paranoid style

• SOURCE: CS Monitor
  5-17-13
  

  Nicole Hemmer: Right-Wing Fear of Government Isn't Paranoid

  Nicole Hemmer is a research associate at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. She also teaches history at the University of Miami.Last week’s revelation that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups was met with near universal disapproval. The IRS singled out organizations with words like "tea party" and "patriot" in their name for scrutiny. In the words of Treasury officials, this focus was clearly “inappropriate.”...Fifty years ago this month, journalists Donald Janson and Bernard Eismann published “The Far Right,” a catalogue of conservative organizations across America. Raising the alarm about the coming conservative threat was something of a cottage industry in the early 1960s. “The Far Right” would share shelf-space with books like “The Radical Right” and “Danger on the Right.” But what separated “The Far Right” from the rest was its revelation of the Reuther Memorandum....

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• The Tea Party Isn't Conservative

  by Christopher S. Parker

  Credit: Wiki Commons.Who, or what, is the Tea Party? Its leaders claim to be conservative, yet the regularity with which the movement and its supporters stray from traditional American conservatism is, frankly, shocking.This claim isn’t based on wild presumption or anecdotal evidence. Rather, this conclusion is based upon the most complete empirical study of the Tea Party, and its supporters, to date.The Tea Party, and its supporters, claim they’re about core conservative principles such as small government and fiscal responsibility. They claim to resist the policies of the Obama administration on ideological grounds: Government, they say, is too big and spends too much.