Right-wingers using most extreme rhetoric - why? and why now?

Digby points out

Clearly, people on the right are very, very angry right now and they are lashing out at their most hated enemies: Americans who disagree with them. The question is, why are they suddenly ratcheting up the rhetoric?

They are exposing their deepest feelings of hate and anger, something that is always behind their actions but normally not expressed publicly because it runs off the independent voters.

Go read Digby's excellent article for an explanation. Let me summarize:

Dave Neiwert considers it just the normal injection of the most extreme rhetoric into the mainstream. This is a long-standing political tactic of the right.

Mark Ames writes that the nastiness is an expression of sexual frustration. America is awash with corporate images of individuals with constant sexual gratification with to most attractive, attentive and imaginative partners. The reality is that American males have limited or no sex life. The conflict between the image and the reality truly frustrates the white males who make up most of the American right-wing, so they are angry and filled with hatred for those who they think have better sex lives than they do - minorities and liberals. The reaction is that right-wing American vote against their own political needs in order to "get" those who have it better than they do. They are voting their spite rather than for their political advantage. [An interesting thesis, one that seems reasonable to me.]

Then there is the now proven fact that conservative brains and liberal brains work differently.

scientists at New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles, found that a specific region of the brain's cortex is more sensitive in people who consider themselves liberals than in self-declared conservatives.

The brain region in question helps people shift gears when their usual response would be inappropriate, supporting the notion that liberals are more flexible in their thinking. [Snip]

A review of that research published in 2003 found that conservatives tend to be more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences. Some of the traits associated with conservatives in that review were decidedly unflattering, including fear, aggression and tolerance of inequality. That evoked outrage from conservative pundits.

This is more than just the 'opinion' of some scientists. It can be demonstrated by pictures of the cortex in the brain as it makes decisions.

Digby concludes that all of these explanations have some validity, but that there is a new element in the American right-wing.

there is one thing that is new in the political landscape that might explain this recent outbreak of nasty invective: political leadership that is not only tolerant of its supporters reliance on violence, both real and rhetorical, but one that engages in it itself. We are led, after all, by a president who started an illegal war based upon lies and who blatantly uses fear and threats for political gain. He says "you're either with us or against us" and he hasn't hesitated to support and commend Republicans who use the same language against their political rivals.

And last week, among all these instances of violent right wing rhetoric flying through the ether, our president smirked, for the umpteenth time, "we don't torture" knowing very well that the whole point of his refusing to define torture is because they want people to believe they are actually torturing. Torture --- a taboo for centuries --- is now considered a useful tool by the government of the United States of America, both in practice and in rhetoric.

I think this, too, has a large element of truth in it. The 'conservative movement' has nurtured and developed a new and more overtly violent leadership. From Nixon's dirty tricksters through Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, there is a new element in the leadership that considers winning by violating the accepted political rules and standards of decency better than winning under restrictions that normal civilized people consider important. They also operate on a basis of personal loyalty and purge anyone who resists their extremism. It is a leadership which respects the way the Mafia operates and considers anyone who doesn't operate by those extreme methods to be mere sheep to be fleeced.

This is the culture that permeates the institutions of the conservative movement. For a description of those institutions and their goal of returning America to the standards of "The Gilded Age" in which the middle class is destroyed and replaced by a struggling working class controlled by a few extremely wealthy families, obtain and read Paul Krugman's new book The Conscience of a Liberal.

Krugman's book provides a broad view of what the right-wing is trying to do to America. As to why they are currently ratcheting up the violence and nasty rhetoric, I think it is a combination of the general proclivities of the mass of conservatives, together with the new crop of extremist conservative leaders who have purged any powerful people from their movement who might object to the extremism.