Star-spangled-bannered authoritarian brutes

Yep, just one more reason to be glad the Wehrmacht went down to ignominious defeat: They and their ideological masters were, you see, as the Cliff Clavin of talk radio so knowledgeably informed us this week, "insanely, irrationally against pollution."

Not only that, as they burned and pillaged and raped and slaughtered their way through Europe and Euroasia and North Africa, wearing loutish insignia which looked -- wouldn't you just know it? -- strikingly similar to Obama's healthcare logo, they held within their black hearts a psychotic hatred of big business (which had financed their continental ravages), and wanted only to return to the fiscally profligate Fatherland, where, just like the bunch of left-leaning Nazis they were, they could enjoy "cradle-to-grave nationalized healthcare."

Those mid-century Teutons, however, probably didn't need such a comprehensive healthcare system quite as much as others, since they all stayed pretty healthy by toiling on "a whole bunch of make-work projects ... one of which was the Autobahn," and, once while taking a break from their founding of the first PETA chapter, they had "banned smoking."

I do wonder how many times that splendid little history education was repeated that evening throughout suburban America, as it prepared to patriotically search and destroy some subversive town hall meeting: "Really, Hon, it's all true, I heard it today on Rush Limbaugh." To the ramparts!

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wondered as well; he was perplexed as the rest of us -- excluding, of course, those greasing their faces black and suiting up for subterranean combat -- and marveled aloud at the political opposition's self-destructive behavior: "They're taking their cues from talk show hosts, Internet rumormongers, and insurance rackets.... It's not often that you try to blow yourself up, but that's obviously what they're trying to do with all this vexatious stuff they're doing with these meetings," said Reid this week with uncharacteristic verve. "It's a party being run by a talk show host."

And, as noted, not very well.

In the immediate post-election period, political observers sat and pondered how the GOP might revive itself; the quickly arrived-at consensus being, it would moderate. But those boys have been full of surprises, crammed up and down and in every which way with the most counterintuitive maneuvering instead -- near-uniform hostility to an economic recovery package in response to a national crisis they caused; widespread opposition to an eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee of future election-determining heritage; and now their blessing, if not direct deployment, of corporate-financed goon squads.

"We know what we're up against," said Reid's counterpart, Nancy Pelosi. "Carpet-bombing, slash and burn, shock and awe -- anything you want to say to describe what the insurance companies will do to hold on to their special advantage"; and in the process, for reasons indecipherable to the rational mind, reduce the complicit GOP's approval rating from a solid minority to a barely detectable third-party level.

Yet, as Reid rightly observed, it's merely self-slashing and self-burning and self-shocking and awing. Most, in fact a crushing majority of Americans really, really dislike this sort of behavior -- the sort such as in St. Louis County Thursday night, where "police officers arrested six people..., some on assault charges, outside a health care and aging forum organized by [Democratic] Representative Russ Carnahan," or in Tampa, Florida, where a town hall meeting, also on Thursday, "descended into violence."

So just who are these swarming crackpots doing the undemocratic bidding of the GOP, corporate propagandists, and 501(c)3-ed gauleiters? Strangely enough, in answer to that master-educator Rush Limbaugh was on to something in his references to mid-century authoritarianism, though naturally he had the "something" all screwed up.

Last night, on MSNBC's "Countdown," there appeared a Princeton professor who, in partial explanation of the kind of human specimen likely to attend only to disrupt a town hall meeting, mentioned a contemporary scholarly manuscript on "authoritarian dynamics" which, I'm sad to confess, I have yet to read. I am, however, somewhat familiar with the larger body of work previously done in this area of socio-psycho-political derangement, principally that of Dr. Bob Altemeyer, in his Right-Wing Authoritarianism, and, originally, the groundbreaking work of Theodor Adorno et al, in their postwar The Authoritarian Personality.

That last title -- a work, admittedly, reworked by scholars because of methodological problems -- pretty much gives the guessing game away. Some, if not many, of these disruptive folks, such as those in St. Louis County and Tampa, possess the interior constitution of a pathological personality -- not only a deep susceptibility to higher authoritarian suggestion and power, but an inner authoritarian makeup so potentially violent it borders on a love of the anarchistic (hence Adorno's neologism of "pseudoconservative").

They proclaim an extreme patriotic fidelity to national and traditional values, but are fascinated by, and attracted to, the undemocratic, the brutish, the brutal. One can't reason with them, because they're irrational (often along racial and anti-ethnic lines); and on a matter such as healthcare for all, one can't appeal to their sympathy for the deprived, because they regard sympathy as a human weakness.

And that's why, three days ago, I titled a piece on this issue "Those marvelous town hall putsches," full of otherwise shrill terminology such as "brownshirts" and "stormtroopers." It's not that "they" are back; only that this twisted personality-type never left us.