Oooh…scary! I’ll bet $1,000 that I could take any random tea party nut and they wouldn’t know even that much, much less that Alinsky died 40 years ago. The only thing radical about Alinsky–who made it his life’s work to help those marginalized in ghettos–was the title of his most famous book, Rules for Radicals…..

The only people who find Alinsky’s writings radical are the Haves, because it suggests that the Have Nots have the power to equalize the system a little more. That’s a scary concept for the one percent for which the GOP is entirely dedicated. But unlike former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman in the clip above, I do think this resonates with those Republican voters notorious for voting against their own interests. Because not one of them will bother to get informed on Alinsky. Not one of them will bother to do any critical thinking but simply categorize Alinsky as one of those nefarious bad things from which to be frightened or suspicious of the liberal agenda.

Newt is taking a page out of Glenn Beck’s book, of course, who talks about Alinsky as much as he does Woodrow Wilson. And why not? Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both on the record as Alinsky admirers and of course Alinsky’s name has a certain, shall we say, “ethnic” quality about it, not unlike my own. Even more important (and this is just the kind of thing that people on the left need to understand better about a big part of the right in this country) are the acknowledgements that Alinsky wrote for his book RULES FOR RADICALS: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history… the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

Alinsky, of course, was being figurative, but for millions of Americans (hundreds of thousands of whom believe Barack Obama is the Antichrist), there is nothing “figurative” about the Prince of Darkness. That is what this particular dog whistle is about–the left’s alliance with the Devil. If you don’t believe me, Google “Alinksy” and “Lucifer” and see who comes up.

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In addition to being an enthusiast, Gingrich is brazen. Isn’t that a lovely old-fashioned word? Shameless. Without scruple. Possessed of brass-faced gall. A man for whom the word hypocrisy has no meaning.

There are a couple of easy pointers for the neophyte Newtist on how to read the Speaker. One is that Gingrich constantly accuses others of that which he himself is guilty. The shrinks call it projection, but I have no interest in his psyche or private life. Projection is simply a fact of his political life. It goes back at least to 1978, during his first successful congressional campaign, when he accused his opponent Virginnia Shapard of preparing to leave her family behind if she went to Washington, while Gingrich’s staffers were taking bets on how long his own collapsing marriage would last.

In Gingrich’s career, the most famous of all the instances of projection is his destruction of Speaker Jim Wright. It is fashionable to write about how ironic it is that Speaker Gingrich had problems with a book contract and that he currently has ethics problems—both ordeals suffered by Speaker Wright. Actually the irony is quite old. At the time Gingrich called Wright “the least ethical Speaker in the twentieth century” because Wright had exceeded the House’s $20,000 limit on honoraria through bulk buying of his book, Gingrich himself had raised $105,000 from former campaign contributors to publicize his own book, Window of Opportunity.

Hypocrisy? Brass-faced gall? Consider this:

Although many of Gingrich’s critics would like to think he merely pops off all the time, in fact both his use of certain language and his repetition of certain ploys are quite deliberate. Connie Bruck, writing in The New Yorker, cites “polarization and oversimplification” as hallmarks of Gingrich’s rhetoric.

Gingrich pays attention to language with a concentration that would do credit to a professor of semiotics. In a 1990 GOPAC letter to Republican candidates, he wrote, “I have also included a new document entitled ‘Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,’ drafted by GOPAC political director Tom Morgan. The words in that paper are tested language from a recent series of focus groups where we actually tested ideas and language.”

Gingrich has a particular fondness for the words grotesque, sick, bizarre, and twisted, and regularly uses them in ad hominem attacks on his critics. He described a reporter whose question he didn’t like as “an incredibly stupid person,” and denounced another as “grotesque and offensive.” Demonstrators protesting Medicare cuts along his book tour were “would-be fascists.” Unfortunately, it’s catching. Gingrich’s critics respond with ad hominem attacks on him, and splendidly brazen as he is, he is not beyond posturing as a wounded innocent.

One of Gingrich’s regular ploys is to associate “the opposition”—whether he defines it as Democrats,liberals, or counterculture McGoverniks—with the most heinous event of the moment.

In 1992 he said Woody Allen’s affair with Mia Farrow’s daughter “fits the Democratic Party platform perfectly.” The Democratic Party has never recommended screwing your lover’s adopted daughter.

When Susan Smith drowned her two sons in South Carolina in 1994, Gingrich said it “vividly reminds every American how sick society is getting and how much we have to change. I think people want to change, and the only way you get change is to vote Republican.”

Actually the Democrats have never recommended drowning your children either. But in reference to the above item, Susan Smith was in fact screwed by her stepfather from the age of fifteen on. He was a member of the state Republican executive committee and the Christian Coalition…..

And this:

The latest round of journalistic efforts to take this unpromising specimen of political guttersnipe seriously includes de rigueur reflections on what The Washington Post calls “Gingrich’s intellectual force.” In Time magazine’s hilarious Man of the Year profile, Lance Morrow hails his “first-class intelligence.” According to Bruck’s New Yorker profile, Shogun is Gingrich’s Bible. God save us, it isn’t even a good book. On the other hand, it is a lot better than his own novel, 1945, which is so appalling that anyone who admires Gingrich should be forced to read it.

It is now conventional wisdom that Gingrich’s “ideas” dominate the Washington agenda, that he was somehow preternaturally in touch with the deepest yearnings of the American people. Actually, much of what Gingrich propounds stems from poll-driven politics and pollster packaging.

And finally this:

Since becoming Speaker, Gingrich has called Democrats “sick,” “corrupt,” “thugs,” and “liars.” Also, a party “that despises the values of the American people,” “cultural masochists” who enjoy bad news, “the enemy of normal Americans,” and guilty of “multicultural nihilistic hedonism.” Various stories that have offended him are “socialist,” maniacally stupid” (that one was aimed at The Wall Street Journal), “a joke,” “mean, spiteful, nasty,” “a despicable hit piece by a person who has virtually no values.”

But can he take it? In March 1995 he told the National Restaurant Association, anent the ethics charges against him, “Frankly, it hurts. It hurts to see people cheat, and it hurts to see the cheating reported as hard news.”

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Let me finish tonight with this. The Republican Party is about to seal a Faustian deal with the devil. Every observer from left to farthest right knows what’s going on here. The Republicans, led by the angriest among them, are about to give away their partisan souls for one all-consuming political purpose, the destruction of Barack Obama. They’re about to begin the nomination for President of a figure who represents the Mephistopheles of what they preach. He is nasty, brutal, ready to fight and kill politically, a man of no discernible commitments or values, who has nothing to offer but a sharp-as-hell intellect and a wicked rapier of words. For the right price and a presidential nomination is his [sic], Newt is ready to jump on a dime and hit any opponent where he shows weakness. Why are they on the verge of enlisting in the army of Newt? Because he voices in cold, nasty, deadly tones the words of their contempt, because he’s an opportunist ready to seek any route to his opponent’s heart and thereby kill it. He’s a political killer, a gun for hire. But he offers a prize so precious, he cannot be resisted.

This. This is the Faustian deal at hand: Newt Gingrich’s promise of a vision of which they on the right have set their hearts, the few minutes of national television in which the President and his wife stand before them in defeat. That’s why they’re offering up their partisan souls, why they’re ready to bow down before this false god of hatred. They will give their souls to Newt, their compact with the devil to get what they most want: Pain on their enemy. They want it more than yet another tax cut, more than another wild, unwarranted war, more than love or freedom or joy. They want the President’s head. And they’ve cut a deal with Mephistopheles to get it. What they’re doing isn’t good. They know it as well as we know it. Deep down, it is wrong to run someone who is so different from what you value. They know it’s wrong and they’re doing it still. They’re willing to give up all the values and hopes and claims to goodness they’ve ever professed. They’re willing to strike this deal with the devil because they want to hurt Obama, because the most enticing prospect of this entire campaign is the chance to bring down this President. And in the prospect and act of doing so, they imagine how damn good it will feel.

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Of course Jackie Gingrich’s daughters aren’t going to line up behind Marianne, whose interview struck me as an anticlimax. I mean, yeah, the guy’s a schmuck–many of us had that one figured out 30 years ago. In the immortal words of the Austin Lounge Lizards, “Gingrich the Newt is puffed up like a toad/So full of himself that he’s bound to explode.”

I was moved listening to Santorum trying to explain to Anderson Cooper or whoever he was talking to after the debate last night about what happened back in the olden days when Newt became Speaker. “In three years,” he said, “They tried to fire him. In four years they did. And the people that led the revolt were conservatives.” Gingrich’s surge is as improbable to me as a triumphant Vanilla Ice comeback tour would be, but so is the idea that America is teetering on the brink of socialism–and that Obama is the “most dangerous president in US history.”

People who hate Obama so viscerally really do want to turn back the clock. So why not reach back into the past for a champion? It makes a kind of rough sense until you remember that Bill Clinton–one of the most villified and certainly one of the most vulnerable presidents we’ve ever had–beat the living crap out of Gingrich. From Katie Bacon’s 2005 interview with John Harris, author of The Survivor, in The Atlantic:

“Mr. President,” Newt Gingrich once threatened Bill Clinton. “We’re going to run you out of town.” Clinton told him in return, “I’m the big rubber clown doll you had as a kid, and every time you hit it, it bounces back. That’s me. The harder you hit me, the faster I come back up.”

Clinton, of course, turned out to be right. Gingrich was the one who was run out of town, while Clinton survived scandal, electoral setbacks, and intense partisan fighting to leave office as popular as he was the day he was elected.

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Psychological research suggests chin shape may be a physical signal of the quality of a mate. For example, women may prefer men with broad chins because it’s sign that a man has good genes; likewise, a woman’s narrow chin may correlate with high levels of estrogen. Zaneta Thayer, a graduate student at Northwestern University, and Seth Dobson, a biological anthropologist at Dartmouth, examined the sexual selection hypothesis by measuring the chin shape of nearly 200 skulls in a museum collection, representing people from all over the world. The pair discovered that there is a small but distinct difference in chin shape between the sexes, with men having a taller, more pronounced chin. They argued in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 2010 that this difference is evidence against explanations that the chin evolved to resist mechanical stress. If chins evolved in response to eating or talking, then there should be no difference in chin shape between the sexes because, presumably, men and women eat and talk the same way.

I’m no Creationist, lord knows, but when I read popular accounts of the latest insights in evolutionary psychology, I almost always feel like I’m reading something that will be quoted by future writers with embarrassment or contempt–like we regard Phrenology today, or more aptly, Social Darwinism or Eugenics.

Dobson and Thayer, I’m sure, are as serious-minded as any scientists should be, but the underlying presumption of the Smithsonian article–that a human anatomical feature, if uniquely evolved, must have its own unique just-so story to explain it–strikes me as being sort of silly.

Even if you could prove that chiseled chins correlate with “good genes” (which genes?), why would our primeval forebears have looked to chins for evidence of those genes and not to something more proximate and unambiguous–big muscles say, for strength, sleekness for food-finding prowess, or overt signs of sexual interest (flirtatious behavior, visible arousal) to signal sexual availability? And why would a feature have to be unique to one sex for the other sex to find it attractive? Wouldn’t it be enough that it’s attached to a member of the opposite sex? Mightn’t a heterosexual man be indifferent to the shape of Steve Tyler or Mick Jagger’s lips but find the same shaped lips appealing when they’re tacked onto a woman’s face? Isn’t it possible that a heterosexual woman might be indifferent to a wispy mustache on a female’s upper lip but find it adorable on a hunky male?

What about all the sexually attractive characteristics that are completely outside the realm of reproduction and hence evolution–ie, some of the features that gay men and lesbians find attractive on their respective objects of desire? I can think of all sorts of sexually-attractive characteristics that are so culturally specific that they’re probably not evolved at all. Some people, for example, find tattoos to be real turn-ons or lacy underwear or spiked heels. Or think of those obese neolithic goddess figures. Evolutionary psychology says we must have chins because our ancestors liked them and that they liked them because they signaled something beneficial. Maybe we like our chins just because we have them–it’s not so much that Kirk Douglass’s is the ideal physiognomy, but that a really weak or recessive chin looks somehow less than human.

The real key, it seems to me, is to find the correlate. If the gene that controls chin shape is also involved in estrogen production and estrogen production confers a genetic advantage, then you’d be hitting closer to the mark. But correlation, as they say in social science, isn’t causation–and evolution isn’t teleology. The fact that we have a feature doesn’t mean that it’s the best possible feature–maybe it’s a crude adaption, a vestige, or a meaningless concomitant of some other beneficial mutation.

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Frank has the same ear for irony, bad faith, and the aporetic as the literary deconstructionists I used to encounter in graduate school in the 1970s, but the discourses that he so mercilessly decodes are the foundational tenets of the revenant right: “Constitutionalism,” “Free market capitalism,” “Entrepreneurialism.” His new book, he writes, is “a chronicle of a confused time, a period when American rose up against imaginary threats and rallied to economic theories they understood only in the gauziest terms. It is about a country where fears of a radical takeover became epidemic even though radicals themselves had long since ceased to play any role in the national life….Seen from another perspective, this is a chronicle of a miraculous time, of another “‘Great Awakening.’”

Here he is on the blue collar repudiation of the Democrats that powered the Republican landslide of 2010:

In a demonstration of “resistance to Obama and his agenda,” the demographic that had been moved by capitalism’s last systemic crisis to hand the presidency to Franklin Roosevelt four times in a row now resurrected the politics of Herbert Hoover.

It was an astonishing reversal, to be sure, but it was hardly the guileless upsurge that its fans have made it out to be. Most of the people involved were well-meaning citizens caught up in the spirit of the times. But the larger political operation in which they enlisted themselves has been like a gigantic game of three-card monte, in which the deck is shuffled and one card takes the place of another. Before our eyes, imaginary terrors have been substituted for real ones. All that remains is for the nation to pay up.

This, of course, is my subject too, though I tend to focus on the epiphenomenal fringe–the KKK rather than the Koch brothers; the Council of Conservative Citizens rather than the Chamber of Commerce. My bad reviews (hopefully Michiko has gorged herself on Frank and will ignore me) will accuse me of shamelessly playing the race card; if anyone is a hater, they’ll say, it’s the author of this book, who willy nilly accuses anyone who isn’t 100% behind the Obama agenda of racism.

But I don’t at all. What I accuse the right (and in some cases the left) of doing is waving bloody flags, of using emotionally-charged stories and symbols to promote their own mostly practical interests. Paranoia isn’t a political position per se; it’s the pre-conscious human condition. It describes what’s going on in the depths of our reptilian brains, which interpret every rustling sound as a hungry bear or a saber-toothed tiger pacing just beyond the firelight; which sees every stranger as a murderous rival who wants to murder or rape us and enslave our children. It’s because we carry so much of that kind of instinctive baggage that we need to be socialized–it’s why civilizations build schools and churches and the like. Any politics that encourages those atavistic impulses should be deplored.

I’m not a particularly partisan person, when you get right down to it. I voted for Obama, of course, but I can think of lots of things to hold against him. I don’t believe that Democrats have a monopoly on virtue or even good sense. But consider the craziness that was going on in Iowa all fall. What astounds me is how determined the mainstream media seemed to be to NOT acknowledge how much raw hatred was in the air.

Ron Paul, a long time Bircher, has appeared countless times on Alex Jones’s 9/11 denialist radio show and allowed racist, homophobic, and conspiracist screeds to be printed over his name. Pundits furrowed their brows and said, “yes, but he doesn’t seem hateful.” In the meantime, as disparate groups as white nationalists, Christian dominionists, and Ayn Rand libertarians claimed him as their own.

Herman Cain’s implicit brand proposition was that he was the antidote to Obama’s black skin—his race would magically cancel out Obama’s affirmative action advantages. He would be one of “our blacks,” as Ann Coulter so charmingly put it.

Newt Gingrich leaped into the presidential race calling for a ban on Shariah law and mosque-building with the same zeal that Henry Ford attacked the Jewish Kahal in the 1920s; Rick Perry tried to revive his foundering campaign with an appeal to defeat the homosexual agenda and beat back the people who were making war on Christmas.

Rick Santorum promised us that the day will come when women will be forced to give birth to their rapists’ children and Michelle Bachmann held out hope of a country reformed according to “Biblical” principles. And the moderate Mitt Romney, the pragmatic businessman, summoned the spirit of the anti-FDR American Liberty League the other day when he told an Iowa rally that “President Obama wants to make us a European style welfare state, where instead of being a merit society we’re an entitlement society, where government’s role is to take from some and give to others….If they do that, they’ll substitute envy for ambition, and they’ll poison the very spirit of America and keep us from being one nation under God.”

In another day, they might have called that McCarthyism; in a political climate that’s as thick with the New Hate as it is, hardly anyone even notices.

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