Heart of Darkness

Lots of good commentary on the Benghazi! hearings, but this may be the best:

In the 21st century, we see the paranoid style honed to near-perfection among a significant cadre of Americans – predominantly male and Southern, and almost entirely white – who are ideologically and geographically exiled from their own society but who see themselves, paradoxically or otherwise, as its spiritual inheritors and most ardent defenders. They perceive themselves surrounded on all sides, at home as around the world, by murderous, treasonous and corrosive anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism (and in many cases also by anti-white racism and anti-Christian bigotry). They discern those forces at work in the Democratic Party and the big cities and multiculturalism and Planned Parenthood and “political correctness”; in the spread of mosques and taco trucks and ambiguous gender assignments; in Black Lives Matter and the still-baffling black president with the funny name, in the stagnant or declining real incomes of the last several decades and the fact that the mightiest military superpower in the history of the world has not conclusively won a war since 1945.

What Benghazi promised the paranoid faithful, or still promises – we can’t presume that one embarrassing hearing will bring an end to this charade – was a chance to turn the tide, to strip the scales from the eyes of their benighted and deluded fellow countrymen and reveal the scope of the hideous plot to destroy America. For the conspiratorial right-wing hive mind, Benghazi is the gate and the key to the gate, like H.P. Lovecraft’s ancient and indescribable entity Yog-Sothoth. But as with the One-in-All and All-in-One of the Lovecraftian universe, opening that gate leads only to madness and oblivion: What lies beyond is the “amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity,” otherwise known as the legislative agenda of the House Freedom Caucus.

Yet there’s more — here’s Krugman:

 As Rick Perlstein pointed out several years ago, the modern conservative movement is in large part a “strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers” with “a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.”

So goldbuggism, for example, is intimately tied to direct-marketing schemes for gold coins and gold certificates. I’ve been getting mail from the American Seniors Association, which bills itself as a conservative alternative to the AARP; sure enough, it’s a for-profit enterprise whose goal is to sell me insurance. And so on.

This is surely a much more important part of our political story than almost anyone acknowledges. I don’t think you can understand the depth of Obama- and Hillary-hatred without understanding just how much of it is generated by scammers out to make a buck off the racism and misogyny of some — sad to say, fairly many — older white men.

Avarice and paranoia, perfect together.