Yesterday I lamented the horrible state of discourse on The Fresno Bee letters website, which is mostly due to the poor behavior of people who rant insanely against “liberals” and “democrats” and “socialists.” There are a few irate, slogan-slinging left-wingers, too, but the anti-left is the main source of the problem. But even “anti-left” is not really accurate; they are viciously against anyone who disagrees with their views, which are basically xenophobic and religious and characterized by systematic intolerance. I just can’t bring myself to call them “right-wing” or “conservative,” which are labels that ought to be reserved for people who, while taking a certain political position, are not unreasonable about it.

Now today I read Paul Krugman’s column titled “The Big Hate.” He writes:

Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

Read the rest of the column. He suggests that we may be on the cusp of an extended period of extremist violence, facilitated, in part, by the so-called “conservative” media outlets, and people like Jon Voigt who declared President Obama to be a “false prophet.” Huh? Again, I just don’t think “conservative” is the right word for these people. “Insane anarchists” maybe?

I’ve also been reading a book on Weimar Germany. In case you’re unfamiliar, the “Weimar Republic” is the name often given to the period in Germany between the two World Wars. There was a flowering of culture and liberalism, but, of course, the outcome was Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party, rising from the simmering sludge of angry anti-liberals.  Here is a paragraph from pages 75-76 the book:

Ludwig Finckh, a conservative Swabian author, loudly proclaimed, “Berlin is not Germany.” The capital was inhabited by “visionaries, dreamers, and adventurers . . . [who] live in a delusion.” They call for the brotherhood of all peoples while Germany’s adversaries laugh away. The Social Democrats “teach respect for every opinion,” and are thereby at best indecisive, at worst traitorous, while the military renounces the reason for its existence by failing to use force. Finckh even called for a new German capital, one that would evoke “the spirit of Germany” against the “spirit of Berlin.” Similarly, the conservative journalist Wilhelm Stapel complained about the “cesspool of the Republic, the spoiler of all noble and healthy life.” Even worse was the desire of small-town residents to replicate it, to make “every little rathole in all of Germany . . . a microcosm of Berlin.” Stapel did not refrain from voicing the deepest fear of conservatives—deracination: “All too many Slavs and all too many altogether uninhibited East European Jews have been mixed into the population of Berlin. It is an embarrassing mixture; it determines through sheer quantity the character of this city.”

Sure sounds a lot like  our anti-left today, especially in California. Just change “Slavs” to Mexicans, “Jews” to gays and the godless, “Berlin” to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and maybe even Sacramento. We’d best be vigilant.