Category Archives: American History

Huh?

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More self-evident stupidity — Steven G. Calabresi, McCain supporter and co-founder of the Federalist Society, argues that Barack Obama is too young to be president.

The Constitution says a person must be at least 35 years old to be POTUS, and Obama is in his late 40s. However, Calabresi argues that since life expectancy is longer now, “35” should be adjusted up.

In 1789, the average life expectancy of a newborn was about 40 years, compared with about 78 today. A lot of this was because of infant mortality, but in 1789, even the average life expectancy of every man who reached age 18 was only about 47. This suggests that at best a 35-year-old age limit in 1789 might have functioned then about the way a 55- or 60-year-old age qualification would function today. On this account Obama may be old enough to drive and buy a glass of white wine, but he has a way to go before he can run for president.

But the possible human life span hasn’t changed much. Our second POTUS, John Adams, was about 91 when he died. That made him only a teenager in dog years, btw. Next?

Others on the legal left, such as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, argue that in choosing between different interpretations of the Constitution, we should select the one that will produce the best consequences. This method too suggests that Obama should be understood to be constitutionally barred from serving as president by reason of his age.

Here comes my favorite part.

We have had three presidents out of 43 who were younger when they took office than Obama would be on Jan. 20, 2009: Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt.

This is bad? Are we making sense yet?

All of them committed serious rookie blunders because they were too young.

As opposed to older guys who screwed up their entire administrations.

I don’t know how old Calabresi is, but I say he’s too stupid to be writing op eds. Or to be left alone for more than ten minutes at a time, for that matter.

Identify With This

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This morning I want to re-visit “identity politics” and why I hate it. But first, I want to clarify again what I mean by the term.

The Wiki definition of “identity politics” is “political action to advance the interests of members of a group supposed to be oppressed by virtue of a shared and marginalized identity (such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or neurological wiring).” That’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s a critical aspect of IP that this definition leaves out. And that is the tendency of IP activists to care and work passionately only on behalf of the marginalized group with which they share identity (hence the name, “identity politics”).

Why is this a problem? It’s a problem because the end result is a balkanization of advocacy groups that compete with each other for donations and attention and sometimes even work against each other. And that end result is one of the reasons the Right has been able to dominate American political discourse for the past quarter century or so.

I witnessed this splintering in the 1970s. Back then what was left of the old New Deal coalition broke apart, partly under pressure from the antiwar and various “New Left” liberation movements and partly because large numbers of whites allowed themselves to be race-baited into voting Republican.

The New Deal coalition had sustained the Democratic Party and constituted its soul for four decades. It was a broad, if flawed, coalition that successfully promoted progressive policies (see, for example, the Great Compression). Granted, by the early 1970s this coalition had gotten rigid and old and was not responding well to the challenges of the times. The time was ripe for a political realignment, in particular one that included minorities and women.

But when the New Deal coalition broke up, it left a huge vacuum within the Democratic Party, and the antiwar and various liberation movements did not form a new coalition to step in to fill that vacuum. Instead, young activists all too often remained in self-absorbed Identity Politics enclaves.

And divided, we were conquered.

In the 1970s, as the New Deal coalition was crumbling, a number of wealthy conservatives like Richard Mellon Scaife began to build the media and political infrastructures that have dominated U.S. politics since the 1980s. While too many progressive activists remained on street corners handing out xeroxed fliers for a narrowly focused cause du jour, a new right-wing coalition came together to dominate mass media and to drive their issues relentlessly.

And with no big coalition to support it, the Democratic Party had to turn to moneyed interests and corporate donors to get the funds to win elections. More and more, the Dems became indistinguishable from the Republicans. Progressives effectively were banned from power.

Fast forward to the 1990s. Bill Clinton won two elections not by challenging the Republican Power Machine but by finessing it. It was a remarkable personal performance that left the right-wing power infrastructure intact and did nothing to restore the Democratic Party’s lost soul.

I don’t fault him for that, because at the time Clinton was up against something that was, in its way, a lot more powerful than the presidency. Given the political culture and circumstances of the 1990s, his popularity and effectiveness were powerful testimony to his unique political skills.

But, ultimately, if we’re going to create a society and government that genuinely are open to progressive ideas and policies, the political culture has got to change and the right-wing power infrastructure has got to be pushed back hard. I don’t believe that was possible in the 1990s. Now, I think it is possible. Thanks to the colossal failures of the Bush Administration, and the new progressive infrastructure made possible by the Internet, we have an opportunity to effect broad, systemic change in American politics that will help all progressive causes.

This is an opportunity that must be seized now. A door is open now that might be closed to us by the next election.

Today, many of us are catching our breath hoping the Dem nomination battle really is over so that the general election fight can begin. But these past few months I’ve been dismayed at how quickly so many of us fell back into the old Identity Politics, equality for Me but not for Thee, patterns. Once again, we’re forming circular firing squads.

As a generic choice I don’t much care whether the First President Who Is Not a White Man turns out to be a black man or a white woman, or for that matter a woman of color were one running this year. When I look at senators Clinton and Obama, my questions are which one of these two gets it? Which one sees the possibility of creating a new political culture friendly to progressivism? Which one is more likely to walk through that door?

And the answer I come up with is Obama. I cannot say whether he will succeed. He is human and imperfect, not political Jesus. But his words and background and the way he has run his campaign tell me he sees the opportunity that I see and will, at least, try.

However, I don’t believe Senator Clinton sees the opportunity. My belief is based in part on her performance in the Senate, which on the whole has been disappointing, and on the way she has run her campaign, which has been the same old “finesse (but don’t challenge) the Right and divide the Left” politics. All her formidable political skills mean nothing if she doesn’t see that open door.

Yes, electing Hillary Clinton would make a grand statement for feminism. But then we’d sweep up the popped balloons and confetti and go back to Old Politics Business as Usual. And nothing substantive would change. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I see it.

Michelle Goldberg has a article at The New Republic called “3 A.M. for Feminism.” You should read the whole thing, but here’s a snip:

Hillary Clinton has lost the nomination, but some of her most ardent female backers seem unwilling to accept it. A strange narrative has developed, abetted by Clinton and some of the mainstream feminist organizations. In it, the will of the voters was thwarted by chauvinistic party leaders in concert with a servile media, and Obama’s victory represents a repeat of George W. Bush’s in 2000. It’s a story in which Obama becomes every arrogant young man who has ever edged out a more deserving middle-aged woman, and Clinton, hanging on until the bitter end, is not a spoiler but a feminist martyr.

This conviction, that sexism cost Clinton the nomination, is likely to be one of the more toxic legacies of this primary season. It is leaving her supporters feeling not just disappointed but victimized, many convinced that Obama’s win is illegitimate. Taylor Marsh, a blogger and radio host whose website has become a hub for Clinton fans, says she gets hundreds of e-mails from angry Democrats pledging not to vote for Obama. She’s started running posts from such readers under the headline DEMOCRATIC STORM WARNINGS. “I’m not saying that this is a huge voting bloc,” she says. “I’m just saying that there is a huge amount of talk and I’m convinced it’s a reality that needs to be addressed.”

Taylor — and let me say I’ve met Taylor and like her very much, in spite of, well, recent events — responded:

Michelle Goldberg’s subtitle couldn’t be more insulting: “Clinton dead-enders and the crisis in the women’s movement.” There’s enough anger and rancor. It doesn’t help. But not even progressives get it.

People just do not understand the rage.

I don’t understand the rage, and I’ve been as held back by sexism as much as most women my age, which is close to Taylor’s and Hillary’s age.

I’ve faced the harassment and double standards. I’ve watched incompetent men sail effortlessly up the management ladder while exceptionally competent women remained stuck in entry-level positions for year after year. I’ve had to train men to manage me who had half my experience. I spent years struggling with unequal pay while raising two kids by myself. I certainly understand being angry about that.

But, y’know what? People get shafted lots of ways. Lots of people other than women have good reason to be angry at the status quo. If we’re going to change the status quo, we need to stop shoving each other out of the way just to make statements. I’m done with making statements. I want change.

As I wrote a couple of days ago, equality by definition has no preferences. If you are fighting for equality only for your particular slice of the demographic pie, then you aren’t fighting for equality but for favoritism.

If we’re going to turn the nation in a more progressive direction, we must jettison Identity Politics and come together to work for Progressive Politics.

I know Senator Clinton complains that she’s been shoved out of the race. But in spite of a strong finish, she was mathematically out of the race weeks ago, and her “kitchen sink” dirty campaigning was only poisoning the water without changing the inevitable outcome. Further, the Florida-Michigan issue was nothing but a slick attempt by Clinton to pick up cheap votes, and the fact that Clinton supporters willfully fail to see this tells me they’ve got their eyes shut to reality.

You know what we’re really up against? Read carefully this opinion piece by Daniel Henninger at The Wall Street Journal.

The irony too bitter to swallow is that Barack Obama’s identity politics trumped Hillary Clinton’s identity politics. Put differently, what goes around comes around. …

… The hard version [of identity politics] introduced people, mostly college students, to an America partitioned into categories of race, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. The softer version has flown for 30 years under all sorts of euphemized banners – diversity, multiculturalism, celebrating our differences. Only one campaign is celebrating our differences this week. …

… After South Carolina, the campaigns accused each other of playing the race or gender card. Obama deflected this charge. “I don’t want to deny the role of race and gender in our society,” Obama said. “They’re there, and they’re powerful. But I don’t think it’s productive.”

I’m not convinced. I think Barack Obama is more inclined to interpret American life in the formal categories of identity politics than is generally thought, or even than would older “conventional liberals” like Al Gore or John Kerry. Legal theorists have been a main source of its ideas; it’s hard to imagine that Barack and Michelle Obama didn’t hear a lot about “marginalized constituencies” at Harvard Law School. Sen. Obama may not be so conventional after all.

Speaking last July about picking Supreme Court nominees, he said: “We need someone who’s got the heart . . . the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges.” This is the language of identity politics. It’s not just talk. It’s an ideology designed to produce . . . change. …

… John McCain by instinct, biography and upbringing is prone to see America as a common civic culture. The vocabulary of “unjust” class distinctions familiar to Obama is alien to the McCain worldview. Sen. McCain should think about this and figure out a way to talk about it. If Americans are going to affirm a president making appointments on the basis of race, gender, class and sexuality, they should know it in 2008, rather than 2009-2012.

To Henninger, any political activism that addresses the concerns of any demographic other than White Upper-Class Male is, by default, “Identity Politics.” White Upper-Class Male is the default norm that constitutes what Henninger sees as a “common civic culture,” never mind lots of us have been disowned by that “common” culture.

And as long as we keep ourselves divided into demographic splinter groups, and allow indulgent, self-centered anger to blind us to the bigger picture, Henninger wins.

[Update: I watched Senator Clinton’s speech this afternoon and thought it very classy. She did a lot to rehabilitate her reputation, and I hope the majority of her supporters can take her advice and support Barack Obama for President.]

Jaw Jaw

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The Right is still trying to paint Barack Obama as an “appeaser.” In a hopelessly muddled column that, I believe, originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick argues that talking to Iran would be appeasement. Glick writes,

OBAMA’S RESPONSE to Bush’s speech was an effective acknowledgement that appeasing Iran and other terror sponsors is a defining feature of his campaign and of his political persona. As far as he is concerned, an attack against appeasement is an attack against Obama.

This, of course, is a flat-out lie. Obama’s position is that talking is not the same thing as appeasing, which happens to be true. Look it up.

Glick continues,

Obama and his supporters argue that seeking to ease Iranian belligerence by conducting negotiations and offering military, technological, military and financial concessions to the likes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who refers to Israel as pestilence, daily threatens the Jewish state with destruction, and calls for the eradication of the US while claiming to be divinely instructed by a seven-year-old imam who went missing 1100 years ago is not appeasement.

I don’t have time to do an exhaustive search, but when did Obama say he intended to offer “military, technological, military and financial concessions” to anybody? The controversy over Obama’s position, I thought, was that he intends to have talks without “preconditions,” meaning (to me) that any deals that might be struck would be a result of talks, not that talks would be the result of a deal.

Obama recalls that US presidents have often conducted negotiations with their country’s enemies and done so to the US’s advantage. And this is true enough. President John F. Kennedy essentially appeased the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when he offered to remove US nuclear warheads from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba.

I believe that is, in fact, what happened.

But there are many differences between what Kennedy did and what Obama is proposing. Kennedy’s offer to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was made secretly. And the terms of the deal stipulated that if its existence was revealed, the US offer would be cancelled.

Exactly why does secrecy make the deal less of an “appeasement”? Later in the article Glick says Obama “wants to undermine US credibility while giving Ahmadinejad and his murderous ilk the legitimacy that Kennedy refused to give Khrushchev.” Legitimacy? What did legitimacy have to do with anything then? I recall Kennedy had face-to-face meetings with Khrushchev at some other point in his presidency, as did Eisenhower. Our heads of state in those days were not burdened by the Bushies’ childish attitude that we should punish people we don’t like by not talking to them.

As I remember it — again, I’m sorry I don’t have time for history research this morning — the negotiations over the Cuban missiles were kept secret to allow both governments to stand down from the crisis without losing face to their respective citizens. Kennedy had been concerned that if he attacked Cuba, the Soviets would retaliate by attacking West Berlin. Basically what happened is that while publicly saber-rattling, privately the Kennedy Administration was willing to concede a great deal to the Soviets to prevent war. And vice versa.

More importantly, Khrushchev was open to a deal and was ready to give up the Cuban nuclear program. And – most importantly of all – Kennedy deployed military forces and went to the brink of war to make the alternatives to negotiation credible.

Kennedy didn’t want war, but Khrushchev didn’t want war, either. This made for a decent basis for striking a deal. I agree that Teddy R.’s advice to carry a big stick probably is still operative, but I haven’t heard that Obama plans to dismantle the U.S. military. Oh, wait …

Obama has repeatedly stated that unlike Kennedy, if he is elected president, he will not openly threaten war while being open to private talks. Instead, Obama intends to surrender the war option while conducting direct, public negotiations with the mullahs.

The plain fact is that the stick’s not as big as it used to be. Back in the day the Soviets rightly feared us, as we feared them. But after getting bogged down in Iraq all these years, who’s afraid of us now?

And saying that one will not openly threaten war is not the same thing as surrendering the “war option.” But to threaten a war option we must have a credible war option, and thanks to Iraq I don’t think we do.

Far from exerting force to strengthen his diplomatic position, Obama has pledged to withdraw US forces from Iraq where they are fighting Iranian proxies, cut military spending and shrink the size of the US nuclear arsenal.

We need to talk about military priorities. Every day we spend in Iraq whittles the stick down a little more. Talk to people in the military, and they will tell you they are seriously concerned about our military readiness. Once we’re out of Iraq it’s going to take years to build the military back up to what it was before we invaded. Military spending needs to be redirected toward restoring our military instead of pouring whatever billion dollars we pour every month into the sands of Iraq.

Put another way, Iraq is the biggest reason we’re neither feared nor respected any more. “Shock and awe” devolved into disgust and ridicule.

SINCE THE definition of appeasement is to reward others for their bad behavior, and since the US has refused for 29 years to reward the Iranians for their bad behavior by having presidential summits with Iranian leaders, Obama’s pledge represents a massive act of appeasement.

Let’s see, what is the definition of appeasement? The American Heritage dictionary defines it as “The policy of granting concessions to potential enemies to maintain peace.” But merely talking to someone is not appeasement. Again we see right-wingers thinking like eight-year-olds who punish other children they don’t like by refusing to sit next to them.

The notion that we are “rewarding” somebody by engaging in negotiations assumes that the heads of hostile governments actually feel bad that we won’t talk to them, or that our mere presence at a negotiating table is a special privilege only to be handed out to the deserving. This is the way children think.

And as Glick says, we’ve not held summits with the leaders of Iran for 29 years. We can see how well that’s turned out.

Glick goes on and on, and I’m out of time to write further, but skipping down to the last paragraph she says “in a world in which evil men are combining and preparing for war and genocide, good men are preparing for pleasant chitchat with their foes because they have come to prefer attitude to substance.”

Preferring attitude over substance is a brilliant description of the Bush Administration’s approach to foreign policy. The Bushies have no substance; they just whip out their ever-shrinking sticks (double meaning intended) and threaten to hit everyone they don’t like. The challenge to an Obama administration will be to put aside the attitude and embrace substance. I don’t know if that will work, but it’s worth a try. Nobody’s done it in a while.

White Nationalism

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Glenn Greenwald points to this genuinely disgusting column by Kathleen Parker, in which she writes,

“A full-blooded American.”

That’s how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for John McCain over Barack Obama. His feelings aren’t racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with “someone who is a full-blooded American as president.”

Parker argues that Fry isn’t necessarily racist, mind you.

Who “gets” America? And who doesn’t?

The answer has nothing to do with a flag lapel pin, which Obama donned for a campaign swing through West Virginia, or even military service, though that helps. It’s also not about flagpoles in front yards or magnetic ribbons stuck on tailgates.

It’s about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots. …

…We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants — and we are. But there’s a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice. …

…What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.

Republicans more than Democrats seem to get this, though Hillary Clinton has figured it out. And, the truth is, Clinton’s own DNA is cobbled with many of the same values that rural and small-town Americans cling to. She understands viscerally what Obama has to study.

Glenn points out that Barack Obama’s white grandfather fought in World War II, but somehow Barack Obama hasn’t earned the same “blood equity” that whiter candidates have, nor is his DNA properly “cobbled.” Gee, I wonder why that is?

Of course Parker is a racist. She’s worked out some system in her head by which she can justify being more comfortable with the white candidates than with the black guy, and then she kids herself she isn’t a racist. But she is.

Anyway — Since my ancestors starting earning “blood equity” in the Revolution, I assume I have the authority to tell Parker she doesn’t know America from grapefruit. Conservatives cling to a much-beloved fantasy that the “America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years” was somehow all of a piece culturally until recent times. Fantasy, I say. As I wrote a couple of years ago, the fact is that American culture has been in constant flux since the first white guys sailed into Chesapeake Bay to found Jamestown. Each group of immigrants, from the 17th century on, both changed whatever culture they found here at the time and were changed by it.

As I wrote in the earlier post, if we could reconstitute Daniel Boone and show him around, he wouldn’t recognize this country at all. I think they had apple pie in his day, but much of “traditional” American culture — baseball, jazz, barbecue, John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” — didn’t exist in Daniel Boone’s America.

If you spend much time with American history, surely you understand that different parts of the country developed very different “heritages,” in part because of the differences in immigration patterns. This was very apparent in the 19th century. The cultural differences between the slave-owning South and the free-soil North were particularly striking, and traces of that difference linger to this day. But there were also big cultural differences between, say, New England and the upper Midwest.

At the same time, although my fore-parents have been on these shores for just about three centuries, to native Americans I’m still an interloper. I respect that.

For a more nuanced look at what White America is going through, check out this column by Gregory Rodriguez. Although his DNA may not be properly cobbled either, I say Rodriguez understands America better than Parker does. (And per Parker’s own criteria my bloodlines make me the authority in these matters.) Rodruguez writes,

Last week, exit polls in West Virginia showed that Barack Obama might be facing some fierce racial resistance if he becomes the Democratic nominee. More than half of West Virginia Democratic voters — 95% of whom are white — said they would be dissatisfied if Obama won the nomination.

Is this white supremacy? No, in fact it might be its opposite, an acknowledgment that white privilege has its limits. With immigration and globalization reformulating who we are as a nation, it isn’t the white elites that are threatened by the changes; rather, it’s the nearly 70% of whites who are not college educated who figure among the most insecure of Americans. Many feel that their jobs are being outsourced or taken by immigrants — legal or otherwise — and that their culture is being subsumed. When Clinton promises to make their voices heard, she’s appealing not to Anglo-Saxon racial triumphalism but to the fear of white decline.

They’re bitter, you know, whether they’ll admit it or not.

Granted, not everyone who fits under the rubrics of “white, working class, not college educated” is going to vote against Obama. But by rallying to Clinton’s faltering candidacy, some sectors of white society might be trying to solidify the old racial boundaries of American nationhood. It’s not so much that they are hoping to reclaim their place, but that they are seeking to carve out a niche and demanding that, at the very least, the presidency remains “theirs.”

Like black or Latino activists who insist that a particular congressional district should be represented by one of their own, the disgruntled white working-class, non-college-educated voters might be demanding that their majority status still translate into something at least symbolically meaningful to them.

I say it’s splitting hairs to claim this isn’t a variation of white supremacy. For a very long time white supremacy has been all about building up the flagging self-esteem of unexceptional white people. But Rodriguez points out that we’re turning into a nation in which everyone’s in a minority.

Romantic notions of ethnic self-determination and multiculturalism may have once served to dismantle empires and garner attention for forgotten minorities. But today they are more likely to nurture the kind of white nationalism on which Clinton has placed her last political hopes.

Parker’s skewed perception of people’s “bloodlines” and “DNA” rests on the biased fantasy that the United States is a white nation. If the United States is going to be a functional nation in the 21st century, we’d best learn that we’re all in this democratic government thing together.

Quick Comments

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The insanity among the Clintonistas continues.

See Benjamin Wallace-Wells for more on how the death of Martin Luther King devastated liberalism.

Tibetans are not the only minority group facing brutal oppression by the government of China. Charles Cummings writes on the treatment of the mostly Muslim Uighur people of Xinjiang:

Uighurs have been jailed for reading newspapers sympathetic to the cause of independence. Others have been detained merely for listening to Radio Free Asia, an English-language station funded by the US Congress. Even to discuss separatism in public is to risk a lengthy jail sentence, with no prospect of habeas corpus, effective legal representation or a fair trial. About 100 Uighurs were arrested in Khotan recently after several hundred demonstrated in the marketplace of the town, which lies on the Silk Road.

And what happens to these innocent Uighur men and women once they land up in one of Xinjiang’s notorious “black prisons”? Amnesty International has reported numerous incidents of torture, from cigarette burns on the skin to submersion in water or raw sewage. Prisoners have had toenails extracted by pliers, been attacked by dogs and burned with electric batons, even
cattle prods.

In Typhoon, I relate the terrifying true story of a prisoner in Xinjiang who had horse hair inserted into the tip of his penis. Throughout this diabolical torture, the victim was forced to wear a metal helmet on his head. Why? Because a previous inmate had been so traumatised by his treatment in the prison that he had beaten his own head against a radiator in an attempt to take his own life.

This is the reality of life in modern Xinjiang. Quite what the Chinese hope to gain from their inhumane behaviour remains unclear. According to Corinna-Barbara Francis, a researcher with Amnesty’s East Asia team, “the intensified repression of Uighurs by the Chinese authorities is in danger of contributing to the very outcome that China claims it is warding against – the radicalisation of the population and the adoption of violent responses to the repression.”

The government of China commits hideous atrocities on anyone it decides it doesn’t like. Of course, we’re hardly in a position to claim the moral high ground any more.

But ethnic minorities in China’s outlying areas, like the Uighurs and the Tibetans, are treated particularly harshly. As I said in “Rebellion in Tibet,” the Chinese are making every mistake every imperial power ever made.

That’s why it stuns me when some online publication that claims to be for “peace and social justice” publishes apologies for China such as this. Unbelievable.

Forty Years

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Today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the web is brimming over with retrospectives. See, for example, Eugene Robinson.

I want to point in particular to E.J. Dionne’s column, however, because he plays one of my own recurring themes — the way the Right exploited racism to take over America. The column begins:

Forty years ago, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered. On April 4, 1968, a relatively brief but extraordinary moment of progressive reform ended, and a long period of conservative ascendancy began.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots that engulfed the nation’s capital and big cities across the country signaled the collapse of liberal hopes in a smoky haze of self-doubt and despair. Conservatives, on the run for much of the decade, found a broad new audience for their warnings against the disorders and disruptions bred by reform.

It wasn’t just the riots. Much of white America was still simmering with resentment over court-ordered school desegregation. Also, Lyndon Johnson had initiated New Deal-style programs aimed primarily at relieving poverty among African Americans. Suddenly, whites who had had no problem with “entitlements” before — when benefits went mostly to whites — discovered the virtues of “self-reliance.”

It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to the events of 1968. The attacks on “big government,” the defense of states’ rights, and the scorn for “liberal judicial activism,” “liberal do-gooders,” “liberal elitists,” “liberal guilt” and “liberal permissiveness” were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded.

Richard Nixon did a masterful job of exploiting fear and prejudice to lure white working-class voters away from the Democrats. And, of course, whites in the Deep South switched their allegiance from the Dems to the Republicans en masse.

The Right-Wing Narrative says that Democrats lost power because George McGovern opposed the Vietnam War, and the Dem Party was overrun by “peaceniks.” But this view of history doesn’t square with what really happened. McGovern’s stand on the Vietnam War was the least of the reasons he lost to Nixon in 1972.

And check out the acceptance speech Nixon gave at the 1972 Republican convention. The first half of the speech was all about race. It was in code, of course, but no adult alive at the time could have mistaken his meaning when he spoke of quotas and tied paying high taxes to the costs of “welfare.” And Republicans are still running on those themes today.

Just the other day, someone argued in the comments that the next Dem president would be punished for “losing Iraq” the way the Democrats were punished for “losing Vietnam.” Except that I don’t see how the Dems were punished for losing Vietnam. Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975; in 1976, America elected Jimmy Carter as president and gave the Dems a small increase in Congress, expanding the large increase the Dems had enjoyed in the 1974 post-Watergate midterms.

The fact is, once combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and the POWs came home, America lost interest in Vietnam. The whole bleeping country developed amnesia over Vietnam (except for the extreme Right, a group of people who are never so happy as when they are nursing resentments). As I remember it, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the Narrative emerged about Dems losing elections because of Vietnam. But this was an important narrative for the Right, because it helped them paper over the real primary reason the Right gained and the Left lost in those years. And that primary reason was racism. There were other issues, too, but racism was the foundational issue upon which other right-wing issues would be built.

Right-wing politicians had employed Red-baiting with some success since the late 1940s. But the excesses of McCarthyism had turned off moderates, and the Kennedy Administration had ushered in a liberal resurgence. Eventually, racism would succeed where Red-baiting had faltered.

The success of the racism strategy in the 1960s and 1970s taught at least a couple of generations of right-wing politicians about the importance of wedge issues. As new issues came up — feminism, abortion, gay rights — right-wing politicians embraced them and followed the old racism scenario to exploit them. Meanwhile, the Left crumbled into confusion and single-issue activism.

And as right-wingers gained more and more power over the federal government, the federal government became less and less functional. Because wedge issues may win elections, but they don’t govern a nation.

E.J. Dionne continues,

Forty years later, is it possible to recapture the hope and energy of the days and years before that April 4? Has liberalism spent enough time in purgatory for the country to revisit how much was accomplished in its name and to acknowledge that the nation is better off for what the liberals did?

In “The Liberal Hour,” an important new history of the ’60s that will be published in July, Colby College scholars G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert S. Weisbrot note that for all its deficiencies, the period of liberal sway “demonstrated what democratic politics can produce when public consensus crescendos, when coherent majorities prevail, and when skilled leaders provide direction, inspiration, and relentless energy.”

In the U.S., public consensus, coherent majorities, and skilled leaders providing direction in a positive, not a destructive, way are things only us geezers dimly remember and the young folks have never seen.

And after a few years of near-total dominance by right-wingers of the federal government, 81 percent of Americans say the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.

It’s 40 years since 1968. Now a black man and a white woman are competing with each other for the Dem nomination. They both face nasty bigotry barriers, and it would be a breakthrough if either were elected. Yet only one of these candidates has shown a real talent for building public consensus. The other one is running an increasingly bitter, and angry, wedge-issue style campaign. I think 40 years of that crap is quite enough.

Update: Wingnut priorities.

On Hair and Privilege

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There’s no better illustration of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Right than a comparison of Mitt Romney and John Edwards.

And yes, I’m talking about the hair. Righties cannot speak of Edwards without calling him the “Breck girl.” Surely Mitt goes through as much shampoo as John. The point, of course, is to feminize Edwards, but I say if either of these two leans more toward yin than yang, Mitt’s the guy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And speaking of guys with hair …

We could analyze all of the presidents and their coiffures, but I suspect there is little correlation between hair quality and job performance. Or masculinity, for that matter. John Kennedy’s alleged lasting contribution to men’s fashion was the death of the hat (Snopes questions this). Whatever the cause, fedoras for daytime wear did disappear suddenly about the time JFK was elected — the better to see a guy’s hair, my dears. But no one has ever questioned JFK’s manliness, as far as I know.

No matter. Someone introduced the “Breck girl” comment into American political discourse, and righties (plus Mo Dowd) picked it up and can’t let go of it.

And then there’s the wealth issue. David Leonhardt writes in today’s New York Times that Edwards and Romney both made fortunes in the 1980s. Yet Edwards is running on economic populism an Romney is a “free markets” guy.

The two men represent a clear divide between the Democratic and Republican parties over whether the government should redistribute more wealth, from the rich downward, now that economic inequality is greater than it has been since the 1920s.

I’d like to point out that ordinary working people created most of that wealth. Inequality doesn’t grow because the wealthy are somehow more deserving and working stiffs less so; it grows because the wealthy are able to control the wealth distribution system to their advantage. The role of government is not to take money away from the rich to give to the poor, but to keep the wealthy from gaming the system.

And this is good for us all in the long run, primarily because a nation with a large and upwardly mobile middle class is likely to be a politically stable nation; a nation in which most of the population is shut out of enjoying the wealth they create with their labor is asking for revolution.

Mr. Romney and Mr. Edwards also represent a divide among the affluent themselves. Many of the new wealthy — the great majority, in all likelihood — see their success as a sign of this country’s economic strength. Yet there is also a minority — including Mr. Buffett and William H. Gates Sr., Mr. Gates’s father, who have both opposed eliminating the estate tax — worried about inequality. …

… Every leading Democratic candidate has proposed rescinding the Bush administration’s tax cuts on households making at least $250,000, saying the money can be better used on programs to help the middle class. Every leading Republican candidate favors making the tax cuts permanent, saying that tax increases would hurt economic growth and, by extension, the middle class.

It may be significant that Edwards is the son of a mill worker and Romney is the son of an automobile executive. Romney explicitly denies there are two Americas, but it’s possible he’s never lived in America. Instead, he has lived his whole life in the Privilege Bubble.

Yet, on the Right, Edwards is called out for being a prissy poseur. Byron York wrote in September:

By the way, Edwards’s line, “I was brought home to a two-room house in a mill village” was carefully crafted, a reflection of his years of experience as a personal injury lawyer. Yes, after he was born he was brought home to a small house. But within a year his family moved to a better house as his father, a mill worker, began a rise that eventually made him a supervisor.

Did I mention Mitt’s dad was an auto executive? But the implication is that because Edwards has money now, he can’t possibly be sincere about wanting to help working people get a fair deal. Or else people who wish to help the poor are supposed to be poor. Or something. But in American history there have been other well-off people who fought plutocracy and tried to even the playing field.

Theodore, in fact, made a point of stepping out of the privilege bubble to hang out with cowboys and woodsmen. Franklin’s point of view likely was shaped by polio. Along with the various Roosevelts, the Kennedys — wealthier, I believe, than the Roosevelts — also came to be a fairly liberal/populist group.

The Right cannot honestly debate Edwards’s proposals, or much of anything else, so they fall back on criticizing Edwards’s looks and lifestyle without bothering to examine their own guys in the same light. Did I say something about intellectual bankruptcy? I believe I did.

Update: An editorial from the Concord Monitor — “Romney should not be the next president.”

A Conspiracy So Immense

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Tim Weiner writes in tomorrow’s New York Times,

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said. …

… Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons.

There is no evidence suggesting that President Truman approved any part of this proposal.

Reaction from the Power Tools was predictable: “Hoover was too quick to judge people disloyal–it would be interesting to get a look at the list of 12,000–but some may feel nostalgic for a time when disloyalty was at least acknowledged to be a bad thing.”

I feel nostalgic for a time when shredding the Bill of Rights was at least acknowledged to be a bad thing.

Regarding the 12,000 — from 1950 to 1953 J. Edgar Hoover leaked copious amounts of information and names to Sen. Joe McCarthy, who then “investigated” and held “hearings” in which he bullied and smeared his targets. McCarthy’s sidekick, the infamous Roy Cohn, also had contacts in the bureau, who gave him access to confidential FBI reports.

Much of what [McCarthy] got came directly from the FBI, which had a habit of leaking information to favored politicians. Not only was Joe friendly with J. Edgar Hoover, but several of his aides had either worked for the Bureau or built up good contacts there. Roy Cohn, for example, was very close with Lou Nichols, the assistant director. One source said that Cohn knew

    … all about FBI lists of supect Communists and has a fantastic memory for the names and backgrounds of practically all the important ex-Communists in the country. My friend has frequently been with Cohn when he picks up the phone, calls the FBI and demands to know the whereabouts of some ex-Communist or suspect Communist. Within a half hour or so the Bureau will call him back and give him the name of the special agent who is riding herd on the particular individual and Cohn will shortly thereafter get a call from the agent.

Despite his repeated denials, Cohn also had access to confidential FBI reports. One agent revealed that his colleagues “put in long hours poring over Bureau security files, abstracting them for Roy Cohn.” And Ruth Watt, chief clerk of the Government Operations Committee [chaired by McCarthy], recalled that “we had a lot of FBI reports because we could get them, you see.” Watt added that “Roy and J. Edgar Hoover knew each other pretty well, so it was not too difficult to get these things.” [David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy [Free Press, 1983], p. 257]

One suspects that if J. Edgar Hoover were seriously concerned about these 12,000 people, then information on at least some of them ended up with McCarthy and Cohn. And McCarthy and Cohn held investigations and hearings pretty much nonstop until the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. But not one of McCarthy’s investigations resulted in a conviction of espionage. And none of the many charges McCarthy brought against individuals were ever proved, even by the release of the Venona files. So it’s a good bet that the bulk of those 12,000 people that Hoover wanted to detain permanently were innocent.

Don’t Blame the Boomers

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Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast has words for the young folks who blame America’s problems on Boomers.

Last month I had an extended and rather heated exchange with one of our commenters who made a host of sweeping generalizations about baby boomers, few if any of which were true. I’ve had conversations with some of my Gen-X friends on this as well, with many of them similarly blaming the baby boomers for their own plight. I’ve even seen Gen-Xers trying to claim Keith Olbermann as one of their own, even though he was born in 1959 and therefore is indisputably a baby boomer. I hate to tell them this, but no less a Gen-X icon than old Lloyd Dobler himself, John Cusack, only escaped the dread Baby Boomer label by a mere six months.

I’m seeing a lot of this lately; blaming the baby boomers for everything that’s gone wrong in this country, hand-in-hand with the idea that Gen-X, Gen-Y, and the Millenials are somehow either a) hapless victims of the evil boomers (largely the province of Gen-Xers who are now reaching an age when the refusal to “sell out” is starting to have the nasty consequences of no savings and no health insurance); b) greedy, evil people who have sucked up all the resources and left nothing for anyone else; or c) an entire generation of hippies who had all the sex and all the drugs and all the fun and then became Republicans and tried to deny anyone else the fun they had.

I’ve seen a lot of this, too, and while I don’t think all Gen-Xers, etc., are guilty (that would be generalizing), enough of ’em are guilty, and it annoys the bleep out of me.

Jill is right when she says,

There’s this notion Chris and others put forward that the 80-hour workweek is somehow the invention of sellout baby boomers out of pure greed for bigger houses and ever-more electronic gewgaws and STUFF. But the fact of the matter is that at least for people born my year and later, especially those of us on a white-collar track, the defined benefit pensions and job security that our parents enjoyed was already largely gone by the time we emerged from college into a recession caused by the second oil shock in a decade.

This was my experience, also, and I’m older than Jill. By the time I was out of college the kind of job security my parents had enjoyed was already evaporating. I agree that younger people today are getting a raw deal generally compared to us Boomers, but we Boomers got a rawer deal than our parents did after World War II. And I believe the forces causing this creeping rawness were put into place while most of us Boomers were still babies.

I have in my hands a book titled Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf. Dr. Fones-Wolf documents that during the very years the Boomers were birthed, a cabal of wealthy corporate leaders used their resources to undermine the popularity of New Deal progressivism and unions. They succeeded, and this success ushered in the era in which corporations could demand that workers pretty much turn over their lives to the Company. Before most Boomers were even in high school most of the damage had been done, and by the time we entered the workforce the rules had already been changed, although we didn’t realize it right away.

Our parents were certain that the road to success lay in staying with one employer for years and years and years, accumulating pensions and vacation time, and for the most part that worked for them. But most of us Boomers learned, slowly and painfully, that this life plan was no longer possible. Certainly some among us bought the corporate bullshit and played the games, but most of us have just been trying to survive. And now making a living is even more precarious. This concerns me deeply. I want to reverse this pernicious trend and help younger people achieve a better quality of life.

However, my dears, if you are going to blame me for your problems … go bleep yourselves.

I’ve pointed out many times that the archetypal rightie-bot is a Gen-Xer whose earliest political memories are of the Carter Administration. You see this over and over again. I’m not saying all Gen-Xers are rightie-bots, but I do think a disproportionate number of the loyal soldiers of the Right are Gen-Xers. I expect someday the Millenials will turn around and slam Gen-Xers for causing their problems, so be prepared.

Every generation has its idiots. My generation is as diverse as any. The activists among us did get some things wrong, such as putting too much faith in single-issue and “identity” politics. We also thought Ralph Nader was our hero … oh, wait; that’s a cross-generational mistake. Sorry.

The truth is that we Boomers were brought up in the 1950s to be idealistic and patriotic. I’ve written about this before, here and here. We faced an entirely different culture with entirely different challenges than younger people do today. No doubt some of what we did makes no sense outside that context — you had to be there — but if you’d been brought up in the 1950s, you’d have felt drawn to beads and patchouli oil, too. Trust me.

Recently Andrew Sullivan wrote an article for The Atlantic that extolled Barack Obama as the post-Boomer candidate (in truth, Obama was born in the waning years of the Boom) and blamed the Boomers for America’s culture wars and “a cultural climate that stultifies our politics and corrupts our discourse.” This is, IMO, one of the biggest piles of steaming crap Andy has ever produced, and that’s saying something. The rifts in our culture pre-date the Boom, and what has corrupted our discourse more than anything else is the emergence of the extreme Right via the Goldwater/Reagan wing of the Republican Party. (See pseudo conservatism.)

Must of the griping against Boomers is the result of rightie propaganda about the 1960s and the counterculture and Boomers generally, and like most rightie propaganda the Narrative has little to do with what actually happened. It’s disheartening to see so many allegedly progressive people fall for it. So if you’ve fallen for it, wise up.

Update: See also Richard Blair at All Spin Zone.