The right is ok with tyranny, just not Obama's brand of tyranny

Jonathan Weiler at Huffington Post argues that what fuels the right wing's opposition to all things Obama is not a concern with government intrusion into our lives ("tyranny") per se, but the specific form of intrusion that aims at redistribution from the privileged to the less so. With a tinge of race anxiety to boot.



In this crazy political season, when stay-in-school speeches are transformed into demonic efforts at socialist indoctrination, expanding health care is viewed as the step just before the gas chamber and raising taxes on the wealthy is the open door to the Gulag, it's worth remembering this: the rabid right, as expressed by its leading organs, whether congressional Republicans or the talking heads Limbaugh, Beck and so on, is not concerned about tyranny per se, but only a very specific type of it. These high organs of the right cheered on eight years of significant erosions of civil liberties - warrantless wire-tapping, torture and the demonizing of anyone who had the temerity to criticize a "war president."



The profoundly anti-democratic (that's small "d" for those scoring at home) character of contemporary right-wing ideology is too plain to dispute and, as Marc Hetherington and I show in our new book - Authortarianism and Polarization in American Politics - is especially pervasive precisely among authoritarian-minded individuals who have, in turn, become the base of the Republican Party.



The point may seem obvious, but every time you hear another right-wing ring leader, whether it's the aforementioned Limbaugh or Beck, or Michelle Bachmann or Sean Hannity lament the loss of freedom and the imminent imposition of tyranny, it's important to remember what galls the modern American right about Obama is not the loss of freedom itself, but the extent to which he represents, in their collective imagination, the loss of prerogative (what folks used to call "status anxiety.") They believe that Obama's redistributionism means less for them and their kind - the true, deserving "real" Americans - and more for those who should know their place rather than despoil America with their grubby insistence on government entitlements. Whether it's illegal immigrants, gays, or brown-skinned people more generally, the modern right may have some sympathy for individuals in need, but as collective groups, it's an outrage that government wants to help them at the expense of the real Americans.