Addicted to fear
by digby
This is why America should not be the world's only super-power. We are simply, as a nation, too stupid to have that responsibility:
The least popular line in President Obama's State of the Union address, judging by the hear-a-pin-drop reaction from members of Congress and others in the audience, came when he declared that ISIS may "pose a direct threat to our people" but its members "do not threaten our national existence."
When Obama paused for applause, fewer than a dozen of the hundreds in attendance obliged him — the only such moment of the evening.
It was a revealing moment. Among Middle East and national security experts, it is considered a self-evident and banal truth to say that ISIS's threat falls far short of existential. Yet on the main stage of American politics, acknowledging this well-known fact is considered not just impolitic but practically unspeakable.
Of course it's a self-evident and banal truth. Not only that, but the only possible existential threat to America from another nation remains the same one that's been out there for over half a century: a nuclear strike. And the same deterrent we've had during all that time remains in place --- Mutually Assured Destruction. That's a real threat, no doubt. But we've held it back so far.
Anything else, particularly the "threat" of some mentally deranged losers buying some guns and shooting Americans as an existential threat is so daft it's embarrassing. 9/11 wasn't even an existential threat and neither is this, especially since mentally deranged losers shoot Americans every single day and it's treated like it's completely normal.
When did Americans decide to love the image of ourselves being threatened so much? Have we always been this way?
Asking that question reminded me of this passage in Ryan Grim's article about the president's SOTU. He quotes expert scholar Robert Paxton:
"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
Well ...
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