat to our existence for the last four decades that we’ve only just discovered. Enter Pamela Geller, the Upper East Side professional blogger/ex-wife who organized opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque and once claimed that the State Department was run by “Islamic supremacists.” She also called Grover Norquist a “stealth jihadist,” and briefly used her site to start the rumor that a young Barack Obama slept with—her words, here—”a crack whore.” Exactly how Geller’s all-fronts campaign to warn people about Islam differs from the work of, say, the Ku Klux Klan is difficult to articulate, and PayPal at one time classified her blog as a hate site. Here’s one difference: Pamela Geller gets 200,000 unique hits a month, and appears regularly on Fox News.

So yes, the American right is explicitly in favor of abolishing half the Executive Branch and implicitly opposed to the world’s second-largest religion, but it’s the left that is extreme. That’s the stunning conclusion reached by this poll from The Hill, in which 44% of respondents said the Democratic Party is dominated by extremists, while 37% said the same thing about Republicans. Now, the caveats. The poll was conducted in ten “toss-up congressional districts,” meaning places that are inundated with political advertisements. If the Republican Party is doing one thing, it’s lurching crazily to the right, but if it’s doing two things it’s lurching crazily to the right and relentlessly portraying Democrats as crypto-socialists and autocrats. The poll may not reflect Americans’ views of Democratic policy so much as their exposure to rhetoric. Sadly, the rhetoric appears to compose a good portion of what we know.

Is it working? Yes, in the sense that it has given the Republican Party inordinate political and discursive power at a time when their numerical representation is at a 30-year low. But no, it is not working in the sense of having a functional government. Case in point: former SEIU lawyer John J. Sullivan has withdrawn from consideration for the Federal Election Commission position for which he was nominated 15 months ago. Sullivan, whose appointment was held up after Russ Feingold (D–WI) and John McCain (R–The Time When He Had Principles) threatened to filibuster his confirmation, said that “it didn’t seem likely the impasse was going to be resolved, and a confirmation didn’t seem in the offing in the foreseeable future.” He also described the Senate rules for filibuster as a broken system. He seems to have a point, although I’m sure the sort of petty debates that have prevented us from having a full commission to oversee the fairness of elections won’t spill over into anything important. Yes, the lunatics are running the asylum. Maybe, they will conduct themselves sanely enough to pay the electric bill. No, there isn’t much we can do about it, at least for now.

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