Category Archives: American History

Fear Is Not an Idea

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I’m so grateful to E.J. Dionne for writing that insensible column dissing Richard Hofstadter. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered to find and read Hofstadter’s work. Truly, the man was a genius (Hofstadter, I mean). This morning I want to look at something Hofstatder wrote more than 50 years ago and then add to it to something I read in today’s Washington Post.

In the mid-1950s Hofstadter embarked on some lectures and essays about pseudo-conservatism. To understand this fully, keep in mind that in the mid-1950s the New Deal coalition was the establishment. New Dealers had been in power for 20 years. Moreover, Hofstadter wrote, the “jobless, distracted and bewildered men” of the Depression had become comfortably middle class — well fed, well clothed, well housed — thanks to the New Deal, the GI Bill, postwar mortgage subsidy programs, and solid economic growth.

Hofstadter quotes Adlai Stevenson:

The strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country — the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations.

Yet in those days there were dissenters. We recognize that dissent now as the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy in fetal stage. Here is how Hofstadter described them — note I am adding some boldface and breaking up the long paragraphs into smaller bits to make it easier to read —

Representing no more than a modest fraction of the electorate, it is not so powerful as the liberal dissent of the New Deal era, but it is powerful enough to set the tone of our political life and to establish throughout the country a kind of punitive reaction. The new dissent is certainly not radical — there are hardly any radicals of any sort left — nor is it precisely conservative.

Speaking of what is or isn’t radical — you must read this new post by Billmon. (If you want to read to the end of this post first, I’ll remind you about Billmon again later. But do read that post and this one together.)

Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for nonconformism, but is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions.

Sounds familiar, eh?

They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound and largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive evidence both from clinical techniques and from their own modes of expression.

I haven’t read John Dean’s new book on authoritarian personalities and the “conservative” movement, but if any of you have, let me know if this sounds familiar —

From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative.

I like the part about “concealing from themselves.” One of the most consistent traits of rightieness is their utter blindness to where their own ideology is taking them. And us, too, of course.

The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. … The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

Hofstadter tries to identify exactly who these pseudo-conservatives were. Pseudo-conservatism appealed to people across social classes, “but its power probably rests largely on its appeal to the less-educated members of the middle classes” (many of whom, please note, wouldn’t have been middle class were it not for Franklin Roosevelt). Further,

The ideology of pseudo-conservatism can be characterized but not defined, because the pseudo-conservative tends to be more than ordinarily incoherent about politics. The lady who, when General Eisenhower’s victory over Senator Taft had finally become official in 1952, stalked out of the Hilton Hotel declaiming: “This means eight more years of socialism,” was probably a fairly good representative of the pseudo-conservative mentality.

Compare/contrast something Joe Scarborough wrote (yeah, I know, it’s Joe Scarborough, but it’s not that bad) about right-wingers calling Bill Clinton a Marxist.

Hofstadter continued,

The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics in the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that is it constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the Orient — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.

This ties in to what I wrote in this post, about how the Right usurped the Left’s credibility on national defense and foreign policy through lies and hysteria. And it ties very nicely into “Stabbed in the Back!” by Kevin Baker in the June issue of Harper’s.

Hofstadter goes on for several very rich paragraphs about the social-psychological elements of pseudo-conservatism, and this essay is followed up by two more in this book. Right now I’m going to skip over several pages and quote one more paragraph, from the essay “Goldwater and the Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” which Hofstadter wrote in the mid-1960s.

Writing in 1954, at the peak of the McCarthyist period, I suggested that the American right wing could best be understood not as a neo-fascist movement girding itself for the conquest of power but as a persistent and effective minority whose main threat was in its power to create “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.” This still seems to be the true potential of the pseud0-conservative right; it is a potential that can be realized without winning the White House, even without winning the Republican nomination.

The Right did indeed create “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.” Unfortunately, once they had accomplished this they were able to seize political power as well. And now the very people Hofstadter wrote about 50 years ago have seized both the White House and Congress and have refashioned themselves as the mainstream, the center, the true patriots, the defenders of the American ideals they undermined and all but destroyed in order to gain power.

The pseudo-conservative movement started out as an intellectually incoherent reaction to the New Deal and the ideals and values that were mainstream 50 and more years ago. It was based on a complex of fears — fear of foreigners, fear of Communists, fear of the powerful forces in the world that they didn’t understand. Most of all, they were beseiged by doubts that they fit into a world that was rapidly changing but which they didn’t understand. They feared they were being pushed out of what they saw as their rightful place in American life. Exactly what that place was, and who was pushing them, cannot be clearly defined. Often they lashed out not at real enemies but at the very institutions that protected them and enabled social and economic stability. Theirs was an irrational attempt to erase the previous several years of world history and go back to an earlier time — before the Depression, before World War II — when they had felt more secure. It didn’t sink in that that old feeling of security had been delusional.

At some point, however, the Right managed to invent an ideological facade in which to hide their fears. In the 1950s they seized upon scholar Russell Kirk — I’m not sure Kirk was really One of Them, but they seized upon him, anyway — and William Buckley. Under Goldwater’s influence the pseudo-conservatives increased their influence within the Republican Party, which they re-invented as the “Party of Ideas.” Their “ideas” were the standard pseudo-conservative agenda of dismantling the New Deal while somehow becoming both more aggressive and more isolationist in foreign policy — neoconservatism is, at its core, proactive isolationism — but through their growing infrastructure of “think tanks” they figured out how to package their incoherent agenda to make it look like ideas.

But their “ideas” are all based on the conceit that if they could just brush away all the liberal crapola — dismantle the New Deal, deregulate everything in sight, and lower taxes to shrink government in order to drown it in a bathtub — that we would find ourselves living in Utopia. Somehow.

And this takes us to Harold Meyerson’s column in today’s Washington Post.

Wasn’t it just a couple of years ago that Republicans were boasting that they were the party of ideas? They would privatize the commonwealth and globalize democracy, while Democrats clung to the tattered banner of common security in both economics and national defense. The intellectual energy in America, it seemed, was all on the right.

That, as they say, was then. In 2006 the campaigns that the Republicans are waging in their desperate attempt to retain power are so utterly devoid of ideas that it’s hard to believe they ever had an idea at all.

With fewer than 60 days remaining before the November election, the only two Republican strategies left standing are to scare the public about the Democrats collectively or to slime the Democrats individually. There’s nothing new about these strategies, of course, but this year they exist in a vacuum. Having run both the executive and legislative branches for the past two years with nothing but failure to show for it, the Republicans can no longer campaign as the party that will balance the budget, reform entitlements, lower energy costs, fix the immigration problem, create a more secure world or find a suitable way out of their endless war of choice in Iraq. What’s left is a campaign of scaring and sliming, with the emphasis on the latter. ..

…What’s a party to do when its high road leads nowhere but down? The Republicans tried privatizing Social Security, but their numbers never added up. They tried spreading democracy with unilateral, preventive war but instead unleashed a sectarian bloodbath. So the party of big ideas, of Milton Friedman and the neoconservatives, is now just one big Swift Boat flotilla, its ideas sunk of their own dead weight, kept afloat solely by its opposition research. For their part, the Democrats still champion common security; they call for a government that can build dikes and reduce the costs of college and medication and that knows that remaking the world becomes more plausible when some of the world is actually willing to go along with us. Those are, in the campaign of 2006, just about the only ideas in play.

We lefties are pragmatists who think that nothing is ever perfect, but through democratic government We, the People, can at least make improvements. (Bill Clinton spoke about this at length yesterday, but I want to wait until I get the transcript to quote him.) But pseudo-conservatives are utopians who have long believed that, if they could only have their way, they could create a perfect America and a perfect World.

Well, folks, they got their way. And they failed. That’s because their “ideas” were never really ideas at all; just fantasies that grew out of their fears. And fear is not an idea.

The Right can’t see that yet. As Richard Parker wrote here,

For America’s ”party of ideas,” it is still only their opponents’ ideas which have failed. To the fatal contradictions inherent in their own utopian principles, they seem to remain impervious.

But the facade is crumbling, fast.

I want to hop over to the Billmon post I mentioned above.

I see no reason to doubt the ultimate aim of Rovian politics is to dismantle the remaining framework of New Deal/Great Society liberalism. But most Rovians understand it’s a long-term project. And if offering the seniors a third-rate drug benefit (and greasing Big Pharma in the process) helps the vanguard party tighten its grip on power here and now, so be it. A revolution is not a dinner party at the Cato Institute.

Of course, such compromises (for the good of the movement, you understand) are also how radicals gradually morph into reformers and refomers turn into comfortable establishmentarians. And the Rovians, particularly the congressional branch, are obviously pretty far down that road. But there’s a difference between betraying your principles and not having any, and I think most conservative cadres within the Cheney Administration, like their brethren on K Street, are still loyal — in their hearts, if not their wallets — to an explicitly radical agenda.

Maybe the best way to put it is that the Rovians are radical reactionaries — so reactionary their aspirations to turn the clock back to circa 1896 actually sound like something fundamentally new, in the same way that “globalization” sounds so much more hip and modern than good old Manchester Liberalism. The conservative “Great Leap Backwards” probably isn’t attainable (and, considering the death toll from Mao’s attempt to jump in the opposite direction, thank God for that) but I’d be willing to bet there are Cheney Administration staffers who will be scheming, or at least dreaming, of “the day” until the day they die.

Unfortunately, as Billmon concludes, just throwing the bums out will not solve our problems. We will still have to deal with the pseudo-conservatives’ chief accomplishment — the political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety are impossible. I’m not sure even where to start.

Too Cool

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A little group of us bloggers ate lunch with the last elected President of the United States today, in his Harlem office. I’m afraid if I try to name everybody I’ll leave someone out, so I’m not going to try, but attendees included (in no particular order) Dave Johnson of Seeing the Forest; Matt Stoller of MyDD; Duncan Black of Eschaton; Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft, who has photos up already; Jane Hamsher and Christy Hardin Smith from firedoglake; Bill Scher of Liberal Oasis, and, um, more people. And moi. I’ll post the full list eventually.

The purpose of the meeting (as near as I can tell) is that Mr. Clinton has been reading blogs and just wanted to do a little outreach, facilitated by Peter Daou. We had a lovely time schmoozing about, you know, political stuff.

No big bombshell revelations, but it was certainly an interesting discussion. Lots of smart folks in the room. I took a few notes, but I think I’ll wait until I get the official meeting transcript to write in detail.

But how cool was that?

Update: John at AMERICAblog has more photos. McJoan at Daily Kos has more details.

Paranoia

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The scheduled installment of “Ten Days After: Day Two” probably won’t be up until late this evening. Click here for Day One. Meanwhile —

I’ve been reading Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” an essay written in 1963. I regret that I haven’t found it online except in abridged form that leaves out some of the best stuff, so I’ve keyboarded four paragraphs to bring to your attention. I’m sure I could extract several dozen blog posts out of these four paragraphs alone, but since I’m short on time this morning I’m going to just post the paragraphs for you to think about.

Seems to me these paragraphs fit several groups in the U.S. today — the Right versus militant Islam; the Right versus the “liberal elite”; the Bush Administration’s approach to the “war on terror” (the second paragraph in particular); Dick Cheney and other neocons versus Saddam Hussein; and on the Left, people who are convinced the WTC towers were brought down by controlled detonation.

Have at it.

Let us now abstract the basic elements in the paranoid style. The central image is that of vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life. One may object that there are conspiratorial acts in history and there is nothing paranoid about taking note of them. This is true. All political behavior requires strategy, many strategic acts depend for their effect upon a period of secrecy, and anything that is secret may be described, often with but little exaggeration, as conspiratorial. The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade. The paranoid spokesman sees the face of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out. Like religious millenarians, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to see a date for the apocalypse. “Time is running out,” said Welch [Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society] in 1951 “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month in which Stalin will attack.” The apocalypticism of the paranoid style run dangerously near to hopeless pessimism, but usually stops short of it. Apocalyptic warnings arouse passion and militancy, and strike at susceptibility to similar themes in Christianity. Properly expressed, such warnings serve somewhat the same function as a description of the horrible consequences of sin in a revivalist sermon: they portray that which impends but which may still be avoided. They are a secular and demonic version of adventism.

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to the finish. Nothing but complete victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for unqualified victories leads to the formulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same sense of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

This enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of the past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he directs the public mind through “managed news”; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brain washing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional); he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system.

The enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy. The enemy, for example, may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Senator McCarthy, with his heavily documented tracts and his show of information, Mr. Welch with his accumulations of irresistible evidence, John Robison with his laborious study of documents in a language he but poorly used, the anti-Masons with their endlessly painstaking discussions of Masonic ritual – all these offer a kind of implicit compliment to their opponents. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operations through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various Christian anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication, discipline, and strategic ingenuity the Communist cause calls forth.

Losing China Again

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Awhile back I wrote a post that explained how, during the Cold War, Republicans claimed credibility as the “war-national security” party when it was three Democratic presidents who had led the nation through World War I and II.

In a nutshell, it was through a campaign of hysterical charges and bald-faced lies.

In the 1930s it was the American Right, not the Left, who thought Hitler was an OK guy who could be appeased into leaving us alone. Before World War II conservatives were staunch isolationists who opposed any move by Franklin Roosevelt to send aid to Europe or prepare for war.

Here’s just a bit from “Stabbed in the Back!” by Kevin Baker in the June issue of Harper’s, which I urge you to read if you haven’t already.

In the years immediately following World War II, the American right was facing oblivion. Domestically, the reforms of the New Deal had been largely embraced by the American people. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations—supported by many liberal Republicans—had led the nation successfully through the worst war in human history, and we had emerged as the most powerful nation on earth.

Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow liberal internationalists had sounded the first alarms about Hitler, but conservatives had stubbornly—even suicidally—maintained their isolationism right into the postwar era. Senator Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” and the right’s enduring presidential hope, had not only been a prominent member of the leading isolationist organization, America First, and opposed the nation’s first peacetime draft in 1940, but also appeared to be as naive about the Soviet Union as he had been about the Axis powers. Like many on the right, he was much more concerned about Chiang Kai-shek’s worm-eaten Nationalist regime in China than U.S. allies in Europe. “The whole Atlantic Pact, certainly the arming of Germany, is an incentive for Russia to enter the war before the army is built up,” Taft warned. He was against any U.S. military presence in Europe even in 1951.

Baker explains the whole sorry episode very nicely. Briefly, in the late 1940s the former appeasers of Hitler got worked up over the Soviet takeover of eastern Europe and Mao Zedong’s takeover of China. One of the catchphrases of the day was “Who lost China?” as if China had been ours to lose. Right-wingers were convinced these things would not have happened except for (liberal) traitors in the government who either allowed them to happen or arranged for them to happen. (They seemed unable to consider that people and events in the USSR, eastern Europe, and China may have been factors.) And the Right put up such a stink about this that by the 1960s Dem politicians were challenged to prove they were as “tough on Communism” as Republicans, never mind that Democrats had a much longer and stronger record on foreign policy and as protectors of national security than Republicans at the time.

I bring all this up because Glenn Greenwald’s post of this morning makes me wonder if we’re just replaying old tapes.

Glenn’s post documents that during the Clinton Administration, Republicans in Congress downplayed the threat of terrorism even as President Clinton urged more aggressive counterterrorism measures. “[T]o the extent Republicans spoke about Clinton’s anti-terrorism efforts at all, it was to criticize them for being too bellicose, too militaristic, and just unnecessary,” writes Glenn. Particularly during his second term Clinton urged Congress to become more pro-active about terrorism. With a handful of exceptions, Republicans in Congress ignored the warnings.

During his first presidential campaign George W. Bush ignored terrorism as an issue even though he offered other specific criticisms of Clinton policies.

Get this:

The 2000 Republican Party Platform contains 13 specific criticisms of the Clinton Administration’s foreign and military policies. Not a single one mentions or refers in any way to Al Qaeda or terrorism generally. After that, there is an entire section entitled “The Middle East and Persian Gulf” that deals extensively with Iraq and the alleged threat posed by Saddam Hussein, but it does not say a word — not a single word — about Islamic extremism, Al Qaeda, or Osama bin Laden.

Even the section of the Platform entitled “Terrorism, International Crime, and Cyber Threats” makes not one reference to Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or Islamic extremism. It does not contain a single claim that the Clinton administration was insufficiently aggressive towards Islamic terrorists, nor does it advocate increased militarism in the Middle East or against terrorists. In fact, to the extent Republicans advocated a new approach at all, it was to emphasize the need for the very “law enforcement” and “domestic preparedness” approaches which they now claim to disdain.

During his debates with Vice President Gore, George Bush was asked to explain his views toward the Middle East. He said not one word about Islamic terrorism. He did say things like “I’m worried about overcommitting our military around the world. I want to be judicious in its use. . . . It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious.” And also, “And so I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.”

Condi Rice also showed no interest whatsoever in al Qaeda or bin Laden.

When George W. Bush became President, one of his first acts was to kneecap the Hart-Rudman Commission recommendations then before Congress and assign the task of forming national security policies to Dick Cheney, who as of September 11, 2001, had not yet made a start. In spite of the warnings of outgoing Clinton officials that al Qaeda was a terrible threat, in April 2001 the Bush Administration’s first annual terrorism report left out Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden had been discussed extensively in Clinton-era reports. A senior State Department official told CNN the Clinton Administration had made a mistake by focusing so much on bin Laden and “personalizing terrorism.” The Bush Administration planned to focus on governments that sponsored terrorism, not on stateless terrorist organizations like al Qaeda.

And, of course, through the summer of 2001 the Bush White House blissfully ignored warning after warning that bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States.

Yet no sooner had the dust settled at Ground Zero that the Republicans declared themselves to be the All-High God-Appointed National Security Honchos, rightie fingers pointed at Bill Clinton, and Prince Pissant persuaded the American people that he, and he alone, could protect them from terrorism.

ABC’s controversial 9/11 film has inspired many other bloggers to write about actions Clinton had taken against terrorism, and al Qaeda in particular, before he left office. Here’s an old article by William Rivers Pitt that provides details, plus there are a wealth of good links in the comments to Glenn’s post.

You could argue that Clinton could have done more. But you cannot argue, based on their own record, that the Republicans or President Bush have more credibility in national security and counter-terrorism than Democrats do. If facts are our guide, Republicans ought to have less credibility in national security and counter-terrorism than Democrats do.

The only reason the Right gets away with claiming credibility in national security is through a relentless campaign of hysterical charges and bald-faced lies — just like the bad old days, when Joe McCarthy was shrieking about traitors in the State Department who lost China.

Capture the Flag

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This feature by Ezra Klein in American Prospect points to a trend that bears close watching “populist” or “pro-government” conservatism.

Small-government conservatism is anachronistic, but not because of Newt Gingrich’s failures. Rather, three longer-term factors have deprived the ideology of both intellectual legitimacy and popular support: structural changes in the GOP’s coalition, accelerating economic insecurity, and the empirical failure of supply-side economics.

Of these factors, the first is the most noteworthy. Through its use of cultural and “values” issues — and, since September 11, security concerns — the Republican Party has captured the allegiance of working-class, socially conservative whites and seen its coalition’s center of gravity shift from West to South. But recent research shows that these voters, whatever their views on gay marriage, are quite fond of the stability and protection of the entitlement state. …

… some younger, less tradition-bound conservative thinkers are sketching out a pro-government philosophy that supports conventionally progressive proposals like wage subsidies and child-tax credits but places them in a new context — as rear-guard protective actions in defense of the nuclear family. That is, whereas progressives argue for economic justice for a class or classes, these conservatives are arguing for economic favoritism for families, buttressed by government policies that encourage and advantage them as the central structure of American life. It isn’t hard to see the potential appeal of that approach, and it could corner Democrats and liberals into being the party of the poor, while the GOP becomes the party of parents.

Get this:

Fully 80 percent of Pro-Government Conservatives believe the government must do more to help the needy, even if it means going into debt. More than 60 percent believe that environmental regulations are worth the cost, 83 percent fear the power corporations have amassed, and 66 percent believe government regulation is necessary to protect the public interest.

To which we progressives are left sputtering: but… but … but… that’s progressivism. And liberalism, even. WTF???

The distinction, as Ezra says above, is that “whereas progressives argue for economic justice for a class or classes, these conservatives are arguing for economic favoritism for families, buttressed by government policies that encourage and advantage them as the central structure of American life.” But is essentially the same way New Deal liberalism was marketed to the American public back in the day. For example, in the 1948 presidential campaign, Harry Truman told Americans “All I ask you to do is vote for yourself, vote for your family.” Back then the Democrats marketed themselves as the champions who protected ordinary working men and women, and their families, from the rapacious greed of (Republican) fat cats, big business, and special interests.

So how did progressivism and populism get “conservative”?

A few days ago I wrote about how the Democratic Party lost its historic connection to working-class voters. Two factors in particular caused the ordinary working man and woman to abandon the Democratic Party and vote Republican. One was Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” which provided social and health benefits for the elderly and the poor, including poor African Americans. Earlier New Deal entitlement programs showed favoritism to whites (a concession FDR had to make to southern Democrats). By the 1960s white workers enjoyed a fast-rising standard of living, largely thanks to New Deal liberalism. But most whites resented paying taxes to relieve the poverty of African Americans. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and other Republicans exploited racist resentment to persuade white working-class voters to vote Republican.

The other factor was the New Left. As explained in this essay (scroll down to the American History subhead):

New Deal liberalism had been erected on the understanding that it was the job of government to protect the virtuous people from the rapacious interests. But, asked the new politics liberals of the 1960s, what if the people themselves were corrupted by materialism, imperialism, racial bigotry, and a variety of other malignancies? Their answer, inspired in large measure by the civil rights movement, was to return to a pre-New Deal definition of democracy based largely on court-generated rights. Denuded of its democratic drive, liberalism had become minoritarian.

Beginning with Richard Nixon, the Republicans picked up the “common man” theme and ran with it to victories in five of six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988. Where FDR had spoken of the “forgotten man,” Republicans like Nixon and Ronald Reagan spoke of the “silent majority” imperiled by crime and court-ordered “social engineering.” Conservatives played on the opposition to social policies like busing for racial integration to argue that government, not big business, was the great danger to the average American. By the 1988 presidential election, twice as many voters defined themselves as conservatives than as liberals. Liberals, members of the party of court-protected minorities, had themselves become a minority.

While we’re here, I’d like to quote a spot from the same essay about “Naderism.”

In the 1970s, legal crusaders like Ralph Nader, famous for exposing the safety hazards of General Motors cars, filed class action suits to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of social science. The NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Legal Services Corporation, or one of the many “Naderite” public interest law firms was as likely to sue government on behalf of aggrieved minorities as to defend it. Liberalism became increasingly associated not with a broad majoritarian politics but with a court-imposed politics, whether dealing with racial and gender quotas or with pollution control standards.

Legal reformers initiated what, in regulatory terms, was almost a second New Deal between 1964 and 1977. Ten new regulatory agencies were created. Regulatory battles over everything from product safety to energy conservation took the shape of class conflict but–fatally for post-New Deal liberalism–without mass support. Without that support, the new liberalism, an alliance of lawyers and other professionals with minorities, was politically vulnerable.

The decoupling of liberalism and populism is still hurting us now.

Ezra continues(emphasis added),

An early template came last November in The Weekly Standard, which featured an article by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam arguing that the GOP is “an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working-class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health-care entitlement.” They identified a new breed of “Sam’s Club Republicans” and urged GOP politicians to take the economic fears and anxieties of their constituents seriously. Doing so “would mean matching the culture-war rhetoric of family values with an economic policy that places the two-parent family … at the heart of the GOP agenda.” They even admitted that such a program would “begin with the recognition of a frequent left-wing talking point — that over the past few decades, returns to capital have escalated while returns to labor have declined, and that the result has been increasing economic insecurity for members of the working and middle classes.”

There is both peril and opportunity here, for both parties. It’s hard to imagine the GOP making a genuine effort to help the working class without alienating the other factions that support it. On the other hand, in the minds of white middle class voters the Democrats still are the party of the poor and minorities, not them. Ezra concludes,

For Democrats, being boxed in as the Party of the Poor while the GOP assumes the mantle of the family is an electoral nightmare. A conservative progressivism primarily for the middle class and discriminating against the underclass, while less just, will be politically potent, promising downscale whites all the benefits of redistribution without all the subsidization of urban blacks. Call it the rise of the Republicrats. Call it a disaster.

For another perspective on where liberalism went wrong, see yesterday’s E.J. Dionne column — “A Wrong Turn Led to the ‘L-Word‘” Dionne argues that liberals gained a reputation for being elitist snots because of the influence of historian Richard Hofstadter.

David S. Brown’s “Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography” offers us the life of one of our country’s most revered historians. Hofstadter, the author of such enduringly popular works as “The American Political Tradition” and “The Age of Reform,” shaped modern liberalism in ways that we must still grapple with today. …

… Hofstadter may have misled the very liberal movement to which he was devoted. There was, first, his emphasis on American populists as embodying a “deeply ingrained provincialism” (Brown’s term) whose revolt was as much a reaction to the rise of the cosmopolitan big city as to economic injustices.

Many progressives and reformers, he argued, represented an old Anglo-Saxon middle class who suffered from “status anxiety” in reaction to the rise of a vulgar new business elite. Hofstadter analyzed the right wing of the 1950s and early 1960s in similar terms. Psychological disorientation and social displacement became more important than ideas or interests.

Now, Hofstadter was exciting precisely because he brilliantly revised accepted and sometimes pious views of what the populists and progressives were about. But there was something dismissive about Hofstadter’s analysis that blinded liberals to the legitimate grievances of the populists, the progressives and, yes, the right wing.

The late Christopher Lasch, one of Hofstadter’s students and an admiring critic, noted that by conducting “political criticism in psychiatric categories,” Hofstadter and his intellectual allies excused themselves “from the difficult work of judgment and argumentation.”

Lasch added archly: “Instead of arguing with opponents, they simply dismissed them on psychiatric grounds.”

This was, I believe, a wrong turn for liberalism. It was a mistake to tear liberalism from its populist roots and to emphasize the irrational element of popular movements almost to the exclusion of their own self-understanding. FDR, whom Hofstadter admired, always understood the need to marry the urban (and urbane) forms of liberalism to the traditions of reform and popular protest.

Hmm. Dionne makes a persuasive argument, but I think there’s more to this story.

Blogger Todd Mitchell discusses Hofstadter’s 1962 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, beginning with a quote from a New York Times book review by Sam Tanenhouse:

    1. Tanenhouse:

“Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”” includes many brilliant pages. There is a discussion of early American evangelism and its attack on learned clergy, the eggheads of their day. And there are justly celebrated passages on “the revolt against modernity”” that occurred in the early 1900’Â’s – ““the emergence of a religious style shaped by a desire to strike back against everything modern – the higher criticism, evolutionism, the social gospel, rational criticism of every kind.”“In the boom years of the 1920’Â’s, for instance, millions of small-town and rural “native stock”” Americans, alarmed by the ascendancy of the country’s pluralistic urban culture, had embraced the organized bigotry of the Ku Klux Klan and flocked to the punitive crusades of anti-evolutionism and Prohibition. The pattern was being repeated in the 1950’s…”

And of course, today. That’s why I was so surprised, upon re-reading a few passages from the book, why no one is talking about Hofstadter. His piercing analysis and dissection of conservatism, including its obvious anti-intellectualism, is more relevant now, probably, than it was in the 1960’s.

So I scratched my head and wondered, how come no one is talking about this Times review? Why haven’t a few of the more enlightened blogs I read mentioned Hofstadter’s work?

The answer, Mitchell says, is that Hofstadter was as hard on the New Left as he was on the Right.

Hofstadter’s comment that “the progressive movement is the complaint of the unorganized,” is devastating and true. He also highlighted the “thread connecting McCarthyism to popular left-wing dissent,” which had been visible for some time.

“Little did Hofstadter suspect that a year after the publication of “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,”” attacks on autonomous liberals far more damaging than any inflicted by the right would come, as Brown writes, “from the children of the liberal class itself.”” University-based militants of the New Left began echoing the criticisms of the liberal establishment the right had been making for years.”

The subject of Hofstadter’s influence on liberalism is too complex to take up today. But I think Dionne is barking up the wrong tree if he thinks Hofstadter primarily is to blame for the demonization of the “L” word. He may have played an unwitting supporting role, but that’s it.

I do think the problem of anti-intellectualism is worse now than in the 1950s, and this is another factor working against liberalism, because it’s part of the myth of the “liberal elite” — the cabal of wealthy latte-sipping lefties who, according to rightie mythology, secretly run everything and are the source of all evil in America.

The “liberal elite” myth was in part the creation of Joe McCarthy. McCarthy liked to pose as the protector of the common man; his opponents were “eggheads” who didn’t understand the real world. Then Richard Nixon picked up the “egghead” theme and ran with it, even though Nixon was no more “the common man” than I’m an aardvark. (Nixon called Adlai Stevenson an “egghead” more than once. To which Stevenson responded, “Via ovicipitum dura est.” Or, “the way of the egghead is hard.”)

Today the VRWC has persuaded a big chunk of the electorate that there’s something suspicious about people who are smart and knowledgeable, as Stevenson was. Instead, the electorate is told, we’re supposed to prefer a politician who is likable, a politician we’d like to have a beer with, instead of a politician who is an intellectual. Forget intellectual; a politician who can find Peru on a map and speak in complete sentences as an “egghead” these days. So now we’ve got a grinning idiot for a president. (And we liberals are supposed to apologize for that, Mr. Dionne?)

And may I say that I’d vote for a guy who can ad lib in Latin over a grinning idiot, any day.

But it’s becoming more and more clear to me that liberals and progressives must, somehow, recapture the flag of populism that we dropped back in the 1960s, and we must do this without abandoning our commitment to justice and equal opportunity for all.

Can Dems Find Their Mojo?

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There were a couple of articles in Tuesday’s newspapers that underscored, for me, how far the Dems have fallen. One was a Washington Post column by E.J. Dionne:

While Republicans believe in their party and in the cause of building its organization from bottom to top, Democratic sympathizers tend to focus on favorite causes and favorite candidates, notably in presidential years. …

… a political party needs to see itself — and be seen by those who support it — as a long-term operation, not simply as a label of convenience at election time.

The other article was a New York Times story by Robin Toner, “Fathers Defeated, Democratic Sons Strike Back.”

In the history of the Democratic Party, the election of 1980 looms large: the year the party lost the White House, the Senate, a generation of Midwestern liberals and, in some ways, its confidence that it was the natural, even inevitable, majority party.

Now, that election has a sequel.

Call it the return of the sons: Chet Culver, the Iowa secretary of state and the son of former Senator John C. Culver, is running for governor of Iowa. Senator Evan Bayh, son of former Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, is organizing and testing the waters for a possible presidential bid in 2008. And Jack Carter, the son of former President Jimmy Carter, has decided at the age of 59 to run an uphill race for the Senate in Nevada, his first foray into electoral politics.

All of them had their political sensibilities shaped, to some extent, by the election that defeated their fathers and began a generation of conservative dominance.

OK so far. But the article goes on to describe the sons as “careful” centrists who run away from the dreaded “L” word — Liberal. For example:

While Birch Bayh was known as a classic “Great Society liberal,” as Evan Bayh has put it, and as a champion of causes like the equal rights amendment, the son has long been a careful centrist, a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council and a founder of the Third Way, a centrist research group.

Visiting 22 states over the past year, he has argued that the way for Democrats to win is to reach out to the middle class, demonstrate credibility on national security and show respect for faith and values issues.

Conclusion: Evan Bayh is a eunuch.

The past couple of posts focused on how the Democratic Party lost itself. This post discusses how the Right, through a long campaign of “hysterical charges and bald-faced lies,” undermined the Democrats’ credibility on foreign policy. The last post looks at how white middle- and working-class voters bolted to the Right when Democrats took a stand in favor of racial equality. Further, the old New Deal coalition was fatally undermined by the New Left. But the New Left did not create a new coalition to take the place of the old one. Instead, for almost forty years American liberals and progressives have been caught up in discrete issues — civil rights, reproductive rights, gay rights, the environment, etc. — that compete with each other for money and attention.

Meanwhile, the Right built an infrastructure of think tanks and media that by the 1980s dominated the nation’s political discourse and agenda.

This is a complex history, and I’ve only touched on a few main points. I’ve left out Ken Starr and the Clinton impeachment, for example, and the pernicious influence of the Christian Right. And then there is the problem of fundraising. With no broad-based coalition to support them, the Dems came to depend on a small pool of wealthy donors for campaign money. Now, E.J. Dionne notes, Dems argue whether they should wage a 50-state campaign or strategically focus on 20 or so “blue” states, conceding the remainder to the Right.

The result: In recent years Republicans have ruled national politics like lords, while the Dems cringed about like court eunuchs being careful not to offend. While the Republicans pushed for broad and radical change in domestic and foreign policy, Democrats attempted little more than minor, incremental tweaks. And when George W. Bush became president, and as we leftie bloggers and other liberals screamed our virtual heads off at the Dem Party to get a spine and stand up to the Right, at first Washington Dems either ignored us or ran away from us.

Dems in Washington are so insular they barely know what to make of demands from the grassroots. At first they seemed to think that if they ignored us, we would go away. Now some of them are catching on that we’re not going away, and they’re becoming more responsive. But conventional wisdom tells the Dems to stick with the Clinton triangulation approach, because we liberal activists have burned the party before, in the 1960s and 1970s.

There’s a lot of distrust and estrangement here. We liberals of the base don’t trust the party to work for our issues, but the party doesn’t trust us, either.

Some progressives argue in favor of a third party. The Dems, they say, are hopeless. Why work to elect them when they’re going to let us down, as they have in the past? This argument suffers from two fatal flaws. First, since the emergence of the first “third” party in the early nineteenth century, in national campaigns third parties at best have been spoilers. This has to do with the way we run elections in the U.S. and is not going to change no matter how sincere and earnest we are.

But the other flaw is even more fatal: Until we heal our toxic political culture, and until we liberals and progressives pull together to create a unified coalition with infrastructure to rival the Right’s — any third party we create will end up being just like the Dems.

The national Democratic Party came to be the way it is in response to the nation’s political environment, which has been so fouled by the Right that real political debate and discourse are damn near impossible. And it came to be the way it is because no coalition of citizens and interest groups support it and defend it, the way the New Deal coalition supported the Democrats from the 1930s until the 1960s. Instead, our myriad single-issue advocacy groups hang back until an election is looming, then issue endorsements. Like anyone cares. And the rest of us tend to focus on favorite issues and candidates, as Dionne says.

I cannot emphasize enough that the Democrats in Washington won’t change until we change. That’s the whole point of the netroots uprising, and I believe we’re having an effect.

Those who advocate abandoning the Dems for a third party are thinking too small. They are looking for the Magic Candidate who will get elected and go to Washington and make it all better. But this ignores how Congress works and how agendas are set in Washington; in fact, individual politicians are only as strong as their parties. Going the third-party route, IMO, would make progressives even more marginalized than we already are.

This is a feeble analogy, but let’s say you have a big aquarium, but your fish are sick and dying because there is something wrong with the aquarium environment. There’s not much point in replacing dead fish with new ones if you don’t fix what’s wrong with the aquarium.

Healing the political environment is not going to be easy. Media reform, which I’ve ranted about in the past, is critical. But I’ve got a couple of other ideas.

First, we absolutely must re-build a strong and broad coalition that will work together to support the Democratic Party and liberal/progressive politicians and issues all the time; not just when elections are looming. This coalition will not necessarily look like the New Deal coalition. It would include unions and minorities, but it should strive to include small business owners, who have been pretty much shafted by the Bush Administration, and workers, and not just workers who belong to unions. Everyone who lives on a paycheck and hopes to retire with a pension or 401K is being hurt by Republican policies these days. Retirees, also, should be our natural partners.

The single-issue advocates should think hard about whether it’s in the best interests of their causes to put all their effort into maintaining big nonprofit organizations that can’t actually do much but make noise, or instead work together through the Democratic Party. I say that if the advocates — for the environment, reproductive rights, civil rights, health care, etc. — could pull together and focus their efforts on strengthening and influencing a single political party, eventually they could have the power to effect real policy changes instead of settling for tweaks. Or, as in recent years, just trying to blunt the damage being done by Republicans.

As commenter JHB pointed out, 1970s-era changes in campaign finance law, which were supposed to make campaigns more democratic, had the effect of empowering pro-big corporation PACs and gave rise to single-issue groups pretending to be bipartisan, but who demagogue on one or two inflammatory issues to help Republicans get elected. It seems every time campaign finance gets “reformed,” new sets of problems arise. And, oddly enough, those problems tend to help the Republicans and hurt the Dems. I am more and more convinced that public finance of campaigns is the way to go. But if we can’t get public financing, we must fight any “reform” that would hinder our efforts at coalition building.

In short, liberals and progressives must completely re-think our way of doing political business. All the time. Not just the way we run election campaigns.

My advice for the Washington Democrats is to figure out who they are in their own right, and stop allowing themselves to be defined by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Dems are so cowed they’ve come to believe rightie revisionist history — that the Democratic Party destroyed itself by their mushiness on foreign policy and association with 1960s hippies and radicals. And that the only way they can prove themselves to be worthy is to be like Republicans. Bleep that. I spent the last two posts explaining why the GOP version of Democratic Party history is bogus. Further, I sincerely believe a majority of voters are sick to death of the Republicans’ act and would respond well to something else.

In the last post I said Dems should “reconnect to the best of the core principles that made the party strong in the past and reaffirm those principles in the present.” Take, for example, this passage from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address:

For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

    Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
    Jobs for those who can work.
    Security for those who need it.
    The ending of special privilege for the few.
    The preservation of civil liberties for all.
    The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

Whenever the Republicans go off on tangents about saving endangered stem cells or starting more wars in lieu of an actual foreign policy, Dems should be saying, look, here are the basic things government should be doing, along with national defense and homeland security, and government controlled by Republicans isn’t doing any of them. Instead, we’ve been distracted by fringe issues, most of which amount to government interfering with matters that people could better decide for themselves. Republicans believe in fairy tales — such as starting wars in the Middle East will spread democracy, or cutting taxes increases government revenue, or unregulated business and markets will improve everyone’s standard of living. None of these fairy tales have come true in the past, and they aren’t coming true now, yet Republicans still believe in them. If you’re tired of fairy tales and want government that works, government that does the job government is supposed to do, vote for Democrats.

Is that so hard?

How the Democrats Lost, Period

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This is a follow up to the last post, which reviews how the Right took the foreign policy issue away from the Left after World War II, as well as the “Don’t Blame McGovern,” “Hey, Hey, LBJ,” and “Countercultural” posts from last week. I’m afraid this post is long even by my standards, but there are a lot of pieces to be pulled together. Even this post is barely just an outline.

I’m walking through this old stuff because I think it’s important to clarify how the Democratic Party was eclipsed by the Republican Party, to the point that it went from being the dominant party to being the triangulation party. Today the Democrats have a big, fat opportunity to regain political momentum if they can present a clear alternative to the floundering Republicans. But the Democratic Party has been stumbling along for years with no clear self-identity. Emptied of cohesion and purpose, at times the party has seemed little more than a catch-all receptacle for politicians who are not Republicans, exactly.

For years Conventional Wisdom has said that the Democratic Party crashed in the 1960s and 1970s because Democrats were opposed to the war in Vietnam. And ever since, says the CW, voters just haven’t trusted Dems to handle foreign policy. Now the Lamont Insurgency and other signs of uppitiness among the Dems has the punditocracy wagging its fingers and warning of the dire consequences of “McGovernism.”

I’ve already argued in the previously cited posts that the “McGovernism” charge is bogus. But I think that before the Dem Party can find itself again it needs to clearly understand what did strip the party of its soul. Then, perhaps, the Dems can reconnect to the best of the core principles that made the party strong in the past and reaffirm those principles in the present.

Essentially, what happened in the 1960s and 1970s was that the New Deal coalition came apart, and no new coalition stepped in to take its place. What was the New Deal coalition? From Wikipedia:

The 1932 election brought about a major realignment in political party affiliation, and is widely considered to be a realigning election, though some scholars point to the off-year election of 1934. Franklin Delano Roosevelt set up his New Deal and was able to forge a coalition of Big City machines, labor unions, liberals, ethnic and racial minorities (especially Catholics, Jews and African Americans), and Southern whites. These disparate voting blocs together formed a large minority of voters and handed the Democratic Party seven victories out of nine presidential elections, as well as control of both houses of Congress during much of this time.

A great many factors eroded the coalition, and Vietnam was one of those factors. Other factors included the decline of the city machines and the decreasing influence of labor unions. But I think if there was one factor that stood out from the rest, it was not Vietnam. It was race.

From the end of Reconstruction (ca. 1877) to the mid-twentieth century, southern whites were Democrats. Although Franklin Roosevelt pushed the Democratic Party overall in a more liberal direction, he compromised with southern white supremacists to get his programs passed in Congress.

1948 saw a prequel of party divisions to come: In January President Harry Truman integrated the military by executive order, and that summer at the Dems’ national convention Hubert Humphrey urged the Dems to add an anti-segregation plank to the party platform. Humphrey’s speech so inflamed some southern delegates that they walked out. After Truman’s endorsement of and the party’s adoption of the anti-segregation plan, some of the southern Dems split off and formed the Dixiecrat Party, which nominated Strom Thurmond for president. On election day the Dixiecrats won in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina.

On the other hand, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision got a tepid response from both parties. Racial issues played little part in the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns of Adlai Stephenson and Dwight Eisenhower. The Dixiecrats returned to the Democratic fold, for a time. National politicians tried to ignore the Civil Rights movement, although in 1957 circumstances (i.e., Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus) forced Republican President Eisenhower to send the 101st Airborne Division to protect African American students attempting to attend a newly integrated high school in Little Rock. In the late 1950s Congress went through the motions of addressing racial issues by passing some toothless civil rights laws. The essential point, however, is that neither national party was closely associated with desegregation in most peoples’ minds in the 1950s.

But in 1960, when Martin Luther King was sentenced to a four-month prison term in Georgia, presidential candidate John Kennedy called Coretta Scott King to express sympathy. That may not seem extraordinary now, but in 1960 it was a major breakthrough. As president, Kennedy expressed support for the Freedom Marchers and introduced the bill that would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Again, Kennedy’s contributions to racial equality were small, but they encouraged Democrats outside the South to more openly support civil rights.

President Lyndon Johnson kicked Democratic Party support for racial equality to new levels. Overall, Johnson’s record as a champion of civil rights is, um, mixed. But IMO Johnson’s Great Society program was at least as big a watershed moment for the Democratic Party as Vietnam, if not bigger. The Great Society was wildly unpopular among white Americans. In their minds, it amounted to taking tax money from whites and giving it to blacks. (Remember, as I explained here, entitlement programs were fine with the white folks in earlier times, when it was understood whites were the principal beneficiaries.)

It was the Great Society that popularized the myth of the tax-and-spend liberals, IMO. The Right may have said the same thing about FDR and the New Deal, but the New Deal was popular. The Great Society wasn’t. In fact, Johnson was reluctant to raise taxes. But in 1967 Johnson’s economic advisers persuaded him that taxes had to be raised to pay for Vietnam, and he struggled for most of the rest of his administration to shove a short-term tax surcharge through Congress. Republican politicians successfully coupled the tax surcharge with welfare programs in white voters’ minds, forming the basis of the “tax-and-spend” charge embedded in the public mind for the past forty years.

I bump into people today who think the definition of liberal is “someone who wants to raise your taxes and increase government spending.” See also this Heritage Foundation commentary claiming our current Congress’s reckless spending means it is turning “left,” never mind that the money is being drizzled away on war and pork, not expanded social programs. Today spending alone is what defines “left,” not the purpose of the spending. The fact is that Republican Administrations over the past 25 years have run bigger deficits and spent more as a percentage of GDP than the Democratic Administration. Yet you still hear “pundits” claim that Democrats spend more.

Back to civil rights — in the 1960s, as the national Democratic Party became associated with civil rights and racial equality, the old Dixiecrats bolted the Democratic Party and became Republican. Thus it was that “solid south” went from being solid Democrat to solid Republican. There is more background on the significance of the Dixiecrat Revolt here. See also this Wikipedia article about Richard Nixon and the Southern Strategy.

But also in the 1960s the issue of race became subliminal. It was no longer socially acceptable (accept on a local level) for white politicians to openly advocate white supremacy. Even Strom Thurmond toned down his rhetoric. George Wallace may have been the last prominent politician to wage an openly racist campaign to run for national office. For this reason the impact of race on politics in the 1960s and 1970s might not be obvious today to someone studying the speeches and editorials of those years. For example, as I explained in the “McGovern” post, most of the first half of Richard Nixon’s 1972 nomination acceptance speech amounted to an appeal to white racist voters, even though Nixon didn’t use the words race (except in the context of arms race), racial, equality, integration, or other words directly associated with racial issues. Believe me, everyone listening at the time knew exactly what he meant.

What about the New Left? As explained in this essay (scroll down to the American History subhead; emphasis added):

Liberalism in the Truman era seemed to be simple self-interest to most families who benefited from the G.I. bill and veterans’ mortgages. Campaigning in 1948 on the slogan “All I ask you to do is vote for yourself, vote for your family,” Harry S. Truman not only defeated challenges from his left and right, but triumphed despite drawing only limited support from the top tiers as measured by wealth, education, or occupation.

New Deal liberalism’s final political victory came in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson once again defeated Hoover’s ghost in the form of the outspoken economic libertarian Barry Goldwater. Johnson went on, in effect, to complete much of the New Deal’s agenda by expanding its social and health benefits for the poor, the elderly, and African-Americans who had earlier been ignored. …

… By the middle of the decade, New Deal liberalism was in retreat, routed initially not so much by its conservative opponents as by new forms of liberalism, which had emerged in response to the cataclysms of those years. In the next quarter century, its reputation declined until in the 1988 presidential race “liberal” became the “L word,” an epithet.

New issues, such as racial justice and the misuse of a now powerful presidency to fight a morally untenable war in Vietnam, destroyed the New Deal political coalition. At the same time a renewed fear of government as a threat to individual moral autonomy, defined in terms not of property but of lifestyle, undermined the social and cultural assumptions of the New Deal’s mild collectivism and authoritative institutions. Both civil rights and lifestyle liberalism were moral critiques of meat-and-potatoes majoritarianism and both pursued their goals through the courts, the “undemocratic” branch of government the New Deal had, in large measure, defined itself against.

The legacy of the New Left was that liberalism in America splintered. “Identity politics” and single-issue advocacy groups have been the main focus of American liberalism since the 1970s. This may have been therapeutic, but it’s way ineffective. And as the Left came apart, the Right got its act together. During the 1970s a number of wealthy conservatives began to build the media and political infrastructures that dominate U.S. politics today. Kevin Baker’s “Stabbed in the Back!” article discussed in the last post explains how Nixon expanded his campaign against the antiwar movement and counterculture into permanent cultural war.

This takes us to Ronald Reagan, who was still pandering to racism with his “welfare queen” remarks in 1980. Reagan was brilliant at playing the role of a strong, big-hearted representative of the common man while appealing to the meanest instincts and prejudices of voters. As explained in this Wikipedia article, by Reagan’s time white working-class voters no longer saw the Democrats as champions of middle-class issues and aspirations, as they had during the heyday of the New Deal coalition. (Note: I disagree with Wikipedia that these same voters saw “gains” during the Reagan Administration; I remember just the opposite. But that’s another post, maybe.) Working class whites came to believe Dems were working only to benefit other people, who happened (ah-HEM) to be black. See also this article by William Schneider in the July, 1992 Atlantic Monthly. Writing about the 1992 election campaigns, Schneider wrote,

Democrats have been talking about “the forgotten middle class,” and for good reason. For the past twenty-five years the Democrats have forgotten the middle class. And they have paid dearly.

One could debate whether the Dems actually forgot the middle class, or whether they were only perceived to have forgotten the middle class. But the damage was done. The Republican Party had become the party of both Big Money and the working class it exploits. The Democrats had become the party of … who, exactly?

OK, this post is already too long. If you’ve read this far … bless you. I’ll finish in another post.

How the Democrats Lost Their Spines

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E.J. Dionne writes in today’s Washington Post that “The Democratic Party has a self-image problem.”

Talk to Democrats at every level about the strong position the party is in for this fall’s elections and the conversation inevitably ends with a variation of: “Yeah, if we don’t blow it.” Karl Rove’s greatest victory is how much he has spooked Democrats about themselves.

From there Dionne discusses Democrats and fundraising, but I want to dwell longer on the “self-image problem.” The fact is that the self-image problem didn’t start with Karl; the Dems have had a self-image problem for many years. Karl is brilliant at exploiting it, but he didn’t create it.

Conventional wisdom says that the Dems lost their edge as a party because they went all mushy on foreign policy. Peter Beinart certainly has bought this view:

When John Kerry lost in 2004, I started in my despair reading about the late 1940s, the first years of the Cold War. That was the last time America entered a new era in national security. It started very fast in 1945 and 1946. And it was the last period where the country trusted liberals and Democrats to defend it.

As Will Marshall has pointed out, if you look at all presidential elections since the Vietnam War, the disturbing reality is the Democratic Party has only won in those moments when the country turned inward. Carter won in 1976, when the country turned inward after Vietnam. It was the first election since 1948 when national security was not the issue that people told pollsters they were most concerned about. Then Clinton won in 1992, in the aftermath of the Cold War.

The truth is this: Unless the Democratic Party can change its image on national security, its only realistic hope of winning the White House is the hope that the war on terrorism is a passing phenomenon that will be over in a few years.

There’s some truth to what Beinart says, but it’s not the whole picture. Last week I took apart the conventional wisdom that says George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon by a landslide in 1972 because McGovern was anti-war. As I explained, opposition to the war was possibly one of the least important factors in McGovern’s defeat. The same conventional wisdom says that it is the Dems’ delicate sensibilities about war and the military, and their Neville Chamberlain-like tendencies to appease enemies rather than confront them, that gave Republicans the edge in foreign policy issues ever since. And this, “pundits” like Beinart propose, is why voters flock to Republicans whenever national security is a prominent issue. And it’s why, other “pundits” declare, the Dems must avoid association with antiwar types if they expect to win elections.

As Beinart says, the Narrative that Dems are soft on security goes back to the late 1940s and the beginning of the Cold War. But isn’t it odd that, so soon after World War II, Democrats were under fire for being soft? After all, two Democratic Presidents had just led the nation through World War II. And before WWII, it was right-wing isolationists who wanted to ignore or appease Hitler, while Franklin Roosevelt argued that Hitler was a threat who must be confronted. (There are echoes of this old argument in today’s paleoconservative revisionist history that the war in Europe was unnecessary and that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance and didn’t stop it.)

The notion that Republicans are, somehow, traditionally the party of war and Democrats the party of wusses seems particularly odd when you consider that Poppy Bush (41) was the first Republican president to take the nation into a war worthy of the name since William McKinley . Except for the Gulf War, the big wars of the 20th century — World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam — were joined under the leadership of Democratic presidents — Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson.

In fact, when I was a child the old folks often said that Democrats liked to start wars because wars are good for the economy. I haven’t heard that one in a while.

To understand how Dems went from being warriors to wusses, you must understand how Republicans went from isolationism to imperialism. For background, I urge you to read “Stabbed in the Back!” by Kevin Baker in the June issue of Harper’s. A snip:

In the years immediately following World War II, the American right was facing oblivion. Domestically, the reforms of the New Deal had been largely embraced by the American people. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations—supported by many liberal Republicans—had led the nation successfully through the worst war in human history, and we had emerged as the most powerful nation on earth.

Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow liberal internationalists had sounded the first alarms about Hitler, but conservatives had stubbornly—even suicidally—maintained their isolationism right into the postwar era. Senator Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” and the right’s enduring presidential hope, had not only been a prominent member of the leading isolationist organization, America First, and opposed the nation’s first peacetime draft in 1940, but also appeared to be as naive about the Soviet Union as he had been about the Axis powers. Like many on the right, he was much more concerned about Chiang Kai-shek’s worm-eaten Nationalist regime in China than U.S. allies in Europe. “The whole Atlantic Pact, certainly the arming of Germany, is an incentive for Russia to enter the war before the army is built up,” Taft warned. He was against any U.S. military presence in Europe even in 1951.

Of course, by 1951 Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s “red scare” campaign was in full swing, and McCarthy ranted about the Soviets often enough. But Baker argues persuasively that in the postwar years Republicans saved themselves from irrelevancy by propagating the myth of Yalta. The Yalta agreements forged by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in 1945 met with widespread approval at first. But then along came Alger Hiss, who had been a junior member of the U.S. delegation at Yalta. Accusations that he was a Soviet spy first emerged about eight months later —

[T]he exposure of Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent followed, in relatively rapid succession, by the fall of Czechoslovakia’s coalition government to a Soviet-backed coup, the Soviet attainment of an atomic bomb, and the victory of Mao’s Communists over Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang regime in China, cast the entire policy of containment into doubt. Never mind that the right’s own feckless or muddled proposals for fighting the Cold War would not have ameliorated any of these situations. The right swept them into the memory hole and offered a new answer to Americans bewildered by how suddenly their nation’s global preeminence had been diminished: Yalta.

A growing chorus of right-wing voices now began to excoriate our wartime diplomacy. Their most powerful charge, one that would firmly establish the Yalta myth in the American political psyche, was the accusation that our delegation had given over Eastern Europe to the Soviets. According to “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace,” an essay written for Life magazine shortly before the 1948 election by William Bullitt—a former diplomat who had been dismissed by Roosevelt for outing a gay rival in the State Department—FDR and his chief adviser, Harry Hopkins, were guilty of “wishful appeasement” of Stalin at Yalta, handing the peoples of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states over to the Soviet dictator.

The Right became obsessed with the notion that Hiss had somehow manipulated the conference so that the agreements would favor Stalin. Exactly how a young junior delegate accomplished this feat was never clear, and although righties persist in calling Hiss a spy he was never, in fact, convicted of espionage, but of perjury. And Baker argues that a close look at the Yalta negotiations reveals the myths about Hiss to be absurd. No matter; Yalta became a symbol for perfidy and weak-kneed appeasement on the part of Democrats. From there the Republican Party launched a full-court-press campaign — a “compilation of hysterical charges and bald-faced lies,” Baker writes — against the “weakness” of Democratic foreign policy. Events such as Truman’s dismissal of General MacArthur became new chapters in the Narrative of the Spineless Democrats — charges that fall apart under even moderately casual scrutiny, but which took hold in the American public conscious nonetheless.

The charge from the Right that traitors in the State Department “lost” China to Mao — as if it had been theirs to lose, and the people of China had nothing to do with it — led to a purge of Asia experts. This purge had serious consequences; Henry C K Liu wrote for Asia Times:

Robert McNamara, defense secretary under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, attributed the Vietnam debacle to the thorough purge of China experts by McCarthyism. He wrote, “The irony of this gap – Asian experts – was that it existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the State Department – John Patton Davies Jr, John Stewart Service and John Carter Vincent – had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we – certainly I – badly misread China’s objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony.”

And by the 1960s the old charge about “losing” China had taken a toll — “Democrats in particular, like Kennedy and Johnson, feared a right-wing backlash should they give up the fight; they remembered vividly the accusatory tone of the Republicans’ 1950 question, ‘Who lost China?'” Andrew J. Rotter wrote.

So Johnson made the catastrophically bad decision to send combat troops to Vietnam. The war was such a disaster that Johnson chose not to run for a second term in 1968 (as had Truman, because of MacArthur and Korea, in 1952). In the Humphrey-Nixon campaign it seems to me that Nixon was the “peace” candidate, since he was the candidate who promised to end the war. Yet somehow Democratic defeats in 1968 and 1972 are attributed to Democrats taking an antiwar position.

Baker discusses the way the Right “processed” Vietnam at some length. It was, he says, a war the Right had been clamoring for. When it went sour, the Right did not admit that the war in Vietnam had been, fundamentally, a bad idea. Instead, the Nixon Administration and the Republican establishment successfully turned the antiwar movement and “liberal elites” into scapegoats. The antiwar protesters were traitors who were aiding the enemy. That Nixon made this charge stick at the same time he was stumbling around looking for a way out of Vietnam is a testament to his political genius.

Baker also argues that Nixon escalated the Right’s foreign policy campaign into permanent cultural war. Which takes us to our current problem —

On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan’s mythical “welfare queens” through George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals”; from Lee Atwater’s characterization of Democrats as anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and “out of the mainstream,” the entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam. Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies—from the “gay agenda,” to the advocates of Darwinism, to the “war against Christmas” last year.

This has become such an ingrained part of the right wing’s belief system that the Bush Administration has now become the first government in our nation’s history to fight a major war without seeking any sort of national solidarity. Far from it. The whole purpose of the war in Iraq—and the “war on terrorism”—seems to have been to foment division and to win elections by forcing Americans to choose between starkly different visions of what their country should be.

Again, I urge you to read the entire Baker article, because it is excellent, and because it puts our current political mess in an entirely different light.

I’m planning another post to tie together Baker’s article with some ideas in my “Don’t Blame McGovern” post from last week to say more about the Democrats’ self-identity problem. I hope to have that post published by tomorrow. Maybe this evening.

Countercultural

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[Update: If you’re here ’cause Susie sent you, you probably want this link.]

A follow up on this morning’s history post —Eric Alterman writes,

The punditocracy argument about 1972, while dead wrong about McGovern himself, who was a brave, patriotic World War II hero form the South Dakota, has some validity, given whom he was perceived by voters to represent. The first serious historical research I ever did was when I was researching my honors thesis as an undergraduate. I wanted to study the origins of neoconservatism, the Six Day War, and Vietnam—this was back in 1981—and my adviser, Walter LaFeber—insisted that I learn a little context first by examining the attitudes of the entire country to the war and the antiwar movement. I poured over the polling data and found to my surprise, that in many ways, the antiwar movement was counterproductive. Many Americans didn’t like the war but they really hated the counterculture. If supporting Nixon was a way to get back at the hippies and protesters and rioters, they were willing to do it, even if it meant extending a war they thought to be already lost.

This is true, and I’ve said the same thing many times. And every time I say this somebody tells me I’m crazy. “The Vietnam War ended, didn’t it? That must mean the antiwar movement was effective.” Hardly. History always looks simpler when you view it from a distance, but at the time it’s generally complicated and messy.

Now look at today. In the first place, as I keep saying, remember this is Connecticut. It’s blue, antiwar state. It’s not the whole damn country. But second, look at the context for God’s sake. There’s no antiwar movement to speak of, no riots, no marches, no one is burning their draft cards, preaching free love, wiping themselves with the flag, bussing your kids to ghetto schools or vice-versa, taking away your jobs, raising your taxes to give the money to rioting race-baiting Black Panthers, etc.

Exactly. Instead you’ve got mostly middle-class citizens in khakis who give a damn about America and think the ship of state is being steered the wrong way — a view shared by a whopping majority of Americans.

The only Abbie Hoffman/Jerry Rubin types are on the right and when they’re not hosting Fox News programs, they are being called “brilliant” by Chris Matthews on MSNBC. So the upshot we are left with is that Connecticut Democrats picked a candidate whose positions are consistent with the majority and rejected one whose are not. And yet that, we are told is somehow the “elitist” position that will destroy the Democrats with a public that largely agrees with them. In other words, the analogy fails completely upon the slightest scrutiny.

Exactly.

Also, the Anonymous Liberal has a history post up at Unclaimed Territory. And thanks to commenter dday for recommending this article on McGovern in The American Conservative magazine, believe it or not. It’s worth a look.

Don’t Blame McGovern

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Jacob Weisberg writes in Slate,

Political analysts tend to overinterpret the results of isolated elections. But you can hardly read too much into Ned Lamont’s defeat of Joe Lieberman in Connecticut’s Aug. 8 primary. This is a signal event that will have a huge and lasting negative impact on the Democratic Party. The result suggests that instead of capitalizing on the massive failures of the Bush administration, Democrats are poised to re-enact a version of the Vietnam-era drama that helped them lose five out six presidential elections between 1968 and the end of the Cold War.

And David Espo of the Associated Press writes:

The challenge for Democrats is that Republicans already are pointing to the anti-war activists who flocked to Lamont, and their penchant for edgy political tactics, as evidence that Democrats can’t be trusted with the nation’s security.

“We’ll soon find out just how significant this election is, but it’s a problem for Democrats long-term,” the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said after Lamont had won.

“The McGovern wing of the Democrat party seems to have forgotten that we’ve been on offense for the last five years and that’s why we haven’t been attacked here at home.” …

… “Republicans are anxious to say the left wing is taking over, the antisecurity wing” of the Democratic Party, the three-term senator [Lieberman] said recently, not exactly rebutting the claim as he repeated it.

[Update: See also Mike Allen’s absurd commentary in Time.]

Let’s dissect this “McGovern / antisecurity” nonsense. First, George McGovern was not opposed to national security; he was opposed to the bleeping war in Vietnam. During World War II McGovern “flew 35 combat missions as a B-24 bomber pilot in Europe, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross,” says this web site from his alma mater, Dakota Wesleyan University. This suggests to me that he supported national security. But the war in Vietnam wasn’t making us safer from anyone; it was pure folly. Like Iraq.

Second, the Democratic Party didn’t falter because of opposition to Vietnam. I realize The Story we’re supposed to believe is that in 1972 people voted for Nixon because he was strong on national security and pro-war, while McGovern was a sock who wanted to turn the keys to Washington over to Chairman Mao. But this is not an accurate picture of the time.

The bare facts are that, as I wrote here, by 1972 at least 60 percent of the public thought the war in Vietnam was a mistake. While a minority of the public remained hawkish, and the Nixon Administration continued military action, the Nixon Administration was not promising to “stay the course.” Indeed, President Nixon kept promising the American people he was looking for a way out.

The 1972 election was not a simple referendum for or against the war in Vietnam Vietnam. Note these items from this timeline:

  • January 25, 1972 – President Nixon announces a proposed eight point peace plan for Vietnam and also reveals that Kissinger has been secretly negotiating with the North Vietnamese. However, Hanoi rejects Nixon’s peace overture.

  • February 21-28, 1972 – President Nixon visits China and meets with Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai to forge new diplomatic relations with the Communist nation.

  • May 15, 1972 – The headquarters for the U.S. Army in Vietnam is decommissioned.

  • August 23, 1972 – The last U.S. combat troops depart Vietnam.

  • October 8, 1972 – The long-standing diplomatic stalemate between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho finally ends as both sides agree to major concessions. The U.S. will allow North Vietnamese troops already in South Vietnam to remain there, while North Vietnam drops its demand for the removal of South Vietnam’s President Thieu and the dissolution of his government.
    Although Kissinger’s staff members privately express concerns over allowing NVA troops to remain in the South, Kissinger rebuffs them, saying, “I want to end this war before the election.”

  • October 24, 1972 – President Thieu publicly denounces Kissinger’s peace proposal.

  • October 26, 1972 – Radio Hanoi reveals terms of the peace proposal and accuses the U.S. of attempting to sabotage the settlement. At the White House, now a week before the presidential election, Henry Kissinger holds a press briefing and declares “We believe that peace is at hand. We believe that an agreement is in sight.”

  • November 7, 1972 – Richard M. Nixon wins the presidential election in the biggest landslide to date in U.S. history.

  • November 30, 1972 – American troop withdrawal from Vietnam is completed, although there are still 16,000 Army advisors and administrators remaining to assist South Vietnam’s military forces.

The fact is that the contest in 1972 was not between a hawk and a dove, but between a dove (you could argue Nixon was a hawk in dove’s feathers) trying to save face through a peace agreement and a dove who said, the hell with saving face; let’s just get out. I strongly suspect that if Nixon in 1972 were acting the way President Bush is now — in denial about the scope of the disaster, and with no plan other than “stay the course” — the 1972 elections could have gone the other way.

You want to know what the 1972 elections really were about? Check out Richard Nixon’s 1972 Republican Convention acceptance speech.

The first issue Nixon launched into was not Vietnam, but quotas. He was speaking out against Affirmative Action. He spoke of “millions who have been driven out of their home in the Democratic Party” — this was a nod to the old white supremacist Dixiecrats who were leaving the Democratic Party because of its stand in favor of civil rights (the famous Southern Strategy). McGovern had proposed a guaranteed minimum income for the nation’s poor that was widely regarded as radical and flaky and (in popular lore) amounted to taking tax money away from white people and giving it to blacks. Nixon warned that McGovern’s policies would raise taxes and also add millions of people to welfare roles — another racially charged issue. Then Nixon took on one of his favorite issues, crime. If you remember those years you’ll remember that Nixon was always going on about “lawnorder.” This was another issue with racial overtones, but it was also a swipe at the “permissiveness” of the counterculture and the more violent segments of the antiwar and Black Power movements.

Finally, toward the end, he addressed Vietnam:

Peace is too important for partisanship. There have been five Presidents in my political lifetime–Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.

They had differences on some issues, but they were united in their belief that where the security of America or the peace of the world is involved we are not Republicans, we are not Democrats. We are Americans, first, last, and always.

These five Presidents were united in their total opposition to isolation for America and in their belief that the interests of the United States and the interests of world peace require that America be strong enough and intelligent enough to assume the responsibilities of leadership in the world.

They were united in the conviction that the United States should have a defense second to none in the world.

They were all men who hated war and were dedicated to peace.

But not one of these five men, and no President in our history, believed that America should ask an enemy for peace on terms that would betray our allies and destroy respect for the United States all over the world.
As your President, I pledge that I shall always uphold that proud bipartisan tradition. Standing in this Convention Hall 4 years ago, I pledged to seek an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. We have made great progress toward that end. We have brought over half a million men home, and more will be coming home. We have ended America’s ground combat role. No draftees are being sent to Vietnam. We have reduced our casualties by 98 percent. We have gone the extra mile, in fact we have gone tens of thousands of miles trying to seek a negotiated settlement of the war. We have offered a cease-fire, a total withdrawal of all American forces, an exchange of all prisoners of war, internationally supervised free elections with the Communists participating in the elections and in the supervision.

Not exactly “stay the course,” is it? And Nixon doesn’t argue that McGovern’s withdrawal proposal amounted to being weak on national security. Instead, he argued that it would be ignoble and a betrayal of our allies: “[I]t will discourage our friends abroad and it will encourage our enemies to engage in aggression.”

The charge that McGovern is weak on national security comes at the very end. McGovern proposed “massive cuts in our defense budget which would have the inevitable effect of making the United States the second strongest nation in the world,” Nixon said. He didn’t have to explain that the “first strongest nation”would have been our long-time nemesis, the Soviet Union.

Still, you’d think that, as unpopular as the Vietnam War was, and as unlikeable as Nixon and Agnew were, McGovern would have done better. But there were other factors at work.

First, George McGovern was not the candidate the Democratic Party establishment wanted to run. As explained in more detail in this article, in 1972 primaries had just begun to eclipse smoke-filled rooms in the nominating process. Because he had alienated many powerful Democrats during his nomination bid, McGovern received only tepid support from the Democratic Party itself during his general election campaign. Then McGovern’s original running mate, Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, was found to be difficult (officially it was announced Eagleton had a history of mental illness; rumors in Missouri said Eagleton was an alcoholic) and so he was replaced with Sargent Shriver. People around the nation wrote McGovern off as a flake after that. Nixon was creepy, but in many ways he had been an effective president. Nixon won re-election partly on the “devil you know” factor.

As I wrote here, during this Vietnam era the old New Deal coalition fell apart, but not primarily because of the war. Instead, it crumbled because it could not accommodate the social and cultural challenges of the times. I call your attention to another essay by Fred Siegel (scroll down to the American History subhead; emphasis added):

Liberalism in the Truman era seemed to be simple self-interest to most families who benefited from the G.I. bill and veterans’ mortgages. Campaigning in 1948 on the slogan “All I ask you to do is vote for yourself, vote for your family,” Harry S. Truman not only defeated challenges from his left and right, but triumphed despite drawing only limited support from the top tiers as measured by wealth, education, or occupation.

New Deal liberalism’s final political victory came in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson once again defeated Hoover’s ghost in the form of the outspoken economic libertarian Barry Goldwater. Johnson went on, in effect, to complete much of the New Deal’s agenda by expanding its social and health benefits for the poor, the elderly, and African-Americans who had earlier been ignored. …

… By the middle of the decade, New Deal liberalism was in retreat, routed initially not so much by its conservative opponents as by new forms of liberalism, which had emerged in response to the cataclysms of those years. In the next quarter century, its reputation declined until in the 1988 presidential race “liberal” became the “L word,” an epithet.

New issues, such as racial justice and the misuse of a now powerful presidency to fight a morally untenable war in Vietnam, destroyed the New Deal political coalition. At the same time a renewed fear of government as a threat to individual moral autonomy, defined in terms not of property but of lifestyle, undermined the social and cultural assumptions of the New Deal’s mild collectivism and authoritative institutions. Both civil rights and lifestyle liberalism were moral critiques of meat-and-potatoes majoritarianism and both pursued their goals through the courts, the “undemocratic” branch of government the New Deal had, in large measure, defined itself against.

The original FDR-era New Deal discriminated against blacks. This was largely because FDR had to cut deals with the southern Democrats to get his programs through Congress. Fact is, “entitlement” programs were very popular through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s until they were expanded to include African Americans. By the 1960s many of the same white Americans who had benefited from the New Deal, the GI Bill, and postwar housing and mortgage subsidy programs suddenly decided that such programs encouraged people to be lazy and dependent on government. Race was the elephant in the living room of American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Although prominent politicians rarely gave explicitly racist messages, racism screamed loudly and clearly between the lines. Nixon’s acceptance speech is a good example.

Back to Siegel:

New Deal liberalism had been erected on the understanding that it was the job of government to protect the virtuous people from the rapacious interests. But, asked the new politics liberals of the 1960s, what if the people themselves were corrupted by materialism, imperialism, racial bigotry, and a variety of other malignancies? Their answer, inspired in large measure by the civil rights movement, was to return to a pre-New Deal definition of democracy based largely on court-generated rights. Denuded of its democratic drive, liberalism had become minoritarian.

Beginning with Richard Nixon, the Republicans picked up the “common man” theme and ran with it to victories in five of six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988. Where FDR had spoken of the “forgotten man,” Republicans like Nixon and Ronald Reagan spoke of the “silent majority” imperiled by crime and court-ordered “social engineering.” Conservatives played on the opposition to social policies like busing for racial integration to argue that government, not big business, was the great danger to the average American. By the 1988 presidential election, twice as many voters defined themselves as conservatives than as liberals. Liberals, members of the party of court-protected minorities, had themselves become a minority.

It was the move away from democratic progressivism and toward “identity politics” that rendered the Democratic Party a shell of its former self, IMO. Consider the 1972 Democratic Convention, in which fights over the party’s platform dominated the floor on the night nominee McGovern was supposed to give his speech. Television viewers saw angry black and feminist delegates in heated argument with labor and party regulars; McGovern didn’t give his speech until about 3 a.m. (A shame, because it was a good speech.) And this scared the bejeesus out of Mr. and Mrs. White Middle-Class American, who flocked to Nixon to protect them.

Meanwhile, as the Left came apart, the Right got its act together. During the 1970s a number of wealthy conservatives began to build the media and political infrastructures that dominate U.S. politics today. This was the beginning of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, in other words.

And that, boys and girls, is the true story behind The Story.

So while the Weisbergs and the Cokies and other pundits declare that the Democrats are repeating old mistakes, in most ways struggle within the party today is entirely different from what happened in 1972.

An editorial in yesterday’s New York Times called Tuesday’s Connecticut primary “revenge of the irate moderates.” (Emphasis added.)

The defeat of Senator Joseph Lieberman at the hands of a little-known Connecticut businessman is bound to send a message to politicians of both parties that voters are angry and frustrated over the war in Iraq. The primary upset was not, however, a rebellion against the bipartisanship and centrism that Mr. Lieberman said he represented in the Senate. Instead, Connecticut Democrats were reacting to the way those concepts have been perverted by the Bush White House. …

… Mr. Lieberman’s supporters have tried to depict Mr. Lamont and his backers as wild-eyed radicals who want to punish the senator for working with Republicans and to force the Democratic Party into a disastrous turn toward extremism. It’s hard to imagine Connecticut, which likes to be called the Land of Steady Habits, as an encampment of left-wing isolationists, and it’s hard to imagine Mr. Lamont, who worked happily with the Republicans in Greenwich politics, leading that kind of revolution.

The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president’s choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration’s contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.

Yet while all this has been happening, the political discussion in Washington has become a captive of the Bush agenda. Traditional beliefs like every person’s right to a day in court, or the conviction that America should not start wars it does not know how to win, wind up being portrayed as extreme. The middle becomes a place where senators struggle to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him. Attempting to regain the real center becomes a radical alternative.

Further, the “netroots” Left today is keenly interested in the “meat-and-potatoes” issues that the New Left dissed in 1972 — jobs, health care, pensions, and other policies that support the American middle class.

I say again, today’s political struggle bears little resemblance to the Vietnam era. It ain’t 1972 any more. We liberals and progressives must challenge The Story. We need to clarify what happened then, and we must not allow rightie propaganda to deter us from our purpose now.

I want to close by linking to this article written by George McGovern in April 2003, just a month into the disaster of Iraq. He saw more clearly than most exactly what was happening. McGovern is a good guy, and the way his name is evoked to call shame upon Democrats is a damn injustice.

See also: Digby.

UPDATE: More historical background by a diarist at Daily Kos. My one quibble is that I’m not sure how much the Democrats were seen to have embraced the counterculture in 1968, especially after the Grant Park, um, protests during the 1972 1968 Democratic Convention. Certainly by 1972 the counterculture and the Democrats seemed an old married couple to most of the public, even though the New Left and the old establishment Dems weren’t entirely on speaking terms. (Hat tip: Digby)