Has America’s Right Wing Entered Its ‘Hippie Phase’? Ask the QAnon Shaman
The headline to Williamson’s piece caught my eye: “The American Right Hits Its Hippie Phase.”
In a nutshell, Williamson observes how today’s Democrats have embraced authority and what we used to call the corporate and political “Establishment,” while Republicans increasingly have become the countercultural “revolutionaries.”
Result: “We’re reenacting the 1960s with the roles reversed.”
The increasingly self-destructive violence that characterized militant protest movements following the movements of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and other liberal anti-war pacifists can be seen today in the increasingly self-destructive far-right militias and neo-racist movements that stormed the Capitol and carry rifles into state legislatures to protest mask mandates and other intrusions on their right to spread coronavirus to their families and neighbors.
The gurus of 1960s left-wing protest and alternative new-age religion have been replaced by militant evangelical culture warriors and the QAnon Shaman.
LSD? Try hydroxychloroquine. No, don’t. Not unless a doctor who doesn’t wear buffalo horns on his head prescribes it.
But, like Williamson, I can’t miss the eerie similarities between the two eras — and the reversals.
It used to be the right that defended the institutions that keep this country strong — including the FBI, CIA, military and police. Now it is Trumpists on the right who call the Capitol Hill police “murderers” and the like. It all depends on whose buffalo is being gored, I guess.
In my college days, I read Richard Hofstadter’s landmark essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Written in 1964 in response to the rise of the John Birch Society and Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, I did not truly understand what he was on to until this era of “election trutherism.”
With age I have learned better than to get too alarmed by such crazy swings in the national mood. My advice: Stick to what Colin Powell used to call the “sensible center.” Avoid the radical swings long enough without getting your head busted and, sooner or later, the national mood will come back to you, if you can survive.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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