As the week comes to a close, the two most talked-about lumps of prose are the hysterical — in every sense of the word — zombie-apocalypse op-edby the NRA's Wayne LaPierrein which he warned us of the nightmarish world our children will inherit if the Congress mandates background checks at gun shows, and/or as a result of the president's executive suggestions regarding various epidemiological studies of gun violence, and Sam Tanenhaus'slong exegesisin the new, now-with-50-percent-less-fabulism-we think-and-100-percent-less-Marty-Peretz New Republic of the Republican party long, slow, and deliberate slide into racial backlash, secession, nullification, and other ideas that were bad in 1860 and look even worse in retrospect. In reality, however, the two pieces are companions to each other in a great many ways, and neither one is a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.

Oh, to be sure, LaPierre's op-ed is less an argument than it is a paranoid episode. Invading gangs from Central America! Al Qaeda in Guatemala! Food riots! Runs on the banks! Tornadoes! (Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face-not just maybe. It's not paranoia to buy a gun. It's survival. It's responsible behavior, and it's time we encourage law-abiding Americans to do just that. I encourage Wayne to stand outside during the next tornado and open up with his AR-15 at the funnel cloud. I look forward to his subsequent dispatches from Oz.) Is this guy a lobbyist, or is he pitching projects to Wayne Emmerich? Tanenhaus's effort is a far more judicious study of how the Republicans came to ally themselves with public loons like Wayne LaPierre. It has great intrinsic entertainment value in that it already has touched off The Singer Midget. ("I still don't recognize the magazine that I sold in 2012 to the Facebook FB +1.94% zillionaire Chris Hughes." Here, with an opposing view, is noted author Stephen Glass.) It also will be of great utility to anyone too young to remember who George Wallace was, or who hasn't been reading Rick Perlsteinfor the last, oh, I don't know, 20 years or so.

The connective tissue between these two pieces is the simple historical fact -- which Tanenhaus at least acknowledges -- that, for what it perceived to be a political advantage, and for what turned out, alas to be one, the Republican party allied itself with the detritus of American apartheid. It adopted the historic political philosophies that guided American apartheid, and it adapted them to suit its political requirements in different parts of the country at different times in history. And it was what became known as "movement conservatism," starting in the ashes of the Goldwater campaign in 1965, that gave the essential energy to this transformation. Tanenhaus at least admits that this was the result of a deliberate series of acts. Usually, modern conservatives deny any of this really happened at all, argue that it was really Teh Librulz who did it (Robert Byrd was in the Klan!), or treat the whole thing as a god-kissed reaction to the excesses of progressive politics and the fact that many of these folks were the only people in the 1960's who couldn't get laid. Scholars vary on that last point.

(Although, honestly, you can't connect the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Watts and Detroit riots in a "politics of counter-cultural protest," as Tanenhaus does, without squinting really hard through the movement conservatism lens that you are ostensibly taking apart. You can't even really connect Watts and Detroit that way, except that, you know, black people were involved in both episodes.)

OK, so far, so Perlstein. While good on the adoption, Tanenhaus falls far short in his explanation for the widespread adaptation of the political philosophies of American apartheid to appeal to different people in different parts of the country at different times in history, particularly throughout the late 1970's and early 1980's. There's too much Disraeli and Edmund Burke in his piece, and not nearly enough Terry Dolan and Phyllis Schlafly. The fundamental tactic was the creation of a useful Other. That could be black people in the South, pinheaded intellectuals in the north, secularists in the Midwest, and the guy from the Forest Service out west. In the truly grimy NCPAC campaigns of the late 1970's, it turned out to be people like George McGovern and Frank Church, who got turfed out of the Senate in favor of an embarrassing collection of lightweights who were able to make people like McGovern and Church the public faces of all the Others. The strategy worked, and so were born the lucrative political careers of Lee Atwater, and Karl Rove, and three generations of conservative ratfckers.

In adapting these philosophies on the ground, Republicans have been flirting with nullification, and secession, and the whole bag of horrors for years now. And it never was entirely the fringe, either, as Dave Neiwert's been arguingfor years. Republican congressmen spoke for years at Wise Use rallies and militia gatherings in the west. In the South, Republican congressmen regularly dined with the Council Of Conservative Citizens, a white-supremacist group that was the modern outgrowth of the old Citizens Councils, which were, in their time, the polite Chamber Of Commerce face of the Klan and various unaffiliated domestic terrorists. (This stopped only when a visitby Trent Lott to a CCC dinner — briefly -- cost him his Senate seat.) And its essential taproot can be found in the most famous passage in Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

That speech presented the apex of the modern conservative argument — something called Government was the ultimate Other. The modern conservative movement was a multipronged assault aimed at severing a self-governing people from the government they were bound as citizens to create for themselves. It was to undermine confidence in the idea of the creation and maintenance of a political commonwealth and to eliminate as many of the manifestations of that political commonwealth as it could, whether those were national parks or public schools. This was done, mainly, to bring about the blessings of oligarchy to the people who created and financed the conservative movement for their own private gain. This is the fundamental political foundation behind a conservative movement that endlessly prattles about the native entrepreneurial genius of individual Americans. It's the sunny side of the spectrum that ends up in the phrase, "I got mine, Jack." Once you've done this, once you've convinced enough people that they are victims of an alien entity called Government, and not essential partners in a political commonwealth wherein takes place the ongoing creative act of self-government, it's no great leap to get to secession, and nullification. Reagan even got there in the very same speech, when he asserted the essential Calhounite constitutional heresy right after swearing an oath that committed him to the notion that Calhoun had been terribly wrong.

It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government.

Apparently, the entire Constitution is sacrosanct except the first three words, which is the whole modern conservative project, and its essential paradox, in a nutshell. The Constitution is not a compact between We, The People, or a committment by us to one another to what the current president calls "the hard, necessary work of self-government. Once you're already there, it's no great leap at all to Wayne LaPierre, screaming at the tornadoes and trying to shoot a hurricane to death. It's where you wanted to be all along. We become a nation of survivalists, alone in the bunkers of our mind, with nothing but empty static on the radio.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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