Just in case anyone still hasn't gotten the memo...

[Cain]

...the American right is not turning crazy, it's been full stop crazy since somewhere around 1950.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/why-conservatives-are-still-crazy-after-all-these-years-20120316#ixzz1pIm4acf7

Over fifteen years of studying the American right professionally — especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s — I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right "thought." Right-wing radio hosts fingering liberal billionaires like George Soros, who use their gigantic fortunes – built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution – out to "socialize" the United States? 1954: Here's a right-wing radio host fingering "gigantic fortunes, built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution ... being used to 'socialize' the United States." Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, "fed up with elitist judges" arrogantly imposing their "radically un-American views" — including judges on the Supreme Court, whose rulings he's pledged to defy? 1958: Nine Men Against America: The Supreme Court and its Attack on American Liberties, still on sale at sovereignstates.org.

Only the names of the ogres have changed — although sometimes they haven't. Dr. Noebel's latest project is to republish a volume he apparently finds freshly relevant, Dr. Fred Schwarz's You Can Trust the Communists: To be Communists. Schwarz, an Australian physician who died three years ago, had his heyday in the early 1960s, when he would fill municipal auditoriums preaching his favorite gospel: that the Kremlin dominated its subjects by deploying "the techniques of animal husbandry," and harbored "plans for a flag of the USSR flying over every American city by 1973." The new version, updated by Noebel – it comes with raves from grateful Amazon.com reviews, like this: "Just as important as it was 50 years ago"; and this: "Should be required reading for every American," and "This book made me a conservative" – is titled You Can Still Trust the Communists: To be Communists, Socialists, Statists, and Progressives Too.

Why does this matter? Because the notion that conservatism has taken a new, and nuttier, turn has influential adherents whose distortions derail our ability to understand and contain it. In a recent New York Review of Books review of Corey Robin's ground-breaking book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, which traces continuities in right-wing thought all the back to the seventeenth century, the distinguished political theorist Mark Lilla pronounced that "most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley." So what did a "reality-based conservative" like Buckley make of Fred Schwarz? Reader, he blurbed him, praising the good doctor for "instructing the people in what their leaders so clearly don't know." So, in fact, did Ronald Reagan, who in 1990 praised the quack's "tireless dedication in trying to ensure the protection of freedom and human rights." And here's the late GOP heavyweight Jack Kemp, who wrote in praise of Schwarz's 1996 memoir (Reagan is pictured with Schwarz on the flap): "How much I appreciate the fact that as much as anybody, including President Reagan, President Bush, and Pope John Paul ... [Dr. Schwarz] has had the opportunity to educate literally thousands of young men and women all over the world in the struggle for democracy and freedom and the struggle against the tyranny of Communism." The "establishment conservatives," Reagan and Kemp, and the "nut," Dr. Fred Schwarz, were never so far apart after all.

You hear a lot about Ronald Reagan from the conservatives-are-nuttier-than-ever-before crowd: They praise him as a compromiser and point out, correctly, that he raised taxes seven of his eight years as president, in stark contrast to today's Republicans, who refuse to raise them at all. Here's the thing, as I wrote amid the hosannas after he died in 2004, during the awful reign of Bush: "It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet old Goldwater."

And so it goes: Reagan is now deemed one of those reality-based conservatives whose disappearance we now lament. Wrong. Deeply informed by the whackadoodle far-right, Reagan at earlier points in his career loved to quote its nostrums: that according to Communists blueprints "by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free"; that, as he said in a 1975 interview – rehabilitating a quote supposedly from Vladimir Lenin but in fact made up by the founder of the John Birch Society – once Lenin and his comrades had organized the "hordes of Asia," then conquered Latin America, "the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, [would] fall into their outstretched hands like overripe fruit." But he was also a good politician, and as such he learned to avoid saying things that disadvantaged him politically. The reason he didn't effectively fight tax increases was because, with a Democratic Congress, he didn't have the power to do so. Every time he actually had to sign one he made his preferences perfectly clear, blaming wicked liberals for forcing his hand and adding that this was why liberalism had to be defeated — so that he wouldn't have to sign one again.

This was "reality based." But so, politically at least, is the obstructionism of today's supposedly non-reality-based conservatives: They block all tax increases because they can. And it's worked, hasn't it? That's because as conservative power has steadily increased since the 1960s, more and more of what conservatives actually believe — and have always actually believed —has come to shape American society and its institutions.

The next person caught pining for the good old days of Reagan deserves a clip around the ear.

[Freeky]

Why does it feel like people are crazier than they were even five years ago?

[Bu🤠ns]

Better coverage

[Bruno]

I think the tea party helped organize the crazy a little bit, too

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Repressed memory. People don't want to remember being assraped.

[Lord Cataplanga]

Because, as crazy as Reagan was, that was in the past, and you survived his government. But the future is always uncertain.

Also, what Anna said about selective memory.

[Junkenstein]

I think it may be more than just selective memory. Humans seem to have a tendency to romanticise the past. Consider for example the decade in which you spent your teen years. Music was just better then right? No. A lot of it sucked. You just happen to have a lot of positive memories associated with it so it takes a higher value in your mind. I would suggest this is almost exactly why you get the elderly "Back in my day" clichés.

5 years ago Bush was still knocking about with a smile and fucked up quote. At the time many expected him to bring the apocalypse any day.

10 years ago the War against terror was gearing up. We were going to go there and fix shit.

News becomes olds. It becomes a new normal which you measure future events. The new crazy is stranger and scarier than the old crazy.

Somewhat rambling now. I guess I'm trying to say that people aren't that much different, but your ability to notice fucked up things constantly improves so the "now" always seems worse than "then"

Also, huge boom in social media and civilian reporting gets the crazy to you faster with less dilution.

[Bu🤠ns]

It's morning again, in America

[Oysters Rockefeller]

Yeah...I haven't met too many moderate, reality-based conservatives. And I don't necesarilly think it's an impossible thing, but every time I think I meet one they eventually let slip something about the "socialist liberal agenda" or "anti-christian values" or something racist against muslims.

I kind of think its because, in my eyes, being socially conservative just isn't reality-based. I imagine there are a few times when being a conservative might pay off economically, but I'm hardly an expert.

Also, I agree with everything junkenstein said above.