Michael Savage, conservative radio host: America needs a new nationalist party

Savage is pretty unhappy with the betrayal of House and Senate reps willing to work  with their colleagues across the aisle to tend the nation's business. As he explained to his 10 million listeners, "There is no Republican party. It's an appendage of the Democratic machine."

At first when he suggested the ultra-negative tea partiers may have to form their own "nationalist" party under a "charismatic leader," I thought, great! Then some of these terms hit me. 

A party with a nationalist ideology made up entirely of aggressive, bigoted authoritarian followers who considered it their patriotic duty to do whatever their charismatic authoritarian leader told them? Gee, where have we heard of THAT happening before?

Attractive as it initially was to imagine them isolated in some noisy little wingnut group always trying to split the conservative vote, it's worth remembering that there is no leader now. Just WHO that person would be and WHERE he would lead, as well as those coming after down through the years, would be a major wild card, with no sensible mainstream conservatives to provide balance or emergency brakes.

In considering te authoritarian follower personality, there's at least a little of it in a significant majority of us. It's a tendency to certain behaviors, not a mental illness. Perhaps a minimum of roughly 22-23% of Americans are heavy AFs at all times, but the number of people behaving in an AF manner can swell to over a third, even half and more in bad times when the world gets scary and threatening. And, yes, this IS what happened in Germany. 

Fortunately for us right now, because I think this would be a really bad idea, the tea partiers are charismatic-leaderless--at the moment, anyway, their strings pulled by their billionaire funders who prefer to work from behind the scenes...