The American Right has reigned triumphant in American politics for at least a decade. Other than the blip of the crippled Obama presidency and two years of an ineffectual Democratic majority in Congress, the Right has had a virtual lock on all branches of the American political system. To this day, they have a resurgent majority in the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court rules as though it were the American Enterprise Institute. One would think that the Right would be basking in assurance that it is the real force in American politics.
Oddly enough, however, it seems the rhetoric of the American Right often reflects a defensiveness and paranoia more appropriate to 1936 or 1964, years in which it seemed that a triumphant liberalism had put the continued survival of the conservative movement into question. Possibly, were it not for the intransigence of the Solid South and the disaster of the Vietnam War, it would have. I actually read a post today in which one conservative was arguing that American liberals had an "exterminationist" attitude toward the Christian Right. Critical, certainly; hostile, possibly, but exterminationist? Hardly. The Democratic Party is hardly going to set up a gulag if they were actually able to take and wield power. But to read some conservative rhetoric, one would think that it what is at stake. And that irrational attitude might explain such phenomena as the American Right's willingness to wreck the country's credit rather that compromise on revenues. Unfortunately, they do not have a Franklin Delano Roosevelt or a Lyndon Baines Johnson to reckon with.