Yeah, I fear that you are right. There is this right-wing mythical streak in US society – as there is in Europe, of course – but in the US it’s not been challenged by a left-wing mythology at least for half a century, not since the McCarthy years. All that was buried when FDR died, I guess.

As an ex-US-diplomat (actually a Republican) once remarked in Vienna during a heated debate when the Iraq war started: The difference between Europa and America is that even without knowing it themselves (i.e. easily 80%), practically all Europeans have been exposed to Marxist thinking which goes against the worship of the Übermensch who can fix it all and looks at the division of power in a society and at the question of class, while most Americans have not been exposed to it.

I wouldn’t be worried about this streak in US society if it hadn’t been transported massively to Europe via Hollywood movies. Election results lately suggest that European youths, particularly less educated disenchanted males, are beginning to find the easy fix via a “strong man” very attractive as well.

B

You see, you have a singularly difficult obstacle: critical thinking skills.

I know, I know, it’s embarrassing and I likely shouldn’t have been so public about this disability of yours. Poor thing, you actually read and understand. How effete! How European! How utterly Un-American.

Americans have romanticized and mythologized a kind of “uber-mensch” we see in the movies. From the John Wayne figures in the cowboy movies of the 1950s to the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry of the 1970s to the more recent Matt Damon Jason Bourne of more recent vintage, young American, testosterone-filled males have looked up to and idolized and identified with hero figures who are capable of solving all problems wholly on their own.

We have no history in America and what little we do have, we have never read, understood nor remembered. Thus, the late 19th Century Spencerian Social Darwinism myths once thought smashed by progressivism still live on in Christian evangelical circles in which it is believed that a very few people get filthy rich by divine right and blessings.

Mix in a good bit of propaganda paid for by some inheritors of great wealth that disguise simple greed as patriotism and — voila! — Randian libertarian idiot fringe political movements that grow like insidious virus.

Of course it’s poppycock and you with your guilty dirty little secret ability to actually dissect that nonsense and see it for what it is find it hard to understand our devotion.

Hope that helps, but if it doesn’t, just drink far too much of that good Viennese beer and sing the Horst Vessel Song until you are almost passed out; in the few minutes before oblivion, screech “Zeig Heil” a few times and just as you pass out, it will make perfect sense.

In the succinct words of Gore Vidal, it’s crypto-fascism, pure and simple.

John, not the superman JohnX one, but the other one.