July 2009
In early spring of 2009 the Department of Homeland Security, newly headed by Janet Napolitano, released a report warning that domestic “right-wing extremists” might be poised to commit acts of revolutionary violence in the United States. These suspects-before-the-fact, the report explained, were likely to be people motivated by single-issue concerns such as abortion, immigration, gun control, and taxes—as close as the DHS came to defining right-wing extremism, which in its view seems to mean anyone who dissents from the progressive establishment on salient matters that also happen to be measures of political correctness, or its opposite. The report, Napolitano, and the Department instantly became the focus of angry protests, not least because the authors had also identified homecoming troops as being among the potential troublemakers. Napolitano and her people at first were defiant in the face of outrage. Later, the Secretary offered something like an apology. A couple of months later, in incidents occuring a week or two apart, Scott Roeder shot and killed Dr. George Tillman, one of the nation’s few late-term abortionists, in Wichita, and James von Brunn, a white supremicist, killed a black security guard inside the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
Liberal commentators lit up with the instananeous, raucous reaction of an electronic scoreboard. Within hours of the museum incident, Rachel Maddow drew what to her seemed the obvious conclusion. Secretary Napolitano, she suggested, had been vindicated after all. In both instances, the killers had been persons of “extreme right-wing” political views, just as the DHS report had warned; therefore, she inferred, it was Napolitano who was now owed an apology by her critics. And on June 12 Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times (“The Big Hate”), castigated mainstream conservative commentators like Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck for agitating and inciting potentially violent extremists, and Republican politicians like Senator Mitch McConnell for applauding them. “…Today,” Krugman wrote, “as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and the political establishment.” The DHS report, he concluded, “looks prescient…. At this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.” In evidence of the GOP’s alleged extremism, Krugman offered the Republican National Committee’s charge that “the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideas.” One would never guess, from paying attention either to Krugman or the RNC, that President George W. Bush expanded Medicare to include prescription drugs and that he wished to legalize millions of illegal Mexicans already living on welfare payments and to federalize the American educational system.
“…[S]upposedly respectable news organizations and political figures are giving aid and comfort to dangerous extremism,” Krugman continued. “…Politicans and media organizations wind up [extremists] at their, and our, peril.” By “wind up,” I think, Mr. Krugman meant “incite.” Yet there is another way to incite men to action besides telling them what they wish to hear, and that is giving them to understand that they are expected to resort to action. In this respect, perhaps, it is telling that the Wichita and Washington killings followed, rather than preceded, the DHS’s report. If a child overhears his parents worrying out loud that they fear he will misbehave in a particular way, that surely is a powerful inducement for him to do so. “Don’t put such ideas into his mind,” I heard adults whisper to one another when I was growing up. Yet the Department’s report was unintentionally calculated, if not to put into the minds of men ideas which were not already there, then to encourage them to act on those ideas in fulfillment of their imagined personal destiny. If I were an extremist myself, instead of a radical conservative, I might go further and suggest that such a result was not uncalculated by the drafters of the DHS report, and that it was rather their intent to urge racists, doctor-killers, gun enthusiasts, restrictionists, and “haters” of every sort to jump into the headlines, so that they might be identified at last and exterminated. That, of course, would be to subject myself to the risk of winding up on the DHS’s top-secret list of suspects-before-the-fact, which I have no doubt at all exists somewhere on Janet Napolitano’s computer.
As to the generalized threat that liberals believe “hate” and “extremism” pose to American society, I admit to a confirmed skepticism.
Racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious animosities are as old as humanity itself, historically traceable from 40,000 years ago when modern humans arriving from Africa apparently exterminated the Neanderthal race from Europe and West Asia. There has never been a society that did not experience these hatreds, and most likely there never will be—especially if liberals of the future persist in finding them everywhere and condemning them selectively. (Absolutely no one knows how to hate like a liberal, or a protégé of liberals.) Also if they continue to press and enforce an agendum that runs bang upon against human nature and the natural law; and if they pursue their increasingly tyrannical way. Most of the troubles from which this country suffers are caused by liberalism, liberals, and liberal policy, and yet liberals insist that it is all the fault of nonliberals, who must be coerced if necessary into liberal beliefs and liberal behavior. Peter Minogue, in his book The Liberal Mind, says somewhere that from the time a society is infected by liberalism, it is a moribund society. The whole record of the modern world is no more than a proof worked out by history to that effect.
As for “extremism,” it is merely a word, like Sir John Falstaff’s “honor,” signifying nothing but suggesting dissent from the shibboleths of postmodern progressivism. American liberals in general, and the Democratic party in particular, are currently the dupes of what could easily be for them a fatal misreading of contemporary American politics. Because the Republican Party is in shambles, they see a golden opportunity not just to exterminate the GOP for good and all, but to engineer the mass surrender of illiberalism in the United States. When liberal critics and Democratic wirepullers and functionaries lecture the Republicans on the need for the party to “moderate” itself, they mean, to become Democrats like them. “We are all Democrats now.” For them, the election of the first black president (a political and electoral fluke if ever there was one) qualifies as proof that “the country has changed,” “we have gone beyond that”—“that” being the Bad Old America. What they cannot see is that the demise of the Republican Party would facilitate, not impede or make impossible, the rise of a real antiliberal politics that would fight the Democracy tooth and nail. Such a politics would, of course, be an “extremist” politics. But, as the extremist presidential candidate who more than four decades ago forfeited the election to his Democratic rival who went on to consolidate the American imperial army and the modern American welfare state, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” In fact, it may not even be extremism. ###
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.