Prof. James F. Tracy: Political Extremism in the Technocratic Order

Extremists have taken over, and they're the ones who run the foreign policy and have convinced us to go along with all these wars. Congressman Ron Paul. The alleged bogey of extremism has become a prominent element of public discourse, particularly since the mid 1990's. The assumed terrorist  tendencies of ordinary Americans is a preoccupation of many mainstream and liberal intellectuals apparently more concerned with moral guardianship than the growing police state and continued wartime economy. These conditions underline a campaign to promote paranoia that only intensified following September 11, 2001. As the specter of deviant commoners helps validate accelerated repressive measures, the states genuine extremism of illegal wars and evisceration of most civil liberties, falls from public purview. The 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building set the stage for the creation of an imaginary extremist other bitter clingers in today's parlance, purportedly emerging from a noxious combination of Bible study, country music, and gun collecting. Against this and similar extreme archetypes, a normality is defined where the broader population is encouraged to confirm a tentative political identity and rationalize the support of intensified social control measures. The often strange and misunderstood instances of probable state sponsored terror, of which the Oklahoma City incident is the most well known and incontestable alongside the prominence of well funded establishment oriented quasi intelligence and disinformation outlets, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti Defamation League misleading conflate political thought, extremism and terror together in the public mind, with dangerous implications for meaningful open debate and the preservation of important civil liberties. In the months leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing, Senator Joe Biden, and subsequently the Clinton Administration laid the legislative groundwork for the 2001 PATRIOT Act, that criminalized political thought and undermined the Posse Comitatus Act. September 11, 2001 merely provided the pretext for the laws ratification.