It’s interesting to see in this piece by Dave Weigel (Weigel : Sharia Today, Sharia Tomorrow, Sharia Forever) that a large percent of people believe President Obama wants to impose Sharia law on Americans. This got me thinking to how this is not all that different than some of the fears older Americans had with communists and the U.N. and the imposition of outside laws on Americans. Americans are proud of their laws and their Consistution, but right wing Americans have always had a fear of outsiders taking that away. Indeed, if you think of organizations like the John Birch society that “is against “one world government“, and has an immigration reduction view on immigration reform. It opposes the United Nations, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and other free trade agreements. The society argues that there is a devaluing of the U.S. Constitution in favor of political and economic globalization, and that this trend is not an accident. It cites the existence of the Security and Prosperity Partnership as evidence of a push towards a North American Union.[8]” (taken from Wikipedia’s description of the J.B.S.). For some on the American right, the enemy keeps shifting, much like in “1984”, but the idea is the same: keep America free and isolated.
What is interesting is that Fred Koch, founder of Koch Industries, was a founding member of the John Birch society many years ago. Now according to this article in the New Yorker, two of the Koch brothers who own the current Koch Industries conglomeration, are waging war against Obama and funding opponents of climate change and the Tea Partiers, among other right wing groups. In seeing this, it also appears that the enemy keeps shifting, but the supporters of it also remain the same.
Smart People I Know 