More Sarah Palin Than Ronald Reagan: CPAC’s Paranoid Style ‘recycled script sold to new dupes’
This is just a recycled script sold to enthusiastic new dupes.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/16/more-sarah-palin-than-ronald-reagan-cpac-s-paranoid-style.html
More Sarah Palin Than Ronald Reagan: CPAC’s Paranoid Style
by John Avlon Mar 16, 2013 11:10 AM EDT
At CPAC, the old politics of paranoia are always in vogue, writes John Avlon.
There’s no place where the paranoid style in American politics mixes with presidential aspirants quite like CPAC.
At this year’s conservative conclave, held at the Gaylord Hotel in Maryland, there is a mood of grim resignation after their rejection in the 2012 election, a determination to look for restoration along even more strict ideological lines.
What was once a decidedly fringe festival that Main Street Republicans have derided as a “Star Wars bar scene” has become a mandatory stop on the GOP presidential circuit, with Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal and Paul Ryan all making speeches this year. For conservative activists, it serves as an annual tribal gathering, selling special knowledge to those who feel at war with much of modern America and all of the Obama administration. And the media happily feeds the beast because CPAC offers a one-stop shop for portraying the uneasy coexistence between constitutionalists and conspiracy theorists inside the conservative movement.
The anxieties evident in panels and pamphlets echo those famously articulated by Richard Hofstadter in The Paranoid Style in American Politics a half century ago: “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try so repossess it and to prevent the final act of subversion.”
This year, the heraldry included a trailer to a fake film that envisions a politically correct collectivist party takeover of a city on a hill, inspiring an underground teenage guerilla liberty movement. There are books with titles like “The Ultimate Obama Survival Guide” and panel like “Trump the Race Card: Are You Sick and Tired of Being Called a Racist and Know You’re Not One?” and “Stop THIS: Threats, Harassment, Intimidation, Slander, and Bullying from the Obama Administration.”
The impulse to play the victim is strong among these Padawans; a pose that is decidedly more Sarah Palin than Ronald Reagan.
This is a place where panelists describe the “The Left’s Anti-Child Utopia” to nodding audience agreement and Brian Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage, advises “The time when you can stay at home and not have conflict is gone.” It is a place where congregants line up to ask questions like “What protections are in place for Christians with a Biblically informed sense of morality and marriage to have that same opportunity to serve openly in the United States Army?”
—->Continued