The Politics Of Rage

by Patrick Appel

Rod Dreher discusses partisans on the right and left who only want to express anger, not ideas. First, the right:

They want to talk about Obama, and they talk about him as if he were two tics away from the Antichrist. The lack of proportion is what's so striking. I get that they don't like him or his policies, and are dedicated to opposing him. Fine, good luck to you. But what I can't put my finger on is why they take him for such a monster (and I do not exaggerate). I'm afraid I don't have anything useful to say to someone who believes the president to be a socialist Snidely Whiplash and/or a Muslim Manchurian candidate. During the later Bush years, I'd run into lefties who felt that way about Dubya, and while I certainly -- and publicly, in my writing -- had more than had it with him as a politician, the deranged conviction that he was some sort of monster made it impossible to have a normal, analytical conversation with some people. So you just sort of nod your head, and extricate yourself from the situation as soon as you can. I do that these days with some conservatives who make it clear that they are so filled with fear and loathing toward Obama that they really have nothing interesting to say about him.