I was preparing a post on the the American right's obsession with power and the use of violent force as rooted in its feelings of powerlessness and helplessness, but Greenwald does the job for me in this Salon post. Powerlust is a symptom of a pathology rooted in the feeling that one has so little personal presence in the world that the only antidote to prove to oneself that he exists is to violently dominate another. The dominated cannot deny that you exist or think you unimportant. When the individual who feels powerless inflicts harm while part of a pack or crowd provoked by perceived threat or resentment, he is more easily able to absolve himself of any guilt he may feel about the harm he causes. An excerpt:
People who feel weak and vulnerable crave strong leaders to protect them and to enable them to feel powerful. And those same people crave being part of a political movement that gives them those sensations of power, strength, triumph and bravery -- and they need a strong, powerful, masculine Leader to enable those feelings. And they will devote absolute loyalty to any political movement which can provide them with that.
That is just the basic dynamic of garden-variety authoritarianism, and it is what the right-wing, pro-Bush political movement is at its core -- far, far more than it is a set of political beliefs or geopolitical objectives or moral agendas. All of it -- the obsessions with glorious "Victory" in an endless string of wars, vesting more and more power in an all-dominant centralized Leader, the forced submission of any country or leader which does not submit to the Leader's Will, the unquestioning Manichean certainties, and especially the endless stigmatization of the whole array of Enemies as decadent, depraved and weak -- it's just base cultural tribalism geared towards making the followers feel powerful and strong and safe.
The Coulter/Hannity/Limabugh-led right wing is basically the Abu Grahib rituals finding full expression in an authoritarian political movement. The reason people like Rush Limbaugh not only were unbothered, but actually delighted and even tickled by, Abu Grahib is because that is the full-blooded manifestation of the impulses underlying this movement -- feelings of power and strength from the most depraved spectacles of force. The only real complaint from Bush followers about the Commander-in-Chief is that he has not given them enough Guantanamos and wars and aggression and barbaric slaughter and liberty infringement. Their hunger for those things is literally insatiable because they need fresh pretexts for feeling strong.
This is why the threat posed by the right in this country isn't going to go away any time soon. So long as politicians' willingness to exploit this feeling of powerless in these uncertain times is legitimated in the mainstream media, this nation is in very serious danger of being transformed into the kind of authoritarian regime that the hard right lusts for. The Bush administration has been clearing the ground and building the foundation for it. Because he appears weak now does not mean that the tide has turned. Believe me, these folks on the right look at the midterms as a temporary setback.
See also this post based on an interview with Stephen Ducat.