DEMAGOGUES, THEN AND NOW

I've been trying to understand what's up with the wingers for several years and I've made a little progress. Perhaps the most insight came from Prof. Altemeyer's work on authoritarian personalities followed by Hofstadter's historical analysis and observations by Hayek and others that more than a few rigid, doctrinaire conservatives were once rigid, doctrinaire Marxists. We seem to be dealing with a personality type that has been around for quite some time, so it's not surprising that we can find similarities between the demagogues of the 30s and 40s and our current freakshows.

Glenn Beck made this statement on the July 28th episode of his radio show:

I think this is you know, ACORN has attached itself to the face of our government right now and everyone is trying to get ACORN off and they are concentrating on that. Stop concentrating on that. It has laid eggs inside of our government, not just in the White House and through the czars and everything else but it is laying those eggs, deep and powerful eggs in something called AmeriCorps.

70 years ago, Gerald L. K. Smith¹ made this parallel statement:

These alien enemies of America are like the parasitic insect which lays his egg inside the cocoon of a butterfly, devours the larva and, when the cocoon opens, instead of a butterfly we find a pest, a parasite.

You may recall Free republic founder Jim Robinson's recent call for the overthrow of the government. It's not much different from what Charles Bartlett Hudson² wrote in 1941:

...With a determined MARCH on WASHINGTON you could expect the guilty cowards in both House & Senate to run away, leaving the patriots, who could then go thru with the impeachment proceedings. That patriotic remnant of the Congress then could enact a law declaring who would serve as Pres., V-P, etc., until next election. That is the law!

¹The Prophets of Deceit by Leo Lowenthal and Norman Guterman. Harper, 1949. Page 55.
² op.cit., page 100