Progressives have had a lot of sport recently contrasting wingnut attacks on Barack Obama as a vicious law-breaking tyrant in domestic
affairs with their simultaneous attacks on him as a weak, trembling
figure on the world scene. How could Vladimir Putin fail to notice that
Obama has struck so much fear into the hearts of his enemies at home,
who are cowering in their homes awaiting assaults from IRS agents and
affianced gay people? Hard to say..
But wingnut self-contradiction about Obama's spine reflects a much broader and deeper ambivalence about whether they are winning or losing the great battle for America's culture and political system.
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We have certainly come a long way from the '70s, when Nixon and Agnew boasted of support from a "Silent Majority," or the '80s, when a "Moral Majority" helped Ronald Reagan steal two consecutive terms and also "win" (with an assist from Pope John Paul II) the Cold War. You could argue that conservative self-confidence persisted into the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was accused of winning by "stealing our ideas," and the long economic boom was credited by the wingnuts to Reagan's policies. And the "our side's winning" claim definitely persisted through 2004, when the Iraq "victory" was often treated as a huge transition point in U.S. and world politics and Karl Rove dreamed of a permanent repugican cabal majority.
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Since then, however, wingnut self-confidence has regularly alternated or even coincided with defeatism and paranoia. There's always been an undertone of cultural despair in the post-moral minority christian lunatics, where the legalized-abortion "regime" that has prevailed since Roe v. Wade occasionally tempts wingnuts to compare the U.S. to Nazi Germany or the antebellum South. And even in times of wingnut political ascendancy, claims that the Judiciary or academic elites were thwarting the achievement of wingnut policy goals have been very common.
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