Return of the Strong Gods: Understanding the New Right
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? ~W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” In mid-November, just two weeks after one of the most contentious elections in American history, Democratic National Committee member David Atkins took to Twitter. “No seriously… how *do* you deprogram 75 million people?” he wondered, sounding more like a member of the Politburo than the DNC. “Where do you start? Fox? Facebook? We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan.” He continued: “This is not your standard partisan policy disagreement. This is a conspiracy theory fueled belligerent death cult… the only actual policy debates of note are happening within the dem coalition between left and center left.” As the comments flooded in, Atkins doubled down: “You can’t run on a civil war footing hopped up on conspiracy theories… without people trying to figure out how to reverse the brainwashing.” What is most striking about Atkins’s comments is not his evident belief that 75 million Americans are conspiracy theorists, nor his …