The Paranoid Style of the American Left

I'm always amazed at the hard left's fascist slurs against the Bush administration. Fascism has come to America, they say, and the Bush administration is the next Hitler!

Yeah, right! And Guantanamo will be our Auschwitz. We'll use ferries off the coast of Florida to transport our victims of genocide, rather than the cattle cars that rumbled the Jews to the camps during the Holocaust.

One could go on with the absurd examples, which is what Noemie Emory does in her devasting critique of current left-wing paranoia in the Weekly Standard:

The fascists are coming! Or rather, they're already here, installed in the White House, planning like mad to subvert the Constitution and extend their reign in perpetuity, having first suppressed and eviscerated all opposition and put all of their critics in jail. Thus goes the rant of America's increasingly unhinged left.

Read the whole thing - the article's a true classic. I love the conclusion in particular:

Let's give the last words to Mark Crispin Miller, as he told the blog Buzzflash in February 2006: "That sort of warped perception comes from extreme paranoid projectivity: the tendency to rail at others for traits or longings that one hates and fears inside oneself. We're dealing with a movement that is anti-rational. It's faith-based...it's a movement that believes what it believes, and it believes what it believes is right. It believes what it wants to believe. If it hears contrary evidence, it comes up with evidence of its own. This is not a movement that the rational can ever shame into surrendering by merely demonstrating its illogic to its followers. Paranoia is based on fear, and therefore on a kind of 'logic' that's impervious to evidence and quite incapable of learning from experience. Paranoia is an atavism, deep within us all."

Anti-rational, eh? Maybe Miller's on to something!