[Rokenn]

Part 3:
Why does the right hate so many Americans?
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Bush is revered so intensely among CPACers that all successes seem to issue from him, while failures are the fault of others unworthy of the great man. Jason Crawford, a 23-year-old who works in business development in New York, formed his group Patriots for the Defense of America right after Sept. 11 to promote "moral clarity" in the war on terror. Now, convinced that moral clarity requires attacking North Korea and fomenting revolution in Iran, he's disappointed in the administration. Yet speaking along with Oliver North (who ranted against the "brie-eating, foie gras-sucking French") at the "What Are We Fighting For?" panel, he put the blame not on Bush, but on some amorphous "us" who failed to rise to Bush's challenge. "Today we can see from our actions that we lack moral clarity," he told the crowd. "We are betraying the principles of the Bush doctrine!"

Rev. Lou Sheldon, the founder of the Traditional Values Coalition and sworn enemy of homosexuality, put it best. Asked if Bush was in sync with his agenda, he replied, "George Bush is our agenda!"


But Sheldon, a plump, pink man with pale blue eyes, wasn't out celebrating the Bush presidency. Instead, the man who has pledged "open warfare" against all things gay, stood in the exhibitors hall before a makeshift carnival game called "Tip a Troll," in which players were invited to throw gray beanbags at toy trolls with the heads of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle, or trolls holding signs saying, "The Homosexual Agenda," "Roe V. Wade" and "The Liberal Media."

Sheldon, like the rest of the right, isn't letting success distract from a monomaniacal focus on its foes. Indeed, the overwhelming message at CPAC was that it's time to toughen up.

At a Thursday seminar titled "2002 and Beyond: Are Liberals an Endangered Species?" Paul Rodriguez, managing editor of the conservative magazine Insight, warned that the liberal beast wouldn't be vanquished until conservatives learn to be merciless. "One thing Democrats have long known how to do is play hardball," he intoned, urging Republicans to adopt more "bare-knuckle" tactics. The next day, Frank Gaffney, assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, told a rapt crowd about the "well-financed media campaign against the Bush White House."

The rise of Fox News and talk radio has done little to assuage right-wing resentment toward the supposedly liberal media. "It's amazing conservatives ever win any victories at all with the left's hegemonic domination of the media," Coulter told her listeners. She spent most of her talk mocking antiwar arguments ("Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil") and antiwar protesters. "Scott Ritter, that's a liberal for you," began one bit. "Cleans up, cuts his hair and it turns out that it's to get underage girls." Bada-BOOM.

For speakers like Coulter, who performs her act as a kind of stand-up routine, much of this stuff just seems like cynical hyperbole, but among the rank and file, liberal-phobia is real and deep. Virgil Beato, a 25-year-old graduate student at American University, spoke of the "mean-spiritedness" of the left, much of which he'd learned about from David Horowitz (the former Salon columnist). "David Horowitz knows how the left thinks," Beato proclaimed. "He's trying to send out the message that sometimes we need to play hardball. That's the message we're getting from here."

Throughout the three days of CPAC, Beato, a gangly, smooth-cheeked blond studying public administration, sat rapt in the audience, sprawling on the floor when all the seats were taken and murmuring, "yes, yes" as people like Coulter hurled imprecations against liberal treachery. An evangelical Christian who proudly announced his virginity to me moments after we met, he was polite and earnest and seemed genuinely worried by what the Democrats have in store. "The liberal ideal is a collectivist utopia," he said gravely. "In essence, it's the same as communism. Tom Daschle won't get up there and say he's a communist, but ultimately that's what the left envisions." He invoked, as many at CPAC did, the Scandinavian hellhole of Sweden. "Sure, some people there might be happy," he allowed, "but how do you define happiness?"

Beato really believes that Coulter isn't cruel, only brave and battle-worn. "Ann's passion is a reaction to a lot of what she receives from liberals," he said. "She's had tomatoes thrown at her. She's trying to communicate with a sense of humor about the mean-spiritedness of the left."

It's a telling twist, this idea of Coulter as a victim lashing back at her tormentors. Writing of the paranoid, Hofstadter said: "He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish." It's a will that Coulter has, and that the right has. Over three days, they struggled with various degrees of sincerity to puzzle out why the left, as they imagine it, hates America. A better question, and one they'll never ask, is why the right hates so very many Americans.

salon.com