Ethics

Right Wing Dystopic Predictions

By Ed Brayton

While listening to the right wing throw a hissy fit while claiming that Obama is planning to send disabled kids and old people to the gas chambers in the name of healthcare efficiency and grind them up into soylent green, a question suddenly occurs to me: Has the right wing ever been right when they've predicted some dark dystopic future?

Let's go back a ways. In the 30s, they were clamoring about FDR's programs, claiming that he was going to turn us in to another Soviet Union. Didn't happen.

In the 1950s, the John Birch society was claiming that "both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a 'one-world socialist government.'" Didn't happen.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on August 10, 2009 (boomark / email).