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After many years as a psychotherapist studying the psycho-dynamics leading Americans to move to the Right, (before I became a rabbi and editor of Tikkun), I began to understand why a fringe and extremist group could be so successful in gathering support that would eventually lead to its ability to shut down the functioning of the government.
Here’s what I learned about why right-wing extremists are on the ascendency:
1. The Right has a coherent worldview, deeply mistaken, but nevertheless held firmly and taught widely through the media it controls and the many institutions it funds. They know what they want—the elimination of government except for its policing, fire-fighting, immigrant fighting, and military services.
2. The Democrats are perceived as wimps, because they don’t fight for what they say they believe in. So even though temporarily they are slightly winning the battle about who is to blame for the government shut down, they keep missing opportunities to challenge the Tea Party and their supporters.
3. With the decline of American political power and economic power globally, coupled with the intense assault by the 1% on the incomes and economic security of the rest of the population and growing awareness and despair about the way climate change might be real and might lead to environmental disaster, and you get a huge amount of insecurity about the future, and a willingness to grab on to a variety of pseudo-solutions.
4. The takeover of the culture by the ethos of materialism and selfishness (which go hand-in-hand with the Social Darwinism that is Libertarianism). Rarely in history have we seen such a huge buy-in to that ideology and to the common-sense notion that people are basically ego-driven and selfish and that “what they really want is more and more things,” as we see in the media-driven culture of the 21st century.
The full article is available here
