The Counterrevolutionary Delusion

Man the barricades and toll the bells, raise the snake flag high! The counterrevolution is coming! Again.

It won’t work this time either, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have their fun.

Don’t call them conservatives, call them what they are, counterrevolutionaries, fighting the good fight. There’s only one problem. There was no revolution.

All the explanations of what is happening on the right, right now, are unsatisfactory, because it’s not about “right now.” To understand what’s going on you have to travel back into the mists of time, all the way back to the 1960s, when there wasn’t a revolution in this country.

The sixties were the culmination of a profound, prolonged evolution in American society. A “tipping point,” in modern parlance, when more or less everything changed forever.

But it was no revolution, it wasn’t made, it happened, and it was leaderless. The hated liberals didn’t create the changes that appeared in the sixties, but they were mostly okay with them; they accepted the new way of things.

The conservatives did not. Will not. They’ve been fighting against history ever since, they’ve been waging counterrevolution against a revolution that never happened.

It started with Nixon and the “silent majority.” That was a counterrevolution among the white proletariat; it brought us hard-hat’s for the war, the lunchpail conservatives and the Okie from Muskogee. Ten years later counterrevolution was in bloom with a new name, the Reagan Democrats, Joe Six-Pack and Up With People. Next it was the neo-cons, the purest counterrevolutionaries of all because they’re products of the 60s non-revolution.

The neo-cons lived like revolutionaries, with their high divorce rates and their drug problems, but they preached counterrevolution, especially for the masses, and some of the masses bought it. Not enough to give up their mistresses and meth, but enough to go to church a lot and brag about it.

Now counterrevolution is back, but, in America, it has no place to go. The culture has moved on, gays aren’t going back into the closet, women aren’t going back to the kitchen, minorities aren’t going back to their place.

The battles of the sixties are over and mostly won. You can see it in the terms of debate about an impossible-before-the-sixties issue like “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Pre-sixties it was “kill the fairy.” Now even the counterrevolutionaries pretend to be tolerant of gays, mostly. The ground is conquered, the counterrevolutionaries are fighting over the last few yards around the bunker, and even that is lost; it’s just a matter of time.

But the counterrevolution is alive and well. Doing better than they have for years. They don’t have a revolution to overthrow but that’s a detail. They don’t need a revolution to be against, all they need is a boogie man. And that they’ve got.

Barack Hussein Obama, a mildly liberal Democrat of mixed parentage and no particular ideology, is the face of pure evil to the counterrevolutionaries. They don’t really believe that themselves, but he has an indispensable role to fill.

He’s the poster boy. His job is to embody everything they hate and fear about American culture, and all the regrettable changes that happened while they were down at the Rotary Club. That’s why they call Obama, a moderate if ever there was one, a Marxist. Obama is no Marxist, but he’s a boogie man nonpareil.

Are there blatant racists in the counterrevolution? Of course there are, reactionaries have always welcomed the sordid, squalid, and vulgar into the movement. When you’re fighting against history you need all the help you can get, thugs included.

But racism isn’t the point of the counterrevolution, it’s an unpleasant side-effect, a grimy underbelly to be tolerated until the counterrevolution succeeds, then purged, but it’s not the point.

The point is, well, there isn’t any point. You can’t undo a revolution that never happened. A revolution can be reversed, evolution cannot. This is a cry against history, this is nostalgia as a political movement. It cannot succeed, it can only disrupt.

There is a reason the counterrevolutionaries are short on solutions and long on slogans. It’s not about positions, it’s about emotions. You can hear it in the rhetoric—the fired up base, the mad as hell people, the anti-intellectual rants against the machine. The tea party and the “regular people” are telling the elites how they really feel.

Feel. Not think. This big-money-funded movement fumes against the power of big money, big government, big everything. And everything is what they’re against. The counterrevolution doesn’t have rational positions; everything they claim to want is contradicted by everything they claim to want.

No more deficits and no more taxes? No way. No more bailouts and no more regulation? Impossible, the second guarantees the first. Get the government off our backs and get the government into our reproductive organs? Self-contradiction.

This counterrevolution will be short-lived. It’s all emotions and emotions are fleeting; I doubt it will last until 2012. And when it passes, it will have achieved approximately nothing. They may slow legislative progress for a session or two, they may cause a bunch of trouble, but they can’t stop history moving farther and farther away from them.

But they are dangerous. The counterrevolution is a delusion. And like all emotional disturbances, capable of doing great harm.

We don’t have to let it happen. I strongly suggest you get up off your smartphone and go vote November 2^nd.