The Persecution Complex of Conservatives

Rick Perlstein over at The Washington Post today has a fascinating look at the health care debate currently going on, and I strongly suggest anyone with a few moments read the article here. An excellent analysis of what he calls "the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument."

Perlstein gives a great history of the conservative movement and its hysterical opposition to things they don't like, including:

• In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism.
• Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents.
• Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."
• When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles...were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States.
• Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites.

Perlstein ends the article powerfully:

Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.