The new New Right's slap-happy disease of naive radicalism

This is a difficult needle to thread, and an impossible thesis to presently prove, but it seems that in the steady streams of radical conservatism -- now there's a self-negating term for you -- there run the undercurrents of its own destruction.

Or, to put it another way, as I did yesterday, "as ultraconservatism moves ever ultra, it leaves behind yet another bloc of vestigial conservative conscientiousness" -- leaving the former and seemingly ascendant bloc more and more isolated from what might be called American mainstreamism, itself a demographic grab bag of old-school conservative temperament of exceedingly moderate disposition.

In short, as ultraconservatism becomes more visible, the more it targets itself for extinction, since the American body politic has historically been pretty much everything but ultra-anything.

That radical conservatives will "only to get louder," as Politico reported yesterday, is evidenced in more than a national mood: "a new crew of little-known conservative attack groups," Politico continued, "are pumping cash into the airwaves in an attempt to bring flagship components of Obama’s already-battered agenda to a grinding halt" -- a new crew whose "sources of funding and precise agenda [are] often unclear."

One group, the rosily-patriotic-sounding American Future Fund, for instance, "this week launched a $900,000 barrage of anti-health-reform television and radio ads targeting Democratic incumbents in 18 Republican-leaning congressional districts"; and another group, the scandalously named League of American Voters, has already and similarly spent a quarter-million.

Yet their funding sources aren't quite as unclear as suggested. The corporate cash behind right- (and righter-) wing organizations such as FreedomWorks is both aggressive and undeniable, while the League's executive director claims that his group is chiefly "funded by donations averaging between $25 and $75 and support from about 60,000 individuals."

"Less hazy," continues Politico, is the League's "political genealogy": Fox News' Dick Morris is, let's call it, the creative talent behind its ads, and "two of the four staff members listed on the league’s website ... have penned columns for the right-wing publication Newsmax likening Obama to a Nazi."

Further clearing the funding haze is this: "Their messages are enabled ... in part by a huge surge in online fundraising." This is at once a response to and reflection of what film director David Puttman so accurately characterized at a recent Cambridge University event: "demagogic bloggers who exploit their access to the medium" and thereby ignite "a digital lynch mob."

With that word -- "mob" -- we further approach the corrosive mentality that underlies these assorted groups; that of, that is, the Tea Partyers.

And here, by a somewhat circuitous route, we arrive back at the original thesis: that in today's ultraconservatism there run identifiable undercurrents of its own destruction.

Happily, you need not (suspiciously) take my democratic-socialist word for it, because old-school conservatives themselves are already just as happily pronouncing the pathological death of the Tea Party movement. I offer, as just one example, old-schooler David Brooks, of the NY Times, who has by the way described this ultraconservative movement as "radically anticonservative."

Poignantly, writes Brooks, there is a profound similitude between the Tea Partyers and the 1960s' radical Old Left, itself long since dead by suicide. The greatest similitude, in my concurring opinion? "Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures."

It's the old radical song, sung by swans.

Brooks makes other comparisons. "Both movements go in big for conspiracy theories," from the Old Left's phantasmagoric belief in "shadowy corporatist/imperialist networks" to the Tea Partyers' "dizzying array ... involving the Fed, the F.B.I., the big banks and corporations and black helicopters"; both "worry that the corrupt forces of the establishment are perpetually trying to infiltrate the purity of their ranks"; both "have a mostly negative agenda: destroy the corrupt structures [and] defeat the establishment"; both "believe in the spontaneous uprising of participatory democracy ... [and] mass action and the politics of barricades"; and both, perhaps above all else, possess "a legitimate point about the failure of the ruling class" (my emphasis).

Yet both "ruined it," or will ruin it, concludes Brooks, "through their own imprudence, self-righteousness and naïve radicalism" -- the latter of which, especially, goes against the historically imbedded grain of American mainstreamism.

And those are the undercurrents. Just give them time.