Yet another reason I'm still ecstatic to be an Independent...

"Another thing that makes some elite conservatives nervous in this recession is the sheer level of unhinged, even violent irrationality at the grassroots. In postwar America, a panicky, violence-prone underbrush has always been revealed in moments of liberal ascendency. In the Kennedy years, the right-wing militia known as the Minutemen armed for what they believed would be an imminent Russian takeover. In the Carter years it was the Posse Comitatus; Bill Clinton's rise saw six anti-aborition murders and the Oklahoma City bombings. Each time, the conservative mainstream was able to adroitly hive off the embarrassing fringe while laying claim to some of the grassroots anger that inspired it. Now the violence is back. But this time, the line between the violent fringe and the on-air harvesters of righteous rage has been harder to find. This spring the alleged white-supremacist cop-killer in Pittsburgh, Richard Poplawski, professed allegiance to conspiracist Alex Jones, whose theories Fox TV host Glenn Beck had recently been promoting. And when Kansas doctor George Tiller was murdered in church, Fox star Bill O'Reilly was forced to devote air time to defending himself against a charge many observers found self-evident: that O'Reilly's claim that 'Tiller the baby killer' was getting away with 'Nazi stuff' helped contribute to an atmosphere which Tiller's alleged assassin believed he was doing something heroic.
At least in the past, those who wished to represent their movement as cosmopolitan and urbane could simply point to William F. Buckley as the right's most prominent spokesman. Now Buckley is gone, and the most prominent spokesmen- the Limbaughs and O'Reillys and Becks- can be heard mouthing attitudes once confined to the violent fringe. For the second time in three months, Fox heavily promoted anti-administration 'tea party' events this past Fourth of July- rallies in praise of secession and the Articles of Confederation, at which speakers 'joked' about a coupe against the 'communist Muslim Barack Obama' like the one against Manual Zelaya in Honduras. 'What's going on at Fox News?' Frum recently asked, excoriating Beck for passing out to followers books by the nutty far-right conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen. If you were an elite conservative, you might be embarrassed too.
The conservative intellectuals once were able to work together more effectively with the conservative unwashed. Now, more and more, their recent irritation renders them akin to the Stalinist commissars mocked by poet Bertolt Brecht, who asked if they might 'dissolve the people/and elect another.' The bargain the right was offered the downwardly mobile, culturally insecure traditionalist- give us your votes, and we will give you existential certitudes in a world that seems somehow to have gone crazy- is looking less like good politics all the time."

- Rick Perlstein, "Beyond The Palin"