Category Archives: American History

The Spitters Are Back

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Righties can’t let go of the stories about antiwar protesters spitting on soldiers during the Vietnam era. There’s a new round of blog posts about it, mostly linking back to this one. Although it would be foolish to claim it never happened, I do have a few clarifications to make.

First, regarding Jerry Lembcke — the sociologist did not, I believe, claim that no antiwar protester ever spit on a soldier. His research focused on a particular spitting narrative, that of antiwar protesters lining up at airports to spit on veterans who had just returned from Vietnam. He explained this is a Boston Globe op ed in 2005.

One can, of course, chop parts of Lembcke’s many articles and his book out of context to make it seem he was claiming there was no spitting whatsoever, and I’m sure righties do that all the time, but everything of his I’ve ever read was specifically focused on the spitting-at-the-airport stories. This was an issue because, for some reason, in the 1980s and 1990s such stories were so common you’d think every soldier walking out of an airport must’ve been wringing wet with spittle, yet Lembcke was unable to find contemporary news stories about this phenomenon. He concluded that the airport spitting stories amounted to an urban legend.

On the Right, however, Lembcke’s claims were contorted into a claim that no soldier was ever spit on by anybody during the Vietnam era, and I see they’re still arguing with Lembcke based on this assumption.

The examples of soldier-spitting dug out of old newspapers by the rightie bloggers do not take place in airports. (I see one airport story, but it’s not clear that it was taken from a newspaper.) Hence, they do not disprove Lembcke’s contention that the airport stories in particular are apocryphal.

Such claims made many years after the fact are suspect for many reasons. For one, urban legends have a way of planting themselves into peoples’ heads as false memories. Two, although it’s impossible to prove it never happened — can’t prove a negative, you know — if it had happened half as much as it was claimed to have happened, you’d think somebody would have noticed it at the time. But the airport-spitting stories didn’t take off until several years after the war.

Another point the righties love to drag up and argue about is that, somewhere, Lembcke wrote that soldiers didn’t land at the San Francisco airport, at which much of the alleged spitting took place. And, of course, soldiers did land at San Francisco sometimes, so that is not true. Without seeing exactly what Lembcke wrote I can’t defend it properly, but his point may have been that soldiers didn’t typically return from Vietnam to the U.S. together in a troop ship. They flew back to the states as individuals on commercial flights, to whatever airport was closest to home. Thus, it made no sense for protesters to hang around in airports just waiting to find soldiers to spit on, since on many days they would have waited around all day and never seen one, or maybe just one or two, and then there was no way to know whether they had just returned from ‘Nam or not.

And, indeed, I never saw any protesters at airports, even the San Francisco airport, in those years. On the other hand the Hare Krishna devotees were thick as fleas at San Francisco and other airports back then. They were generally benign as long as you bought their flowers. But maybe some folks mistook them for antiwar protesters.

The next point I’d like to make regards the Right’s false dichotomy that in those days the Left was antiwar and anti-military and hated the troops, and the Right was prowar and pro-military and supported the troops. It wasn’t that simple. For one thing, as the war turned sour many hawks blamed the soldiers for being slackers and drug addicts. It was not at all difficult to find people who were pro-war and who badmouthed the troops for losing it. For all we know some of the people who spat at soldiers were pro-war.

Further, as the war continued the enlistees were increasingly against the war themselves. This page (hat tip to Steve Gilliard) lists various protests and riots by soldiers on military bases during the Vietnam War era. It so happens I spent the summer of 1971 living on post at Fort Ord, California, with my brother and his wife, and those enlistees I met had, um, attitude problems. They hated the war, and the military, and didn’t want to be there. I remember a couple of fellows claiming they took part in antiwar protests — in civilian clothes — on their days off, but they may have been bragging to impress me.

In any event, by 1970-71 or so it was the returning veterans themselves keeping the antiwar movement alive, and not just as part of the Winter Soldier campaign. By then the Pentagon had switched to a lottery system to call up enlistees, and fewer and fewer young men were being called, and after 1971 or so (as I remember) there was less antiwar activism on most college campuses than there had been earlier. As soon as the guys figured out they weren’t going to be drafted, they tuned out the war and went back to planning keggers. It was mostly the returning veterans who cared passionately that the war end asap. I rather doubt they spit on other veterans.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Well, OK, here’s an update — Here’s a photo (source) of a Vietnam protester not spitting at a soldier.

As the article linked to says, sometimes encounters between demonstrators and protesters got hostile. And sometimes the protesters gave the soldiers flowers.

Who’s Right?

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I started to tack this on to yesterday’s morning post, then decided to enlarge on it a little more in a new post. So here goes. Paul Silver writes at The Moderate Voice,

Political sands are always shifting. Labels become obsolete. Paradigms evolve. People with little interest in politics can find themselves bewildered to figure out who stands for what. Political parties are challenged to be in a constant state of reinvention.

I have been a Democrat and a Republican and an Independent. I changed when the parties changed. Now I find myself sliding back towards appreciating the Democrats because they are remaking themselves into a party of pragmatism and inclusion. The GOP has lost the benefit of the doubt that they are the party of fiscal restraint, organizational competence, the masters of foreign affairs. So what do they want to be? It is a new game.

I contend that the Republicans haven’t changed so much as have their bluff called. As I wrote here, the GOP modus operandi going back as far as I remember has been to bash Democrats and claim that if only the Dems would get out of the way the GOP would do so much better. But when they finally got complete control of both Congress and the White House they proved they have no clue how to actually govern. Bash Democrats is all they can do.

It is good to remember that, over time, the parties have reinvented themselves considerably. A century ago Republicans were (more or less) the progressives, and Democrats were, um, not. But if you look back over time at what American liberalism and conservatism have stood for, then for the past century or so liberalism (I’m talking real liberalism, not the made-for-TV version) has been about economic and social justice, whereas conservatism had been about protecting property, wealth, and privilege from the unwashed populist mob. And as much as my sympathies lie with the liberal side of the equation, I would argue that in a healthy political climate these two sets of values should balance and moderate each other.

Paul Silver continues,

We each have own way of organizing our worlds. I tend to embrace the progressive aims to move the world towards more fairness, health and opportunity. I tend to embrace the conservative method of optimizing free markets to most efficiently utilize resources. The most viable political movement that best combines these gets my money and vote. Apparently the next generation of leaders are sorting through the same choice.

Ah, yes. Free markets. In the 19th century (and today, in many parts of the world) the term “free market” was associated with liberalism. Once upon a time the opposite of “free market” was “controlled market,” in which government regulates prices and supply. A free market economy was liberal when most citizens were either farmers or self-employed artisans — shoemakers, silversmiths, whatever — as was the case in the early days of the Republic.

Back then “free markets,” along with “limited government,” were thought to be supportive of democracy, independence, equal opportunity, and civil liberty. Hence, free markets and limited government were “liberal.” “Strong” government, on the other hand, was thought to protect the aristocracy and special privilege, and was considered conservative. And in many parts of the world “conservatives” and “liberals” still sort themselves out that way. But not in the U.S.

A funny thing happened on the way to laissez-faire paradise — the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization and the rise of capitalism brought with it widespread exploitation of “free” labor by employers. In fact, in the early 19th century, as the economy in the northern states became dependent on manufacturing and many citizens dependent on jobs, white southerners hooted at capitalism and called it “wage slavery.” The “independence” of white plantation owners and farmers was, of course, purchased by, um, traditional slavery. One of the reasons so many poor, non-slave-owning southern whites supported slavery was that they’d rather be poor but independent subsistence farmers than factory laborers.

In the capitalist North it didn’t take long for a new kind of aristocracy to arise, and they were called “robber barons” and “tycoons.” And this new aristocracy found that limited government and “free” markets worked to their advantage. By the late19th century — during the so-called Gilded Age — America had devolved into a Hobbesian free-for-all in which the powerful few prospered to the detriment of many others. Those unfortunates forced to survive as being factory or farm laborers — “quitting” meant starvation — were not much better off than slaves. The fact that it was not government exploiting workers but capitalists operating outside government was a meaningless distinction.

Over in Europe, Karl Marx was writing about class struggle and predicting that capitalism was not sustainable and must be replaced by socialism. Socialism was harder to sell in America, however, because most white people still were either independent farmers or small business owners for whom a free market economy still worked pretty well, and socialism had no appeal for them. Those who sharecropped in the South or toiled in tenement sweatshops in the North were pretty much out of sight and out of mind for the majority until “muckrakers” like Upton Sinclair and Jacob Riis shoved the ugliness in their faces. Some people, at least, perceived that “free markets” were creating a new class of workers who were, in effect, slaves in all but name. Further, as the robber barons became more powerful they began to undermine democracy itself, and government was less “of the people, by the people, for the people” than it was “of big money, by big money, for big money.”

About a century ago, as the struggle between (anti-capitalist) socialists and (pro-corporatist) fascists was getting under way in Europe, American progressives considered less extreme alternatives. As explained by Theodore Roosevelt in his New Nationalism speech of 1910, through government the people could seek protection from exploitation and provide for equal opportunity within a capitalist economy. TR didn’t call his ideas “liberal,” but I think the New Nationalism speech laid the foundation of modern American liberalism. The ideas and values TR championed got little opportunity to be put into effect before the Progressive Era ended, however. Then a series of non-progressive Republican administrations in the 1920s supported laissez-faire policies that crashed and burned on Wall Street in October, 1929. (See “A (Pretty) Short History of Wingnutism.”)

When Great Depression began in 1929, conservatives blamed trade unions, saying they upset the glorious natural balance of capitalism and free markets. They argued that the government had to restrict democracy and restore profit margins to put the economy back on track. Socialists, on the other hand, called for a “command” or centrally planned economy that restricted civil liberty. Franklin Roosevelt said no to both “solutions.” He enlarged upon his distant cousin Teddy’s New Nationalism ideas, and he called the result liberal — a word previously associated with limited government, laissez-faire policies, remember. But it was liberal because it was based on the values of fairness, equal opportunity, civil liberty, and economic and social justice.

FDR was determined to protect neither the privilege of aristocracy nor “free-market” plutocracy. He built upon Cousin Teddy’s New Nationalism idea and promoted policies that protected ordinary folks from both the malefactors of great wealth and the boom-and-bust caprices characteristic of unregulated economies. As I explained in “Wingnutism” the New Deal had only a limited impact on the economy itself. But New Deal programs had a longer-term success in fostering economic stability. Federal deposit insurance, unemployment insurance, Social Security, increased government oversight of securities, and other New Deal innovations made Americans’ economic lives more secure and created a buffer against many of the factors that cause economic depressions.

Leapfrogging to the post-World War II era — in Harry Truman’s day liberalism had become populist and looked pretty good to many working-class whites who were benefiting from the New Deal, the GI Bill, and mortgage subsidies. In those days the Democratic Party and the unions had partnered up to reinforce the principle that Democrats were for the little guy, giving them pretty solid support among white working folks.

The achilles’ heel of liberal domestic policy was that FDR had made a deal with the devil (am I mixing mythical metaphors?) to get the New Deal enacted back in the 1930s. He caved in to the demands of southern Democrats to allow for racial discrimination. White workers enjoyed protections and benefits that black workers did not. So the economic gap between whites and blacks grew even wider. In the 1960s Lyndon Johnson launched some New Deal-type programs intended to reduce the gap; in effect, he finally broke down the racial barriers built in to FDR’s New Deal. And working class whites, who had once supported the New Deal, suddenly got conservative and began to spout off about the virtues of self-reliance and the evils of “dependency” on “government hand-outs.” I go into more detail here.

And the Right saw an opportunity, and before you can say “voodoo economics” white workers had bought into a big lie that busting unions and stripping away worker protections would make everybody free and prosperous. And, by the way, don’t expect government to do anything for you, unless you’re a big corporation.

So now it’s 2007, and a whole generation of people too young to remember much before the Carter Administration has been conditioned to accept, unquestioningly, the propaganda of the Right. “Free markets” are intrinsicallygood. “Deregulation” is always right. Any sort of government regulation is bad. “Big government” is bad. “Limited government” is good. And they mindlessly regurgitate these ideas without understanding their historical context or even thinking them through.

I say that none of these things is intrinsically bad or good. Sometimes the same economic policy will benefit one part of the population but devastate another. Sometimes taxes need to be lowered, and sometimes they need to be raised. Sometimes government regulations are stupid, and sometimes they are necessary. A nation needs to look at the situation in which it finds itself, and think many things through, before understanding which is the correct course.

Yes, knee-jerk ideology will sometimes provide an acceptable solution, but so will a Ouija board.

On the other hand, when something is tried over and over again and always turns out badly, one might think doing it a few more times expecting a better result is, um, nuts.

Paul Silver — who seems to be a perfectly nice fella, so I don’t want to be harsh here — actually says “I tend to embrace the progressive aims to move the world towards more fairness, health and opportunity. I tend to embrace the conservative method of optimizing free markets to most efficiently utilize resources,” without realizing that you can either have “fairness, health and opportunity,” or you can have “conservative method of optimizing free markets,” but you can’t have them both. Because the second thing will, inevitably, destroy the first. And I say that because it always has.

I defy anyone to show me a nation that has actually enacted pure “free market” policies that did not devolve into corruption, plutocracy, and worker exploitation eventually.

This is not to say that government regulators always make the right choices, but when you allow “the market” (e.g., the interests of wealth) to make decisions with no government oversight, you can count on enough of those unregulated capitalists to make enough bad choices to do considerable damage, like cheating people out of their life savings, or starving the Irish. It is inevitable, I say.

Ideologies are, essentially, strategies for making the world easier to understand by limiting one’s cognitive choices. They allow people to “get” complex issues by simplifying them. Ideologies often are based on how issues unfold most of the time, or something that has been successful in the past. But human civilization, and its political and economic components, are perpetually changing and evolving, means that an approach that might have worked in one century is a disaster in another. And if nobody ever sits down and thinks the issues out, all the way through, ideologies turn into something like superstition. It never rains when I wear my pink socks. Or, free markets always optimize the use of resources.

History tells us that complete deregulation more often results in the exploitation of resources and nasty boom-and-bust cycles, but telling that to some people is like telling a four-year-old there is no Santa Claus.

But let’s swoop back up to the beginning of this post, where Paul Silver says

The GOP has lost the benefit of the doubt that they are the party of fiscal restraint, organizational competence, the masters of foreign affairs. So what do they want to be? It is a new game.

Hard to say. American conservatism (which was not always married to the Republican Party) has been riding the hobby horse of free markets since the post-Civil War era, and I don’t expect them to stop in my lifetime. The Democrats are only just beginning to pick up the mantle of economic populism that they dropped many years ago, and the Washington establishment Dems remain mostly clueless. So we could see only incremental tweaks in both parties over the next few years, or we could see big changes and a major political re-alignment similar to the one the New Deal brought about. I think it could go either way.

But if the latter is the case, I see where the Dems could go with that, but the Republicans? I have no idea.

Steppenwolf

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Since we’ve been talking about the antiwar movement or lack thereof –at the Washington Post, John McMillian writes a column called “Missing in Antiwar Action” wondering why young people aren’t engaging in the antiwar movement. McMillian is a Harvard history professor, and his column is mostly about the low-key reaction to the war by his students. An obvious reason is the lack of a draft, of course. McMillian suggests some other reasons:

First, today’s young people claim to be under more pressure to succeed than we were. I believe this is true, and I’ll elaborate in a minute. But I think it’s a lame excuse.

Second,

… today the gauzy idealism that circulated among teenagers in the 1960s seems almost freakishly anomalous. According to a recent U.S. Census report, 79 percent of college freshmen in 1970 said that “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” was among their goals, whereas only 36 percent said becoming wealthy was a high priority. By contrast, in 2005, 75 percent of incoming students listed “being very well off financially” among their chief aims.

Certainly, acquiring wealth was less of an issue for us because we grew up at a time when the American middle class got more affluent every time it breathed. The road ahead didn’t seem all that intimidating when viewed from the 1960s — a big reason, I suspect, we may have felt less pressured than students today. We would have a harder time than we realized, since the post-World War II economic growth that seemed endless to us peaked about 1972. The economy slowed down after 1973 and never quite recovered. Although it may be that Boomers as a group are less frugal than our parents were, we struggled more than our parents did — with two-income families, for example — to keep up appearances. And I think our children will find appearances slipping no matter how hard they work. It’s bleak out there.

Some of my students suggested that they might not even be capable of experiencing the kind of indignation and disillusionment that spurred many baby boomers toward activism. In the Vietnam era, the shameful dissembling of American politicians provoked outrage. But living in the shadow of Vietnam and Watergate, and weaned on “The Simpsons” and “The Daily Show,” today’s youth greet the Bush administration’s spin and ever-evolving rationale for war with ironic world-weariness and bemused laughter. “The Iraq war turned out to be a hoax from the beginning? Figures!”

As I wrote last week, we Boomers were raised to be naive and idealistic. As we caught on to what our government actually was doing, we felt betrayed. Most of us remained idealistic, however, even as we protested the government. Consider also that our parents had gone from being the Greatest Generation in the 1940s to being the “Gray Flannel Suit” generation in the 1950s — from military regimentation to social and cultural regimentation, creating a society so oppressively conformist that if the hem of one’s skirt deviated by even a half inch from standard specifications — mid-knee length in a below-the-knee year, for example — eyebrows were raised. Of course, hair length on the boys was every bit as regimented, and facial hair (other than the occasional rakish mustache à la David Niven) was a no-no.

Naturally, when the Boomers hit adolescence the cry of rebellion was heard throughout the land. We decorated ourselves with beads and feathers and wore our hair and our skirts any length we damn well pleased. The books we all read were mostly about either oppression, liberation, or transcendence — 1984, Animal Farm, Hesse’s Siddhartha and Steppenwolf (although you might not have made it all the way through Steppenwolf), The Prophet, Jonathan Livingston Seagull (you tried to forget that one, didn’t you?), The Lord of the Rings.

What are the young folks reading these days? I don’t even know.

McMillian’s piece ends rather bleakly:

“Just like [in] the 1960s, we have an unjust war, a lying president, and dead American soldiers sent home everyday,” one student wrote me in an e-mail. “But rather than fight the administration or demand a forum to express our unhappiness, we accept the status quo and focus on our own problems.”

That’s sad, considering the status quo is even bleaker for them than it was for us. All the taxes we’re not paying now are going to end up in their laps, for example.

On the other hand, this study from UCLA says —

This year’s entering college freshmen are discussing politics more frequently than at any point in the past 40 years and are becoming less moderate in their political views, according to the results of UCLA’s annual survey of the nation’s entering undergraduates. … the percentage of students identifying as “liberal” (28.4 percent) is at its highest level since 1975 (30.7 percent), and those identifying as “conservative” (23.9 percent) is at its highest level in the history of the Freshman Survey, now in its 40th year.

Good luck, young folks. You’ll need it.

Bye, Art. It’s Been Fun.

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I remember being an Art Buchwald fan while I was still in elementary school, which was about two centuries ago. We were both a lot younger then.

Art Buchwald died yesterday at the age of 81. He kept working right to the end; there’s an archive of recent columns here. If anyone can find some of his older work online, let me know.

    “Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, it’s the only time we’ve got” — Art Buchwald, 1925-2007

Update: More from the Library of Congress.

After the Surge

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Yesterday Baghdad suffered its worst day of carnage in more than a month. Most of the violence appears to have been at the hands of Shiites, targeting Sunnis.

MSNBC reports that the Sunni nation of Saudi Arabia is thinking about sending troops into Iraq “should the violence there degenerate into chaos.” Would the Saudi troops favor the well-being of Sunnis, while Iran is backing the Shiites? Is this really a good idea?

No one outside the Bush Administration seems to think the so-called “surge” — which Senator Clinton said today is a “losing strategy” — will have any significant impact on the violence. Still, Congress is not moving all that fast to stop it. Renee Schoof writes for McClatchy Newspapers:

Although most Democrats and some Republicans oppose Bush’s 21,500-member troop increase, Congress isn’t moving very fast to try to stop or alter the plan. Democratic leaders in both houses want their first step to be a resolution calling on lawmakers to go on record as being for or against Bush’s Iraq plan.

Democrats say they have a solid Senate majority against the plan, including perhaps one dozen Republicans, so the resolution is effectively a symbolic vote of no confidence in Bush’s war plan. Only after that vote will they look at ways to use Congress’ power over funding as a hammer.

This may make sense as political strategy, but I fear that by the time Congress does anything concrete the “surge” will be a fait accompli.

On the other hand, this was just posted at WaPo —

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) announced legislation today capping the number of troops in Iraq at roughly 130,000, saying that lawmakers should take an up-or-down vote on President Bush’s plan to send additional troops to the country and not settle for the non-binding resolution several Senate leaders prefer.

But for the moment, let’s look ahead to post-surge Iraq. Paul Krugman’s column on Monday called the surge/escalation/augmentation the “Texas Strategy.”

Mr. Bush isn’t Roger Staubach, trying to pull out a win for the Dallas Cowboys. He’s Charles Keating, using other people’s money to keep Lincoln Savings going long after it should have been shut down — and squandering the life savings of thousands of investors, not to mention billions in taxpayer dollars, along the way.

The parallel is actually quite exact. During the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, people like Mr. Keating kept failed banks going by faking financial success. Mr. Bush has kept a failed war going by faking military success.

The “surge” is just another stalling tactic, designed to buy more time.

I wrote something along the same lines last April, although I wrote about Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling. I wrote then:

It would have worked out if we’d just stayed the course, the chief executive said. Everything would have been fine if people had had more faith. We failed because we were attacked by people who wanted us to fail.

Bush in Iraq? No, Jeffrey K. Skilling in court.

The former Enron CEO, on trial for multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud, told the court yesterday that Enron’s slide into bankruptcy was caused by a loss of faith.

The Enron execs genuinely seem to have believed that if only they could have kept their losses hidden and maintained the illusion of success a little longer, the Good Profits Fairy would have come along and bailed them out eventually. (And who’s to say that the Bush Administration wouldn’t have given them enough war and disaster profiteering contracts that they’d be riding the gravy train today?) So, in their own minds, they did not fail. As for the bad decisions that put them in a hole to begin with — hey, stuff happens.

Bush’s plan seems to me even more cynical. He just wants to keep the illusion going on long enough that the failure doesn’t happen on his watch. The fact that the “illusion” has already mostly evaporated doesn’t seem to bother him.

On the other hand, maybe he still thinks the Victory Fairy will turn up after all. Robert G. Kaiser wrote in the Sunday New York Times:

In other words, the national security adviser told the president 42 months after this disastrous war began that we can still fix it. A few well-placed bribes plus Yankee ingenuity — pulling this lever, pushing that button — can make things turn out the way we want them to.

Kaiser’s article is really good; you should read it all.

Along the same lines, as John Cole of Balloon Juice points out today, the “Who lost Iraq” mythos is already being written. Be sure to read the whole post for examples from rightie blogs. John Cole concludes,

So they have all the bases covered, you see! If we win, it is because these brave stalwarts stuck it out on their blogs, and lavished unrelenting praise on the troops and the President. They stayed the course, you see, and because of them the troops could get the job done!

If we lose, it wasn’t because of anything this administration, the Pentagon, or their blind support for a leadership that didn’t deserve it. It is because of the lying ass media and those pussy Democrats.

Heads, I win; tails, you lose.

Outside the Bush Administration and its True Believers, conventional wisdom says winning in any meaningful sense is no longer an option. The real questions revolve around disengagement (how’s that for a euphemism?) from Iraq — when, and how? And then after that, we’ll all be wallowing in the political fallout for some time.

Harold Meyerson has an excellent column in WaPo today discussing how that fallout might fall. He looks at the last two presidents who bailed the nation out of unpopular wars — Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.

As the first Republican to occupy the White House since the coming of the New Deal, Dwight Eisenhower could have chosen to divide the public and try to roll back Franklin Roosevelt’s handiwork. In fact, he didn’t give that option a moment’s consideration. Social Security and unions, he concluded, were here to stay; any attempt to undo them, he wrote, would consign the Republicans to permanent minority status. Ike also ended the Korean War without attacking Democrats in the process.

And then there’s Nixon —

For Nixon, politics was about dividing the electorate and demonizing enemies. Even as he drew down U.S. forces, he did all he could to inflame the war’s already flammable opponents in the hope that however much the people might dislike the war, they would dislike its critics more.

Do we even have to ask which way the Bushies are likely to go? And consider that the damage Nixon did lived on long after him; much of it is still impacting politics (and hurting Democrats) today. I realize that a lot of people, including me, are impatient with the Dems for being cautious. But they have good reasons to be cautious.

It is possible to lose even if we win. By that I mean that it’s possible the Dems could grow the spine to confront the President and force a withdrawal from Iraq, and yet get the worst of the post-war fallout, which would put the Republicans back in business.

It’s likely that the aftermath of our Iraq adventure will be a nasty business, both here and in the Middle East. Please note what I’m saying here. I’m not saying we should stay in Iraq, but that it’s possible the violence and destabilization will escalate after we leave and create new foreign policy problems that we cannot ignore, the way we pretty much ignored Southeast Asia after Vietnam. I ask again, please read this carefully and don’t whine at me that I am some kind of Bush supporter, because I think these bad things are likely to happen if we stay, also. But the Right is not going to make that distinction, and all crises that arise from the Middle East for the next quarter century are likely to stir up fresh howls about Who lost Iraq? You can bet the Dems in Washington realize this and are thinking hard about it right now.

Betrayal

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Per Glenn Greenwald, don’t miss this audio essay by rightie Rod Dreher.

As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.

But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.

In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.

The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.

Like so many loyal soldiers of movement conservatism, Dreher’s earliest political memories are of the Carter Administration and the Iranian hostage crisis, followed by the triumphant ascension of Ronald Reagan. He was 13 years old when Reagan was elected, so you can’t fault him for viewing these events through a child’s eyes. The problem is, as it is with so many of his fellow travelers, that his understanding of politics remained childish. He seems to have retained a child’s simple faith that Democrats (and liberals) are “bad” and Republicans (and conservatives) are “good,” so one does not have to think real hard to know who’s right or wrong. In the minds of righties, Republicans/conservatives have an inherent virtue that keeps them on the side of the angels. What passes for “critical analysis” among righties is most often just the unconscious jerking of their knees in support of their faith.

Dreher’s is the voice of a man who realizes his faith has been betrayed.

As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.

I had a heretical thought for a conservative – that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word – that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot – that they have to question authority.

On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?

The answers to your questions, Mr. Dreher, are (1) yes, and (2) because you were brainwashed. As I wrote here,

I noticed years ago that the rank-and-file “movement conservative” is younger than I am. Well, OK, most people are younger than I am. But surely you’ve noticed that a disproportionate number of True Believers are people who reached their late teens / early twenties during the Carter or Reagan years at the earliest. They came of age at the same time the right-wing media / think tank infrastructure began to dominate national political discourse, and all their adult lives their brains have been pickled in rightie propaganda.

Because they’re too young to remember When Things Were Different, they don’t recognize that the way mass media has handled politics for the past thirty or so years is abnormal. What passes for our national political discourse — as presented on radio, television, and much print media — is scripted in right-wing think tanks and media paid for by the likes of Joseph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, and more recently by Sun Myung Moon. What looks like “debate” is just puppet theater, presented to manipulate public opinion in favor of the Right.

In this puppet theater “liberals” (booo! hisss!) are the craven, cowardly, and possibly demented villains, and “conservatives” are the noble heroes who come to the rescue of the virtuous maid America. Any American under the age of 40 has had this narrative pounded into his head his entire life. Rare is the individual born after the Baby Boom who has any clue what “liberalism” really is. Ask, and they’ll tell you that liberals are people who “believe in” raising taxes and spending money on big entitlement programs, which of course is bad. (Read this to understand why it’s bad.)

Just one example of how the word liberal has been utterly bastardized, see this Heritage Foundation press release of March 2006 that complains Congress is becoming “liberal.” Why? Because of its pork-barrel spending.

But I want to say something more about betrayal. One piece left out of most commentary on the freaks (not hippies, children; the name preferred by participants of the counterculture was freaks) was how betrayed many of us felt. Remember, we’d been born in the years after World War II. We’d spent our childhoods dramatizing our fathers’ struggles on Normandy Beach and Iwo Jima in our suburban back yards. Most of us watched “Victory at Sea” at least twice. Most of our childhood heroes were characters out of American mythos, like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone (who seemed an awful lot alike). Further, some of the scariest times of the Cold War unfolded during our elementary and middle schools years. We grew up believing the Communists would nuke us any second. Our schools (even Sunday School, as I recall) and media made sure we were thoroughly indoctrinated with the understanding that liberty and democracy were “good” and Communism was “bad,” and America Is the Greatest Nation in the World.

For many of us, these feelings reached their apex during the Kennedy administration. I was nine years old when he was elected. He seemed to embody everything that was noble and good and heroic about America. I remember his tour of Europe the summer before the assassination. I watched his motorcade move through cheering crowds on our black-and-white console television and never felt prouder to be an American.

But then our hearts were broken in Dallas, and less than two years later Lyndon Johnson announced he would send troops to Vietnam. And then the young men of my generation were drafted into the meat grinder. Sooner or later, most of us figured out our idealism had been misplaced. I was one of the later ones; the realization dawned for me during the Nixon Administration, which began while I was a senior in high school. Oh, I still believed in liberty and democracy; I felt betrayed because I realized our government didn’t. And much of my parents’ generation didn’t seem to, either.

The counterculture was both a backlash to that betrayal and to the cultural rigidity of the 1950s. And much of “movement conservatism” was a backlash to the counterculture, albeit rooted in the pseudo-conservatism documented earlier by Richard Hofstadter and others.

(And how weird is it that anyone is still talking about “hippies”? Did some hippiechick sitter drop Dreher on his head when he was a baby?)

Rod Dreher and others of his generation are now old enough that their children are at least approaching adolescence, if they haven’t already arrived. What “earliest political memory” will imprint on them? What form will the inevitable rebellion against their parents’ generation take?

Update: Sorta kinda related — Jonathan Zasloff speculates how much the Carter/Iranian hostage crisis episode caused the Dems to lose credibility on foreign policy. The fact is, to get the whole sad story of how the Dems lost credibility on foreign policy you have to go back to the 1940s. And it has little to do with anything the Dems actually did, or didn’t, do.

Frederick the Great

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This sort of goes along with our discussion in the Glitches post — in today’s Boston Globe, Derrick Jackson writes about the great Frederick Douglass. Never let it be forgot that every civil rights activist since stood (and still stands) on Douglass’s shoulders.

Jackson mentions a speech Douglass made 200 years ago in Boston. “The speech was given at Boston’s Music Hall after a mob drove Douglass out of the Tremont Temple,” Jackson wrote. I believe this is that same speech. Jackson ties what Douglass said about slavery to gay marriage legislation that was pushed by Mitt Romney in the final weeks of his term as governor of Massachusetts. Inspirational and thought-provoking stuff.

“The Last Regular Republican”

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Sidney Blumenthal’s latest column deserves a close reading. It shines a light on another part of our recent political history, when the Republican Party was taken over by the Goldwater-Reagan “pseudo conservative” faction. Further, it shows us how the Bush II Regime tied the Reaganite conservatives back to the Nixonian imperial presidency, giving us the worst of several possible worlds in one toxic White House.

When the late Gerald Ford became President, he chose Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president. And this mightily pissed off the Reagan faction, including Reagan himself. Reagan actually snubbed the President on a visit to Washington.

Reagan’s motive, however, was ultimately personal pique – he was “disappointed that he had been passed over himself,” according to his biographer Lou Cannon. Reagan thought of himself as the rightful heir apparent and Ford as nothing but a “caretaker”.

Ford had a dismally low regard for Reagan, dismissing the threat of his potential challenge. “I hadn’t taken those warnings seriously because I didn’t take Reagan seriously.” Ford considered Reagan “simplistic,” dogmatic and lazy. Reagan, for his part, argued that Nixon’s 1972 mandate was not a Republican victory but an ideological one for junking the old Republicanism and that Ford was betraying it. “The tragedy of Watergate,” Reagan said, was that it “obscured the meaning of that ’72 election.”

Reagan’s assessment of the 1972 election makes absolutely no sense to me. About the only thing Nixon had in common with Reagan was red- and race-baiting. Nixon was an internationalist who favored détente with the Soviet Union and who visited the other Evil Empire, China. And Nixon had no ideological problem with applying some “big government” solutions to domestic problems. Nixon’s administration established the Environmental Protection Agency, for pity’s sake. I think Reagan was hallucinating.

Reagan accused Ford of fatally weakening national security. He opposed Ford’s pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union through Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that led to treaties reducing the production of nuclear weapons and Ford’s signing of the Helsinki Accords in August 1975, which held the Soviet Union for the first time to standards of human rights. Reagan’s critique appeared against the backdrop of the collapse of South Vietnam and the scene on April 30, 1975, of helicopters evacuating US personnel from the roof of the US Embassy.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

In April 1975, the Senate Operations Committee under the chairmanship of Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, released 14 reports on the abuse of intelligence. It chronicled “excessive executive power”, “excessive secrecy”, “avoidance of the rule of law”, “rogue” operations and even spying on domestic politics. “Whatever the theory,” the report concluded, “the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected.”

Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld – moved from White House chief of staff to secretary of defense as his deputy, Dick Cheney, was promoted to the chief of staff job – created a Team B of hawks within the Pentagon who attacked the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate for supposedly underestimating the Soviet Union’s military strength. Rumsfeld began making speeches assailing detente, claiming that the Soviets were flagrantly violating treaties negotiated by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, another hate object of the right who was long associated with Vice President Rockefeller.

The CIA officially responded by calling the Team B report “complete fiction.” And CIA Director George HW Bush said that Team B set “in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy.” Nonetheless, Rumsfeld’s inflation of the Red menace, based on faulty data, turned up the flame under Ford. Rumsfeld had his own motive: He wanted to be named vice president, a nomination that in the end went to Sen. Bob Dole, considered acceptable to Reagan.

To appease the Right, Ford pressured Rockefeller not to run as vice president in 1976, an act Ford himself called “cowardly.” Bob Dole would would be Ford’s running mate. Now, get this:

Rockefeller advised Ford: “I’m now going to say it frankly … Rumsfeld wants to be President of the United States. He has given George Bush [another potential vice-presidential choice] the deep six by putting him in the CIA, he has gotten me out … He was third on your list and now he has gotten rid of two of us … You are not going to be able to put him on the [ticket] because he is defense secretary, but he is not going to want anybody who can possibly be elected with you on that ticket … I have to say I have a serious question about his loyalty to you.”

Just think … President Rummy.

Rummy lost his government job when Jimmy Carter was elected. He played some small roles in the Reagan Administration, such as special envoy to the Middle East (1983–1984, during which time the famous Rummy-Saddam handshake took place), but for most of the Reagan years and after Rummy retreated to private industry until Junior brought him back to Washington in 2001. Blumenthal continues,

Cheney and Rumsfeld, since their days in the Nixon White House, had observed the imperial presidency besieged. Under Ford, they saw it reach its low ebb, and they were determined to restore the presidency as they imagined it should be – unchecked by an intrusive Congress, shielded from the press, and unobstructed by staff professionals in the intelligence community who did not clearly understand the present dangers that required just such an executive.

After the 2000 election, Vice President-elect Cheney held a dinner at his house where he held forth that the new administration would finish off Saddam Hussein, a job that the elder Bush had left undone, opening him to charges of softness. Rumsfeld, appointed by the new president as secretary of defense at the suggestion of Cheney, named one of the key members of the Ford-era Team B, Paul Wolfowitz, as deputy secretary. At the first meeting of the National Security Council with Bush, Wolfowitz raised the question of invading Iraq.

And there you have it. Through the Bush II White House, the drown-government-in-the-bathtub Right was tied together with the Nixonian “Executive Power Ãœber Alles” Right. This gives us secretive, oppressive, antidemocratic government that can’t govern. Nice.

Blumenthal writes that “Ford was the last regular Republican to serve as president.” If you’re much younger than I am you may not remember what a “regular Republican” is.

Sweet

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At his photo-op swearing in, Rep. Keith Ellison will use a copy of the Koran once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson’s copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed most of Jefferson’s collection and has his customary initialing on the pages. This isn’t the first historic book used for swearing-in ceremonies — the Library has allowed VIPs to use rare Bibles for inaugurations and other special occasions.

Ellison will take the official oath of office along with the other incoming members in the House chamber, then use the Koran in his individual, ceremonial oath with new Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Keith is paying respect not only to the founding fathers’ belief in religious freedom but the Constitution itself,” said Ellison spokesman Rick Jauert.