The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and by Will Bunch

By Will Bunch

they believe Obama Isn't an American Citizen.
they suspect Obama desires to positioned americans in focus Camps.
they believe Obama Is the Anti-Christ.
This Isn't simply the Tea Party—Welcome to the Backlash.

In November 2008, the election of Barack Obama was once imagined to bring in a brand new age of desire, optimism, and postpartisan politics. as an alternative it provoked unheard of anger at the some distance correct that finally twisted vital nationwide discussions and driven principles from the conservative fringe into the mainstream media. within the resulting months, numerous pollsters and journalists have attempted to appreciate the guts of this mob that seemed so without notice, yet none of them has effectively accounted for the hard-right movement's fast progress or defined the hidden connections among its elements. earlier.

during this gripping exposÉ, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Will Bunch unearths the secrets and techniques in the back of the campaign opposed to Obama, exploring how forces like radical armed forces teams, the Tea celebration, pro-gun zealots, and Glenn Beck have mixed outdated populist outrage with digital-age phobias to supply a wave of resentment that many have ridden immediately to the financial institution. Pulling again the curtain at the paranoid politics of a brand new iteration, Bunch exhibits how occasions comparable to the election of America's first African-American president, the commercial recession, the increase of social networking, and the phenomenon of Glenn Beck have created a perilous political second that poses valid dangers to democracy in the US.

From conspiracy theorists to secessionists, birthers to "independent" Tea Partiers, Bunch illuminates the binds between this new array of teams. Going past effortless sketch, he strips away layers of rhetoric to bare politicians like Paul Broun, who, as probably the most severe individuals of Congress, works as difficult for right-wing ideologues as he does for his economically battered parts, and teams just like the Oath Keepers, a fast-growing, ultraradical association that spreads unsubstantiated fears of Obama confiscating weapons and putting U.S. voters in focus camps. moreover, Bunch exposes the opportunists who've embraced a brand new model of apocalyptic fearmongering, which has made them hundreds of thousands yet has additionally resulted in the common paranoia that has helped gas an increase in antigovernment violence.

the outcome exhibits the genuine stakes of this political ideal hurricane, demonstrating how the anger of the some distance instantly threatens to eat the US. strong, surprising, and thought-provoking, The Backlash is a debatable examine the place our democracy is—and the place it can be heading.

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Additional info for The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

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This is because Arendt insists that a fully human life is one lived among other people in a community. A human life, well-lived, is conducted among a plurality of people and not in isolation. : 105–6). While labouring can be a grim Schopenhauerian struggle for existence, the pleasures of the body offer some compensation. However, Arendt does not want us to conflate the idea of pleasure with the essential constituents of a good human life. : 134). Finally, we should not mistake Arendt’s views as a utopian desire to rid people of the need for labour.

Labouring and consuming, the twin activities of animal life, cancel each other out and leave no properly human mark. Second, labouring for the purpose of maintaining and reproducing life is an act done in isolation, according to Arendt. Digestion is a solitary act in the same way that pain is a solitary experience – we cannot digest each other’s food any more than we can feel the pain of others. Arendt remarks: The only activity that corresponds to the experience of worldlessness, or to the loss of the world that occurs in pain, is laboring, where the human body, its activity notwithstanding, is also thrown back on itself, concentrates on nothing but its own being alive, and remains imprisoned in its metabolism with nature without ever transcending or freeing itself from the recurring cycle of its own functioning.

Instead she is identifying modes of being in the world that are available to human beings, what Seyla Benhabib (2003) has called Arendt’s phenomenological existentialism. While each mode of being is necessary to human life, each mode has its proper and correct place. Arendt is critical when the order of the vita activa is disrupted and a lower mode of being comes to dominate society, cancelling out the virtues of the higher modes. She is particularly critical of the mode of existence typified by animal laborans and we will examine some of those criticisms here.

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