re: #195 Gus 802

We even have a resurgence of the end-of-times crowd to boot.

Absolutely. I’m dead serious in saying that if people can read only one essay to explain what has happened to people on the right (the people now watching Beck, Malkin, etc, I mean, not the sane right) and what is happening with the GOP leadership and the rightwing blogosphere— — it should be this essay. It also becomes clear that this style only went underground and we’ve been seeing a recrudesence of it.

Charles and other have noted that the party of personal responsibility has turned into the party of perpetual crying and victimhood, and that syndrome is delineated there as well.

This is good too:

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction

Doesn’t this sound like the unhinged rants against “progressives” , “the left”, and Obama, by sufferers of ODS?