“It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.”
                                              - Dorothy Thompson

After 9/11, President Bush led the charge to fight terrorism. We declared war on it; we passed the Patriot Act; we invaded Iraq; we sanctioned the invasion of American citizens’ privacy with the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Act. During the Bush years, the Right readily took the position that anyone who spoke out against the Bush Administration and its policies was Anti-American, going so far as to accuse the Left of providing support for terrorists.

Now that the Conservatives are out of power, it has suddenly become Pro-American for organized mobs from the Right to shout down representatives of the government, call the President a Nazi and openly threaten law-abiding citizens by appearing at town hall meetings openly carrying firearms. The latter, of course, they do by hiding behind the Second Amendment with absolutely no consideration for the threat they pose to unarmed civilians.

While it may be legal in certain states to show up at a communal gathering carrying an automatic weapon, there are only two reasons for doing so –

1. Concern for their own safety, in which case they must feel they are in danger of being assaulted and need the weapons for self-defense. If that is the case, then why not just stay away?
2. Intimidate the opposition, which seems the most logical reason for their actions. Any rational person, especially those of us who have seen the effects of an automatic weapon on the human body, has to be intimidated by the sight of obviously angry, armed people whose actions indicate they are driven more by emotion than by reason. Concern that one individual’s emotional anger may cause them to use their weapon certainly evokes the atmosphere of fear the Right seems bent on propagating.

Outside President Obama’s town-hall meeting in New Hampshire two weeks ago a gun-toting protester carried a sign saying, “It is time to water the tree of liberty.” The Thomas Jefferson quote that inspired this message said nothing about water. Instead, it said “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” As Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times, “That’s the beauty of a gun — you don’t have to spell out the ‘blood.’”

The protester was a one of the nuts of which America has never had a shortage. But then we come to someone we expect to be a somewhat more rational citizen - Tom Coburn, Republican senator from Oklahoma, where 168 people were murdered in the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building. The leader of the right-wing psychopaths who carried out the bombing, Timothy McVeigh, was wearing a T-shirt with the same Jefferson quote when he committed this act of mass murder. But last Sunday, when David Gregory asked Coburn on “Meet the Press” whether or not he was troubled by current threats of “violence against the government,” Coburn placed the blame, not on the Right Wingnuts, but on the government, itself, saying, “Well, I’m troubled any time when we stop having confidence in our government, but we’ve earned it.”

At least Coburn is consistent. Following the Oklahoma City bombing, he was part of a House contingent that helped delay and soften an antiterrorism bill. He even tried to strip out a provision blocking domestic fund-raising by foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas. Why? Because the far Right, in league with the National Rifle Association, was angry that the federal government was aggressively policing America’s self-appointed militias. In a 1996 floor speech, Coburn conceded that “terrorism obviously poses a serious threat,” but then went on to claim, “There is a far greater fear that is present in this country, and that is fear of our own government.” As he demonstrated on “Meet the Press,” apparently even the occurrence of 9/11 has done nothing to change his view of the world.

On Monday, the day after Coburn said he was okay with those threatening violence, a dozen Right Wingnuts with guns, at least a couple of which were assault weapons, showed up for President Obama’s V.F.W. speech in Phoenix. Within hours, another Republican member of Congress, Phil Gingrey of Georgia, told Chris Matthews on MSNBC that as long as brandishing guns is legal, he saw no reason to discourage Americans from showing up armed at public meetings.

In April, a report issued by the Department of Homeland Security and originally commissioned by the Bush administration, reviewed the rising threat of violent right-wing extremism. In the report, DHS stated, “The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment.”

The report was ridiculed by conservatives, including the Republican chairman, Michael Steele, who called it “the height of insult.” Since then, a neo-Nazi subscriber to the anti-Obama “birther” movement has murdered a guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, an anti-abortion zealot has gunned down a doctor in a church in Wichita, Kansas and armed Right Wing zealots have shown up at multiple public gatherings with the intent to intimidate those who disagree with their Right Wing Radicalism by brandishing weapons.

Earlier this month the Southern Poverty Law Center, the same organization that warned of the alarming rise in extremist groups before the Oklahoma City bombing, issued its own report, which states, “Almost a decade after largely disappearing from public view, right-wing militias, ideologically driven tax defiers and sovereign citizens are appearing in large numbers around the country.” The report also notes, “One law enforcement agency has found 50 new militia training groups — one of them made up of present and former police officers and soldiers.” And a federal law enforcement agent told the center he hadn’t seen growth this steep among such groups in 10 to 12 years. “All it’s lacking is a spark,” he said.

This uptick in the radical right is not confined to the health care debate that is supposedly inspiring all the gun waving. Nor can this movement be attributed to a stepped-up attack by Democrats on this crowd’s holy Second Amendment because Obama has relegated his campaign pledge to reinstate the ban on assault weapons to the back burner.

It appears the biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism is panic - panic over a new era of cultural and demographic change. As sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the Right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”

Bell’s analysis originally appeared in his essay “The Dispossessed,” published in 1962, between John Kennedy’s election and assassination. But it could just as well have been written at any time following Conservative dispossession of power. Kennedy was no more a leftist than Obama, but he was the first Roman Catholic in the White House and the leader of a new liberal order. Between Bill Clinton’s election and the Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton, like Kennedy and Obama, brought liberals back into power after a conservative reign and represented a generational turnover that stoked the fears of the turned-out Conservatives.

The only major conservative writer to repeatedly and forthrightly take on the radical right this year is David Frum. Frum ended a recent column for The Week entitled “The Reckless Right Courts Violence,” with a plea that the president “be met and bested on the field of reason,” not with guns.

Many on the right defend the reckless radicals by arguing, “The left does it too!” And it is certainly true that both the left and the right are fond of pronouncing Holocaust-trivializing, Hitler analogies; and it is true the protesters of the antiwar group Code Pink disrupted Congressional hearings. But Code Pink did not show up on Capitol Hill with firearms. And, as 1960’s historian Rick Perlstein pointed out on the Washington Post Web site last week, not a single Democratic politician endorsed the Weathermen in the Vietnam era.

But, as we learned in Oklahoma City, at the Holocaust museum and in Wichita, this kind of irrational radicalism has a myriad of targets. And it is impervious to reason. As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in his famous Kennedy-era essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” three men from Bagdad, Ariz. who drove 2,500 miles in 1964 to testify against a bill tightening federal controls on firearms after the Kennedy assassination were gun enthusiasts who were convinced that the American government was being taken over by a “subversive power.” Sound familiar?

Even Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican on whom Obama was counting to help craft a bi-partisan approach to healthcare and who is the Senate point man for his party on health care, has now capitulated to the armed fringe by publicly parroting their “pull the plug on grandma” fear-mongering.

Obama’s poll numbers have been declining this summer, but he still towers over his opponents. In last week’s Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 21 percent approve of how Republicans in Congress are handling health care reform, as opposed to Obama’s 41 percent. Should Obama fail to deliver serious reform because his administration in any way caters to a decimated opposition party that has sunk and shrunk to its looney nucleus, that would be, well, ludicrous.

If there are any sane leaders left in the Republican Party, it is time for them to begin exhibiting some measure of leadership by standing up against the insane actions of the party’s lunatic fringe. So long as they remain silent or, worse, pander to the lunatics, the greatest threat to our Democracy comes not from foreign terrorism, but from within.