Per Glenn Greenwald, don’t miss this audio essay by rightie Rod Dreher.
As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.
But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.
In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.
The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.
Like so many loyal soldiers of movement conservatism, Dreher’s earliest political memories are of the Carter Administration and the Iranian hostage crisis, followed by the triumphant ascension of Ronald Reagan. He was 13 years old when Reagan was elected, so you can’t fault him for viewing these events through a child’s eyes. The problem is, as it is with so many of his fellow travelers, that his understanding of politics remained childish. He seems to have retained a child’s simple faith that Democrats (and liberals) are “bad” and Republicans (and conservatives) are “good,” so one does not have to think real hard to know who’s right or wrong. In the minds of righties, Republicans/conservatives have an inherent virtue that keeps them on the side of the angels. What passes for “critical analysis” among righties is most often just the unconscious jerking of their knees in support of their faith.
Dreher’s is the voice of a man who realizes his faith has been betrayed.
As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.
I had a heretical thought for a conservative – that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word – that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot – that they have to question authority.
On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?
The answers to your questions, Mr. Dreher, are (1) yes, and (2) because you were brainwashed. As I wrote here,
I noticed years ago that the rank-and-file “movement conservative†is younger than I am. Well, OK, most people are younger than I am. But surely you’ve noticed that a disproportionate number of True Believers are people who reached their late teens / early twenties during the Carter or Reagan years at the earliest. They came of age at the same time the right-wing media / think tank infrastructure began to dominate national political discourse, and all their adult lives their brains have been pickled in rightie propaganda.
Because they’re too young to remember When Things Were Different, they don’t recognize that the way mass media has handled politics for the past thirty or so years is abnormal. What passes for our national political discourse — as presented on radio, television, and much print media — is scripted in right-wing think tanks and media paid for by the likes of Joseph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, and more recently by Sun Myung Moon. What looks like “debate” is just puppet theater, presented to manipulate public opinion in favor of the Right.
In this puppet theater “liberals” (booo! hisss!) are the craven, cowardly, and possibly demented villains, and “conservatives” are the noble heroes who come to the rescue of the virtuous maid America. Any American under the age of 40 has had this narrative pounded into his head his entire life. Rare is the individual born after the Baby Boom who has any clue what “liberalism” really is. Ask, and they’ll tell you that liberals are people who “believe in” raising taxes and spending money on big entitlement programs, which of course is bad. (Read this to understand why it’s bad.)
Just one example of how the word liberal has been utterly bastardized, see this Heritage Foundation press release of March 2006 that complains Congress is becoming “liberal.” Why? Because of its pork-barrel spending.
But I want to say something more about betrayal. One piece left out of most commentary on the freaks (not hippies, children; the name preferred by participants of the counterculture was freaks) was how betrayed many of us felt. Remember, we’d been born in the years after World War II. We’d spent our childhoods dramatizing our fathers’ struggles on Normandy Beach and Iwo Jima in our suburban back yards. Most of us watched “Victory at Sea” at least twice. Most of our childhood heroes were characters out of American mythos, like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone (who seemed an awful lot alike). Further, some of the scariest times of the Cold War unfolded during our elementary and middle schools years. We grew up believing the Communists would nuke us any second. Our schools (even Sunday School, as I recall) and media made sure we were thoroughly indoctrinated with the understanding that liberty and democracy were “good” and Communism was “bad,” and America Is the Greatest Nation in the World.
For many of us, these feelings reached their apex during the Kennedy administration. I was nine years old when he was elected. He seemed to embody everything that was noble and good and heroic about America. I remember his tour of Europe the summer before the assassination. I watched his motorcade move through cheering crowds on our black-and-white console television and never felt prouder to be an American.
But then our hearts were broken in Dallas, and less than two years later Lyndon Johnson announced he would send troops to Vietnam. And then the young men of my generation were drafted into the meat grinder. Sooner or later, most of us figured out our idealism had been misplaced. I was one of the later ones; the realization dawned for me during the Nixon Administration, which began while I was a senior in high school. Oh, I still believed in liberty and democracy; I felt betrayed because I realized our government didn’t. And much of my parents’ generation didn’t seem to, either.
The counterculture was both a backlash to that betrayal and to the cultural rigidity of the 1950s. And much of “movement conservatism” was a backlash to the counterculture, albeit rooted in the pseudo-conservatism documented earlier by Richard Hofstadter and others.
(And how weird is it that anyone is still talking about “hippies”? Did some hippiechick sitter drop Dreher on his head when he was a baby?)
Rod Dreher and others of his generation are now old enough that their children are at least approaching adolescence, if they haven’t already arrived. What “earliest political memory” will imprint on them? What form will the inevitable rebellion against their parents’ generation take?
Update: Sorta kinda related — Jonathan Zasloff speculates how much the Carter/Iranian hostage crisis episode caused the Dems to lose credibility on foreign policy. The fact is, to get the whole sad story of how the Dems lost credibility on foreign policy you have to go back to the 1940s. And it has little to do with anything the Dems actually did, or didn’t, do.
Maha: I am older than you. I was 21 when Kennedy was elected. I didn’t know much about politics then, not even now, but I felt good about him being president. I think it was mostly that he inspired me. Although I was married and had three kids and far removed from the “hippie” culture, today people refer to me as an old hippie. Guess there are some things you can’t hide.
My heart was also broken when he was assassinated and no politician has arisen that can replace him. Seems kind of silly as I think about it cause it must be emotional. But so be it!
Over the years, I have become more jaded which may be good, may be bad.
I would like your opinion on Barack Obama as he is invoking the same feelings in me that Kennedy did. Is there hope? Grannyeagle
I have to wonder how much class plays a part in Dreher’s continued conservatism. I was a child of the Reagan era as well–12 when he was elected–and I found myself relating to the very feelings he described. But here’s the difference. When I finished high school, I didn’t go to college right away. I grew up in a trailer in south Louisiana in a fundamentalist home and that wasn’t much of an option at the time. Instead, I went to work and got married and had a kid right off the bat, and found myself in the first Bush administration’s economy trying hard just to feed myself. That’s when I realized the Reagan rhetoric was crap and began my move toward the political left. If I’d grown up in different circumstances, had different opportunities, I might never have seen the world the way I do know.
And man, would I be an asshole.
It’s always seemed to me that the virulent anti-hippie feelings of so many guys on the right are really “None of those free love hippie chicks would do me.” rejection reactions. Just like the anger of so many non-dating young Arab men…
just thinkin out loud about it
Incertus — good point. A lot of them are upper-middle class AND forty-something, you’re right.
Thank you! I am one year older than you, so your memories and mine are virtually the same. Here’s another thought about our generation.
Our parents were raised (many of them) during hard times; namely the Great Depression and WWII. But THEIR government was competent and AT LEAST, trying to do what was right in a competent and compassionate way. I know that all of Roosevelt’s programs were not unqualified successes and that we didn’t win every battle in WWII, but government truly WAS trying to help people and protect the “American Way of Life.”
When Johnson and Nixon started doing their “thing,” they were apparently NOT trying to do what what was right in a competent and compassionate way. They lied to us; they succumbed to the influence and pressures of the “Miliatary Industrial Complex” that President Eisenhower had so passionately tried warn us about. But my parents simply could not allow themselves to believe that their government would lie to them; or that it would be willing to send their children to die so that coporatists could make more money. They believed in the goodness of American GOVERNMENT, instead of the goodness of AMERICA!
Another Republican betrayal: Eisenhower took over VietNam from the French after DienBenPhu. Kennedy and Johnson were stuck with the tarbaby because they knew the Republicans would use it against them. “Who lost SouthEast Asia?
all you guys need to learn your history… carter didn’t fuck up the hostage situation… the republicans were dealing with iranians in the backroom, and delayed the release of hostages till after the election to make carter look bad.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/09/1444242
excerpt:
“JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Bob Parry, in politics at every election time there’s always talk of an “October surprise†that will affect an election. And obviously the phrase “October surprise” actually goes back to even before this Iran-Contra scandal: the election in 1980 between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Could you talk at all about — was Bob Gates, did he have any role and involvement in that first alleged October surprise?
ROBERT PARRY: Well, when we were doing the Iran-Contra investigations, one of the mysteries was when it really started, and we were able to trace it back initially to 1984, when there were these contacts between some Iranians and some Israelis and some former CIA people, which sort of led to the scandal that we knew at the time. But as we went back, we learned that there the shipments of weapons did not begin in 1985, as we had first thought, but really back in 1981. So we had to look at some of these issues of these allegations that were sort of longstanding from some people who had sort of been in the intelligence world that there had been earlier contacts, that during the 1980 campaign, when 52 Americans were being held hostage in Iran and Jimmy Carter was trying desperately to get them out, that the Republicans went behind his back, first to get information, but also then to make contacts with the Iranians directly.
And the evidence on this has built up over time. We now have a lot of documents. We have some records from that period. We have statements from former Iranian officials, including the former Iranian president, Banisadr, the former defense minister, the former foreign minister, all of whom saying that they had these dealings with the Republicans behind the scenes. So, as we went back through that, the evidence built up that there had been these earlier contacts and that Bob Gates was one of the people involved in them. “
IMHO, Rod Dreher, at age 40, has finally matured, and joined the adults who know independent thought requires the application of common sense.
Common sense requires the results be compared to the claims made pre-action. Accountability to conservatives, in this segment of history, has absolutely zero to do with the comparison of claims vs. results, but is predicated on the trust of a cult of personality.
Although he is miles above Stalin, the despot of measure even 60 years later, the basis of Bush 43’s true power resides purely on a trust given to the leader, clearly not earned by any measurable unit, by faith from hordes of people like Rod Dreher.
That Bush 43 is losing people like Rod is, of course, welcomed by those of us in the ‘hippies’ camp.
In 2007, how anyone can take a US Defence Dept. spokesman’s word at face value, let alone the White House, or a Congress-person’s word, is amazing to me.
Common sense requires that one apply a very basic set of weights and measures to every utterance of this bunch.
I’m not an American. Unfortunately, in today’s world, it’s apparently excusable that these groups lie to me. It is inexcusable that they lie to US citizens, Congress, amd residents at all, let alone daily, as has been Bush 43’s sad performance.
At least, even at 40 years old, some of the idiots, like Rod used to be, have had to confront their egregious errors in judgement.
It gives me hopes, Barbara, just as you and GG do.
To finish my thoughts:
We “freaks” saw through the lies and hypocrisy – something our parents simply were not wired to do. Near the end of Nixon’s reign, my parents began to see just how corrupt government could be. They were crushed, disillusioned, and sorely disappointed.
Most of us hippies went on to successful lives in our various careers; some even becoming conservatives. But instead of believing that our government was good, conservatives became convinced that ALL government was bad.
Now, hopefully, we have begun to realize that American GOVERNMENT is NEVER without sin. But what we need to consider is whether or not our government is trying to do RIGHT in a competent and compassionate way, or whether it has been co-opted by the corporate interests of the MIC.
We know where the Bush Administration stands; we know where their interests lie. They do NOT care about their citizens; they do not care about “The American Way.” They have gutted our Constitution, done away with checks and balances, and have shown an unswerving willingness to send our best and brightest to their deaths for what? PROFIT! CRONYISM! THE LUST FOR POWER!
The “freaks” were right! Love our country and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the rule of law, but ALWAYS be skeptical of the GOVERNMENT! They are NOT the same thing! We “hippies” saw that in the sixties and seventies. Now, we see history repeating itself and it makes us sick, and sad, and resolved to stand up and resist, again, when our government goes astray!
Rod Dreher used to come to our Progressive Student Network meetings in Baton Rouge back in the 80’s (roughly 1986-1989 or thereabouts). I dunno: maybe he DID hate us with a passion. Or maybe he was sent to “monitor” our activities by a conservative group or something like that.
Not that we cared: we had nothing to hide, and our major activities were, I guess, of the educate/agitate variety–lit tables, small demonstrations, a little bit of street theater…after all, LSU isn’t exactly a progressive hotbed. Anyway, Dreher went to the meetings, attended at least some of the demos, and never expressed, at least to me, any underlying hatred of “hippies,” and I remember speaking to him several times. Go figure.
Then again, maybe he’s just so repressed that it took him all this time to finally let his inner angst out.
Or maybe he’s remembering that, while sure, we had long(ish) hair, smoked weed when we could afford it, and drank a lot of cheap beer back then, we were fundamentally RIGHT about the issues we felt were important, and that the folks on the other side of the fence are the same mental midgets who now have us stuck in Iraq…and losing Afghanistan.
I too am a little older than you. Cheer up — we’re out here trucking on, trucking on.
I’ve been fortunate enough to spend much of the last 15 years working politically with a subset of the 20-40 set who are frequently somewhat immune to the media culture: young people of color. Oh sure, they get the garbage drummed into their heads too, but they come to it with the gut knowledge that they are lied to, day in and day out. And some have the idealism to think this country could do better and that is worth working on.
California has sunk into a morass of public squalor through the effort of the wingers, but we have a lot of very promising young folks coming up.
Anyone with a modicum of reading skills should be aware that the main difference between the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter and the Republicans who suceeded him was that the Repbulicans were more than willing to pay tribute and grovel before those who were opposed to US interests.
We know for a fact that Reagan sent a plane load of arms and the cake shaped like a Bible to beg for the release of American hostages.
We know for a fact that Reagan turned a blind eye while the Chinese were providing nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan for fear of alienating the Saudis.
That the those who supported such cowardice would also support the policies of a Petulant Coward like Bush is not the least bit surprising.
mbb —
all you guys need to learn your history… carter didn’t fuck up the hostage situation… the republicans were dealing with iranians in the backroom, and delayed the release of hostages till after the election to make carter look bad.
Of course, but that wasn’t the subject of the post. (And don’t EVER presume to tell me that I need to learn history.)
Thanks for the insight and memories. My older sister cried so painfully when Bobby Kennedy was shot. The morning news tore our family up and apart. My sister, Katheleen, nicnamed ‘shaw,’ reminded me of you. My dad often called her Princess…Kathy just sent me a beautiful ‘paper’ she prepared from her work in hospice. The study she did as a youngster always meant she landed a ‘A’…A Sophia at the second from the H.S. top in the class. I got my education in ‘experiences’ with the flop-flop mired crowd you’ve represented fairly. Same-same, just so we learn. My sister is too esoteric for many ‘folk’:…tunnel of light, bardo, nameste, slight bows when she speaks streams of…Light. Thanks.
I was 21 during Kennedy’s campaign and that was my first of many faithful votes as a citizen of this country. Unlike grannyeagle, above, I did know about politics. For better or worse, my parents treated my sister and I like little adults and as soon as we could put a sentence together we were expected to take part in dinner table talk about social and economic justice, the glory of our constitution and bill of rights, ethics, history and politics.
My parents came out of the working class and, for them, the New Deal was not just the a new deal it was a New World. It changed the lives of millions of people and showed the true promise of democracy.
Like many young people, when I was young I was intolerant of some of my elders, especially those who held conservative views. I remember an argument I had, at age 21, with an old man who was arguing a conservative viewpoint on local politics. I was sharp at the time and countered every argument of his with a liberal answer. Finally, the frustrated old man said: “You should listen to me because I have experience and I’m older and wiser than you.” And I answered, “Well, you know that there’s no fool like an old fool.”
Despite the fact that I am still a liberal (“still crazy after all these years”), I’m embarressed by my youthful arrogance and disrespect.
In my head are all the working class voices I heard as a child: the fireman, the bus driver, the switchboard operator, the midwife, the building superintendent, the waiter – wonderful voices of people who worked hard and were the salt of the earth.
These voices live on only in some old movies, television shows like the Honeymooners, and in the heads of people like me. These people were FDR’s army – both civilian and military – and as important to understanding our heritage as studying our founding fathers.
The problem is, as it is with so many of his fellow travelers, that his understanding of politics remained childish.
Which is not surprising considering Reagan’s simplistic rhetoric, which defined things in terms like “good” and “evil”, “right” and “wrong” … it was the era of dumbing down, and all nuance got lost in the process. When dealing with rigid extremes, creative debate and the free exchange of ideas cannot flourish. This does not mean we must move back to the center, which is what I am afraid might happen. It means we must embrace subtlety, shades of grey, and out-of-the-box thinking.
When the Iraq disaster finally reaches its horrible end, which we can only speculate about, I would say the hostage affair in the U.S. embassy in Tehran will finally have come to a close. Before this Iraq disaster, no event has probably imprinted itself so strongly on the U.S. public’s mind, as Dreher and so many others can testify: the humiliation, the ‘unacceptable’ defiance of the U.S. And this all ultimately goes back to the glorious reign of the repressive King of Kings in Iran who was the darling of the U.S. and all the western countries, at least until he got ideas of reginoal hegemony in his head, which the present Iranian government is only continuing to play out, including their nuclear program,which, by the way, the U.S. helped to set up in Tehran in about 1953, after orchestrating the overthrow of the truly democratically chosen government. Much can be said about Ayatollah Khomeiny, for instance that his revolution has kept influencing and determining U.S. policy for the last quarter of a century. Over and over, the specter of Iran is invoked in Washington rites and rituals, maybe never so much as today. ‘Real men go the Tehran’, a right-winger famously said. I’ve only recently realized the meaning of the statement: the source of all our woes can only be cut off there. The present U.S. configuration of politicians and power brokers has unnecessarily made the country and the entire world a much unhappier place.
At 13 you are not a child, and though he was exposed to lots of bullshit, I would not say that “you were brainwashed.”, and 40 – 13 = 27.
You are far too easy on Dreher.
And how weird is it that anyone is still talking about “hippies� And how weird is it that anyone is still talking about “hippies�
I think you can blame the blogosphere, particularly atrios, for that.
It has become sardonic shorthand to characterize the continued dismissal of all of us (including Howard Dean, Russ Feingold and Scott Ritter) who were right as not being “Serious.”
Nice piece: a perfect example of starting to unspin their narrative and replace it with something a lot closer to reality. I’m younger (born in 1973) but I grapple with the results of thirty years of right wing marination every day in trying to organize my fellow Gen Xers. Very, very few of them have been able to cut through the slag of “common sense” that Reagan and his machine baked into their minds.
The answer to your last question is that that data is already showing that Bush has created an army of more or less permanent Democrats in Gen Y. The rightie’s infrastructure is still formidable and will always be able to peel huge chunks of folks off and win elections, but there’s a persuadable leftward base there that simply did not exist six years ago.
From one freak to another, well said.
Wonderful essay. Thank you. I found you through Glenn Greenwald.
I was born in ’61, and somehow I escaped the conservative brainwashing. I often attribute this to my Berkeley education, but I think you’re right, our politics are shaped by much younger memories. For me, it was the Vietnam debacle and Nixon’s resignation. I saw the protesters as heroic figures, the returning vets as unfortunate victims of bad policy. Nixon and Watergate forever convinced me not to trust authority.
I wonder if some folks have a powerful drive to believe in the goodness, righteousness of their leaders, and in the goodness of their country. It almost becomes an aspect of their self esteem, and God help you if you challenge that.
We’re raising our son (11 years old) on Howard Zinn and Keith Olbermann. He questions everything. I doubt he’ll be easy to brainwash.
Incertus tells a (sort of) similar story to my own. I was born in 1970 in Guam, a Navy brat. Ours was a staunchly republican lower-middle-class northern California family (I remember as a child putting Gerald Ford campaign literature on people’s doorsteps, even.) I liked Carter, but my parents always scowled about what a terrible president he was. I was too young to really understand this, though. Reagan inspired me to some degree with the space shuttle program, but blew it with his handling (if you can call it that) of the AIDS epidemic. Many good people around me were dying of a mysterious disease that the government refused to address as I was just leaving high school. As a closeted gay kid, this was very disturbing and showed what value our country that claimed to value “equality” and “diversity” placed on my sorry ass. Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi became early political heroes to me after Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk were murdered and the AIDS epidemic was out of control. I still didn’t really understand the difference between Republicans and Democrats though.
I couldn’t afford college either and worked on and off, going to a technical school. Then the Bush (41) recession happened and also a hurricane (Andrew?) that he was unprepared for and I realized that this guy hadn’t a clue about regular people”s lives. (remember the first time he saw a supermarket scanner? They’d been around for 15 years or so. Whew.)
So, when the ’92 campaigns started up, I realized we needed something better. Paul Tsongas seemed like a good guy, but wasn’t charismatic enough. When asked in a town hall debate what a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread costs, Bill Clinton knew, while George Bush (41) looked at his watch and talked about how “people with means” shouldn’t be taxed for being successful and showed us his American Express card… ugh.
Since then, I’ve seen the light and I’ve always been sceptical of the Neocon dreams of world domination. My rich kid friends from high school all went off to be successful republican idiots. Now they must be seeing the errors in their ways. Pity. Maybe I should actually go to a High School reunion and see how they’ve all turned out.
Maha’s stories help me understand my parent’s generation a bit better, from a perspective I can relate to. My mother died a few years ago and my dad won’t talk about how he came to his political beliefs now that he realizes that by not questioning his leaders’ motives, we have allowed ourselves to repeat the unrepeatable… Vietnam. He stopped paying attention to current events (other than the weather) around the time of Katrina.
After reading the (very inpsiring) Glenn Greenwald piece this morning, I am glad I found this one next. Thank you for all you do, Maha.
At 13 you are not a child
Are too, especially boys.
I was only 11 when Reagan was elected, but my parents were virulently anti-Reagan, because my father was a member of Carpenters Local 43. We were the only house in town that had Carter signs on our lawn in 1979.
My politics are definitely shaped by my parents. My father always said the Republicans are for the rich, and the Democrats are for the working man. He believed it then, although we both feel that both parties are for the rich these days, and there are precious few elected officials who give a damn about the working man.
I’m more socially liberal than my parents – my father is prejudiced against various minorities and doesn’t like to even think about homosexuality. My mother thinks “the gays” (as she calls them) deserve the same rights as everyone else.
But none of us vote Republican.
My husband was raised in a pretty staunch Republican environment, and with the exception of his mother, all of his family are now Democrats. That’s because of George W. Bush. My father-in-law, lifelong Republicans, was flabbergasted when Bush was chosen as the candidate. He couldn’t understand why everyone couldn’t see what a fool Bush was.
Before this Iraq disaster, no event has probably imprinted itself so strongly on the U.S. public’s mind, as Dreher and so many others can testify: the humiliation, the ‘unacceptable’ defiance of the U.S.
I can understand that, if you aren’t old enough to remember, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Kennedy Assassination(s) or MLK’s assassination or the 1960s generally, that would seem to be so. To me, it was interesting at the time but I can’t say I was imprinted with it. I think I’d run out of room for imprinting. 🙂
For some reason, I can’t look back on the hostage crisis without thinking of Tony Orlando and Dawn. A grim and better forgotten time, I say.
I should have said that I agree with my mother about “the gays”!
Dreher’s an idiot if the first major event he remembers is the Hostage Fiasco.
I’m only a year older than Dreher, and my memories stretch waaaaay further back than ’79-’80. I remember vividly Carter’s speech the morning that the rescue attempt went so horribly wrong … but I also remember Watergate, Three Mile Island, Love Canal, “Hi, I’m Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president” in ’76, a good chunk of the Nixon years, Vietnam, and — for good measure — the night HHH Jr. died. And I remember other kids talking about this stuff in school, too. I dunno, maybe Dreher’s head was just too deep in the paste jar to be paying attention to the rest of us — but we knew what was going on, and we were talking.
And hippies: If Dreher was really paying attention, he would have noticed actual, in-the-flesh, hippies all around him when he was a kid, rather than the longhaired, patchouli-reeking monsters lurking in his closet. He still probably wouldn’t have liked them very much (I never did … or at least, I never took them seriously), but he wouldn’t have automatically associated them with Demon Liberalism.
I was born in 1971, and grew up in a Republican household.
Becoming liberal is something that takes more than time to think through. It requires communication. We need to be engaged with responses to our questions when they are respectful.
You are dismissive of righties for good reason, they want to convert you to their very broken way of thinking.
Those of us who are living through these events for the first time are nonetheless having to learn what will preserve what is good and end what is evil in the government.
You may call me an idiot or other names, and I accept my limitations. I am not so old and wise.
As a kid in Chicago I spent many summer afternoons at the Montclair Theatre at Grand and Harlem. Double features were twenty-five cents. Many included war pictures. I saw “The Longest Day†there. (I was six when Kennedy was elected.)
Americans were the good guys. We went to war reluctantly, only against countries that attacked us or our friends. The bad guys mistreated prisoners. Americans did not. It violated our principles. We were better than that. That’s what made us the good guys. For America, right made might.
Vladimir Posner, for years the mouthpiece of the Soviet state, said in a 2005 interview how he recalled that when President Kennedy was shot, people on the streets of Moscow wept.
This was the height of the Cold War, after the U-2 incident, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis. Muscovites may not have known much about American democracy or everyday life here, just the promise of the United States the youthful Kennedy represented.
Kennedy was dead. Moscow wept. That was 1963.
After the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, the French newspaper Le Monde proclaimed, “We are all Americans now.â€
By 2005 that goodwill had been squandered, lost in a thicket of secret prisons, torture, murder charges, beatings, abuse photos, “ghost detainees†and “extraordinary rendition†practiced by few and excused by too many inside and outside of this administration as justified by Sept. 11.
It’s one thing to boast of conviction and principles. Holding onto them when tested is the real proof of character. That is perhaps what Benjamin Franklin meant at the close of the Constitutional Convention when asked whether delegates had crafted a republic or a monarchy. “A republic,†he replied, “if you can keep it.†A decade earlier, signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged to defend principles they held dear with their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. There was no footnote saying, “in case of terrorist attack, principles and honor be damned.”
By 2004, John Le Carré and others in England were writing to Clark County, Ohio voters, pleading for them to oppose Bush: “Give us back the America we loved.”
Amen to that.
mbb
all you guys need to learn your history… carter didn’t fuck up the hostage situation… the republicans were dealing with iranians in the backroom, and delayed the release of hostages till after the election to make carter look bad.
We’re not talking about history–we’re talking about perception at the time events were happening, and in this particular case, the perceptions of teens and pre-teens, and the way it seemed at the time was that Reagan represented strength. That that didn’t turn out to be the case is irrelevant.
When Johnson and Nixon started doing their “thing,†they were apparently NOT trying to do what what was right in a competent and compassionate way.
I have always hated this painting of Johnson and Nixon with the same brush.
Johnson was a great progressive leader who did a lot of good things for this country but stumbled badly with Vietnam. His regret was visible, genuine, and he died the day before Nixon’s deal went into effect, which wasn’t any better than the one Johnson was trying to get in ’68
Nixon always was a cynical opportunist who saw the Vietnam war (and the aftermath of the civil rights movement) as his opening to the presidency. He used the war for another four years to his re-election. Nixon lived on another twenty years or so, and unlike the obviously guilt-ridden Johnson, perpetually sucking the sour grape that he had been betrayed.
It was enlightening the way Repubs circled the wagons in Nixon’s later years, and I hope someday, the same can happen to Johnson.
The first time I ever voted was for JFK. I was impressed by him. But right about then I met one of the freedom bus riders and I realized there was a huge gap between the illusion and the reality of America. I was lucky. The gap has never ever gone away. It’s got bigger, in fact. The disconnection between Bush’s mouth and the reality of Iraq is indicative of the size of the gap. But I’m afraid it’s permanent, now—most people have got too much to lose (too much stuff) if America was to surrender it’s world domination.
Take a second look at Dreher’s words. He’s not crushed by the immorality of the enterprise, by the lies, the corruption, the horrific numbers of dead Iraqi’s. He’s not bothered by the shredding of the bill of rights, no fly lists, or any of the rest of it.
The source of the pain? We’re losing. Once there are some new neonazi’s in power, or if the old bunch manages to get on a winning streak, all his concerns will be resolved, and he’ll return back to the fold of might makes right and America uber Alles.
We’ve seen it before. We’ll see it again.
whig, you are right. It’s just that I have fought this fight for too long, and spent too many wasted hours trying to “communicate” with people who would not be communicated with, and I have no patience with the bullshit any more.
Take a second look at Dreher’s words. He’s not crushed by the immorality of the enterprise, by the lies,
Oh, I think he is. Did you listen to the entire audio? I only quoted a little bit.
Methinks Rod Dreher’s latest Wingnut Welfare check bounced! Don’t worry, Roddy, baby! Just an administrative error. We’ll send you a new check this week.
Furthermore, I don’t think the moment at which you go looking for a new political direction to minipulate is the right time to expose just how shallow and cheap your political thinking is. I wouldn’t want this schmendrick on my side no matter how much he hated conservatives.
Stick with the tried and true till it gives out on you, Roddy. Then drop out of sight and change your name to go with your new politics.
mbb, I really need to learn more about the October surprise and Iran-Contra. I think this is a good time to be blogging about that, as we should hope to bring down this entire Republican regime by showing their criminal collusion with terrorists since the 1980’s or earlier.
whig-
It goes on way back before the 80’s. Watch the BBC series “The Power of Nightmares” free at Google Video. 3 1-hour segments. You’ll see.
Honesty is the most important attribute in a leader, and the most dishonest dealing people know this well. So they groom idiots to be fed on a diet of lies, provide them with every advantage when they follow their assigned script, and unto the next generation the lies spread and are believed even by the parents and grandparents themselves.
Someone said, “Always be sincere, whether you mean it or not.” I think that sums up my point. Sorry for the verbosity.
A genuinely honest person is what we’re all hoping for. Few genuinely honest people seem to rise to positions of high authority. We want to believe the fairytale, that there will be a good person who will lead us, and we are defeated whenever we look outside ourselves for that person. We must make our own paths.
What a difference a few years makes. My first political memory was freshman year in a Jesuit high school in 1973-74 and learning that our government had a hand in the assasination of Salvador Allende in Chile. That’s not what I had learned in my history classes just a few years before, that our government helps destabilize and kill political leaders it didn’t entirely like. (Now, as an adult, I realize, no sh*t Sherlock, that’s why we have to be politically engaged.)
I also was profoundly upset by Reagan’s initial responses to the AIDS crisis, as RandyH noted above. Glad to see someone else saw that, too. I lost friends and a boss in the mid to late 1980s and the Republicans lost me forever on that one.
I agree with Den Valdron, there’s more than a touch of anger due to losing rather than an internal moral realization and change. I don’t know how you wean fascists from their love of order, however. People are adults. They have to decide to change. They have to grow an awareness beyond themselves.
Personally, I teach our kids (8 & 10) to question authority early and often (in a mostly polite way, naturally), even mine. And they know not to get me started on talking about Bush or politics. So I think they’ll turn out okay. I worry about Dreher’s kids, though.
Thanks, Maha, for the excellent essay, and for the comments.
Nice to know where my fellow freaks hang. Full props to Incertus for the statement, … man, would I be an asshole; I would have been happy for that to be the last word on the subject.
Yep, both my parents lived the struggle through the Depression and the war, and managed to push their noses into the middle class tent. Just. As the legacy of the New Deal has been eliminated, I’ve come to understand how many elements combined to make that upward mobility possible; it wasn’t just their hard work and sacrifice, it was the GI Bill and Social Security, without which my parents would have surely had to constantly choose between supporting their parents and their children.
I’d always self-identified as an independent, socially liberal and fiscally pragmatic-conservative. I tended to vote Democratic at the top of the ticket, based on policy, certainly from Reagan forward and did a lot of ticket-splitting downballot, believing that the tension of opposition makes for balance. The last of that disintegrated under Bush. Had I voted in Indiana in 2004, I would not have voted for Richard Lugar. That would have been a first for me.
But the point I started out to make is this: my concept of sacrifice is a product of my childhood, of my parents’ stoop labor in childhood that kept their families from going hungry. I was never very hungry for very long, but I was damn well aware that there were people in my own country who had been, and there were children all over the world who were.
My dad only told a few stories about his service; most of them were funny, or about the comraderie of those on his boat, and in his squadron. I knew he had schrapnel in one leg, and had almost died from dysentary, and that he hated the Red Cross for being f*cking useless when my older brother was born. These are the forces that shaped my concept of sacrifice, and I suspect they’re shared my most of my age cohort, we boomers, hippies, freaks.
So here comes Bush Jr., and I didn’t like him much to start with. I knew I wouldn’t be voting for whatever Republican was nominated, and I had little regard for his daddy. The final snap came when, after 9/11, he came out blazing, with his mouth full of revenge. and told us to go shopping. Patriotic sacrifice through shopping, that’s what our country and our countrymen required of us. That remains to this day the single most offensive and contemptible thing I’ve ever heard a politician say, and there’s lots of competition. I was astonished when he recently repeated it.
Thanks for this thread; maybe it will be possible to reanimate the America we loved, to reassert OUR traditional values.
It always amazes me that cons use the aborted rescue mission in Iran on Carter. I know the man who was the commander of that mission. He happens to be the bravest (maybe some say fool hardy) man I and many of his contemporaries know. It was a sand storm that caused the mission to be aborted. Already one helicopter had crashed and it was apparent there would be more death and destruction if they didn’t get out. Guess they prefer Reagan standing up and yelling “tear down this wall” or sneaking around and negotiating with the Iranians. I was better when I didn’t know how ridiculous cons world view is.
I must agree with Maha that at 13 boys are indeed still boys. But I can’t help thinking that Mr. Dreher has had quite a few years to move beyond that stage. After all, he was older that 13 when Iran Contra took place. I think that he must have been one of those Young Republicans who found sex abhorrent, but cakes and keys and big guns — oh boy. Now, he’s upset because we aren’t winning; that’s the real problem for him, isn’t it? We’re ‘weak’. The president has made us look ‘weak’. Does Dreher regret Guantanamo, I wonder. He clearly regrets Iraq, but were we ‘winning’, I’m sure he would still be on board.
I don’t know if feeling betrayed really qualifies as coming to one’s senses. And his conclusion, that he will teach his children to distrust government etc etc, seems to me to be a prolongation of his immaturity.
i was 12 delivering the news paper when nixon resigned in shame.
it really shook me, but then i figured the press had done it’s job, and that was the power, and the beauty of democracy.
oh well, live and learn, or not. propaganda, all is phony.
i don’t really belive in voting, in fact i resent it. but you bet your ass i voted in 2004, and i wish i had voted in 2000. no opinion on liberals, but i know republicans are evil, liars, and a lot of them are criminals too.
I don’t know what is more funny, reading about a Conservative realizing that he has been duped his whole life, or reading the assinine comments from people who think that “their side” is better. Screw them all, Republicans, Democrats, the whole damned lot.
I also find it funny that some of you feel seem to feel “enlightened” for realizing that people in power lie. Fucking A!! A chimpanzee should be able to see that. It is a sad sad commentary on humanity and Americans that we are so easily duped time and again.
People in power are the same today as they were 5,000 years ago, as they were 500 years ago, and as they will be 500 years from now. They only care about power, getting more power, and then getting some more and keeping it. Everything and everyone else, be damned. And that includes the sainted John F. Kennedy.
So, forget about them all. Take care of your family, yourself, and your community in that order. Try to figure out what is right in every situation and then DO IT. Fuck all the presidents, senators, kings, and other assholes. They are dirt and the lowest scum of the earth. All of them deserve nothing but contempt.
It might be worthwhile recalling that Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966 on an anti-DirtyHippie platform, and then he took office on Jan 1, 1967, at a time selected by his and Nancy’s astrologer. Go figure. But the point is, he came to elective office on the premise that Progressivism was Bad, and the evidence was the hippies, freaks, and students in the streets. None of which would have occurred, according to the conservative theories of the times if the Progressives hadn’t had decades of free rein to indoctrinate the children and provide them with free educations.
So, right from the outset, Reagan saw his mission as the dismantlement of Progressivism in California — and then the nation, and oh, heck, why not world-wide?
We see the legacy all around us: particularly in an uneducated populace incapable of critical thinking.
The irony is that the student and DirtyHippie revolt that Reagan and his ilk were so intent on crushing came about in part because students (starting at Berkeley in 1964) and later DirtyHippies felt utterly betrayed by the very Progressives who had given them so much, from freeways to free education through university.
i know republicans are evil, liars, and a lot of them are criminals too.
It’s not a bad thing to remember that they didn’t use to be. I don’t think either party is inherently better or worse than the other. The people in the parties, however …
RE: Aunt Deb
Perceptive, Deb. What struck me, aside from a shot of schadenfreude, was how absolutist Dreher seems. Either it’s all right or it’s all betrayal. As I read through the thread, the thought kept coming back to me: conservatism is really nothing more than a failure of nuance. While sleeping they’re conservative. Prod them awake and they’re reactionary. Put them in a room together and they invent “neoconservatism” which is really just reactionaries fuelled by oil and Jesus.
There’s no appreciation that sometimes a little government is good, or that sometimes you need a lot of it, and sometimes none is best. This constant searching for the grand unified theory of politics–the one answer that answers every question. That’s the endstage of conservatism that we’re living through right now.
Dreher may think he’s growing up. But he’s just abandoning one answer in the search for another. As soon as he finds it, I’m sure he’ll become just as insufferably rigid about it as he was about the greatness of the GoP.