LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

I found this very insightful Buzzflash interview with Mark Crispin Miller.

He has some very interesting insights:

This is a faith-based movement, which means that we cannot just write off everything they do as mere manipulation by cynics who secretly know better. That some of them are Machiavellian there is no doubt, but there's a pathological component, an apocalyptic drive, that we ignore at our own peril.

What often seems to be mere breath-taking cynicism is, as well, a sort of self-delusion, or self-hypnosis, common to fanatical movements of all kinds, religious and otherwise. These are people who themselves are in the very audience they're always working to arouse. On some level they believe that, if they say something repeatedly and loud enough, it will not just make everybody else believe it, but it will actually make it true. It is that faith-based self-deception that makes the movement deeply frightening - and incomprehensible - to rational observers. There is no arguing with that mentality, which poses a far greater worldly threat than all the humanistic interests on Earth combined.

They respect no worldly powers other than themselves, and so they've set about the reconstruction of our government, to operate it wholly by themselves in their own interests. If it were up to them, there would be no special prosecutors. There would be no independent authorities capable of passing any judgment on them or of enforcing any rules that they would rather not follow. If it were up to them, there would be no parties but their own. It's staggering, but surely less astonishing than the refusal of "the liberal media" to give it the attention it deserves.