Graduate Student, Sociology and Anthropology
Thesis Title: Southern Salvos: The rise of the Hysterical Right and the cold civil war in the age of Obama
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Beverley Best
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About
I am a graduate student of sociology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
My research centers on the politically-evinced psychosocial pathologies of the right wing in America since the election of Barack Obama.
My thesis traces a metanarrative of the rapid rightward shift of the Republican Party using as examples four key political narratives in the four years of Obama's first term:
First, the 2009 rise of the Tea Party and the debate over health care reform.
Second, the 2010 midterm elections and the installation of the Tea Party in Congress.
Third, the 2011 debt ceiling and payroll tax cut crises as manifestations of Tea Party control over the House of Representatives - a brinksmanship indicative of the hysteria of the new Right.
Fourth, the 2012 Republican presidential nomination primaries, in particular the cycle of candidate surges, the candidates' forcing each other further towards the (quasi-extreme) right, and the internal fracturing of the GOP.
