It is easy to find an excuse to comment on this subject. Just open up any American newspaper these days. The Washington Post's lead column, for example, is entitled "Toxic Brew for the GOP." This is about the ideology of the politicians who are bound to win control of the U.S. Congress in November's midterm elections.
How to call them? Republicans? Generally speaking, yes. Conservatives from the so-called Tea Party? Absolutely. Incidentally, these are related organizations but with some major differences. Are they small town Americans? Yes, they are that, too.
However, among the many labels applied to this political wave in the panicked op-eds of U.S. newspapers, the most precise would be the "attack of the primitives."
The other, less-primitive half of America is really scared this time - what if there is a right-wing takeover of the U.S. sanctioned by the ballot box? And what's most frightening is the kind of people who have launched the attack. They are too wild and willfully ignorant.
Their victory is virtually guaranteed. The pundits find precedent in the 1994 midterm elections during Bill Clinton's presidency. Clinton took office with his Democratic Party in control of both houses of Congress. But in 1994, just two years into Clinton's first term, Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives. History will repeat itself this year. In 1994, 49% of likely voters supported the Democrats, while 42% supported the Republicans. Now these numbers are 46% and 47%, respectively. And today unemployment is almost double what it was in 1994. In other words, it will be a landslide.
And this wave of politicians poised to take power in the states and in Congress -just who are they?
Their opponents denounce them in the harshest terms possible. Tom Tancredo, a candidate for Colorado governor, has suggested that the U.S. should bomb Mecca, advised President Barrack Obama to return to Kenya and called Florida a Third World country because of its illegal immigration problem. Or take some other right-wing heroes. There is Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate, who is accurately described as having the historical understanding and analytical abilities of your average seventh grader; Mike Huckabee, a religious nut posing as a rock guitarist; and Bobby Jindal, who once participated in an exorcism. These politicians are regarded by their opponents as idiots who are totally detached from reality. But yet these right-wing politicians claim to represent "the real America."
It's no surprise that their opponents shudder at the prospect of this "invasion of the savages." This should not be happening. America's religion is democracy -- the illusion that even savages should vote and have their voices heard. The problem is that the savages always have been and always will be the majority in every country. As for ruling the country, this is the prerogative of the well-educated elite. The elite may lose focus and suffer a setback, allowing the reigns of power fall to those who have no right to hold them - the masses, the savages.
This is what the other half of America is scared of. It is scared that the system is not designed to keep out the savages, that the Republican Party won't be able to play its historic role of harnessing and controlling the right-wing fringe, and that the national crisis is so deep that it has broken the two-party system, which has functioned for a hundred years, not counting breakdowns like Senator Joe McCarthy's reign of terror in the 1950s. America's other half fears that the United States is headed for disaster.
But how should we foreigners feel about the American right?
To begin with, we should not discuss the issue in primitive terms. We (the United States included) belong to the group of world civilizations that were influenced by the ancient Persian Empire with its Zoroastrian religion and philosophy (the struggle between black and white, good and evil). But let's keep in mind how this worldview has manifested itself in the U.S. attitude toward Russia: there was the democrat Mikhail Gorbachev versus orthodox communists; the reformer Boris Yeltsin versus conservative communists; and now Dmitry Medvedev versus Vladimir Putin. Anyone who reduces Russia to this simplistic recurring pattern does not and cannot understand us. So let's not make the same mistakes in our view toward America.
It would be wrong to believe that the Republicans, the Tea Party, the right wing, the savages, the primitives and the neoconservatives are all one and the same thing and that all they do is think about the state of the world and Russia.
The neocons are a special subset of the right wing that held power during the George W. Bush presidency. They are focused primarily on America's role in the world. Their grand plan was to secure America's position as the sole superpower, but they gave up exhausted and defeated, having stirred up anti-American sentiments almost everywhere. But they are not necessarily Republican and they are not right-wing savages.
By and large, the savages are not terribly interested in the outside world, with the exception of illegal immigrants from Mexico.
These people shun the outside world. Recently, the magazine Foreign Policy published a serious study on America's right wing and the United Nations. It would take too much to explain the entire study. Suffice it to say that this brand of right-wingers wants to stop paying dues to the UN and to expel it from American soil.
Needless to say, they are not fans of Russia ... or China, or Europe or the Arabs. But for the time being, the brunt of the "attack of the primitives" is focused squarely on the U.S. government and their political opponents. A typical example is the campaign against the construction of an Islamic cultural center two blocks away from Ground Zero, where the Twin Towers used to stand. It was launched by these right-wingers from middle America. New Yorkers, even Republicans and others on the right shake their heads in disgust, believing that the "primitives" simply hate their city, which has become the incarnation of American globalism.
To sum up, what we are witnessing is chaos in the right (or illiterate) wing of American politics. With time, a more or less literate elite will reemerge. Then we'll have to wait and see what comes next.
RIA Novosti political commentator Dmitry Kosyrev
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
