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We are a bit biased about P.M. Carpenter. He's a citizen journalist with a PhD in American History who has written as a BuzzFlash columnist for years.

Carpenter has a trenchant, sardonic style that cuts through Bushevism with finely-sharpened scalpel. Like many progressive analysts, he writes because he feels compelled to. He's certainly not getting rich off of it, just barely getting by.

Which is a damn shame.

Because, as his insightful book, "Political Low Roads: American Demagoguery and the Rise of the New Right," reminds us, a whole football stadium of right wing demagogic propagandists are getting rich by parroting hot button emotional talking points for the wealthy right wingers. Money is the lubricant that oils this GOP Goebbels department of propaganda, now insinuated into almost every level of the mainstream press (including the editorial boards of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal).

Carpenter observes in his book, "As we have seen, only one quality -- unidemensionality...has consistently marked the demagogue: simplicity of message, invariably containing a targeted and scapegoated social body, presented from a wholly one-sided point of view."

That is what we are up against.


From the Publisher:

"Noted columnist and online writer, P.M. Carpenter's Political Low Roads: American Demagoguery and the Rise of the New Right argues that a major transformation occurred in the course of twentieth-century demagoguery. Molded in the rhetorical tactics of Southern-demagogue Ben Tillman of South Carolina, this peculiar art form of mass politics spread without regard to region or party. By the middle and late 1970s, however, the once-Old Right of the Republican Party -- inspired by Barry Goldwater's 1964 rhetoric on national "morality" and racial scapegoats; and inspired as well by Joseph McCarthy's rhetoric -- metamorphosed as the "New Right." Through its politicians, think tanks, and well-financed political action committees, the movement spoke as a unified and collective voice, using precisely the same demagogic rhetorical techniques once exploited only by individual politicians. In short, during the twentieth century the practice of demagoguery moved from a personal to party-wide basis."

Carpenter's book is a thorough exploration of the origins of modern day Republican demagoguery: "The second conclusion drawn in this study," Carptenter writes, "is that American demagoguery experienced a major transformation in the twentieth century....The New Right replaced individual demagogic luminaries with a collective personage; its rhetoricians were secondary to the right-wing point of view, that was the beauty of demagoguery's imposed transformation."

In short, the Democrats keep thinking that they are working within an environment of reasoned discourse. The wingers are like thugs with verbal bludgeons aimed at suppressing all reasonable discourse by appealing to the basest emotional instincts known to humans.

This, in short, is the essence of demagoguery.

And the only way to fight it is with a strategic plan and an iron fist.

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