The Arizona shooting and the context of right-wing extremism

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Offering some of the best commentary yet on the Arizona shooting, Slate's Jacob Weisberg makes the crucual distinction between what may have been going on inside Jared Lee Loughner's troubled head, "politically tinged schizophrenia," and outside:

To call his crime an attempted assassination is to acknowledge that it appears to have had a political and not merely a personal context. That context wasn't Islamic radicalism, Puerto Rican independence, or anarcho-syndicalism. It was the anti-government, pro-gun, xenophobic populism that flourishes in the dry and angry climate of Arizona. Extremist shouters didn't program Loughner, in some mechanistic way, to shoot Gabrielle Giffords. But the Tea Party movement did make it appreciably more likely that a disturbed person like Loughner would react, would be able to react, and would not be prevented from reacting, in the crazy way he did.

At the core of the far right's culpability is its ongoing attack on the legitimacy of U.S. government -- a venomous campaign not so different from the backdrop to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Then it was focused on "government bureaucrats" and the ATF. This time it has been more about Obama's birth certificate and health care reform. In either case, it expresses the dangerous idea that the federal government lacks valid authority. It is this, rather than violent rhetoric per se, that is the most dangerous aspect of right-wing extremism. 

Yes, yes, yes. As I've been saying all along, this isn't just about political speech. To focus on speech, which is what the media are doing (and what even prominent Democratic/liberal/progressive commentators are doing, including Bill Clinton) is to deflect attention away from what this is really all about, that is, the context behind the shooting, and behind right-wing political violence generally, the context of ideology.

That context is what Weisberg describes, and more. It is about anti-government, pro-gun, xenophobic, racist extremism, combined with paranoid conspiracy theories of the kind spun by Glenn Beck on a daily basis. It is about warmongering and fearmongering, about scapegoating the Other, the different, about terror and torture, about a mythical alternate reality of delusion, about a refusal to deal with the world as it is, about a refusal to accept change of any kind unless it is change to some mythical past of right-wing supremacy.

And it doesn't just flourish in Arizona but all throughout America, in the hearts and minds of conservatives and in a Republican Party that has embraced the Tea Party and that is becoming ever more extreme in its outlook and ideology. Weisberg writes:

First you rile up psychotics with inflammatory language about tyranny, betrayal, and taking back the country. Then you make easy for them to get guns. But if you really want trouble, you should also make it hard for them to get treatment for mental illness.

True, "none of this says that Tea Party caused the Tucson tragedy," but "its politics increased the odds of something like it happening."

And it happened, as perhaps it was bound to happen. The right may not have directly caused the shooting, but it is certainly culpable.