Jared Loughner and the Armed Madhouse* by Paul Street

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January 20, 2011

<* This interview originally appeared as “Jared Loughner and the Paranoid Style” on the Web site of New Left Project (UK) at: http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/jared_loughner_and_the_paranoid_style/>


1. Doherty: In the wake of the killings in Tuscon the tea party and their fellow travelers have been attacked for their lack of civility and for constant use of military metaphors regarding their opponents in the Democratic Party. Is civility really the key issue here?

Street: No, it isn’t. Citizens have no special obligation to be gracious and polite – to show “good manners” on the model of an aristocratic tea party – toward politicians and each other in a democracy. Real civic democracy often involves rugged and passionate conflict. Egos get bruised. Harsh words are exchanged. Unpleasant truths are spoken to and against power, often in justifiably angry tones.

SNIP* Still, the Tea Party’s particular brand of incivility should be a source of concern. It has little to do with legitimate popular anger. The Tea Party is basically the fake- and rancid-populist right wing of an ever more reactionary, racist, plutocratic and authoritarian Republican Party. It is largely a corporate-funded, corporate-crafted, and corporate media-ted, top-down phenomenon, Its membership is disproportionately affluent and very predominantly white and its rage is directed primarily (and quite illegitimately) at the poor, blacks, Latinos, Muslims and at government programs that serve – or are perceived as supporting – the disadvantaged. Its anger often takes paranoid forms, including the widespread and highly moronic sense among Tea Partiers that Obama is some type of socialist and Marxist totalitarian who is scheming to steal American prosperity and freedom.


The Tea Party does include on its margins dodgy, hard-right, proto-fascistic elements who advocate violence against “government” (a third of “Tea Party activists” surveyed by CBS and the New York Times last April agreed that it is “justified for citizens to take violent action against the government”), immigrants, and “the left” (a category that for Tea Partiers seems to range from Angelina Jolie and Charles Schumer to the local natural foods coop, NBC, and Hugo Chavez.) Attachment to guns (including rapid- and repeat-fire assault weapons that are about killing large numbers of human beings) runs strong with many Tea Partiers, especially among its more extreme elements. So does a deep sense of persecution and powerlessness in the face of “big government” and other large forces. When we factor in ongoing economic insecurity, the deepening mental illness and even psychosis of many isolated and marginalized Americans, the absence of a serious mental health policy in the U.S., widespread deadly-gun ownership and lax gun laws (Arizona allows citizens to carry concealed weapons without a permit) it becomes a cause for apprehension when:

* Tea Party chapters put up billboards telling citizens to "PREPARE FOR WAR" with a “Marxist” government (their openly idiotic take on the corporate-imperial Obama administration). This happened last year.

in full: http://www.zcommunications.org/jared-loughner-and-the-armed-madhouse-by-paul-street

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