By Glenn Greenwald

The following is adapted from Glenn Greenwald's new book, Great American Hypocrites, released this week.

Central to the right-wing mythmaking machine is the depiction of their male leaders as swaggering tough guys in the iconic mold of an American cowboy and brave, steadfast warrior. Above all else, Republican leaders are invariably held up as exuding the virtues of traditional American masculinity – courage, physical strength, "regular guy"ness, and most of all, a willingness and ability to stare down America's various and numerous enemies – in war, if necessary – and defeat them through superior strength.

The reality, in virtually every case, is the opposite. Those who end up as leaders of the right-wing movement in America have nothing in their lives to demonstrate any actual courage, physical strength, or any of the warrior virtues they desperately strive to exude. Their only "toughness" or masculine "tough guy" credentials are from cheerleading as they send others off to fight wars, never to fight in any themselves. Just like John Wayne, their masculine toughness comes from the costumes they wear, the scripts they read, the roles they play – never from the reality of their own lives.

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This is also the basic dynamic of garden-variety authoritarianism, and it is what the right-wing Republican Party has become at its core – far more than 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 who does not submit to the Leader's Will; the unquestioning Manichaean certainties; the endless stigmatization of the whole array of Enemies as decadent, depraved, and weak; and most of all, the canonization of their male Leaders as Strong, Powerful, Brave, and Über-Masculine – it's just base cultural tribalism geared toward making the followers feel powerful and falsely secure.

The Coulter/Hannity/Limbaugh-led right wing is basically the Abu Ghraib rituals finding full expression in an authoritarian political movement. There is a reason that individuals such as Rush Limbaugh were not bothered by that horror show, but actually took perverse delight in and were tickled by the sadism displayed there and other revelations of American torture, barbarism, and cruelty. It 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.

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