THE AUDACITY OF RIGHT-WINGERS' HOPES

I think a lot of people are missing a key point regarding the much-blogged-about post in which Erick Erickson of Red State calls for armed revolution because (no joke) Washington State is banning phosphates in dishwasher soap:

...To recap:

Spokane County became the launch pad last July for the nation's strictest ban on dishwasher detergent made with phosphates....

Many people were shocked to find that products like Seventh Generation, Ecover and Trader Joe's left their dishes encrusted with food, smeared with grease and too gross to use without rewashing them by hand....

...At what point do the people tell the politicians to go to hell? At what point do they get off the couch, march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?

...Were I in Washington State, I'd be cleaning my gun right about now waiting to protect my property from the coming riots or the government apparatchiks coming to enforce nonsensical legislation.

Erickson isn't angry -- he's champing at the bit. He's Walter Mitty crossed with Travis Bickle. He's imagining himself and his imagined allies going postal and being righteous American heroes for the history books at the same time.

And it feels good.

Right-wingers are desperate to see themselves as justified in violence. They fantasize about apocalypse -- an apocalypse, specifically, that will allow them to say they were right. It's their most well-developed idea right now.

I told you last week about David Horowitz's prediction of terrorist strikes in the U.S. -- he said there's a "100% chance" in the Obama years -- after which (he said gleefully) "I don't think leftists will be found hanging from lamp-posts ... but close."

Alan Keyes asks (hopefully?), "Is Zimbabwe America's future?"

... Barack Obama ... more than adequately represents the characteristics of tragically failed socialist leaders in Africa, like Robert Mugabe. Can we see his politically motivated orgy of debt financed spending as the demagogue's destructive disregard for the real well being of the nation? Can we see in his bid for dictatorial control of the economic sector preparation for the disastrous subordination of economic sense to political ambition? ... On all sides, the political elite in this country seemed ready to abandon the constitutional system of self-government in favor of a mobocratic implementation of pure democracy that temporarily allows demagogues to flourish, while they rape and pillage the hopes of the people they mislead. Is there more than a little Zimbabwe in our future?

And as Adam Serwer notes,

Rep. Pete Sessions says Republicans could learn lessons from Taliban insurgents, Rep. Michele Bachmann is calling for a "revolution" against "tyranny" and Dick Morris thinks that "those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the U.N.'s going to take over' -- well, they're beginning to have a case."

And I haven't even mentioned the tea parties, which right-wingers really would love to turn into a hip, disruptive Sixties-style counterculture movement.

It's killing these guys that the election of Barack Obama and the (semi-)ascendancy of liberalism haven't led to a breakdown of the social order. When do they get a riot of their own?