The American Right’s Problem

I never thought I would write this but Sarah Palin had a point when she said that she was a victim of a “blood libel”. The Left has gone wild and criticised her for implying she was on the receiving end of murderous anti-Semitism – the blood libel is the allegation that Jews delighted in murdering Christians. (For a modern example of the lie that has launched a thousand pogroms readers should note the Liberal Democrat peer Jenny Tonge’s call for an inquiry into invented allegations that Jewish doctors were harvesting the organs of the dead and injured of the Haitian earthquake.)  With equal force, her critics have also accused Palin of making the Arizona murders “all about me”. She meant us to attend to her pain rather than the pain of the bereaved.

But strictly speaking she was right. To date there is no evidence that Palin, the Tea Party or Fox News inspired the killer. American liberals say that she has blood on her hands. This allegation is not true. Thus if she wishes to put technical accuracy before decency, modesty and any sane sense of proportion she can describe the smear as a “blood libel”.

Unfortunately for the American right, that is not the end of the affair by any means. Its problem is that the first assumption of millions of people on hearing of the shooting was that the killer must be from the Tea Party. It seemed reasonable to think that his mind had been corrupted by the screaming accusations that President Obama was a Muslim, or a Mau-Mau from Kenya determined to turn America into a socialist state or whatever other lunacy was doing the rounds when he tuned into to talk radio.

Passionate movements of conservative and lefist populism punctuate American history from the Protestant Great Awakening of the 1740s onwards. Academics are fascinated by them for understandable reasons. But Michael Weiss, one of the most interesting American writers in London, points out that hardly any have looked at how the frenzied passions die down as moral awakening turns to slumber. 

‘What defenders of the Tea Party have failed to understand is that this movement, like every creedal passion-period before it, is liable to extinction by its own hand. This is never more so the case than when public curiosity morphs into public wariness and the movement gets defensive. The shooting of an American Congresswoman by a clinically insane man may have had nothing to do with the broadcasts of Glenn Beck or the unsuccessful senatorial candidacies of Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. But the immediate suspicion that it might have, as well as rapid-response protests of innocence, are indicators of the Tea Party’s actuarial odds. One already detects the lowering of mass blood pressure and hears mutterings about the indecency of dotting any kind of map with rifle sites.’

Just so. Compare the reaction of the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords with the attempted assassination of Stephen Timms by a knife-wielding constituent last year. Not even the Tory Party’s worst enemy assumed that the Labour MP’s assailant had had her mind unhinged by listening to the speeches of David Cameron or by reading the comment pages of the Daily Telegraph. The difference between the instinctive reactions to the two crimes is as concise an explanation as I can find of why the British right is in power while the American right is in more trouble than it has begun to realise.