Friend and current resident of Italy Hank Baker sends me this delightful campaign poster from his small town in the north:

Text reads: “If she were your mother, your wife, your daughter? Close the nomad camps and expel the gypsies immediately!”

Two obvious points: 1. It’s been remarked upon so frequently that it’s a commonplace, but fear is the main driver of these debates. In America, brown people will take your jobs. In Italy, they’ll take your women against their will. It’s laughably lurid sensationalism, except that it has real traction among people. 2. Europe has some very serious issues to work out. Yes, Forza Nuova is a far right fringe party. And yes, Europe has always had a strain of xenophobia running through it which is normally kept at bay by forces of reason. But this kind of emotional propaganda which dehumanizes the aliens within your midst is hard to combat and undo.

Glenn Greenwald excerpts some noxious drivel from The Corner and goes on to complain:

And these are the high-minded, deeply Serious observations one finds in just one 24 hour period in the most respectable right-wing outlet in America. This is to say nothing of what one finds peddled by the lower levels of the right-wing noise machine: Rush Limbaugh, Instapundit, Bill O’Reilly, Drudge, right-wing blogs and the like. But this really is exactly the political faction that has exerted dominant political power in this country for the last 15 years, and has exclusively shaped America’s behavior for the last eight years. And, as a result, we have exactly the country one would expect would be produced when people who have these beliefs are empowered.

I’d like to extend the thesis to Mr. Greenwald that it’s not that we have the country we do today because of the fulminations of certain right-wing publications, but rather that these fulminations are an expression of the true beliefs and dark paranoias which haunt America’s psyche. Fighting the symptoms is no cure.