Category Archives: American History

Conservatives, True and Pseudo

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I want to spend a little more time on the distinction between conservatives and pseudo conservatives. Certainly, we’re not looking at two entirely separate phylum here. Cs and PCs share many common opinions and perspectives. But the differences are substantial also, and I think those differences led directly to the failures of the late Republican Congress and the Bush Administration.

In his essay on “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics” from 1964, Richard Hofstadter wrote,

The difference between conservatism as a set of doctrines whose validity is established by polemics, and conservatism as a set of rules whose validity is to be established by their usability in government, is not a difference in nuance, but of fundamental substance.

Put another way, the distinction is between holding conservative values that guide’s one’s opinions and conservatism as a set of dogmas that must be “believed in” and followed loyally whether they work or not.

Understanding this distinction requires digging “conservative values” out from under the cultural and rhetorical detritus heaped upon them in recent years. When you look at a dictionary definition of “conservative,” for example, you find:

The inclination, especially in politics, to maintain the existing or traditional order.
A political philosophy or attitude emphasizing respect for traditional institutions, distrust of government activism, and opposition to sudden change in the established order. …
Caution or moderation, as in behavior or outlook.

The definition doesn’t quite describe today’s American Right, does it?

If you scroll down from that dictionary definition you find another one, taken from a political dictionary published by Oxford University Press:

Originally in Burke an ideology of caution in departing from the historical roots of a society, or changing its inherited traditions and institutions. In this “organic” form it includes allegiance to tradition, community, hierarchies of rank, benevolent paternalism, and properly subservient underclasses. By contrast, conservatism can be taken to imply a laissez-faire ideology of untrammelled individualism that puts the emphasis on personal responsibility, free markets, law and order, and a minimal role for government, with neither community, nor tradition, nor benevolence entering more than marginally. The two strands are not easy to reconcile, either in theory or in practice.

Are we confused yet? Scroll down a little more, and there’s an essay from a U.S. History encyclopedia:

A national political and intellectual movement of self-described conservatives began to congeal in the middle of the twentieth century, primarily as a reaction to the creation of the New Deal welfare state, but also in response to the alleged erosion of traditional values and the American failure to win a quick victory in the Cold War. Among the factions within this movement, traditionalists typically stressed the virtues of order, local custom, and natural law; libertarians promoted limited government, laissez-faire economics, and individual autonomy; and militant cold warriors sought primarily to combat communism. Despite these internal differences, by 1960, conservatives had formulated a coherent critique of liberalism and built a network of political activists. In 1964, they mobilized to win the Republican presidential nomination for Senator Barry Goldwater and, subsequently, remained a major political force.

Now we’re back to what I wrote about yesterday — Richard Hofstadter’s contention that Goldwater conservatives were really pseudo conservatives.

To attempt a broad and brief generalization of Hofstadter’s argument — “traditional” conservatives like Dwight Eisenhower or Senator Robert Taft were conservative more in the Burkean mold, which valued allegiance to tradition, community, hierarchies of rank, benevolent paternalism, and in some cases “properly subservient underclasses” as well (note that Hofstadter doesn’t cite Burke himself, so I may be reaching a little here). Hofstadter wrote in 1964,

Most conservatives are mainly concerned with maintaining a tissue of institutions for whose stability and effectiveness they believe the country’s business and political elites hold responsibility.

(I suspect if I were to drizzle the sentence above around the Right Blogosphere today the righties would disagree.)

But even those conservatives who trace their philosophies to Burke are of wildly diverse types. On one hand there is the relatively benign Russell Kirk, who defined mainstream conservatism in 1953 in his book The Conservative Mind. Kirk’s “Ten Principles of Conservatism,” which you can read about here, drew upon the philosophy of Burke. On the other hand, Leo Strauss — who heavily influenced today’s neocons — interpreted Burke in an entirely different way and reached very different views from Kirk’s.

I suppose here we have to consider whether Hofstadter’s views on conservatism versus pseudoconservatism are still valid, given that conservatism has redefined itself considerably. In response to my last post, Mike the Mad Biologist writes “I would argue that Nixon and Eisenhower both were essentially the right wing of the liberal consensus, and not conservatives as conservatives themselves understand conservatism. Conservatives are a different kind all together.” Well, yes, if we could reconstitute Eisenhower today — let’s leave Nixon where he is — he’d definitely be on the conservative side of the liberal consensus. And if he went back into politics he’d probably be a centrist Democrat. But within his own time frame Eisenhower was a conservative.

This shows us how far right the “conservative movement” has swung. It also takes us back to the quote above, “The difference between conservatism as a set of doctrines whose validity is established by polemics, and conservatism as a set of rules whose validity is to be established by their usability in government, is not a difference in nuance, but of fundamental substance.”

For example, a “usability in government” type of conservative, back in the day, was not necessarily opposed to all social welfare or “safety net” programs, because he might understand them as fostering economic and political stability. Allowing a large underclass of hopelessly poor people to build up is asking for revolution, and revolutions are very un-conservative. So, 1950s era mainstream conservatives like Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Taft were OK — maybe not wildly enthusiastic, mind you, but OK –with some New Deal programs, because they were benevolent and supported domestic tranquility. Such thinking is, of course, utterly rejected by most of today’s conservatives.

Here rightie blogger McQ of Q and O Blog (“Free Markets, Free People”) critiques an essay written by Irving Kristol back in 1976, in which the Father of Neoconservatism argues that Republicans need to construct and support welfare programs. “The idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with a conservative political philosophy,” Kristol the Elder wrote. Kirstol continues,

This is not a question the Republican Party has faced up to, because it still feels, deep down, that a welfare state is inconsistent with such traditional American virtues as self-reliance and individual liberty. Those virtues are real enough, and are a proper conservative concern. But the task to is to create the kind of welfare state which is consistent, to the largest possible degree. That is not an impossible task, though it would be foolish to pretend it is an easy one. It is a matter of relating means to ends. But before one can do that, one has to take the ends seriously. One has to believe that the American people really need some sort of medical insurance program, or old age assistance program. Because the Republican Party has never been able to make up its mind about this, it has left the initiative to liberal Democrats. It then finds itself in the position, when in office, of having to administer Democratic programs in the least extravagant way. That’s no way for a party to govern.

McQ has an ideological meltdown over this, and concludes that “It appears, at least to me, that compassionate conservatism is simply a code phrase for neo-con, and that if you believe in individualism or even traditional conservatism, you’re in the middle of one hell of a con job.” But we’re really looking at a generation gap here. As recently as 1976 — although not much past that — most American conservatives saw some social welfare programs as basic and necessary for running a stable country. They thought Democrats went way too far with them, particularly after LBJ launched his Great Society programs, but they weren’t yet crusading to wipe them out entirely. “Compassionate conservatism,” on the other hand, was never anything but a campaign slogan.

But then, of course, post-New Deal conservatives of the 1950s and 1960s were much at odds with 19th century “laissez faire” conservatives and pre-New Deal conservatives of the 1920s.

John Dean writes here that conservatism seems not to have any core principles or beliefs, but is a hodge-podge of attitudes and beliefs united around an antipathy of liberalism. And I think he’s right.

But “antipathy of liberalism” is not a blueprint for governing. What does a workable and sustainable American conservative government look like? My argument is that people who identify themselves as “conservatives” nowadays cannot run a workable and sustainable American government. Their beloved “ideas,” put into practice, are not workable in government and in time will bring the nation down into crumbling ruin.

Mike the Mad Biologists (whom I don’t want to pick on; I hope this is just good-fun debate) writes “The problem isn’t that pseudoconservatives fail at governing. It’s that they are using government to achieve the society they would like. What she sees as failure, they see as success.” Yes, they are using government to achieve the society they would like, and in that sense it is working. But I say “the society they should like” is not sustainable. It’s ruining the economy, it’s ruining our national institutions, it’s ruining the bleeping planet. I suppose our species could survive even this, but if we keep going down this road the United States of America will become a puritanical version of a banana republic — Brazil without the samba.

So we’re back to —

The difference between conservatism as a set of doctrines whose validity is established by polemics, and conservatism as a set of rules whose validity is to be established by their usability in government, is not a difference in nuance, but of fundamental substance.

Traditional conservatism, whatever it is, appears to be more authoritarian and hierarchical than liberalism. But authoritarian and hierarchical governments can survive. Most governments in human history have been authoritarian and hierarchical. I wouldn’t choose to live under such a government, which is why I’m a liberal. But a person can be “conservative” in the sense of valuing traditional institutions and ideals and run a sustainable government. And I think a governmental philosophy based on Kirk’s Ten Conservative Principles would also be sustainable. I’m not saying it would be ideal, but I think it would be sustainable. It could be made to work.

But a government run by current conservative dogmas is not sustainable. Perpetually cutting taxes, eliminating social welfare programs, allowing infrastructure to rot, encouraging income inequality, squandering public resources to enrich private enterprise, starting pointless wars all over the planet, restricting civil liberty in the name of “freedom” — this is just nuts.

Freedom to Oppress?

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I’m pleased that I got to meet and hang out with David Neiwert and Sara Robinson at Yearly Kos. It’s this sort of face-to-face time with smart thinkers and good people that makes YK (hence to be called Netroots Nation) so valuable.

Dave’s got a post up today that needs one little addition. Republican Rep. Bill Sali of Idaho “thinks Muslims should not have been allowed to say a prayer in the hallowed halls of Congress, nor should they even have representation there,” Dave writes, quoting this news story:

“We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes — and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers,” asserts Sali.

Not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers? “Well, perhaps they were, perhaps they were not,” writes Dave. “As far as anyone can discern, they were silent on the subject of Muslim American citizens. Some of them were in fact unrepentant racists, so seeking their advice may not be all that useful anyway.”

But what we do know about them is that they believed in the freedom of religion. It’s one of America’s true founding values. See, e.g., the First Amendment.

In fact, one of the Founders did speak to this. Thomas Jefferson wrote about this in his autobiography, discussing the adoption of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it’s protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.

Seems pretty clear to me. It’s a shame we elect people like Bill Sali who doesn’t share America’s true founding values, huh?

Update: Pastor Dan says Sali doesn’t know Scripture, either.

Left Behind

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Among the several people I met in Chicago was Ed Kilgore, former policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council and advocate for all things moderate. I wish I could tell you he told me something insider-y, but since we met at the Teamster “cookout” we were reduced to shouting over the Union loudspeakers, a circumstance not conducive to nuanced conversation.

However, I did get the impression that the DLC is feeling left behind.
Joe Klein wrote last week that none of the Dem presidential candidates visited the DLC annual meeting in Nashville. Not even Hillary Clinton, who is a prominent member of the DLC. And today Martin O’Malley and Harold Ford Jr., governor of Maryland and DLC chariman, have a whiny op ed in the Washington Post asking why no one likes them any more. It begins:

With President Bush and the Republican Party on the rocks, many Democrats think the 2008 election will be, to borrow a favorite GOP phrase, a cakewalk. Some liberals are so confident about Democratic prospects that they contend the centrism that vaulted Democrats to victory in the 1990s no longer matters.

This reminds me of George Bush’s straw man arguments.

“Some say, ‘Well, maybe the recession should have been deeper,’ ” Bush said last summer. “That bothers me when people say that. You see, a deeper recession would have meant more families would have been out of work.”

In Bush’s world, large herds of nameless people go about saying absurd things to which the President strongly disagrees. Some say “certain people” don’t want to be free. Some say we shouldn’t fight terrorists. Some say we should mix thumbtacks into our oatmeal. But I say we must be resolved to keep thumbtacks out of the oatmeal.

So now these same strange and nameless people are following Harold Ford about, also. Some liberals say that centrism no longer matters. Well, Harold Ford and Governor O’Malley disagree.

The temptation to ignore the vital center is nothing new. Every four years, in the heat of the nominating process, liberals and conservatives alike dream of a world in which swing voters don’t exist. … But for Democrats, taking the center for granted next year would be a greater mistake than ever before.

Ford and O’Malley whine along in this vein, talking about a “center” that wants “practical answers,” such as

… smart, New Democrat plans to cap and trade carbon emissions, give more Americans the chance to earn their way through college, achieve universal health care through shared responsibility, increase national security by rebuilding our embattled military and enable all Americans who work full time to lift themselves out of poverty.

And I say, WTF? Capping and trading carbon emissions is fine, but what does “earn their way through college” mean, exactly? Bigger and more glorious work-study programs? And “achieve universal health care through shared responsibility” sounds like “don’t get sick and you won’t mind not having health insurance.”

I looked on the DLC web site and found this:

What is missing today is the political imagination and courage to move to a new vision of universal health care — one in which government takes action in the public’s interest, without seizing control of the system. Such a vision would reject the false choices offered in the stultified left-right debate between those who seek a government takeover of health care and those whose veneration of free markets would leave individuals to fend for themselves. Instead, it would equip Americans with the tools they need to build the world’s best health care system from the ground up.

Translation: We’re not going to risk pissing of the health insurance industry, so you’re on your own.

And we need these people, why? Joe Klein offers this explanation:

In a way, this is just the latest edition of the fight between Northern liberals and Southern moderates that has befuddled the Democrats since… well, since Ted Kennedy challenged the incumbent President, Jimmy Carter, in 1980. But it’s also a consequence of the smug ideological xenophobia that currently afflicts activists in both parties—although, in fairness, the Democrats are playing catch-up to the wing-nut avidity cultivated by Karl Rove as a conscious governing strategy in the Republican Party. The Republicans don’t even have a DLC equivalent.

At the center of the controversy is a gentleman named Al From, a former Senate aide who helped found the DLC in reaction to the Walter Mondale presidential wipeout in 1984 and now serves as its CEO. From is a moderate who acts like an extremist. Early on, he gleefully picked fights with various crumbling pillars of post-Vietnam liberalism—trade unions, antiwar activists and ethnic pleaders. Many of these battles were worth waging, especially on social issues like crime and welfare reform, where Democrats had drifted into a slough of guilt and warped good intentions.

There is a germ of truth there, although you have to do some weeding to get to it.

There are many factors that came together in the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in a weakened, spineless, and soulless Democratic Party, and I explained these in some detail here. But there are three major factors I’d like to point out:

In the 1970s and 1980s, white voters left the Dem Party in droves and began to vote Republican, mostly because Nixon, Reagan, and others did a bang-up job exploiting racism. I think the racist backlash to Dem support of civil rights and antipoverty programs cost Democrats far more, in the long run, than the war in Vietnam did.

Second, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, New Left ideologies discouraged young activists from getting involved in party politics. Instead, progressivism broke up into single-issue advocacy movements that competed with each other for funds and attention.

Third, the New Deal coalition, which had sustained the Party from FDR’s day through the 1960s, dissolved. More critically, nothing took its place. Thus, the Democratic Party itself lost clear identity and purpose. But someone should explain to Joe Klein that trade unions are not vestiges of “post-Vietnam liberalism.” They were the cornerstone of the New Deal coalition, and the relationship between the unions and the Democratic Party goes back many, many decades. New Left activists, on the whole, were uninterested in labor issues.

And while the Democrats were in decline, the Right was busily establishing its almighty infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets. Mondale in 1984 and Dukakis in 1988 ran adequate campaigns for the pre-VRWC age. But the shift in political and media culture that the Right had imposed stymied both of them.

Al From and others found a strategy for playing by Right-wing rules and winning an election here and there. But they never confronted the real problem, which is that politics and media came to be dominated by a faction of Right-wing extremism subsidized by corporate power, making it nearly impossible for any voices but the Right’s to speak to the American people. The Right claimed the center and enforced that claim with bluster and intimidation. And for a time the majority of Americans more or less went along with the Right’s agenda, mostly because that was the only agenda presented to them.

Noam Scheiber wrote for the New York Times,

Before the Clinton presidency, the leadership council’s critique of the Democratic Party had merit. Many voters emerged from the 1970s and early ’80s deeply skeptical of liberalism. As Mr. Clinton put it in his 1991 speech, people who once voted for the Democrats no longer “trusted us in national elections to defend our national interest abroad, to put their values in our social policy at home or to take their tax money and spend it with discipline.”

The council grew out of frustration with Walter Mondale’s crushing 1984 defeat. Mr. Mondale had maneuvered to win the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s endorsement during the Democratic primaries, but his victory was pyrrhic. The endorsement solidified Mr. Mondale’s reputation as the candidate of special interests. In order to shake the label, Mr. Mondale proposed raising taxes to cut the deficit, which only worsened his image among swing voters.

Let’s look at this more closely. What, exactly, had the Dems done to lose the nation’s trust?

The nation’s economy had stalled halfway through the Nixon administration, and stagflation reigned through the Ford administration. (Ford’s economic policy, as I remember, was handing out “Whip Inflation Now” pins.) President Carter, it is true, made little headway against the economic problems handed to him. But the problems were handed to him by Republican administrations, notice. Then in 1979 the Federal Reserve clamped down on the money supply, which whipped inflation. Reagan’s first term was marked by a deep recession that was especially painful for blue-collar Americans. Reagan’s economy heated up, then cooled off just in time for George H.W. Bush to take over. The Bush 41 years saw whopping income disparity and mass layoffs.

And dontcha love the part about trade unions representing “special interests”?

I’ve written at length about the charge that Dems are “soft” on security. See, for example, “Don’t Blame McGovern,” “Don’t Blame McGovern II,” and “How the Democrats Lost Their Spines.” This is a history that goes back to the end of World War II; in short, the Right took credibility on national security away from the Dems through years of hysterical charges and lies. And the Wingnut Generation (b. 1970, give or take) were heavily imprinted by Jimmy Carter’s failure to resolve the Iran Hostage Crisis and the perception that the nation had been made strong again by Reagan. The fact that Democrats saw the nation through World War II, and the way Democratic President John Kennedy stared down the Soviets in the Cuban Missile Crisis, were entirely forgotten. Carter-Reagan became the only recognized narrative for both parties.

So how did Mrs. Clinton respond in 1991? We’re sorry we’re such screwups. We promise to do better from now on. In other words, instead of correcting the narrative, the “New Democrats” validated the narrative and attempted to win elections by riding piggy-back on Right-wing propaganda. See? We can electrocute mentally retarded criminals and blame poverty on welfare queens, too! Can we say Republican Lite?

The DLC came along and had some success with a short-sighted strategy: Ignore the base, because they don’t have anyone else to vote for, and try to pick off “swing voters” by moving to the Right. But now the American people are desperate for someone to lead them away from the failed policies of the Right. As Ford and O’Malley say, “George W. Bush is handing us Democrats our Hoover moment. ”

Let’s see, what did Franklin Roosevelt do with his “Hoover moment”? Did he mince around and say, Don’t worry, I won’t do anything drastically different from what Herbert Hoover did. I’ll just institute a few tweaks. I don’t think so.

The base — and please note, Mr. Ford and Gov. O’Malley, we vote too — is sick to death of “leaders” who are too timid to lead.

Steven Thomma writes for McClatchy Newspapers:

The Democratic Party is growing more liberal for the first time in a generation. …

…The Democrats’ shift to the left carries some risk, but probably much less than it would have in years past. That’s because independent voters — the ones who swing back and forth and thus decide elections — also have turned against the war and in favor of many more liberal approaches to government.

“There is greater support for the social safety net, more concern for inequality of income,” said Andy Kohut, the president of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. “More people are falling into the liberal category based on their values.”

Dear DLC: Step aside, fellas. We’re doing the leading now.

Update: See also the BooMan, who was also in Chicago.

Another Belmont Stakes Post

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[Update: The filly won! Whoopee!]

One filly, Rags to Riches, will be running in the Belmont Stakes today. A filly hasn’t won the race in over a century. Rags to Riches is a daughter of A.P. Indy, who won the Belmont Stakes in 1992. A.P. Indy was sired by Seattle Slew. His dam was Morning Surprise, a daughter of Secretariat.

Rags to Riches is one of the favorites, after Curlin and Hard Spun. Hard Spun is a descendant of Man o’ War and War Admiral, through his grandma Pas de Nom. He is also a grandson of Northern Dancer (winner of the 1964 Kentucky Derby and Preakness) and a great-grandson of Alydar, famous for running second to Affirmed in all three races of the 1978 Triple Crown. Curlin is a great-great grandson of Northern Dancer, as is Rags to Riches on her ma’s side.

Update: Rags to Riches’s ancestry also goes back to Man o’ War, through her great-grandpa Buckpasser.

Once Upon a Time

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So we know there won’t be a Triple Crown winner this year, but thanks to video we can watch a Triple Crown Belmont Stakes victory anyway.

First, a story. Once upon a time, two thoroughbred breeders made a deal. They agreed that the owner of pedigree brood mares would send two mares to the champion stud owned by the other owner. They flipped a coin, and the winner of the coin toss got first choice of the two foals. Then the same two mares made the same trip the next year, and the loser of the coin toss got the first choice of the second two foals, except one of the two mares failed to produce a foal the second year.

So, the winner of the coin toss took home one foal, a filly that proved to be unexceptional. The loser got the second choice from the first year — a colt, also unexceptional — and the only foal born the second year. That foal was Secretariat.

If you saw the videos of the 1973 Kentucky Derby and Preakness, you might remember that in both those races Secretariat was in last place early in the race. Then he moved up to take the lead in the stretch. According to William Nack in Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, this was how the big horse ran most of his races. Jockey Ron Turcotte felt Secretariat usually needed to settle into his stride early in a race. But once he was in his stride, he kept accelerating. For example, in the 1 1/4 mile Derby he ran each quarter mile faster than the last one. This is unusual.

Beside Secretariat, there were only four other horses in the Belmont Stakes — Pvt. Smiles, Twice a Prince, My Gallant, and Sham. Only Sham’s owner admitted to thinking his horse could beat Secretariat. Sham had run great races in the Derby and Preakness and might well have won any other year. In fact, in the Derby he would have beat the track record had not Secretariat just set a new track record.

The Belmont Stakes is the longest of the three Triple Crown races — 1 1/2 miles. Sham’s owner instructed the jockey, Laffit Pincay, to go to the lead at the beginning of the race and to try to keep the pace moderate. They probably expected Secretariat to hang back at the beginning of the race, as he usually did. But Ron Turcotte decided that if no other horse set a strong pace he’d let the big horse go to the front and set his own pace.

So, in the video below (there’s a bigger version here) you see Sham and Secretariat both going to the front at the beginning, and they pull away from the other three horses. As they go into the first turn, they both pick up the pace. Pretty soon the two of them are running as if they were in a sprint, not a 1 1/2 mile race. Pincay knows that Sham is running too hard, but he had been ordered not to let Secretariat get ahead. Turcotte, meanwhile, feels the big horse running easily and figures he can keep it up for a while. So the two horses sprint, and reach the half-mile pole at 0:46 1/5, which was the fastest opening half mile in the history of the race.

By now Secretariat’s owners and his trainer are tearing out their hair, convinced that Ron Turcotte has gone out of his mind and will cause the horse to collapse of exhaustion before he gets to the wire. But because Secretariat is running so easily, Turcotte doesn’t realize how fast the horse is going.

At about five-eighths of a mile, Sham begins to fall apart. They’re still running at a faster pace than Man o’ War, Count Fleet, or Citation had run at that same point in the race. Over the next eighth of a mile Sham struggles, and Secretariat just glides along. At three quarters of a mile into the race, Sham is done. He drifts back and eventually finishes last. But Secretariat maintains the same sprint speed. His owners and trainer still think the horse will break down any minute. But Turcotte hasn’t taken out his whip or pushed the big horse; he is just letting him run, still not realizing they’re going at a record clip.

Now Secretariat opens the lead. On the video, you can hear the announcer Chick Anderson:

“Secretariat is blazing along! The first three-quarters of a mile in 1:09 4/5. Secretariat is widening now. He is moving like a tremendous machine!”

Secretariat pulls further and further away from the rest of the horses. His frantic owners watch for any sign the horse is hurting or stressed. There is no such sign. As he turns into the home stretch, Secretariat is running faster than he ran past the half-mile pole. The lead widens. The horse maintains his record pace. At about the point Secretariat is 26 lengths in front — I’m sorry you can’t make this out in the video — Turcotte glanced behind and saw the rest of the field in another county. Then he glanced at the timer and realized he was ahead of record pace. So at the very end of the race, you can make out that he is pumping his arms — for the first time since early in the race — to be sure Secretariat doesn’t slow down at the end and blow the record.

Secretariat goes under the wire at 2:24, 31 lengths in the lead (the announcers says 29 lengths, but the horse was so far out in front it was hard to count). The previous record had been Gallant Man’s 2:26.6, set in 1957.

Since then, the second-fastest clocking is shared by Easy Goer (1989) and A. P. Indy (1992) at 2:26, while Risen Star (1988) and Point Given (2001) hold the fourth-fastest time at 2:26 2/5, it says here.

OK, now you can watch the race. (Or click here.)

You can read about the rest of Secretariat’s life here. In short, the big horse was retired to stud at the end of the 1973 racing reason and euthanized in 1983 after developing laminitis. On the whole his offspring were not exceptional, but his daughters have an outstanding record as brood mares. The fillies got all his good genes, it seems.

Sham was also retired to stud in 1973, after a leg fracture ended his racing career, and died in 1993. In 1978, Ron Turcotte fell from a mount during a race and was paralyzed from the waist down.

To this day, many people still consider Secretariat’s 1973 Belmont Stakes race to be the greatest single performance by a running horse. Certainly, it’s the best performance ever captured on film.

Making New Memories

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Memorial Day “is a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation’s service,” it says here. No doubt some new memories will be made today. As of Saturday, 102 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq in May, which brings the U.S. death toll to about 3,445.

Today all over the blogosphere righties are gushing about “honoring” fallen soldiers. At the same time, they remain among the last visible props of a war creating more fallen soldiers to “honor.” Michelle Malkin is worked up into a snit today (as she is every day) because some people (hint: Democrats) don’t know how to “honor” soldiers properly. It seems the proper way to “honor” the fallen is to swoon over how heroic and decent and honorable they were. On the other hand, she says, Bill Richardson is not swooning properly, even though as governor he helped bring about a significant increase in the death benefits that went to the families of National Guard.

Somehow I think the families would just as soon have the cash than more rightie drool. Of course, what they really want is to have their loved one alive and home again, but then who would Michelle Malkin swoon over?

* * *
The 101st Fighting Keyboarders have plenty to celebrate today. The Associated Press reports that “Americans have opened nearly 1,000 new graves to bury U.S. troops killed in Iraq since Memorial Day a year ago. The figure is telling — and expected to rise in coming months.”

Righties often claim we who oppose the war “dishonor” the troops because we do not support the war in which they are dying. The troops and the Cause are so fused in their minds that one cannot be separated from the other. To some, troops are not individual human beings, but just abstractions in their collective glorious jingoistic fantasy that they mistake for patriotism.

We see the fantasy in this post by rightie blogger Dean Barnett, who took offense when Nancy Pelosi referred to soldiers as “young people” and an honored fallen soldier as a “young man.” “[T]he failure to use the word ‘soldier’, ‘Marine’ or any other term that acknowledges a connection between [Marine Corporal Jason L. ] Dunham and the military is borderline grotesque,” Barnett wrote.

In other words, to acknowledge that a fallen soldier was young (Marine Corporal Jason L. Dunham was 22 years old when he died; seems young to me), that he was a person, that he was a man, that he had a life separate from the military, that he was flesh and blood, and had hopes and sorrows and expectations and vulnerabilities like the rest of us, is borderline grotesque.

Barnett likes his soldiers plastic and pliable. He likes them indistinguishable from the Mission.

(I’d like to add that this is the same Barnett who wrote recently in the Boston Globe that he is opposed to abortion because fertilized eggs are people. I guess sentience is in the eye of the beholder.)

The hawks are forever shrieking about how we could win in Vietnam Iraq if only we liberals would clap our hands and believe in fairies stop undermining troop morale. I’d like to see the rest of us — the two-thirds of the nation that has seen through the lie — turn around and lay every death, every wound, every broken marriage, every busted up life, at the feet of the hawks, and say Look at this. This is your doing. Are you still so proud of what you accomplished?

If I were them, I’d want to pretend soldiers are plastic toys, too.

* * *
If you want to see grotesque, read this:

On Monday, Bush will mark his sixth Memorial Day as a wartime president with a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. He is to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns to honor those who have died in past and current conflicts.

The Creature isn’t worthy to set foot in that cemetery, much less prance around over it and pretend to be a war leader.

The Creature also urges Americans “to rededicate themselves to fighting for freedom around the world.” Good advice. In fact, that’s why I blog. And as long as Bush is in the White House, we we who are dedicated to fighting for freedom around the world have a job to do to pry him out of it.

* * *
In last year’s Memorial Day post I wrote briefly history about my family’s military history, which goes back to the American Revolution. Since then, an uncle has told me that my great-great grandfather William Gillihan was a Confederate, not a Yankee. He wanted the record corrected. My understanding was that WG (who died shortly before the war ended) was a volunteer in an Indiana regiment, but perhaps I was mistaken. That still leaves me with two other “great-greats” who fought for the Union.

The other update is that my nephew, Maj. Robert John Thomas, is now in Baghdad.

* * *
Some other stuff to read today:

David Carr, “Not to See the Fallen Is No Favor”

James Carroll, “Sacrifice, pain, and grief”

Adam Cohen, “What the History of Memorial Day Teaches About Honoring the War Dead”

Michael Kamber, “As Allies Turn Foe, Disillusion Rises in Some G.I.s”

Gary Kamiya, “Memorial Day”

Fred Kaplan, “Bush Bungles a Press Conference”

Paul Krugman, “Trust and Betrayal” (also here)

Donna St. George, “Another Memorial Day Marks Grief’s Journey”

Washington Post editorial, “Remembering Americans of many nationalities“

Nixon in ’08?

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Atrios asks whether the GOP nominee, whoever he is, will be against the Iraq War a year from now. Apparently Lawrence O’Donnell thinks this will happen. Atrios disagrees —

I don’t think there’s any way they can climb out of the rhetorical trap they’ve placed them selves in (surrender dates, defeatocrats, have to fight them there, etc…) given that George W. Bush won’t provide them with an opening for that.

O’Donnell’s comparison point was Nixon in 1968, but Nixon didn’t have President Bush sitting in office defending the war until the end, decrying any attempts to begin ending the war. And I don’t think Liebermanish “no one wants to end the war more than I do but we can’t…” crap is going to fly.

I think anything’s possible, including some big change in the entire Middle East/terrorism situation that renders the Iraq War issue moot. Assuming More of the Same over the next year, however, I am inclined to think Atrios is right. I don’t think the base is going to change its mind, so the candidates can’t radically change their current positions and get the nomination.

The political dynamics of 1968 were more complex, I think, than they are now. Remember, the Republican candidate, Nixon, was running against a Democrat’s war. As I remember it, by 1968 liberals generally had more misgivings about Vietnam than conservatives did. One of the reasons Johnson pushed combat troops into Vietnam was to appease the Right, so that they wouldn’t go after him for “losing Vietnam.” But the antiwar protesters hit the Dem convention, not the GOP convention, because it was Lyndon Johnson’s war. And as I’ve said in other posts, Nixon ran on a promise to end the war; in effect, he was the peace candidate.

But get this from Geoffrey Perret’s new book Commander in Chief. Setting the stage, so to speak: In March 1968 Johnson had announced he would not seek the Democratic Party nomination. In June 1968, Robert Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning for the nomination. Perret writes,

With RFK’s death, Johnson began to encourage a “Draft LBJ” movement.

With his support dropping to 35 percent of registered voters, that effort went nowhere. Even so, Johnson held an iron grip on the convention, which met amid tumultuous scenes in Chicago. There was so much boiling anger among the delegates that if he had appeared at the convention, Johnson might have split the Democratic Party and given the election to Richard Nixon. He stayed away, but nothing important would be decided without his approval.

Humphrey was chosen as the presidential candidate, but Johnson was never going to support him, because Humphrey wanted to run as the candidate who would bring an end to the war. He had long had doubts about the wisdom of fighting a war in Vietnam, and during his first year as Johnson’s vice president he had opposed escalation. That meant being frozen out from nearly all the important meetings on Vietnam and rarely being asked for his advice. The humiliation of the vice president was an open secret in Washington.

A thoroughly decent and intelligent man, Humphrey had found his limits, and so had Johnson. Humphrey came close to being a living, breathing, and slightly sad example of the stereotypical Farmer-Labor Party liberal from far-off Minnesota: plenty of principle, not enough spine.

Johnson could smell weakness as sharks can smell blood — in small traces even over long distances. Having humiliated and bullied Humphrey for more than three years, Johnson was a cobra to a mongoose during Humphrey’s campaign. Every hint of independent thinking on Vietnam brought a threat from above.

It began during the convention, when Johnson warned Humphrey, “The Vietnam plank will be mine — not yours.” Sure enough, the platform supported LBJ’s negotiating position: no end to the fighting and bombing until the North agrees to stop attacking the South.

A month or so after the convention, Johnson heard that Humphrey was working on a speech that would offer to stop the bombing indefinitely if the North promised to reduce — not stop, only limit — the flow of troops and weapons into South Vietnam. LBJ called Hubert to heel. Give that speech, he told Humphrey, and I will personally see to it that you lose Texas. At other times, he told Humphrey that he would make sure that the Democratic National Committee and the big party donors stopped financing Humphrey’s campaign. A large amount of money that ought to have gone to Humphrey’s campaign was withheld to the end.

With only a week to go, Humphrey finally put some distance between LBJ and himself over Vietnam. Humphrey’s poll numbers rose dramatically. Had he shown a little more independence only a week earlier, he would probably have won the 1968 election. He lost to Richard Nixon by half a million votes out of more than seventy-three million cast.

In that final week of campaigning, Nixon was holding a trump card. Anna Chennault, widow of a famous World War Ii airman, acted as Nixon’s intermediary. She assured [South Vietnamese President] Nguyen Van Thieu that if Nixon was elected president, he would provide the kind of unequivocal support that Humphrey would not. Four days before the election, Johnson was handed conclusive proof that Nixon was sabotaging the Paris talks by encouraging Thieu to spin things out.

This news would have won the election for Humphrey had Johnson stayed within the law, but he hadn’t. The evidence came from illegal wiretaps on the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington. Johnson telephoned Nixon and demanded to know if he was undermining the Paris talks. Of course not, said Nixon. Then he hung up the telephone and laughed. [Geoffrey Perret, Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America’s Future, pp. 284-285]

Thinking about this, it occurs to me that the 2008 GOP nominee might be in a position similar to Hubert Humphrey vis à vis Lyndon Johnson. Bush and Rove likely will still be in a position to jerk GOP chains. The nominee may well have to waltz with the Bushies as well as the base. It’s likely he’ll have very little room to maneuver away from the Bush position on Iraq, even if he is personally squeamish about the war.

But if the GOP nominee is Humphrey (roughly speaking; Humphrey was a good guy), does that mean the Dem will be Nixon? In other words, if a Democrat is elected, will he drag his feet as Nixon did to end the war? This is the position taken by Big Tent Democrat at TalkLeft.

I don’t expect whomever is elected President to end the Iraq Debacle for many years after 2008. After all, who wants to run for reelection having “lost Iraq?”

Of course they are ridiculous to fear being labelled as having lost Iraq, but fear it they will. They all fear what the Beltway Gasbags will say.

I’d like to think otherwise, but I’m not going to rule this out. (Clinton? Biden? Who knows what they’ll do.) However, I think it’s highly unlikely that a Dem president would escalate the war as Nixon did early in his first term. We’re going through the escalation phase now; we’re gong to be so over it by 2009. Nor can I imagine any Dem wanting to “stay the course.” I think it’s more likely the next Dem president will withdraw combat troops but leave “consultants” and special ops in place, and we may have to deal with that.

For that matter, it’s not impossible that ground troops will already be on their way out of Iraq before the next administration begins. This is a dynamic situation, and not all of it is under anyone’s control. Many things might happen we cannot anticipate.

Awful Aughts

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Awhile back I wrote a post correcting a claim by Fred Thompson that Calvin Coolidge’s tax cuts had been good for the economy. They weren’t. But while I was researching that post I found some other remarkable parallels between the Roaring Twenties and today, an era I like to call the Awful Aughts (as in 00s).

One of those parallels is with our remarkable inability to rebuild the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. During the Coolidge Administration, the United States experienced several nasty natural calamities. Among these:

On March 18, 1925, a tornado that ripped through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana killed 689 people and devastated many small towns.

On September 18, 1926, a massive hurricane hit Florida and the Gulf Coast. The Great Miami Hurricane (this was before big storms were given people names) killed 372 people and injured more than 6,000. Almost 18,000 were left homeless, and property damage was estimated to be between $80 million and $100 million. That would be something like $2 billion today. But remember there wasn’t nearly as much developed real estate in the region as there is now.

In April 1927, floods along the Mississippi River covered 4 million acres, drowning several thousand people and leaving about 600,000 people homeless. Property damage was in the neighborhood of $300 million.

On September 29, 1927, a tornado tore through St. Louis and destroyed more than a thousand homes.

And if that wasn’t enough, in September 1928 a Category 5 hurricane roared through the Caribbean and the Bahamas, then struck Florida near Palm Beach on September 16. At least 2,500 people were killed when storm surge from Lake Okeechobee breached the dike surrounding the lake, flooding hundreds of square miles. Flood waters covered the land for several weeks, and thousands were left homeless.

As awful as these disasters were, it’s more instructive for us to see how the Coolidge Administration responded. In brief, many of the devastated areas stayed devastated for a long time. This created pockets of economic stagnation in the United States, which became a drag on the entire U.S. economy. Although the Great Depression didn’t officially begin until after the stock market crash of 1929, in actuality large parts of the United States fell into depression in 1926 and 1927.

Please note that I am not saying hurricanes and floods caused the Great Depression. Rather, what we see in the response to these disasters was part of a pattern. Calvin Coolidge believed that cutting taxes and reducing government spending was about all that government needed to do to help the economy. He did cut taxes, and unlike our current “president” he cut government spending, too, and made government regulatory policies much friendlier to business. In short, he did everything the Club for Growth might have asked. But his frugality allowed large parts of the country to rot, economically speaking, and the rot eventually helped bring the whole bleeping house down.

There were other many other drags on the economy in the 1920s, such as a crisis in agriculture. For a number of reasons I won’t go into now, food prices fell and farmers were unable to make a decent living. Millions of farm families lived in abject poverty. Calvin Coolidge himself was from a poor farm family that had suffered deprivation in the 1890s, but in spite of this Coolidge was remarkably unsympathetic. He famously said, “Well, farmers never have made money. I don’t believe we can do much about it. But of course we will have to seem to be doing something.” Whereupon he embarked on a series of tepid, cosmetic “solutions” that didn’t help farmers at all. And he vetoed all bills by Congress that might have given the farmers some relief.

Note that there was little sympathy for farmers in non-farming America. Apparently city dwellers of the time thought it was hilarious that only 10 percent of farm families had running water in their homes or owned a bathtub, which were impossible luxuries to most farmers.

But let’s get back to the disasters. The 1926 hurricane unavoidably killed what had been a booming real estate market as well as tourism in Florida. (The real estate developers were so frantic to downplay the effects of the storm that they actually hindered Red Cross efforts to raise relief funds; bad publicity, you know.) Miami Beach itself was rebuilt fairly quickly with private money, but the region became economically depressed three years before the Great Depression was supposed to have begun.

I want to look in particular at the 1927 floods. Coolidge appointed his commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, to lead disaster relief efforts. David Greenberg wrote,

Hoover threw himself into his task, but the funds he secured were insufficient. Private philanthropy simply came up short. Public debate swirled around a strong response from Washington—in both dollars and symbolism. Coolidge resisted both. Governors, senators, and mayors asked him to visit the flood zone. “Your coming would center eyes of nation and the consequent publicity would result in securing millions of dollars additional aid for sufferers,” the governor of Mississippi wired. But Coolidge demurred. He declined requests from NBC to broadcast a nationwide radio appeal, and from humorist Will Rogers to send a telegram to be read at a benefit.

To be fair, up to that time it was not considered the federal government’s job to respond to disasters. But people read newspaper accounts of the horrible suffering caused by the floods, and then they look at the federal budget surplus made possible by Coolidge’s frugality, and they put two and two together, as it were.

But Congress had adjourned, and Coolidge declined to convene a special session to pass an emergency appropriation. Only in late 1927, when Illinois’ Frank Reid, the Republican chair of the House Flood Control Committee, held public hearings was Coolidge’s hand forced. In his December 1927 State of the Union message—they were often done in December back then—he endorsed federal flood-control measures. But he insisted that local governments and property owners bear most of the costs. Coolidge’s plan also called for spending hundreds of millions dollars less than the Senate and the House bills. Deadlock ensued. Will Rogers remarked that Coolidge was going to further postpone relief legislation in “the hope that those needing relief will perhaps have conveniently died in the meantime.”

It must not be forgotten that African Americans bore a disproportionate share of the suffering. To spare New Orleans, the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana, was dynamited. This was to divert water from the main part of New Orleans and into St. Bernard’s Parish. According to Wikipedia,

During the disaster, 700,000 people were displaced, including 330,000 African-Americans who were moved to 154 relief camps. Over 13,000 evacuees near Greenville, Mississippi were gathered from area farms and evacuated to the crest of an unbroken levee, and stranded there for days without food or clean water, while boats arrived to evacuate white women and children. Many blacks were detained and forced to labor at gunpoint during flood relief efforts.

The flood was a factor in the Great Migration of southern blacks to norther cities. It also soured African American support for the Republican Party, for a lot of reasons that can’t directly be blamed on Coolidge. But that’s huge topic I don’t want to get into now.

Anyway, David Greenburg writes that Coolidge eventually was maneuvered into signing a federal relief bill for the flooded region in May, 1928. That was thirteen months after the flood.

To explain why this is significant, I want to go back to the earlier Coolidge post, about how Coolidge’s tax cuts really didn’t provide the healthy economic growth that conservatives claim it did. I provided this quote —

Even before 1929, signs of economic trouble had become evident. Southern California and Florida experienced frenzied real-estate speculation and then spectacular busts, with banks failing, land remaining undeveloped, and mortgages foreclosed. The highly unequal distribution of income and the prolonged depression in farm regions reduced American purchasing power. Sales of new autos and household consumer goods stagnated after 1926. [Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty: An American History (Norton, 2005), p. 800]

And the stagnation in consumer goods sales was a critical factor in bringing on the Great Depression.

Coolidge did what he thought was the right thing. He cut taxes. He cut federal spending. He refused to throw money around on what we’ve come to call “entitlement” programs. He expected the farmers and the flood and storm survivors to get along without federal government help. He was a good conservative, in other words. And he and Hoover just about flushed the whole country down the toilet.

And I thought of this yesterday when I saw this article in the Washington Post by John Barry — “Our Coast to Fix — or Lose.” I urge you to read the whole article, but for now I just want to point to the ending: “The failure of Congress and the president to act aggressively to repair the coastline at the mouth of the Mississippi River could threaten the economic vitality of the nation.”

And I thought of this when I read at Bonddad Blog that consumer sales are dropping. And that our infrastructure is crumbling from neglect. And on and on.

Coolidge actually had some advantages over Bush. He paid off government debt, and he didn’t get us into a bleeping war that soaked up our bleeping resources. The long-term crisis we face now is not as much with farmers (although they’ve got their problems) as it is with our shrinking manufacturing base.

I’m just sayin’ that in the 1920s most people thought the economy was swell. The stock market went up, up, up. Lots of people made fortunes, The rich got richer. Good times.

But then, as now, income disparity grew. While the rich grew richer, most people didn’t. Many parts of the nation were suffering economically even as the 1920s roared on. Retail sales slowed, then dropped, about three years before the Great Depression swallowed everyone. I’m just sayin’.

Don’t Blame Vietnam

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Atrios has a couple of posts up, here and here, that question the myth that being against the Vietnam War somehow destroyed the Democratic Party. He writes,

For the record, in the 1974 election, before the full end of the war but certainly after the Democrats had become tainted by antiwarness the democrats picked up 49 seats in the House, increasing their majority to 291-144. In the Senate they picked up 3, for a total of 61.

This did follow the 1972 election where, yes, they lost 13 whole seats in the House, leaving them with only 242 seats. That year they gained 2 seats in the Senate, giving them a total of 56.

And then came the 1976 election, post-war, where Democrats picked up the presidency, 1 House seat, and stayed even in the Senate. …

…I’m sure someone has written about this, and maybe it reaches back farther than I remember, but this whole “Vietnam destroyed the Democrats” myth seems to be one which has recently taken hold. I don’t remember it from my teens, though I do remember that Jane Fonda sold a very popular line of exercise videos.

I’ve written about this before. See, for example, “Don’t Blame McGovern” and “Don’t Blame McGovern II.” It is not true, as some would have you believe, that George McGovern lost the 1972 election to Richard Nixon because McGovern was anti-war and Nixon was pro-war.

First, unlike our current Creature in the Oval Office, in 1972 Nixon fully acknowledged that it was time to withdraw combat troops from Vietnam and was in the process of doing so on election day. Of course, Nixon could have done the same thing four years earlier, and today the Vietnam Memorial would be only half as wide. (Indeed, as we now know that Nixon sabotaged Lyndon Johnson’s peace initiatives so that he could run against the war, were it not for Nixon the wall would be very small, indeed.)

Nixon was elected to his first term in 1968 in part because he promised to end the war in Vietnam. You can argue that in 1968 Nixon was the “peace” candidate, in fact. His Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, had been Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President, and of course in 1968 Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson’s War. I doubt Humphrey would have continued LBJ’s policies, but in 1968 there was widespread belief that he would.

But Nixon’s first term dragged on, and the war was escalated and then de-escalated, but didn’t end. Unlike Bush, however, Nixon was not holding out for some hazily defined “victory,” but rather “peace with honor,” meaning he wanted to wring some concessions out of the North Vietnamese before we left so that the U.S. wouldn’t lose face. But just about half of the U.S. military deaths of Vietnam — half of the people named on the wall — died while Nixon was diddling around. By the time McGovern began to campaign for the nomination, at least some people were saying the hell with honor; let’s just get the bleep out.

But in 1972 Nixon and Kissinger were very openly trying to end the war before the election. And just a week before the 1972 general election and Nixon’s landslide victory, Henry Kissinger held a press conference at the White House and declared that “peace is at hand.” The warring parties were right on the edge of a peace agreement, he said. This announcement turned out to be a tad premature, but Americans didn’t find out until after the election.

So, you see, this was not at all parallel with the current state of affairs.

As I discussed in the original “Don’t Blame McGovern” posts, McGovern’s candidacy had several strikes against it that had nothing to do with the war. Notable among these was the visible dumping of his original Vice Presidential candidate, the late Thomas Eagleton of Missouri. But there were several other problems that you can read about in the old posts and that I’m not going to go into here.

As Atrios argues, although McGovern was badly trounced, election results overall from the 1970s just don’t show a clear pattern of the Dems getting punished wholesale at the polls for Vietnam. The Republican Party didn’t really begin its ascent into dominance until Reagan was elected in 1980. That was seven years after the last U.S. combat troop was withdrawn from Vietnam, and five years after the fall of Hanoi. Saigon.

So why did the Democratic Party fall apart? In short, the party had been sustained since FDR’s time by the New Deal coalition, and that coalition collapsed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Certainly Vietnam was a factor, but so was the counterculture, and the civil rights movement, and the feminist movement, and the New Left generally. I’ve spelled this out in detail in the past; see, for example:

“Hey, Hey, LBJ …”

“How the Democrats Lost Their Spines”

“How the Democrats Lost, Period”

“Can Dems Find Their Mojo?”

There are many factors that came together in the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in a weakened, spineless, and soulless Democratic Party. I explain these in detail in the posts above, which I wrote as a kind of series last August. But there are two major factors I’d like to point out:

In the 1970s and 1980s, white voters left the Dem Party in droves and began to vote Republican, mostly because Nixon, Reagan, and others did a bang-up job exploiting racism. I think the racist backlash to Dem support of civil rights and antipoverty programs cost Democrats far more, in the long run, than the war in Vietnam did.

Second, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, New Left ideologies discouraged young activists from getting involved in party politics. Instead, progressivism broke up into single-issue advocacy movements that competed with each other for funds and attention. The New Deal coalition dissolved, nothing took its place, and the Democratic Party itself lost clear identity and purpose. IMO it’s important to look hard at this second issue, because I see a lot of activists today making the same mistakes the New Left made years ago.

Getting Even

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Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor of McClatchy Newspapers report that

Only weeks before last year’s pivotal midterm elections, the White House urged the Justice Department to pursue voter-fraud allegations against Democrats in three battleground states, a high-ranking Justice official has told congressional investigators.

In two instances in October 2006, President Bush’s political adviser, Karl Rove, or his deputies passed the allegations on to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ then-chief of staff, Kyle Sampson.

Sampson tapped Gonzales aide Matthew Friedrich, who’d just left his post as chief of staff of the criminal division. In the first case, Friedrich agreed to find out whether Justice officials knew of “rampant” voter fraud or “lax” enforcement in parts of New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and report back.

But Friedrich declined to pursue a related matter from Wisconsin, he told congressional investigators, because an inquiry so close to an election could inappropriately sway voting results. Friedrich decided not to pass the matter on to the criminal division for investigation, even though Sampson gave him a 30-page report prepared by Republican activists that made claims of voting fraud.

Friedrich testified in a closed-door session, but a “senior congressional aide familiar with the testimony” described it to McClatchy Newspapers.

After Murray Waas reported yesterday …

The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove’s, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

… I’d say it would be hard for the White House to claim that Karl or somebody was not trying to use the Justice Department to gain advantage in midterm elections. The White House, of course, claims this anyway.

At Salon, Garrett Epps writes that “the assault on voter fraud was a solution looking for a problem.”

Republicans do cherish their little practical jokes — the leaflets in African-American neighborhoods warning that voters must pay outstanding traffic tickets before voting; the calls in Virginia in 2006 from the mythical “Virginia Election Commission” warning voters they would be arrested if they showed up at the polls. The best way to steal an election is the old-fashioned way: control who shows up. It’s widely known that Republicans do better when the turnout is lighter, whiter, older and richer; minorities, young people and the poor are easy game for hoaxes and intimidation.

The latest and most elaborate of these jokes is the urban legend that American elections are rife with voter fraud, particularly in the kinds of poor and minority neighborhoods inhabited by Democrats. In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that fraudulent voting would be a major target of the Department of Justice. As the New York Times reported last month, the main result of this massive effort was such coups as the deportation of a legal immigrant who mistakenly filled out a voter-registration card while waiting in line at the department of motor vehicles.

But the administration has remained ferociously committed to suppressing voter fraud — as soon as it can find some.

I like this bit:

As part of the Help America Vote Act, Republicans insisted on creating the Election Assistance Commission, which commissioned studies of the asserted problem. When the studies failed to turn up evidence of fraud nationwide, appointed Republican officials on the EAC insisted that the language say only that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud in elections” — the same approach to inconvenient evidence that’s made the Bush global-warming policy the envy of the world.

IMO the legend that Democrats only get elected because they cheat has been brewing among Republicans for decades. You might remember that the old big city bosses, from William Tweed of New York to Richard Daley (the Elder) of Chicago, were famous for delivering votes for Democrats using less than honest means. But though he’s been dead for more than thirty years, the ghost of Richard Daley, the last of the bosses, still haunts the GOP.

For decades after the 1960 presidential elections Republicans complained that John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon only because Daley stuffed ballot boxes to deliver Chicago (and thereby Illinois) for Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson likewise fixed the vote in Texas. The legend is that Richard Nixon shrugged it off and let Kennedy get away with stealing the election. The truth is that local and national GOP officials investigated allegations of fraud vigorously and challenged results in many precincts in court. As David Greenburg wrote in Slate awhile back, the only tangible result of the several recounts was that Hawaii’s three electoral votes were taken away from Nixon and given to Kennedy. Otherwise, whatever fraud probably occurred wasn’t significant enough to have changed the outcome.

Nevertheless, I noticed through the years that many rank-and-file Republicans nursed a massive grudge about being cheated at the polls. As a result, IMO, they see fraud every time a Democrat wins an election. And they’ve developed a sense of entitlement that it’s OK for them to cheat back.

An article by Phyllis Schlafly written in December 2000 justifies George Bush’s “win” by dredging up the ghost of the 1960 election (“The stuffing of the ballot boxes in Cook County, Illinois and in Texas has been so well substantiated that it is no longer disputed today.”) and implying that William Daley, Gore’s campaign manager, was a vote-stealer like this old man.

See also this “analysis” of the 2000 Florida recount that presents most of the rumors and allegations flying around at the time —

As this is written, we do not know who will be the next president,” the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal declared on Nov. 9, 1960, as the nation awaited results in the presidential contest between Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Vice President Richard M. Nixon. The closeness of that 1960 race and the undeniable fraud were followed by the manly response of Nixon. What a far cry that was from the lachrymose Chinese opera now surrounding Al Gore and George W. Bush as history no longer is being repeated but reshaped.

Despite allegations of Democratic election fraud, particularly in Texas and Chicago, where former senator Lyndon Johnson and the family of former mayor Richard J. Daley were past masters at political pilfering, the Nixon campaign surmised that legal challenges would, in the end, be fruitless. The Gore campaign saw the landscape differently. In fact, it produced a “Chad”-aquiddick drama that has cast a cloud over the Sunshine State’s 25 electoral votes — something which may have been foreseen by Gore when he chose Richard J. Daley’s son, William Daley, to be his campaign manager.

The pattern was there. From the hyperactive get-out-the-vote effort launched by the Democratic National Committee and such sympathetic interest groups as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and organized labor, the ward-healing Democrats were well ahead of their more inhibited GOP rivals. With Gore unable to gin up enough energy with his policy lectures and high-spirited, pulpit-pounding pronouncements, the party stepped up its effort to scour every county, district and precinct in search of Gore voters who might be bused, wheeled or carried drooling to the polls. Churches, schools, homeless shelters, mental asylums, nursing homes and even prisons were seen as housing potential voters to do their bit for the veep.

I remember at the time encountering a Bush supporter who was absolutely certain the Gore campaigned had bussed thousands of illegal immigrants across the border to vote for Gore. There were also rumors about thousands of convicted felons who had voted for Gore.

I have no idea if Karl Rove himself believes the legends, but I do know that Karl is brilliant at manipulating right-wing resentment and paranoia about “liberals” and Democrats. That’s where the sense of entitlement comes in; the Right long has believed it is literally at war with us, and all’s fair in war. Take, for example, the so-called “Brooks Brothers riot” of paid GOP operatives who terrorized the Miami-Dade canvassing board into stopping their vote recount. To us, that was bare-knuckle thuggery. But to righties it was a righteous strike for justice against an evil, powerful oppressor.

At this point I don’t think any amount of hard evidence would dissuade these loons that voter fraud is not the massive problem they think it is and that they are not entitled to cheat back. They see themselves as the peasants storming the Bastille. And yes, they’re nuts. What else is new?