http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts10152004.html

October 15, 2004
Where Did These Conservatives Come From?


The Brownshirting of America

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

James Bovard, the great libertarian champion of our freedom and civil
liberties, recently shared with readers his mail from Bush supporters
(Lewrockwell.com, October 12). For starters here are some of the
salutations: "communist *******," "asshole," "a piece of trash, scum
of the earth." It goes downhill from there.

Bush's supporters demand lock-step consensus that Bush is right. They
regard truthful reports that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass
destruction and was not involved in the September 11 attack on the
US--truths now firmly established by the Bush administration's own
reports--as treasonous America-bashing.

As well, Bovard is interpreted as throwing cold water on the
feel-good, macho, Muslim butt-kicking that Bush's invasion of Iraq has
come to symbolize for his supporters. "People like you and Michael
Moore," one irate reader wrote, "is (sic) what brings down our country."

I have received similar responses from conservatives, as, no doubt,
have a number of other writers who object to a domestic police state
at war with the world.

In language reeking with hatred, Heritage Foundtion TownHall readers
impolitely informed me that opposing the invasion of Iraq is identical
to opposing America, that Bush is the greatest American leader in
history and everyone who disagrees with him should be shot before they
cause America to lose another war. TownHall's readers were
sufficiently frightening to convince the Heritage Foundation to stop
posting my columns.

Bush's conservative supporters want no debate. They want no facts, no
analysis. They want to denounce and to demonize the enemies that the
Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Savages of talk radio assure them are
everywhere at work destroying their great and noble country.

I remember when conservatives favored restraint in foreign policy and
wished to limit government power in order to protect civil liberties.
Today's young conservatives are Jacobins determined to use government
power to impose their will at home and abroad.

Where did such "conservatives" come from?

Claes Ryn in his important book, America the Virtuous, explains the
intellectual evolution of the neoconservatives who lead the Bush
administration. For all their defects, however, neocons are thoughtful
compared to the world of talk radio, whose inhabitants are trained to
shout down everyone else. From whence came the brownshirt movement
that slavishly adheres to the neocons' agenda?

Three recent books address this question. Thomas Frank in What's the
Matter With Kansas, locates the movement in legitimate conservative
resentments of people who feel that family, religious, and patriotic
values are given short shrift by elitist liberals.

These resentments festered and multiplied as offshore production, jobs
outsourcing, and immigration took a toll on careers and the American
dream.

An audience was waiting for rightwing talk radio, which found its
stride during the Clinton years. Clinton's evasions made it easy to
fall in with show hosts, who spun conspiracies and fabricated a false
consciousness for listeners who became increasingly angry.

Show hosts, who advertise themselves as truth-tellers in a no-spin
zone, quickly figured out that success depends upon constantly
confronting listeners with bogymen to be exposed and denounced: war
protesters and America-bashers, the French, marrying homosexuals, the
liberal media, turncoats, Democrats, and the ACLU.

Talk radio's "news stories" do not need to be true. Their importance
lies in inflaming resentments and confirming that America's implacable
enemies are working resolutely to destroy us.

David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine lacks the insights of
Thomas Frank's book, but it provides a gossipy history of the
rightwing takeover of the US media. Brock is unfair to some people,
myself included, and mischaracterizes as rightwing some media
personalities who are under rightwing attack.

Brock is as blindly committed to his causes as the rightwing zealots
he exposes are to theirs. Unlike Frank, he cannot acknowledge that the
rightwing has legitimate issues.

Nevertheless, Brock makes a credible case that today's conservatives
are driven by ideology, not by fact. He argues that their stock in
trade is denunciation, not debate. Conservatives don't assess
opponents' arguments, they demonize opponents. Truth and falsity are
out of the picture; the criteria are: who's good, who's evil, who's
patriotic, who's unpatriotic.

These are the traits of brownshirts. Brownshirts know they are right.
They know their opponents are wrong and regard them as enemies who
must be silenced if not exterminated.

Some of Brock's quotes from prominent conservative commentators will
curl your toes. His description of the rightwing's destruction of an
independent media and the "Fairness Doctrine" explain why a recent
CNN/Gallup poll found that 42% of Americans still believe that Saddam
Hussein was involved in the September 11 terrorist attack on the US
and 32% believe that Saddam Hussein personally planned the attack.

A country in which 42% of the population is totally misinformed is not
a country where democracy is safe.

Today there is no one to correct a lie once it is told. The media,
thanks to Republicans, has been concentrated in few hands, and they
are not the hands of newsmen. Corporate values rule. If lies sell,
sell them. If listeners, viewers, and readers want confirmation of
their resentments and beliefs, give it to them. Objectivity turns
listeners off and is a money loser.

In his book, Cruel and Unusual, Mark Crispin Miller, professor of
media studies at New York University, explains how rightwing influence
has moved the media away from reporting news to designing our
consciousness. "The Age of Information," Miller writes, "has turned
out to be an Age of Ignorance."

Miller makes a strong case. His description of how CNN and Fox News
destroyed the credibility of Scott Ritter, the leading expert on
Iraq's weapons, reveals a media completely given over to propaganda.
Ritter stood in the way of the neocon's invasion of Iraq.

CNN's Miles O'Brien, Eason Jordan, Catherine Callaway, Paula Zahn,
Kyra Phillips, Arthel Neville, and Fox News' David Asman and John
Gibson portrayed Ritter as a disloyal American, a Ba-athist stooge on
the take from Saddam Hussein, and compared him to Jane Fonda in North
Vietnam.

With this, the rightwing talk radio crazies were off and running.
Anyone with the slightest bit of real information about the state of
weapons development in Iraq was dismissed as a foreign agent who
should be shot for treason.

By substituting fiction for reality, the US media took the country to
war. The CNN and Fox News "journalists" are as responsible for
America's ill-fated invasion of Iraq as Cheney and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz
and Perle.

With a sizable percentage of the US population now addicted to daily
confirmations of their resentments and hatreds, US policy will be
increasingly driven by tightly made up minds in pursuit of unrealistic
agendas.

American troops are in Iraq on false pretenses. No one knows all the
fateful consequences of this mistaken adventure. Bush's reelection
would be seen as a vindication of aggression, and more aggression
would likely follow. A continuing expenditure of blood, money,
alliances, good will, and civil liberties is not a future to which to
look forward.

Paul Craig Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for
Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He
is a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the
co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.