Enormous blinders

For the Daily Standard, Max Boot gives a largely laudable takedown of the foolishness in Thomas E. Woods Jr's Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. The review lays bare the sort of insanity that passes for scholarship among the American hard right.

I have a feeling that this book wouldn't have elicited the same sort of animated refutation had some idiot New York Times reviewer not described it a "neocon." This book isn't neocon, it's paleocon, and in roughly the same way that Trent Lott is paleocon. As the review shows, this book is historical revisionism with the intention of advancing the agenda of Southern White Christian nationalists, because, after all, there is no group of people more oppressed than rich white straight conservative Christian Southern men.

What's utterly fascinating to me is how, in the end of his review, Boot suggests that Regnery, a "once-respectable publishing house", ought to be ashamed. You gotta be kiddin' me.

If Regenery is or was once "respectable", it's because conservatives have been making queasy bedfellows with the hard right in this country for decades. Regnery was begun by America Firsters, and some of its earlier published works were John Birch tracts and books critical of the Nuremberg Trials. If you ask my opinion, everything published by that hotbed of fascism should be treated as extremely suspect.

I'm pleased that Boot, although he is a neoconservative and a supporter of an adventurist (and unworkable) foreign policy has the decency to stand up to the extreme right, but I think this is increasingly rare. And I also think it wouldn't have happened at all were Woods not a total apostate to the right on the subject of Iraq.

The American right is riddled with folks like Woods. I remember my favorite bow-tied conservative, Tucker Carlson, suggesting that there were only a half-dozen white supremacists in this country, and they're all mentally disabled. To Tucker, and Max, and all the other metro conservatives in this country- there is no way Republicans would win elections if that were true. In places that are significant and places that are not, the Republican Party depends on prejudice, fear, and frightening nationalist ideologies to stay in power. If it weren't for it use of scapegoats like gays, "pinkos," blacks, atheists, illegal immigrants, "elites," and occasionally Jews, the Republican party would never have expanded its base beyond its natural constituency: plutocrats.