America appears to be having a James Bulger moment: it is confronting an extreme manifestation of a long-recognised problem. In the case of the killing of the two-year-old James Bulger by two other children, the problem was social breakdown in Britain. In the case of the mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, which left six dead and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life, the problem is America's increasingly paranoid attitude to politics.

That doesn't mean that Jared Lee Loughner's actions were the "fault" of the political right in the US, any more than Jon Venables's and Robert Thompson's were the "fault" of the liberal left, which supposedly encourages permissive, bad parenting. Bulger's death resulted in a decade-long "crackdown" on young people that was entirely ineffectual. Much of the American commentariat seems to be suggesting that there should be a similar crackdown on political expression in response to Loughner's act; less of the language of warfare, more of the urbane debating style. This won't work. Better by far to have extremist factions expose themselves through the vacuity and dishonesty of their arguments than to have them silenced.

Palin's failings

For exposing vacuity, we must thank Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. Loughner's ramblings share some of the obsessions I heard when I
attended a Tea Party rally in November. He protested at paying debt "with a currency that's not backed by gold and silver" and talked about the government brainwashing the electorate. The Tea Partiers I met were also paranoid about government spending. But Loughner burned the American flag on film, smoked pot and cited the Communist Manifesto as one of his favourite texts. He was no Tea Partier.

Nonetheless, the events in Tucson are hugely damaging to Palin because they have exposed, yet again, her political incompetence and misjudgement. When Barack Obama's health-care bill was passed last year, Palin tweeted, "Don't retreat - instead, RELOAD!" and directed people to her Facebook page, on which Arizona was shown in the cross hairs of a gun. She was immediately criticised by a cross-party panel of speakers on The View, the ABC talk show co-hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Walters and others. Goldberg warned:

I want to put something out there to those talking heads who are still busy inciting this: whatever comes down from this, it's on your hands. When you say "Wipe 'em out" and when you sort of gently suggest that people do stuff . . . we've seen what happens when people listen to other people; we saw planes going into the buildings because they listened to someone who said: "Go and do this." This is the same thing. Watch yourselves, talking heads, because this is dangerous.

Another co-presenter, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a Republican campaigner, also expressed unease about the map: "I would hope that anyone out there wouldn't take it to an extreme and take this literally but the chance is there. I think there's a civic responsibility, no matter how upset you are with how things are happening with our constitution, with health insurance . . . This is not the way to get anything done."

That Palin left herself exposed to the criticism she is now attracting for her ridiculous use of violent, macho imagery exposes her for the poseur, the political caricature, that she is. The Loughner episode may help the Republican Party in damaging Palin, for if she is chosen as its candidate in the 2012 presidential elections, it will lose. The Tea Party was already fading as a political force: a survey by the Washington Post found that 70 per cent of listed Tea Party groups did not even campaign in the 12 months leading up to the 2010 midterm elections.

What Palin and others on the right in particular do have to answer for is not Loughner's behaviour, but the diminution of political debate in the US; the way populist poses have taken the place of argument. They have seized on the First Amendment right to free speech and twisted it to encourage dishonesty and stupidity. Uninterested in facts, they offer a dangerously combustible mix of religion and politics, an elision of dogma, morality and "patriotism" which mirrors the similarly ignorant ramblings of other extremists. The internet fuels this ignorance, allowing myths such as Obama's supposed foreign nationality to spread.

Myth-makers

A study last year traced the speed with which disinformation spreads in the US today. Brendan Nyhan, at the University of Michigan, traced the trajectory of the myth that Obama's health-care bill would introduce "death panels" of bureaucrats to decide whether the old and sick should live or die.

Invented by a journalist on a radio show in July 2009, the idea was picked up by Republicans and right-wing broadcasters and propelled to new heights by Palin, who wrote on Facebook: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down's syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgement of their 'level of productivity in society', whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." A week later, just a month after the rumour started, 86 per cent of Americans had heard of death panels and nearly a third believed in them, including half of all Republican voters.

Similarly self-serving nonsense greeted even the killings in Tucson on 8 January, with right-wingers warning that the Democrats were planning to "use" the shooting to get the next health-care vote through Congress. Such belief in political conspiracy was shared by Loughner and is encouraged by some on the right, because it damages faith in government. Loughner is a pathetic symbol of the ignorance and paranoia eating away at American politics.