Category Archives: American History

Mooned

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Can you believe the moon walk was 40 years ago today? I think if I survive to the 50th anniversary of the moon walk I’m going to start to feel old.

In July 1969 I had just graduated high school and was taking a couple of summer classes at the local junior college. I remember watching the moon walk live on television, with Walter Cronkite providing the voice-over. Sweet.

I had forgotten about the moon conspiracy theories, that the moon walk was faked and filmed in some big movie lot in a western state somewhere. (Wasn’t there a movie about faking the moon landing? Oh, yes, Capricorn One.) I have a postulation that people believe absurd conspiracy stories because there’s something in the story they want to believe. I’d like to know if anyone ever did a social-psychological study of moon landing conspiracy theorists to determine why they wanted to believe such a thing.

I do dimly remember some grumbling about the costs of the Apollo missions, but I think most Americans were proud of and happy about landing on the moon. We thought it was just the beginning of glorious things. If someone had told us that 40 years later the moon landing would remain the pinnacle of manned space exploration, I don’t think we would have believed it. Even though the Vietnam War was going on hot and heavy at the time, the country today still seems so much smaller and shabbier and diminished from what it seemed in 1969.

The New Whigs?

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I started to write this as an update to the last post, but then decided it deserved its own post. Anyway, responding to a news headline about a split in the Republican Party, Michael Stickings argues that there is no split:

Powell and Ridge, along with McCain and other such renegades, will continue to garner the headlines, but, again, the Republican Party is Limbaugh’s party, the party of the right-wing base and its leadership both in Congress and elsewhere. There are moderate Republicans, to be sure, but they are now a decided minority in a party that has been shifting ever further rightward in recent years, notably in defeat after the ’06 and ’08 elections.

This is true, but I think this shows us the “split” already occurred. I would argue that the real split was in the 1970s, when the Goldwater/Reagan wing of the party ascended and began the process of casting out Rockefeller Republicans and more moderate Ford/Nixon Republicans.

There has been a hard, take-no-prisoners right wing in the GOP for a long time. I’ve read that when Dwight Eisenhower was nominated in 1952, conservatives at the convention (who supported Robert Taft Jr.) were so angry they spat on Eisenhower delegates. At the 1964 convention they booed Nelson Rockefeller off the podium and put nausea-producing drugs into the drinks of Rockefeller delegates. But until the late 1970s the whackjobs were the party fringe. Since taking over the party they have demanded absolute loyalty to their leaders and ideas — well, talking points, anyway — and demonized any faction of the party that didn’t march in step.

So the split is a fait accompli, the few lingering moderates notwithstanding. But now that their “ideas” have been found wanting, and most of the public is thoroughly sick of them and their bullying, fear-mongering brand of politics, the GOP has been so purged of any alternative factions that there are not enough contemporary Rockefeller or Eisenhower or even Nixon Republicans to step up and take over.

There’s an interesting example of what’s happened at the right-wing site American Power. The blogger writes of Colin Powell’s call for the party to be more inclusive — “his own personal history belies the notion that the GOP lacks inclusion or fails to provide opportunities for qualified minorities.” But then he adds, “Actually, it’s something of a shame for him to be getting into these debates at this point.” But he doesn’t say why it’s a shame. And then the commenters come along and say “Powell is irrelevant to Republicans and conservatives”: “I never understood the fuss about him”; “Colin Powell has no business in the Republican Party”; and “Colin Powell is a media whore.” So much for inclusion.

What the hard Right still has are the think tanks and media outlets, and they still have the big money from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Family foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family foundations and the Adolph Coors Foundation to underwrite the think tanks and media outlets and countless astroturf organizations. This will keep the current GOP alive, no matter if 99 percent of the voters turn against them and their regional clout shrinks to Mississippi.

If we assume that there will be two major parties, in the foreseeable future I don’t see a conservative-to-moderate-and-not-insane party rising up and taking over the niche the GOP used to fill. As many of you pointed out in comments recently, the conservative-to-moderate-and-not-insane politicians are Democrats now, albeit of the Blue Dog sort.

But let’s think about the more distant future. If there is to be a conservative-to-moderate political party that will organize to challenge the Dems, will that be a revitalized GOP, or will that be a new party? I think it could go either way, but it might actually be easier to form a whole new conservative-moderate party than to re-take the GOP from the crazies.

I’m guessing that if the Republicans have another losing election in 2010 — and I’m not making predictions, but right now that seems a good bet — surely a lot of the money currently propping up the GOP will move elsewhere. A whole new conservative party that doesn’t suffer from association with Bush/Gingrich/Limbaugh would be much more palatable to a broader swatch of voters, IMO, and might even siphon off the Blue Dogs from the Dems. Maybe they’ll even call themselves New Whigs.

Also — it’s Memorial Day. Here are some old Memorial Day posts from the Mahablog archives:

Memorial Day 2006

Memorial Day 2007

Memo to the Titanic

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Nate Silver has picked up on my generational political “imprinting” hypothesis, which says that at the point a new generation becomes old enough to be aware of politics, it is “imprinted” with whatever narrative is playing out in politics at the time. That imprinting carries with it political memes and values that will stick with most people of that generation the rest of their lives, no matter what.

My hypothesis was based on pure observation, but Nate, bless him, has real data. And he says that much voter behavior hinges on the question “Who was president when you turned 18?”

Nate has a chart that shows people who turned 18 during the Eisenhower and Reagan administrations are more likely to identify themselves as “Republican” than people who turned 18 during any other recent administration. And if this trend continues, the GOP had better be worried. The crop of young folks who turned 18 during the G.W. Bush administration is the least Republican generation ever.

Nate says this political partisan imprinting can be “quite persistent as the voter moves through her lifecourse.” In other words, once imprinted, the imprinting tends to stick, even if political reality changes. The imprinting going on now will impact politics for the next half century.

Heh.

Along the same lines, Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais write for the Los Angeles Times that “The Republican Party ignores young ‘millennials’ at its peril.”

The “millennials” — the generation of Americans born between 1982 and 2003 — now identify as Democrats by a ratio of 2 to 1. They are the first in four generations to contain more self-perceived liberals than conservatives. …

…Only 9% of millennials polled expressed a favorable opinion of the Republican Party. Only 7% were positive about the GOP’s congressional leaders. By contrast, 65% of millennials had a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, and a majority also approved of congressional Democrats.

The authors attribute this shift to how the millennials were raised, but I think the real difference is George W. Bush and the current Republican Party. These young folks came of age during a national train wreck.

For the first time in living memory, young people do not assume their lives will be as financially blessed as their parents were. Even those who go to college and who get “better” jobs spend much of their early adulthood paying off college loans instead of saving for the first house. “Job security” has become an oxymoron. Once they’re too old to be carried on their parents’ health insurance, vast numbers of young people are cut off from receiving medical care.

And the GOP is utterly oblivious to this. Republicans are not addressing these issues at all except to call for continuing the failed policies that created the current reality. This is not to say Democrats will do a better job of addressing these issues, but at least Democrats seem to have a clue.

Millennials tend to be more knowledgeable about environmental issues and more accepting that global climate change is real than previous generations. They also are less homophobic. The current GOP is laissez faire on economics and business, but authoritarian on social issues. But millennials tend to be laissez faire on social issues and want to see government play a more pro-active role in steering the economy. They feel locked out and want the nation’s wealth to be “redistributed,” dammit!

Two other op eds at the Los Angeles Times deserve mention. Mickey Edwards, who appears to be a conservative, argues that “The Nation Needs a Better GOP.”

If Democrats control the legislative and executive branches without meaningful opposition, the country will be the weaker for it. Some of President Obama’s initiatives would dramatically shift the boundaries between public and private, reshape the relationship between citizens and government and alter the lens through which America views its international commitments. These are serious matters and deserve serious, and constructive, engagement.

In the long run it is far better for the country if a broad range of views — or, at least, as broad a range of views as one finds in American politics, which generally isn’t that broad — is represented in government. It’s good when the majority view is challenged intelligently by a thoughtful minority. If nothing else, it keeps the majority on its toes and goads them into thinking through their proposals more clearly. However,

Today, the Republican belief system has degenerated into an embarrassing hodgepodge that worships political victory more than ideas; supports massive deficits; plunges the nation into “just-in-case” wars without adequate troops, supplies or armor; dismisses constitutional strictures; and campaigns on a platform of turning national problem-solving over to “Joe the Plumber.” It’s hard to see how all that points the way to a reawakening of voters to trust in the GOP. …

… Merely attacking administration proposals and labeling Obama a “socialist” will only ensure that instead of rebounding, as the GOP did in 1968, the party will slip even further into irrelevance. And that will not be good for America.

Finally, one other op ed says “What Republicans need is a mutiny.” To take the party away from the troglodytes, yes? Alas, this op ed was written by Richard A. Viguerie, a troglodyte’s troglodyte.

Democrats have nothing to fear from today’s Republican Party leaders. That’s why Democrats have taken to targeting Rush Limbaugh and others who aren’t in formal leadership positions in the GOP but who forcefully articulate a conservative vision.

To paraphrase the Gipper, anyone who thinks Rush Limbaugh is forcefully articulating “a conservative vision” is the problem, not the solution.

Update: Fred Barnes actually wrote this for next week’s Weekly Standard:

Improving the party’s image is a worthy cause, but it isn’t what Republicans ought to be emphasizing right now. They have a more important mission: to be the party of no. And not just a party that bucks Obama and Democrats on easy issues like releasing Gitmo terrorists in this country, but one committed to aggressive, attention-grabbing opposition to the entire Obama agenda.

I hope all Republicans read this and pay close attention to what Fred says.

If Republicans scan their history, they’ll discover unbridled opposition to bad Democratic policies pays off. Those two factors, unattractive policies plus strong opposition, were responsible for the Republican landslides in 1938, 1946, 1966, 1980, and 1994. A similar blowout may be beyond the reach of Republicans in 2010, but stranger things have happened in electoral politics. They’ll lose nothing by trying.

GOP: Barnes is a wise man, and you should do what he says. Please.

Gimmicks and the GOP

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Patrick Ruffini’s article “The Joe-the-Plumberization of the GOP” is as fascinating for what it unintentionally reveals as for what Ruffini argues. Let’s start here —

If you want to get a sense of how unserious and ungrounded most Americans think the Republican Party is, look no further than how conservatives elevate Joe the Plumber as a spokesman. The movement has become so gimmick-driven that Wurzelbacher will be a conservative hero long after people have forgotten what his legitimate policy beef with Obama was.

I’ll leave aside how legitimate Wurzelbacher’s policy beef was, and say that otherwise I pretty much agree with Ruffini. On to the next paragraph:

Since its very beginnings as a movement, conservatism has bought into liberalism’s dominant place in the American political process. They controlled all the major institutions: the media, academia, Hollywood, the Democratic Party, large segments of the Republican Party, and consequently, the government. Liberalism’s image of conservatives in the ’50s and ’60s as paranoid Birchers gave birth to a conservative movement self-conscious of its minority status. As in any tribe that is small in number and can’t fully trust its most natural allies (i.e. the business community or the Republican Party), the meta-debate of who is inside and outside the tribe is magnified exponentially.

Is he saying conservatism did not exist before the 1950s? It’s more accurate to say that the current wave of movement conservatism was born after World War II, rising from the ashes of the conservatism that had pushed back against the New Deal and was opposed to taking sides against Hitler until after Hitler’s declaration of war on the U.S., in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack.

The Right’s climb back to political relevance began with the myth that Roosevelt somehow sold out to Stalin at Yalta (see Kevin Baker’s essential “Stabbed in the Back” from the June 2006 Harper’s). Of course, after the Joe McCarthy debacle had died down the GOP in the 1950s was more or less steered by moderates whose disagreements with Dems were more often in degree than in kind. But you all know the sad story of how the pseudo-conservatives morphed into Goldwater conservatives who morphed into Reagan conservatives, and how these conservatives insist on lockstep ideological purity, so that Eisenhower-style moderates are no longer welcome in the party.

There were, of course, some conservative intellectuals like Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley who managed to slap a veneer of erudition over ideological conservatism. But the rough beast that movement conservatism has become doesn’t know Kirk from mooseburgers, and even Buckley had more or less washed his hands of it before he died.

Ruffini continues,

The legacy of that early movement — alive and well at CPAC and in the conservative institutions that still exist today — is one driven inordinately by this question of identity. We have paeans to Reagan (as if we needed to be reminded again of just how much things suck in comparison today), memorabilia honoring 18th century philosophers that we wouldn’t actually wear in the outside world, and code-word laden speeches that focus on a few hot button issues that leave us ill-equipped to actually govern conservatively on 80% of issues when we actually do get elected.

For whatever reason, conservatives do tend to live in a mythologized past that never actually existed. But I would say that current “movement conservatives” don’t even have coherent issues any more. They have talking points. And the reason they are ill-equipped to actually govern conservatively is that they are ill-equipped to govern at all. “Movement conservatism” is so debased it has no philosophy of government, other than whatever them libruhls is fer, we’re agin’ it.

This culture of identity politics means we get especially defensive about the Liberal Majority’s main lines of attack, because we think of our position as inherently fragile.

There’s a Liberal Majority? Who knew? What happened to the center-right nation?

The truth is, from the 1980s and until about 2006 the Right had thoroughly run true liberalism entirely off the political radar. Genuine liberals, as opposed to ideological centrists who played liberals on TeeVee, were so marginalized in this country we were damn near invisible even to each other. (The Right mistook Bill Clinton for a liberal, but he was not. Clinton never governed as a liberal, but as a triangulator who finessed the Right rather than defeat it.)

But even when they had all the government, all the media, all the attention to themselves, the Right continued to run against the demon liberals they imagined lurked under every bed. Because that’s all they had. Ultimately, when you strip away the rhetoric and the posturing, all they have is resentment of whatever they think “liberalism” is. They have no interest in governing.

Skipping a bit —

This is so different than the psychology of the left. The left assumes that it is culturally superior and the natural party of government and fights aggressively to frame any conservative incursion on that turf as somehow alien and unnatural. (The “Oh God…” whisper being the perfect illustration.) They dominate Hollywood not by actively branding liberalism in their movies, but by coolly associating liberal policy ideas with sentiments everyone feels, like love (gay marriage) or fairness (the little guy vs. some evil corporate stiff).

Well, yeah, people do tend to approve of love and fairness and like to see these things reflected in popular entertainment. This has been true since at least Shakespeare’s time. But it’s not as if liberals get together and plan what values they are going to promote in next year’s films. It’s more a matter of liberalism by nature being more creative, I think. Whenever conservatives try to be creative they come across as either mean or smarmy. Or both. It’s the nature of the beast.

Skipping ahead —

Put another way, Republicans thrive as the party of normal Americans — the people in the middle culturally and economically. This is true of our leadership as well — we have a history of nominating figures who came first from outside politics. Our base is the common-sense voter in the middle who bought a house she could afford and didn’t lavishly overspend in good times and who is now subsidizing the person who didn’t.

That’s how Republicans want to see themselves, but I don’t think that’s been true for a long time. The suburbs didn’t abandon the GOP in the last election because of Barack Obama’s dazzling rhetoric. They abandoned the GOP because the GOP has nothing to offer them except culture war and erosion of the health care system.

This is why Obama’s pitch is fundamentally off-key if framed correctly. People’s first instincts in a recession are not to overspend, but to tighten their belts.

Yes, and a frightened horse’s first instinct is to run back into the stable, even if the stable is on fire. But it is because people are tightening belts that the government has to pump cash into the economy asap.

In these serious times, conservatives need to get serious and ditch the gimmicks and the self-referential credentializing and talk to the entire country. If the average apolitical American walked into CPAC or any movement conservative gathering would they feel like they learned something new or that we presented a vision compelling to them in their daily lives?

A compelling vision is one thing; knowing one’s ass from one’s elbow is something else. The GOP is basically in denial of the nature of the problems we face, which is why they can’t come up with solutions that might work in the real world. The GOP needs to do more than just scrap the gimmicks. It needs to take a deep breath, calm down, and think hard about what government is and what citizens need from it. What is the appropriate role of government? “None” is no longer a viable answer.

This is why I love Newt’s emphasis on finding 80/20 issues and defining them in completely non-ideological terms.

You want to know what “Newt’s emphasis” is? I followed Ruffini’s links and came to this. It’s a bleeping joke. Just a laundry list of discrete right-wing bugaboos like making English the official language and keeping “One nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Please.

Like I said, this is as fascinating for what it reveals as it is for what Ruffini argues.

Update: See also The American Conservative, Daniel Larison, “Needed: Confidence And Wisdom.”

It seems to me that conservatives and Republicans have assumed the GOP is the natural governing party, at least regarding the Presidency and to some extent as it relates to Congress since ’94, which is why so many have continued to insist that America is a “center-right nation” in the face of mounting evidence that it is not and hasn’t been for a while. Symbolic gimmickry does stem in part from a lack of confidence, but it is more the product of a movement and party that have ceased to understand, much less address, most of the pressing concerns of working- and middle-class Americans. The party assumes that all it needs to do is show up, push the right pseudo-populist buttons and reap the rewards, and for the most part the movement cheers. See Palin, Sarah.

The GOP settles for offering “symbolic, substance-free BS” because enough conservatives are already persuaded that Republican policies obviously benefit the middle class, so there is no pressure to make Republican policy actually serve the interests of Republican constituents. It is taken for granted that this is already happening, but voters have been showing for several cycles that many of them do not believe this. Politically Democrats have been gaining ground in such unlikely places as Ohio and Indiana, which would be inexplicable if the GOP obviously and reliably represented working- and middle-class Americans. Of course, lately these voters don’t see it that way, but instead see the right’s pseudo-populists denounce workers for being overpaid, reject measures that would direct some spending to American industries that their free trade zeal has helped gut and even talk about a spending freeze in the middle of a severe recession.

Tolerating Intolerance

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Yesterday I wrote about the liberal approach to sex ed to be found in The Netherlands and how this has resulted in world-record low rates of pregnancy and STDs in young people. The Netherlands also often is cited as having close to the lowest rate of abortion among all nations — I think Iceland edges it out by a decimal point — while allowing liberal, legal access to abortion.

Today we read in the International Herald Tribune that the problems caused by Muslim immigration into The Netherlands is causing the Dutch to re-think their liberal ideals of tolerance.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the Netherlands had lived through something akin to a populist revolt against accommodating Islamic immigrants led by Pim Fortuyn, who was later murdered; the assassination of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, accused of blasphemy by a homegrown Muslim killer; and the bitter departure from the Netherlands of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali woman who became a member of Parliament before being marked for death for her criticism of radical Islam.

Now something fairly remarkable is happening again.

Two weeks ago, the country’s biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch “tolerance.”

Naturally, this story is being celebrated by The Usual Mouth Breathers on the Right as a sign that Europeans are wising up to the evils of allowing brown people with funny accents to live among them. One goes so far as to predict this position paper is the beginning of the end of the European Union.

A genuinely liberal culture is a rare thing. The default position of human civilization seems to be some form of authoritarianism. The challenge to any liberal society is to maintain liberal ideals even while factions within that society are undermining them (e.g., Freepers). Is that possible? Is there a middle ground between using authoritarian government to enforce cultural “norms” and standing by smiling while one’s country is taken over by thugs? Does being liberal mean having to be a patsy?

To me, the absolute foundation of liberalism is the value of human equality and all its permutations — civil liberty, social justice, equal protection under the law. For this reason, liberalism can accommodate cultural differences, but it cannot tolerate intolerance. Historically, genuine liberalism has not flinched from using the power and authority of government to protect civil liberties from whatever thuggish forces violate it.

This is where liberalism and libertarianism part company. In its passion for “small government,” libertarianism is perfectly happy to chuck civil liberties out the window. It is no coincidence that probably the most purely libertarian political document America ever created was the Confederate Constitution, the ultimate purpose of which was to ensure protection of the institution of slavery.

And I still believe much libertarian antipathy toward “big government” was kick-started by the showdown between federal troops and segregationists in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957. But a liberal nation cannot tolerate racial discrimination.

We should be clear that multiculturalism is not the problem. The United States always has been a multicultural nation, right-wing revisionist history to the contrary. Conservatives cherish a mythical past in which all America (except for a few fringes, of course) was populated by English-speaking Anglo Saxons. This was never true. In the 19th century, English was rarely heard in large regions of the country. I’m not talking about city neighborhoods; I’m talking about vast stretches of territory across many states. In big chunks of the upper Midwest, for example, German was far more commonly spoken than English. During the Civil War, some Union volunteer regiments were German speaking, and Lincoln had to appoint German-speaking officers to lead them.

Much of what is distinctive in American culture — music, food, language — in large part comes from African American influence. The Southwest had a thriving Latino culture before the first Anglos showed up. There have been ethnic Chinese in the West for more than 150 years. And, of course, native Americans were here first.

Human history can be seen as one vast multicultural dance. Various cultures are forever moving, mingling, changing. Sometimes a culture can be isolated for a time, but never forever. Cultures that are isolated too long become stagnant. On the other hand, expose some European Crusaders to Middle Eastern arts and sciences, and the eventual result is the Renaissance.

Although Islam seems to encourage authoritarianism, Islam is not necessarily the problem. An article in today’s Christian Science Monitor describes Muslims and non-Muslims living harmoniously together for generations in Cambodia. The articles describes a society in which Muslims are thoroughly integrated, even though the nation is more than 90 percent Buddhist.

“Integration” is the key word, I think. In other Buddhist nations, such as Thailand, Muslims are not integrated, and there is perpetual violence.

But let’s go back to The Netherlands. What happens when people with an authoritarian cultural orientation move into a non-authoritarian, liberal society? Messy and ugly things happen, that’s what. The Dutch are going to have to find their own way through this problem, but the issue before them is how to protect liberal values without violating liberal values.

The message, seems to me, is We don’t care how you worship, and we don’t care how you dress, but you may not oppress or forcibly coerce other people, including those in your own communities. And if you can’t live with that, you will go away and live somewhere else.

The other half of a liberal counter-offensive against illiberalism is to encourage integration and, to be sure those Muslims who are trying to fit into Dutch culture are given help if they need it.

The mistake made in many European countries — France in particular comes to mind — is that they’ve adopted a policy that discrimination against the ethnic newcomers doesn’t exist, even though it does, and they’ve taken no pro-active measures to enable integration and fairness. As a result, Muslims in France are ghettoized, alienated, and have little hope they can work within the system to better their lives.

It’s nearly always the case that there is conflict and enmity when cultures collide. However, the only constant in human civilization is change. Human societies cannot be frozen in amber, nor can they remain healthy walled off from other human societies.

At the same time, the cultural strife being experienced in The Netherlands is not a sign the liberalism has failed, so we must give up on it and revert to authoritarianism. I think it’s a sign that liberal societies are rare, that they are constantly under threat from authoritarianism, and that it takes work to maintain a liberal society. But the work does pay off in the long run.

Plain Facts

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If you’re an honest student of American history, there is nothing in Neal Gabler’s “The GOP McCarthy Gene” that you didn’t already know. Gabler explains why Joe McCarthy — not Barry Goldwater, and certainly not Saint Ronald — was the real father of modern movement conservatism.

In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn’t run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn’t likely to be expunged any time soon. …

… What he lacked in ideology — and he was no ideologue at all — he made up for in aggression. Establishment Republicans, even conservatives, were disdainful of his tactics, but when those same conservatives saw the support he elicited from the grass-roots and the press attention he got, many of them were impressed. Taft, no slouch himself when it came to Red-baiting, decided to encourage McCarthy, secretly, sealing a Faustian bargain that would change conservatism and the Republican Party. Henceforth, conservatism would be as much about electoral slash-and-burn as it would be about a policy agenda.

So much of the uglier side of the GOP ever since — Nixon, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove — is just warmed-over and updated McCarthyism. As Gabler says, the line runs “from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin.” One of the reasons historian Richard Hofstadter was able to see where the U.S. was heading in the 1950s and early 1960s is that McCarthy had already set the course.

It isn’t just the ranting about Communism. The myth of liberal elitism began with McCarthy. Certainly anti-intellectualism had existed in America before McCarthy, just as there had been Red Scares before McCarthy. But he’s the one who figured out how to turn anti-intellectualism into a political force in modern politics.

Steve M adds:

Gabler is right: the Republican Party is held together not by any real ideological coherence (it is a collection of incompatible constituencies with radically different interests) but by a shared devotion to aggression. Or, as innumerable bloggers have put it, to Pissing Off the Liberals.

In (rightly) putting McCarthy ahead of Goldwater, though, Gabler neglects the malignant role Goldwaterite ideology did play in this story: its inherent unsuitability to governing led directly to the nihilism of modern conservatism.

Wingnuts are in denial, of course. One says,

Gabler forgets how William F. Buckley kicked out the McCarthy’s heirs, The John Birch Society, from the conservative movement. Doing so doesn’t fit the theme of a paranoid political party.

This may be why Buckley co-authored a book titled McCarthy and His Enemies called by one reviewer “a bald, dedicated apologia for ‘McCarthyism‘” … oh, wait …

It’s Armistice Day

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It’s Armistice Day. Click here for a Wilfred Owen retrospective. See also last year’s post.

The soldier in the photograph above is my grandfather, Cpl. Robert John Thomas, on the day he returned from France in 1919. The lady with him is my grandmother, Dora Sabina Senter Thomas, and the baby is my father, Robert Thomas, born while Grandpa was on the Western Front. (My father never got a middle name because Grandpa didn’t like his middle name and didn’t want Grandma using it. And since Grandpa wasn’t available for consultation when Dad was named, the middle name got left out.)

It will be a few weeks yet before we know the plan for withdrawal from Iraq. In the meantime, props to The American Conservative for its retrospective on Bush’s War and the best headline I’ve seen today: “He Fought the Wars and the Wars Won.”

The Myth of Liberal “Overreach”

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So far I haven’t seen a single Democrat, or independent liberal for that matter, claim that the election of Barack Obama means there will be a permanent Democratic majority forever and ever amen. The best outcome most of us hope for is that Dems will at least keep if not increase their seats in Congress in the 2010 midterms and that President Obama gets a second term. Beyond that, anticipation dissipates into the Unknowable Unknown.

The only certainty is that all compounded things will decay. Nothing lasts forever, in other words.

This has not stopped a number of conservatives from wagging fingers at us and warning us not to expect a permanent Democratic majority. Of course not, dears, but nobody thinks in terms of “permanent majorities” except you. Oh, and clue: As long as there are human beings, history will not end.

The disconnect may be that conservatives don’t grasp the meaning of the word “permanent.” James Antle, associate editor of the American Spectator, writes,

After Tuesday, the Republican remnant in Washington is fearing the worst. While they seem to have dodged a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, they will have less ability to shape and block legislation than at any time since Jimmy Carter’s administration. Conservative Democratic senators are few, and many moderate Republicans from blue states will feel pressure to cave into Obama’s agenda. Republican opinion leaders warn of a big, and perhaps permanent, shift to the left.

It’s happened before and could happen again.

A permanent shift to the left happened before? But it didn’t last, did it? That means it wasn’t permanent.

Conservatives also are warning us not to “overreach,” meaning don’t go all New Deal on us. Antle continues,

But these concerns could be as overwrought as Democratic worries that their party would forever be shut out of power by an ascendant right wing after November 2004. Undivided American government leads to overreach, and overreach leads to defeat. It took four years of Carter to bring about eight years of Ronald Reagan. It required just two years of Clinton to give way to Gingrich and a dozen years of Republican domination of Congress.

Let’s think about this. Did Reagan sweep Carter out of office in 1980 because of “overreach”? Did George Bush and the GOP win in 2000 because the Clinton Administration was guilty of “overreach”? That’s not how I remember it. There were many factors that caused Dems to lose those elections, some of which were the fault of Dem administrations and Dems in Congress, and some of which were not. But “overreach” was not one of those factors.

Carter lost in 1980 mostly because he seemed weak and ineffectual, not because he “overreached.” His actual policies were middle-of-the-road for the time. Among his achievements were deregulation of the airline and telephone industries.

Regarding “It required just two years of Clinton to give way to Gingrich and a dozen years of Republican domination of Congress” — let us note that President Clinton won re-election easily in 1996. And, frankly, I think it’s possible that he would have been re-elected in 2000 if he could have run for a third term.

So what “overreach” is Antle talking about? If you want to see an example of “overreach,” let’s see — invading Iraq? the Patriot Act? The Terri Schiavo episode?

Spreading the Wealth Around

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The Right-wing media and bloggers are high-fiving over Barack Obama’s “spread the wealth around” comment. “Did Barack ‘Spread the Wealth’ Obama Just Blow the Election?” says one. “Can you say Karl Marx?” says another. The GOP claims the phrase reveals Obama’s “socialist agenda.”

My favorite is “The Left’s Evolution into Totalitarians Completed.” See, the reason the Left is crucifying Joe the Plumber is to distract people from Obama’s “spread the wealth” remark.

During the debate every time McCain repeated the remark, with a “gotcha” smirk on his face, I think most viewers must have wondered what planet he was from. I realize just about any use of the word “wealth” by a liberal sets of alarm bells on the ideological Right. But most working people are getting tired of a system that keeps them shut out of “the wealth,” even though their labor is creating it.

Most of us are fine with capitalism as long as it is kept fair. And, frankly, a capitalist system in which wealth is “spread around” — where workers are paid well and can buy stuff, so that wealth is kept in broad circulation instead of being hoarded by a minority — is a healthy capitalist system that benefits everyone, including the very wealthy.

But the wages and standard of living of working people have been flat for some time. Indeed, most working class folks are worse off than they were eight years ago. And the rot has reached the middle class as well.

Yet, until very recently, we were assured America’s wealth is going up and up and up.

I don’t know if John McCain understands the unfairness that increasing numbers of Americans are feeling. If you think about it, aside from his POW experience (which I do not belittle) he has led a relatively sheltered life, and a life very far apart from most working and middle-class people. As far as I can tell he has no personal experience of how working people in America actually live. Possibly he has no clue how he is coming across when he makes fun of “spread the wealth around.”

John McCain often expresses admiration for Theodore Roosevelt. Like nearly all dead white guys, TR was a mixed bag. He had many of the standard white guy views of his time that are repugnant to us now — “white man’s burden” stuff. But he got one thing right — Americans need a square deal.

So what did TR say about spreading wealth around?

“The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.”

“At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress.”

“The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. … We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.”

“The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted.”

— Theordore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” 1910

“Here in this city of the State of Lincoln I can set forth the principles for which we stand to-day in the words which Lincoln used fifty-four years ago, when in speaking of the then phase of the eternal struggles between privilege and justice, between the rights of the many and the special interest of the few, he said:

“That is the real issue. That is the issue which will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between two principles-right and wrong-throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time. The one is the common right of humanity, the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says: ‘You toil and work and earn bread, and I will eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who bestrides the people of his own nation and lives from the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

“Were Lincoln alive to-day he would add that it is also the same principle which is now at stake when we fight on behalf of the many against the oppressor in modern industry whether the abuse of special privilege be by a man whose wealth is great or is little, whether by the multimillionaire owner of railways and mines and factories who forgets his duties to those who earn his bread while earning their own, or by the owner of the foul little sweat-shop who coins dollars from the excessive and underpaid labor of haggard women. We who stand for the cause of progress are fighting to make this country a better place to live in for those who have been harshly treated by fate; and if we succeed it will also really be a better place for those who are already well off. None of us can really prosper permanently if masses of our fellows are debased and degraded, if they are ground down and forced to live starved and sordid lives, so that their souls are crippled like their bodies and the fine edge of their every feeling blunted. We ask that those of our people to whom fate has been kind shall remember that each is his brother’s keeper, and that all of us whose veins thrill with abounding vigor shall feel our obligation to the less fortunate who work wearily beside us in the strain and stress of our eager modern life.”

— Theodore Roosevelt, “The Case Against the Reactionaries,” 1912

Interesting guy, TR.

Still Crazy After All These Years

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Senator Joe McCarthy began his witch hunts by accusing Asian policy experts in the State Department of being Communists, and by the end of his volatile career he had charged General George Marshall, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the United States Army with treason as well. In 1954 the double punch of Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” exposé and McCarthy’s televised bullying during the Army-McCarthy hearings finally brought him down. But before the double punch, in January 1954, 50 percent of Americans polled by Gallup were “highly favorable” of McCarthy.

In other words, 50 percent of Americans thought it perfectly reasonable to accuse General George Marshall, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the United States Army with treason.

And even after his dénouement, and even as the Senate and the Republican Party publicly were turning their backs on McCarthy, he remained a hero to a substantial minority of Americans. Gallup polls said 35 percent of Americans were highly favorable of McCarthy as late as November 1954, after the Army-McCarthy hearings had concluded.

I thought of McCarthy today after I saw this headline on a right-wing blog: “Question: Does Barack Obama Have Any Friends Who AREN’T Communists?” Tail-gunner Joe would be proud.

I believe — this is based on my observations, not scientific research — that Americans on the whole are harder to demagogue now than they were in 1954. But “on the whole” clearly doesn’t include everybody.

I also believe that people get suckered by demagoguery because, on some level, they want to be suckered. The demagogue is telling them something they want to believe, even if it’s nuts. For example, when people are genuinely afraid of something, many people prefer a demagogue to an honest statesman.

An honest statesman tells people that, while there’s a real threat and our options are limited, we can get through this crisis if we keep our heads and don’t let fear get the best of us. The demagogue validates and reinforces fear and promises absolute protection if people will follow him. Lots of people prefer option B. Option A is weak and, you know, French.

The problem with option B is that the demagogue is promising something — absolute protection from the bad scary thing — that he cannot deliver, especially if the bad scary thing is way bigger than he is and not under his control. So the next thing the demagogue does is identify proxy scary things, preferably small and weak ones that won’t bite back. Thus, McCarthy was much less focused on international politics than on domestic threats.

Yes, McCarthy accused the State Department of losing China and made a great show of clearing alleged Communist literature out of U.S. embassy libraries around the world. But most of his targets were domestic and about as threatening to the security of the United States as tapioca pudding. Yes, there had been Soviet espionage cells in Washington, but not one of McCarthy’s targets was ever found to be part of them.

Back to the present: The more volatile people at McCain rallies, especially the ones who booed McCain when he called Obama a “decent man,” are people who want to be demagogued. They don’t give a bleep about McCain’s policy proposals; they want him to lie to them. Apparently McCain has a couple of scruples still knocking about his psyche and isn’t really into the demagogue thing, although he’s been giving it his best shot.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is playing the demagogue role to the hilt. She’s got a natural talent for it. I don’t expect her to fade from the national political scene anytime soon.

And then there’s the perennial threat of intellectualism, also a target of McCarthy’s. I give you this rightie blog post, called “Intellectualism & Sarah Palin: Or How The Smarty Pants Set Are Threatened By Someone Who Knows Sense .” It’s a classic bit of anti-intellectual literature; someone should shove it into a bell jar to preserve it for posterity.

In her rantings in favor of “common sense” the blogger in truth is exposing her inner insecurities, neuroses and resentments for all the world to see. She divides the nation into “coastal elites” and everybody else. The “coastal elites” live inside their airy-fairy theories; “everybody else” is practical and makes decisions based on real-world experience. If you’ve read Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life you’ll recognize all the themes.

Here we see why the coastal elite hate Sarah Palin:

Why do they dislike her so?

  1. Her state school education and path to power devalues the elite’s Harvard training.
  2. She’s homespun. Intellectuals despise homespun. They prefer the calculated indifference they’ve worked so hard to master over the years.
  3. Sarah doesn’t seem to care what they think. Perhaps her most grievous error is that she just doesn’t give a moose turd what David Brooks thinks. Everyone should care what David Brooks thinks. And Peggy Noonan. And the rest of the obnoxious snobs.

Speaking as a graduate of the University of Missouri with deep Ozark Mountain roots and who genuinely doesn’t give a bleep about what David Brooks or Peggy Noonan think, I suppose I should love Sarah Palin.

I, um, don’t.

Another rightie blogger links to the one above and expands some of her themes. Buried in this diatribe we see the yearning for a daddy figure who will take over and make everything better:

So if you’re Yin, you may feel anger like anybody else, but you get over it. You live in a world of IF…THEN. The Yang live in a world of protocol. “S’poseda.” You’re s’poseda cut your carbon emissions. You’re s’poseda behave humbly so the rest of the world likes us more.

The decision-making is always externalized to someone else. And that “someone else” is always some vague, non-corporeal, undefinable entity. “Them.” “The People.” “Everybody.” “Us.” “Out There.” You dare to make this distinction, after awhile you see this everywhere. I see it in this Charles Gibson interview with The Messiah — Gibson explicitly asks him “what will you do different from what the current administration is doing now” (or some such)…and here comes the reply. The People have lost confidence. It’s always someone else making the decision that matters.

People who populate this whole other world, have good reason to be jealous. Once they own a task, a task that depends on real decisions being made by an individual who’s directly responsible for how things turn out — they’re lost. And they know it. They’ve spent too much of their lives living theoretically…spooning out the right answers to please others. Ignoring cause and effect.

Government of the people, by the people and for the people be damned. This guy wants a dictator.

(Also, dude, if you are so concerned about cause and effect, you might want to consider the effects of not cutting carbon emissions. And I’m not sure you understand yin and yang. Yang is male, direct, assertive, rational, bright, clear. Yin is female, indirect, reticent, emotional, dark and murky. Obviously some male chauvinist guy came up with the yin and yang dichotomy, but that’s what it is.)

If you read these two posts, you see what I mean about absolute protection. Both writers seem to believe that the United States can absolutely protect itself and solve its problems without the cooperation of anyone else on the planet. They don’t want to believe there are big, scary things that we cannot control or bomb into oblivion.

Just as, fifty-something years ago, Americans didn’t want to believe that China was not ours to lose, or that Joe McCarthy’s threats and blustering would not protect them from the Soviet Union.

Still crazy after all these years.