Heated Rhetoric

The continuing Chronicles of the Weimar Republic down south...

I sympathise with this kind of rhetoric, I really do:

Your party has set aflame the entire political landscape, and now, once burned, you warn sternly from the branches of a burnt-out tree about "playing with fire". You used the ashes of one of the great liberal cities of America, New York City, as war paint for your own sick, racist dreams. You shudder at a burning flag, yet are willing to snip-and-cut basic tenets of the Constitution as needed or convenient.

And now, you're outraged, not by any of the rest of it, not by anything that has come before, but because a few prominent Republican faces have -- shock of shocks -- been indicted in probes that have spanned years of investigation, and interrogation, and deposition. That, you say, represents the underpinnings of a civil war....

Welcome to the world of the politics of personal destruction, you tubthumping, chin-jutting, Bush humping gits. Welcome to the nasty and partisan world that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and a legion of insignificant lowest-rung toadies like yourselves nurtured into fruition daily with eager, grubby hands, and now look upon with dull-faced faux horror....

So don't give me chest-thumping crap about civil wars, if your politicians are indicted. Don't give me visions of a lake of fire, if all those who find you loathsome refuse to suck at your teats of scientific ignorance in the name of religion, racism in the name of freedom, and corruption in the name of the New World Order.

Get used to the world you have created, and the stench your worshipped heroes have unleashed.

Like I said, I appreciate the sentiment. God knows I'd love to respond in kind every time crazy Ann goes off her meds again. But the unfortunate thing about democracies is that they require someone to act responsibly. When all sides of the political spectrum start seeing domestic politics as some kind of Hobbesian war of all against all, as the center falls apart people start tearing the very fabric of the country apart.

This process was seen very clearly in Germany before Hitler's rise to power. There was something very rotten with Germany in the 1920s - while the Nazis were growing on the right, the Communists posed a smaller but just as militant threat on the left. The center fell away as Communists and National Socialists won increasing shares of the votes. Soon, the parties were settling their disagreements on the streets.

We saw a taste of that in 2000, when the Republicans interrupted the counting of votes to make sure that their man won. To be clear: The GOP started this scorched-earth tactic of victory. I'm not trying to defend their conduct in any way whatsoever.

But when people on the left start talking about how they've come to enjoy this new way of doing things, as Hunter does at DailyKos, I start to worry. My biggest fear - yes, even a bigger fear than a continuing Republican majority - is that the left responds in kind. Because we'll never be mean enough to actually take power, the way they will. And a lesson the Socialists learned in Germany in the 1930s: It can always, always get worse. All we need is for the left to be blamed for a new Reichstag fire, and if you think the Patriot Act is bad, watch out.