An anti-government tsunami?

There was a very thoughtful piece about the courts, the constitution, and the fate of progressive political philosophy in the June 27 issue of the New York Times Magazine. It is by Noah Feldman, who is a Harvard Law School professor. He summed up the roots of the current debate between liberals and conservatives about what we need to fear the most: liberals most fear unconstrained market forces, while conservatives most fear an overreaching state.

Feldman says that the recent Supreme Court decision in favor of Citizens United that removed limits on corporate campaign financing is a clear example of this division. And he goes on to discuss what constitutes an "activist court," meaning a preponderance of decisions that overturn precedent rather than deferring to prior decisions. By that marker, it's the Republicans who are the activist justices. The Roberts court definitely sides with corporate litigants.

That's a thoughtful, rational analysis of all the heat. But those are not the words that are stirring up the tea party crowd. It's the tactics of Rush Limbaugh & Friends that scare me. Like this (from Huffington Post):

Rush Limbaugh said on his July 2 radio show that he believes Obama tanked the economy on purpose, both as "payback" for 230 years of racial oppression and because Obama simply doesn't like America.

He railed: "Who is Obama? Why is he doing this? Why? Why is he doing it? Is he stupid? Is it an accident? Is he doing it on purpose or what have you? ... I think we face something we've never faced before in the country -- and that is, we're now governed by people who do not like the country, who do not have the same reverence for it that we do. Our greatest threat (and this is saying something) is internal."

Rush doesn't even make "crazy sense." He just says stuff to get people riled up, unthinkingly. An example: he cited a woman whose unemployment benefits expired and how the liberal media used that as an indictment against the Republicans and conservative Democrats who voted against extending benefits. But Rush twists this around to saying that blame is misplaced. It's really Obama and "payback" for racial oppression.

Payback time. This woman's going to find out what it was like, in Obama's view, for other Americans to live as they did in this unfair and immoral country for the 230 years we've been around.

That makes no sense at all. African-Americans are suffering disproportionately in the jobless market. Besides, Obama was pushing for the bill to be passed to extend benefits. The conservative block voted against it and it didn't pass. But somehow it's Obama's fault and it's really intended to make the other side suffer?

And back to Rush's first comments: that Obama "tanked the economy." The economy tanked while Bush was president.

The sad and frightening thing is that Rush knows that many of his listeners will just swallow it whole -- and he's intentionally building up this automatic association of Obama's name with anything bad these people fear. So Obama becomes like Hitler or determined to impose a socialist state that will control every aspect of our lives. (And let's just forget that until now these same people's rallying cry was for government to control people's sexual relationships and reproductive lives.)

Our cherished First Amendment allows Rush to talk such trash. Democrats -- and Independents too -- have got to figure out a way to counter it or we're going to wind up with a bunch of rabid, ignorant, and incompetent people running our government.

Ralph