Is it meaningful to say that the majority party, the one that holds control of all three branches of the federal government, is taking "extremist" positions? After all, if a particular program or ideology can command majority assent, even approval, isn't that by definition "mainstream"?
It's not an argument that I would dismiss lightly. Nor is it the case that "extreme" always means "wrong." Drastically changed conditions may in some cases require measures that in previous times had been considered extreme.
But the last election is not the only measure of what can be considered extreme. Past American political history is also a point of reference. So are the experiences of other democracies in the world, particularly those in highly developed countries like the EU, Canada, Australia, Japan. And rationality can also be applied to evaluating whether a particular program - say, a foreign policy of preventive war and a push to phase out Social Security - should be considered extreme or not.
Something like the latter seems to be what Bill Moyers had in mind in his 12/01/04 speech to Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment when he said:
As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers, there is an even harder challenge - to pierce the ideology that governs official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts. [my emphasis]
Moyers discussed this situation from the standpoint of US policy toward the Islamic world a another speech a few month earlier. I wouldn't have phrased the part about the coupling of theology and ideology in exactly that way. But in the context in which he used it, he has a very good point. (The September speech just linked gives a more complete description of the context.)
Extremism can also be a style and a way of processing reality. I believe it was the investigative journalist Drew Pearson who used the phrase "middle-of-the-road extremists" for people who defended moderate policies with an extremist approach. Richard Nixon is probably a good example of that type.
In their book The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (1970), Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab offer some useful definitions of extremism. Unfortunately, they make heavy use of the word "monism," which is usually encountered in theology or philosophy more than in political science, let alone the daily newspaper. A workable synonym would be "authoritarian." They describe it as follows:
The democratic political process refers fundamentally to democratic political pluralism: an "open democratic market place" for ideas, speech, and consonant politcal action. Monism amounts to the closing down of the democratic market place, whether by a massive majority or by a preemptive minority. The monistic impulse, however, in the context of the American political metaphor, must be legitimated by rendering illegitimate those who are to be ruled out of the market place. Enter the imputation of deliberate evil, rather than lack of wisdom; enter the elements of absolutism, moralism, and conspiracy; and enter, of course, the conspiracy target.
This kind of definitions are always somewhat fluid. Politics is not physics or mathematics. But we can make some meaningful distinctions between different kinds of movements and different kinds of political styles.
Lipset and Raab offer this combination of characteristics as being typical of political extremism: "The model of monism [authoritarianism], of extremism, poses three prime elements of ideology: moralism, conspiracy theory, and a doctrine of monistic [authoritarian] repression." And they discuss how the three characteristics interact:
A doctrine of monistic [authoritarian] repression is, of course, both a necessary and sufficient condition by which to define a movement as monistic [authoritarian]. [But] the existence of a conspiracy theory does not by itself define an extremist movement. But, on the one hand, its existence is at the least a high risk factor for the development of a doctrine of repression; and on the other hand, a doctrine of repression become politically supportable only to the extent that it develops some variant of a conspiracy theory. Moralism - the belief that good or evil intention is specifically determinative in history - is even less a defining condition of monism [authoritarianism] in itsef, but is a necesssary element of both conspiracy theory and repressive doctrine.
Their political science language is a bit stiff. I mean, John Ashcroft's name is essentially synonomous with political repression and moralism. But I'm guessing he probably couldn't give a definition of monism in either its political, philosophical or theological sense.
They refer in particular to how nativism, aka xenophobia and jingoism, has generally played a strong role in rightwing extremist movements in America:
Being a specialized form of political repression, it is itself a sufficient condition by which to define a movement as monistic [authoritarian]. But it is perhaps even more politically significant as an adjunct of a generalized doctrine of repression: the illegitimation of political differences and deviance; that is, the rejection of democratic process. Nativist bigotry has served in American to flesh out the conspiracy theory and to legitimate a generalized doctrine of repression.
I'm not bringing these things up to make some academic point about defining extremism. Or to justify using an unflattering adjective for the Republican Party. I don't need political science texts to come up with those! And I'm not predicting that Bush and Cheney will declare martial law on inquguration day and put Rummy in charge of policing the whole country. (Whether they might want to would be a different speculation.)
But I am pointing out the degree to which extremist ideas and practices, not least of them theocratic tendencies from the Christian Right, have become dominant in the national Republican Party. The doctrine of preventive war that put us in the Iraq War mess and the drive to phase out Social Security that is currently underway are both examples of the outcomes we can expect from this phenomenon. Anyone who thinks that today's Republican Party is just the party of cautious businesspeople and middle-aged married people concerned about the world changing too fast is just not paying attention to what's going on.
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