This time its Alaska's Sen. Lisa Murkowski, no RINO and until a few weeks ago overwhelming favourite to keep the nomination. Her opponent, who will likely win the general, is a complete nutbar. Between these primary victories by crazies and recent anti-Muslim and violence, I'm beginning to see Reed's point of view.

edit- ignore

Alaska doesn't really count. Well, they get two senate seats, unfortunately, but the insanity of the people who live there doesn't really affect my feeling of American culture as a whole. The number of nutters it takes to elect somebody in Alaska is miniscule, really, and it's more of a remote colony of the US than a "real" state, and a really backwards one at that. I don't think there is a country anywhere that doesn't have some backwards bits, is there?

I'm more concerned with the basic structural problems in our political, media, and education systems that allow a very small group of mean, small minded fuckwits to wield so much influence. I believe that the great majority of conservative voters in the US and the world are decent people who want to do the right thing. They just don't know very much, or know what they don't know, or understand the difference between truth and prejudice.

Palin was being pretty outright vindictive on Murkowski's campaign, wasn't she?

Very much par for the course if the Vanity Fair profile is to be believed (and it rings, very, very true).

Warm and effusive in public, indifferent or angry in private: this is the pattern of Palin’s behavior toward the people who make her life possible. A onetime gubernatorial aide to Palin says, “The people who have worked for her—they’re broken, used, stepped on, down in the dust.” On the 2008 campaign trail, one close aide recalls, it was practically impossible to persuade Palin to take a moment to thank the kitchen workers at fund-raising dinners. During the campaign, Palin lashed out at the slightest provocation, sometimes screaming at staff members and throwing objects. Witnessing such behavior, one aide asked Todd Palin if it was typical of his wife. He answered, “You just got to let her go through it… Half the stuff that comes out of her mouth she doesn’t even mean.”

yep: like, kids' names.

It's not just Alaska though, Reed. Crist failed to get the Republican nomination Florida. Angle, who's even more spectacularly ignorant than Palin, won the Nevada primary. Mike Lee beat Bob Bennett (again, no RINO). Toomey seems certain to beat Sestak. And this is just in the Senate. I'm used to wackaloon Republicans in the House, but usually there are only a handful in the Senate (Sessions, Inhofe). The country's politics seems to have taken a really nasty turn since the economy went south and I'm increasingly scared about how it's going to turn out.

Then again, if even "moderate" Republicans are just going to take the Party of No approach to everything, it may not make an actual difference if there are more wingnuts in the Senate. In fact, it might help convince people that the system really is broken.

That said, if Angle wins, I fear for the Republic (then again, I already do).

Is there a chance of the Republicans losing a bit of ground in the middle if those candidates and future House members are perceived as too extreme?

My concern is that moderate Republicans — voters and pols — will move towards the Democrats, pulling that lot even more to the right...

I'm with UA. This is certainly bad, but I'm not convinced it makes it a whole lot worse than it already is and since the Tea Party's ideas are not going to fix the economy, I think they'll lose support after a while in power.

Angle is awful but then so is Nevada. It's a similar situation to Alaska- a barely populated, backward state getting as many votes in the Senate as California or New York. The problem isn't so much her or the wingnuts that support her, but the system that makes it possible for her to be in the senate.

I'm upset Toomey is going to win. It's frustrating because I think Specter would have beat him. Just a bad situation either way.

Sorry, I wasn't clear I didn't mean so much that I fear for what's going to happen to the Senate. That's already fucked up beyond belief. There are 372 bills that have been passed by the House and are waiting for a Senate vote. What I meant was that I fear for the direction the electorate, or at least a sizeable proportion of the electorate, seems to be heading, as evidenced by the primary votes (yes, I know primaries are not representative of the population at large), the ridiculous proportion of people who claim Glenn Beck is the person they most trust, the poll numbers on the Manhattan mosque/community centre, the way increasingly extreme rhetoric by politicians and media figures is becoming mainstreamed, and the whole Obama is a commie Muslim who should go back to Kenya thing. The hard right and large swathes of the rightwing media have been furiously race baiting since at least Katrina and it seems to have started to get a lot of purchase in the last year or so.

Yeah, well, that's why I have a strong impulse to leave this country. But I'm not sure that overall right-wing stupidity is actually on the rise or if it's just more visible and organized now. Which is scary enough in the medium and short term, but maybe not as disasterous in the long run. There are some encouraging signs too. Support for gay marriage has grown in the past 10 years and it seems likely it will soon be the majority position in most states. We still have a dumb healthcare system, but there seems to be more support than ever for fixing it. The demographics appear to be in our favor, especially when you look at the smoking and obesity rates-a whole lot of those fuckers who vote for Rand Paul aren't going to live much longer.

I've spent the last three days thinking about all of this (see my other thread - I can't do a link from my phone.) I've decided I have to stick it out in the States for at least another 10 years. So election 2020, I guess. Worst case scenario, two terms of another right wing fuckhead then we get another chance to get it right.

I'm naturally an introvert, so if I moved, even just to Canada, I'd probably become even more isolated and depressed than I already am.

Yeah, I'm not really thinking about the long run (ie 6+ years) here. I agree there are a lot of positive long term trends, even with the growth of fundamentalist Christianity, and that the current extremism of the Republican party won't last too many years of horrendous governance. What I'm worried about is that I think the next few years are going to be really nasty, especially if you happen to be non-white. Not just from a top-down political perspective, although that could be really bad if the Republicans get both houses and the presidency, but from bottom up hostility and violence. The federal government will, at best, be in stasis, and won't be able to do much about it even if it wants to.

It's an old story. Economy goes into the tank, the people responsible aren't held responsible. Instead the blame falls on some minority or foreigners or both.

The Nazis blamed Jewish bankers for a lot of their troubles. They got the Jewish part monstrously wrong, of course, but at least the bankers got some blame. We can't even manage that.

The short term view is genuinely grim; we desperately need an upturn in the next 18 months for Obama to have a good chance for a second term.

The long-term trends are better, if only because the race-baiting is going to be marvellously self-destructive as the electorate becomes increasingly non-white. Rational Republicans (and yes, there are a few left) realise that the party is committing hara-kiri by demonising the Latinos who (given their general conservatism on cultural and economic issues) are actually the party's best bet at building a long-term majority.

I'm also with Reed in believing that the rise of Fox and talk radio has served to amplify and give more prominence to attitudes that have always been present, but mostly hidden under rocks.

Unless they repeal the 14th ammendment. Not much chance of that, I imagine. I hope.

Sadly, I suspect that sooner or later, there's going to be a big crime - like a mosque will be firebombed or a bunch of Hispanics will get lynched. The silver lining of that is that it will expose what's really going on and what these people are really about. The OKC bombing had that effect to some extent. Earlier, it took some brutal crimes to help shift the KKK to go from a near-mainstream right-wing movement to the mere grotesque sideshow it is now.

I'm also with Reed in believing that the rise of Fox and talk radio has served to amplify and give more prominence to attitudes that have always been present, but mostly hidden under rocks.

Sure, but it's not analagous to, say, increasing diagnoses of autism. As Dave Neiwert has exhaustively documented over the years, the amplification has a normalising effect that changes public attitudes. Views that were always present but generally considered fringe and extreme have become increasingly mainstream precisely because they're being presented uncritically, or even endorsed, by Fox and talk radio. More people think Obama's a Muslim now than they did before he was elected. This is made even worse by the more restrained media's willingness to pick up obviously crazy stories from Fox or the worst right wing blogs for fear of being perceived as liberal.
With regards to race, which was a relatively muted issue during the first Bush term, this normalisation of extreme views seems to have accelerated since Obama's victory and especially in the last year, supported by the mechanism Reed describes in his penultimate post.

The salvation, for lack of a better word, will be that their libertarian Jesusland will prove to be a horrible place for most of the people who currently support it. More and more people will lose their health insurance, a combination of anti-education and anti-immigration will cause us to lose our technological edge, the level of heart disease and cancer will skyrocket, global warming will be so manifestly obvious that most people will have to accept it, etc. Eventually, someday, the population will get sick of it and be willing to try something new.

It exasperates me that neither Obama nor the Democrats mount any sort of counter-offensive to all this nonsense. Why don't they carry the fight back to them? As Jon Stewart is always saying, you're in power, why are you so hesitant to wield that power? Obama's pathetic response to the Ground Zero business was a case in point. Do they think it's strategically best to regard the Tea Partiers beneath the dignity of the Oval Office and are best ignored? If so, I'm not sure that's wise.

I have faith that the internal incoherence of the Tea Party axis, their nebulousness and their reluctance to engage in debate - they prefer to be noisemakers - will ultimately undo them from within. And why is the point not repeatedly made to the TP constituency that they are perhaps more dependent than most on the "big government" they so despise, in the form of subsidies, public services?