Debt talks reveal the Republicans’ apocalyptic war on government

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/debt-talks-reveal-the-republicans-apocalyptic-war-on-government/2011/07/12/gIQAloURBI_story.html

By Harold Meyerson, Published: July 12

<snip>Republicans, to be sure, have long waged a war on government, but only now has it become an apocalyptic and total war. At its root, I suspect, is the fear and loathing that rank-and-file right-wingers feel toward what their government, and their nation, is inexorably becoming: multiracial, multicultural, cosmopolitan and now headed by a president who personifies those qualities. That America is also downwardly mobile is a challenge for us all, but for the right, the anxiety our economy understandably evokes is augmented by the politics of racial resentment and the fury that the country is no longer only theirs. That’s not a country whose government they want to pay for — and if the apocalypse befalls us, they seem to have concluded, so much the better.

[dissidentboomer]

1. Excellent article. Thank you

[starroute]

2. Partly they've just got to have something to hate and fear

It's often uncanny how much of the apparatus of the rabid anti-communists of earlier decades got translated wholesale into hatred of the United States government.

Some of that hate and fear went into the "war on terror" after the Soviet Union collapsed, but that's kind of remote and overseas and doesn't offer a lot of attractive local targets for your average Tea Party type. But government -- and government employees like teachers -- are convenient, easily demonized, and fit the general template of being part of some sort of vague, creeping, socialist menace.

The fact that the country is becoming more multicultural certainly adds to their fear, but the fear itself is primary. If they didn't have black or brown people be be scared of, it would be the old fallback of "East Coast elites" -- which is to say, some nebulous conspiracy between the wealthy and/or educated on one hand and Jews and other successful immigrant groups on the other.