Way back in 1994, the psychiatric establishment made a crucial move. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), they downgraded "passive aggression" from a personality disorder to a conjecture worthy of further study.
One reason this happened was that our liberal establishment in the social sciences wailed and moaned about passive aggression being seen as a disorder. As the name implies, passive aggression occurs when you attack another party by pretending to be an injured party.
For example, if I'm playing cards with three of my friends, and I engage in a slightly dubious practice -- say, making a random card a wildcard, my friends may object. If I'm passive aggressive, I turn around and accuse them of changing the rules to benefit themselves, even though I did it first.
As of yesterday, liberals in America all but admitted that they have one insult to use against the right: "You're racists!" They know it's a powerful insult because it carries with it the stigma of unfairness, injustice, cruelty, exclusion of others and of course, a pathological need to belittle others to feel better about oneself.
However, their passive aggression is showing. Whenever someone objects to the welfare state, whose recipients are of many races, they can be accused of racism to make them back down. After all, blocking the welfare state hurts some people who are African-American. They may also be people we should not be subsidizing, but as long as they are African-American, you can accuse the other party of racism.
It's a one size fits all insult. If any African-American person is inconvenienced by any move we make, it can be arguably racist -- how are we to know that the whole point wasn't a vast conspiracy to inconvenience one or more African-Americans?
In fact, racism is an ever-expanding category. Use black ink? That's a bias. You didn't set up a special category for African-Americans and other minorities? Could well be bigotry. You haven't yet put a sign on your front yard proclaiming the races equal not just in political representation, but ability and potential? Probably on your way to a Klan meeting.
When Tea Partiers talk about the Sovietization of America, what they mean is that we've created a dogma here where anyone who criticizes the free hand-outs, lowered standards, permissive social rules and/or pacifism of the television drugged masses can be accused of racism. So no one speaks up... just as happened in Soviet Russia, shortly before the dogma finally proved itself to be in conflict with reality as the nation collapsed.
Wonder if that'll happen to us.
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