Category Archives: conservatism

Impulse and Ideology

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Some guy at MSNBC argues that it makes “little sense” to call Jerad and Amanda Miller, the Las Vegas shooters, “right-wing extremists.”

He said right-wing extremists typically focus their anger on federal authorities, not local law enforcement officers like these.

“They weren’t the ATF, they weren’t the FBI. They couldn’t be seen as the representatives of a repressive government,” Levin told NBC News. “There are some militia group members who believe that the only valid authority is at the county sheriff level. In fact, many right-wing extremists love the police. They feel kinship to local law enforcement.”

So we’re just supposed to ignore the white supremacist literature, the shooters’ attempt to join the crew at the Bundy ranch and the “don’t tread on me” flag.

I wrote in my first post about the Las Vegas shooting that I doubted the shooters were working with the Bundy crew, who have decided only the federal government is evil. But the remarks at MSNBC reflect a basic misunderstanding of the connection between ideology/belief, whether political or religious, and violence.

This is something I spend a lot of time on in My Book, Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World, because I think understanding this connection and how it functions is critical to dealing not only with our ongoing domestic violence problem but also with understanding religious violence around the world.

My thinking on this issue is very much influenced by Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind. Very simply, Haidt makes a strong argument that our moral choices — including the choice to be violent — and our political and religious beliefs are rooted deeply in the subconscious. We are born pre-wired to interface with the world in particular ways, and this pre-wiring disposes us to leaning left or right, say, or determines whether we are likely to be dogmatists or open-minded. And, of course, the way we perceive, interpret and experience ourselves and the world also is very much influenced by cultural and other conditioning.

As we meander through our lives and bump into myriad phenomena, including religious and political beliefs and moral issues, all of this pre-wiring and conditioning and whatnot clanking around in our psyches churns up emotional responses. These include feelings of comfort and discomfort. We naturally want to affirm those things that make us feel good while denouncing the stuff that frightens or disgusts us. We then call on our rational minds to craft a narrative that justifies our feelings. These narratives are merged into our primary narrative, or personal myth, which is the ongoing story we tell ourselves about who we are and what the events in our lives might mean.

Another factor is what Buddhists call “mental formations,” or our states of mind, which can become habitual. This (in part) refers to the way some people tend to easily become defensive and critical, while others in the same situations are understanding and accepting. This also speaks to our basic orientation toward the world and whether we feel integrated with it or estranged from it.

By the time we are adults this wiring/conditioning “stuff” has become extremely complicated, and I doubt any two human beings who ever lived have identical inner stuff. But it’s important to understand that, ultimately, we are drawn to our beliefs and ideologies because of the stuff, not because it appeals to our rational mind. For this reason, what an ideology or political position represents to an individual on a subconscious or even metaphorical level is more critical than intellectual consistency.

This is what the guy on MSNBC doesn’t get. From their own words and actions, it’s obvious that right-wing anti-government rhetoric and the Bundy ranch drama resonated deeply with Jerad and Amanda Miller and represented something enormously significant to them, even if how they understood the “movement” differed in some particulars from most of the rest of the Bundyites.

More crudely, they wanted to kill police because they wanted to kill police, and in their minds the militia anti-government movement gave them permission, and even made killing police a righteous and praiseworthy act. They weren’t being logical, no. But does anyone seriously think the crew in the desert pretending to be at war with the federal government got there because of logic?

This is why the “he did it because of mental illness” excuse for Elliot Rodger didn’t fly for me. Crazy is a continuum, and we’re all on that continuum. None of us are entirely rational. Everyone feels a violent impulse now and then. But except for those who are demonstrably psychotic, we are capable of choosing to not act on those impulses. And Rodger was not psychotic. His writing was ordered and organized, even if the ideas he expressed were outrageous. This means he was rational enough to choose to not do what he did, as were the Millers. They all knew perfectly well they were breaking laws. Had they lived, it’s enormously unlikely they would have gotten off on an insanity plea.

But what Rodger and the Millers had in common was that they had seduced themselves into believing that their impulses were righteous and justified. And this is where public rhetoric and hate-group subcultures really do get people killed. Within the misnamed “men’s rights” subculture, talk of violating and killing women meets with social approval. Women as a class are perceived as evil and dangerous; violence against women is therefore justified, even heroic. Likewise, the right-wing anti-government rhetoric permeating American society can make killing government officials seem justified, even if some are a little hazy about the distinction between state and federal government officials.

I don’t think extremist right-wingers are inherently more prone to violence than extremist left-wingers. But at this moment in American history, the “extremist” Left is the fringe of the fringe, and it is absent from mass media. I’m not even sure it has much in the way of an internet presence. The applicable political spectrum here goes from a liberal/progressive Left that is well within the mainstream of American political traditions to a Right that stretches deeply into the tin-foil-hat section of the Twilight Zone.

And while you can find individuals on the Left expressing violent impulses, on the Right it’s not just individuals; it’s major media personalities and politicians serving in high-level state and federal offices. It’s coming from positions of authority, in other words.

This is why public rhetoric has consequences (see, for example, Paul Waldman, “How much does right-wing rhetoric contribute to right-wing terrorism?“). We’ve been having this conversation since Columbine, and the hate-speakers on the Right simply refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for the ongoing right-wing domestic violence. I have no solution to this impasse. I fear it will have to get worse before it can get better.

But this is why splitting hairs over whether the Millers were truly “right-wing extremists” because they killed local cops instead of federal BLM agents is stupid.

I’m seeing the same misunderstanding among western “Buddhalogists” in academia. There is a faction of western religious studies professors who are combing through Buddhist doctrines to find the “cause” of the Buddhist violence against Muslims in Burma, and some other places. And they are “finding” it by misinterpreting scriptures and even projecting meaning into scriptures that just plain isn’t there; I walked through an example of this in My Book.

The plain fact is that the violence violates everything the Buddha taught. The impulse is not coming from Buddhist teachings, but from racism and jingoism, and it’s being fueled by political expedience. “Buddhism” is not just a religion to the majority in Burma; it’s part of their ethnic and national identity. And a faction of monks has been cranking out rhetoric that justifies violence as “defending Buddhism.” So in spite of what it teaches, Buddhism has become a symbolic permission slip for violence in Burma.

And weirdly, in America, “patriotism” has become a symbolic permission slip for sedition. Looking for logical reasons for this is a fool’s errand.

Leeches of the GOP

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Aw, heck, let’s gloat some more. It’s a nice change of pace for us.

Somewhere last week I heard a couple of journalists covering the campaigns say that in the days before the election the Romney people were jubilantly confident while the Obama people were hopeful but nervous. Of course, you could also say “deluded” and “realistic,” respectively.

Anyway — by now you’ve probably seen the video clip of Ann Coulter saying “If Mitt Romney cannot win in this economy, then the tipping point has been reached. We have more takers than makers and it’s over. There is no hope.” I infer that Coulter considers herself to be one of the “makers.” But what exactly does she make?

The fact is, Coulter is a professional leech. She is one of several “personalities” who make a good living by leeching off the climate of hate and divisiveness that is the lifeblood of “movement conservatism” and the Republican Party. Every year or so she re-writes the same polemical book and gets it republished under a new title — some variation on Be Afraid: How Liberals Hate God and America and Want to Eat Your Babies. I don’t know who actually reads this stuff, but somebody buys it. Then she does a speaking tour and rakes in fees. Her weekly toxic waste dump of a “column” is still being syndicated. And people still go to her for her “insights” into the direction of conservatism.

But Coulter’s main function within the GOP it to keep pumping the hate so that she can continue to make a living as a leech.

A few days ago Rick Perlstein published an article at The Baffler called “The Long Con: Mail-order conservatism.” Although a bit rambling and unfocused, the article provides a fascinating view of how a culture of leeching has attached itself to “movement conservatism” and the Republican Party. All manner of people are making themselves rich by fanning the flames of alarm and then sucking money out of the rubes who believe them. It’s so blatant that conservative “media” such as Newsmax and Current Events are being subsidized by sucker schemes for Making Big Money Without Actually Having to Do Anything to Earn It.

So you’ve got individuals like Richard Viguerie and groups like the NRA that mostly specialize in fundraising by scaring people. Usually they’re sucking money out of ordinary folks, but we see now that Karl Rove managed to suck money out of the very wealthy, which makes him master of the game, I suppose.

Perlstein describes the standard come-on:

There is the bizarre linguistic operation that turns “liberal” (or, in Coulterese, “pink”) into a merely opportunistic synonym for “stuff you don’t like.” There’s the sloganeering alchemy that conflates political and economic magical thinking (“freedom”!). There’s shorthand invocation of Reagan hagiography. And then, presto: The suggestible readers on the receiving end of Coulter’s come-on are meant to realize that they are holding the abracadabra solution to every human dilemma (vote out the Democrats–oh, and also, subscribe to Mark Skousen’s newsletter for investors, while you’re at it). …

… Miracle cures, get-rich-quick schemes, murderous liberals, the mystic magic mirage of a world without taxes, those weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had hidden somewhere in the Syrian desert–only connect.

The Republican Party isn’t just being challenged by changing voter demographics. As long as people with inordinate influence in what’s called “conservatism” are milking it like a cash cow, they’re not going to let it adapt to changing voter demographics.

GOP: A Cult Looking for a Personality

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Billmon (yes! Billmon!) writes,

There simply is no getting around the fact that the mentality of the modern grassroots conservative movement is in almost all particulars the spitting image of a 20th century totalitarian political party–an “epistemically closed” loop of self-reference and self-delusion. In other words: a cult.

The upshot is that one of America’s two main political parties has managed to turn itself into the proverbial insane asylum run by the inmates. And, unless the doctors want a quick trip to the electroshock table, they damned well better tell the patients that they, too, can see the same pink elephants (wink) tapdancing on the walls:

I’ve been more or less saying movement conservatism is a cult of crazy since I started this blog more than ten years ago. However, I have only recently appreciated how much the Bush regime was able to control Teh Crazy even as they fed it and grew it. Back when the Bush cult of personality was at its peak, Dubya, Turd Blossom et al. were able make the GOP appear to be a normal political party, at least enough so that the media establishment politely looked the other way when Teh Crazy was showing, the way you do when your elderly uncle forgets to zip his fly.

A lot of the media are still doing that, of course, but not all of them. Not any more.

Dubya can’t, or won’t, play the role of Respected Elder Statesman, a role that Big Bill fills so very well. And nobody has taken his place as the Big Giant Head of the cult. Yes, many of them gave their love to Sarah Palin four years ago, but Palin needed a Karl Rove to channel and manage her to keep her cult of personality going. She lacks the smarts and discipline to do it herself (so did Dubya, but he did have a Karl Rove).

(Looking back, it’s a bit surprising Karl didn’t have somebody groomed and ready to step into the role of Trilby to his Svengali when Dubya stepped down. Maybe he didn’t fully appreciate the importance of the cult of personality to manage the masses, either. We may have Dick Cheney to thank for that, though. If Dubya had had a veep with any charisma at all, that person likely would be POTUS now.)

Anyway, now nobody is in charge, and there’s nobody telling Teh Crazy when to zip its fly and behave correctly in public. And the question is, can the toothpaste be persuaded to crawl back into the tube?

Jonathan Bernstein writes that some on the Right may be stoking Teh crazy for personal gain —

Many of us argue that there’s something really wrong with the current GOP. It’s not that it’s conservative; it’s that, well, to be blunt, it’s nuts. Or, to put it more gently, it’s that there are strong incentives for being dysfunctional, such as the profit motive for those who stand to make a lot of money from the party being out of office (when talk show ratings go up and wacky conspiracy theory books about Democratic presidents sell like hotcakes).

In other words, he’s saying feeding Teh Crazy has become an end in itself, instead of just a means of gaining and hanging on to political power. So Teh crazy continues to grow, but no one Big Giant Head is controlling it. And this is not sustainable. No compounded thing remains in stasis for long; it either grows or it decays.

The result is a party more hospitable to, say, Sarah Palin than to Richard Lugar. And a party which takes presidential candidates such as Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain at least somewhat seriously. That is, it’s a party which frequently ignores reality and rejects the normal compromises of the U.S. political system. And every candidate the GOP nominates either shares in the crazy or is hostage to it — which is what we’ve seen from Mitt Romney throughout the campaign.

Bernstein thinks the only thing that might save the Republican Party from self-annihilation would be a leader who could have their loyalty and who would then work to marginalize Teh Crazy. His example is the way President Eisenhower, working partly behind the scenes, marginalized Joe McCarthy. But now the GOP has been infested with countless Joe McCarthys, and I don’t see anyone of the stature of Eisenhower who could both gain their trust and call a halt to it. And McCarthy wasn’t being funded by a 1950s equivalent of Sheldon Adelson and supported by a vast network of think tanks and dedicated media outlets; he was pretty much a one-man show.

Further — if we go back to the McCarthy example, we see that McCarthy was supported by the Republican establishment until he became a political liability, and then they dumped him rather abruptly. And that was the end of his public career. At least part of the current Republican establishment seems to understand their party is out of control, and I bet they would like to tone it down if they could, but Teh Crazy isn’t listening to them any more.

The 20th century totalitarian political parties were eventually defeated, but it took war to do it. Watching Soviet soldiers loot one’s house can help one wake up to the reality that maybe the war isn’t going well, and maybe some political leaders had one snookered.

However, I am inclined to think that Teh Crazy will fade slowly rather than go down in a blaze of inglory. The question is, will the GOP itself survive? Can this party be saved? Or will it break up and go the way of the Whigs? The original Republican party was made up mostly of ex-Whigs plus a contingent of anti-slavery Democrats, I believe, so you could argue that the original GOP was something like the Reformed Whigs. I could see a coalition of moderate Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats challenging the crazy-infested GOP someday. I think that’s at least as likely to happen, eventually — not right away, but in four to six years, maybe — as the GOP coming back to its senses.

And have we reached peak wingnut yet? I didn’t think so back in 2008, when the peak wingnut theory was first kicked around, but now I think wingnuttism is pretty close to maxing out, short of armed and violent insurrection.

GOP Struggles with Math

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Yesterday Politico trotted out a polling analysis that says Romney is winning among middle-class families. They don’t define what they mean by “middle class,” but I notice the analysis makes a careful distinction between middle-class voters and middle-class families. Apparently Romney is losing with middle-class voters but winning with middle-class families; like the kids and dog count, I suppose. Or maybe they define “families” as “related white people who live together in the South somewhere.” The whole thing strikes me as an exercise in reassuring themselves they aren’t really losing.

Righties even have adopted what they are calling “unskewed” polling outcomes that show Romney winning handily. On the other hand, Sam Wang of Princeton Election Consortium is giving President Obama a 90 percent win probability. Nate Silver continues to give the President a comfortable lead in probable electoral votes.

Meanwhile, a small army of conservative number-crunchers are striving mightily to figure out a way to make Mitt Romney’s tax-and-deficit promises mathematically possible. So far, they haven’t been able to do it. See also “Checking Rove’s Math.”

Josh Marshall writes about why the GOP can’t, or won’t, adapt.

As recently as a couple weeks ago, the top generals in the Romney camp were stuck on the idea that Obama cannot win with unemployment this high. Can’t. And if evidence suggests otherwise, just give it time.

I’m reminded of this column which Byron York wrote on September 10th …

Mitt Romney and his top aides are running an essentially faith-based campaign. Whatever the polls say at the moment, whatever the pundits say, whatever some nervous Republicans say, Team Romney simply does not believe President Obama can win re-election in today’s terrible economy. The president may appear to be defying gravity now, but he can’t keep it up through Nov. 6.

Whether Romney could have done anything else if his team thought Plan A might not pan out I don’t know. But I think York was on to something here. Maybe not quite arrogance but a deep faith in an unproven hypothesis — enabled by a contemptuous disrespect for their opponent which blinded them to some of his assets as a candidate.

Perhaps they are blinded by his “blah”-ness.

Seriously, I’ve been saying for years that one symptom of whatever cognitive dysfunction is common to righties is a desperate need to believe that everyone but a small fringe of crazy liberals sees the world the way they do. You see something similar in white supremacists, who devoutly believe all other white people are white supremacists also but that a majority won’t admit it because it’s not “PC.” A rightie can no more admit that wingnuttery is not embraced by almost all Americans than the Pope could convert to Sikhism. That’s why, when they lose elections, the only possible (to them) reason must be voter fraud, or else voters were deceived by the Lamestream Media. So, it’s not surprising they simply cannot accept what is happening now in the campaigns.

The Empty Shell of Movement Conservatism

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George Will writes a floundering column about what a shame it is that Romney is the most “electable” GOP candidate running for office. “Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for this?” Will wails.

Alexander Burns clarifies at Politico,

Even as Republicans come around to the idea that Romney may be their strongest opponent for President Obama, many are still convinced that a Romney presidency would represent a historic missed opportunity for the right.

At a moment in history when the Democratic incumbent in the White House ought to be extremely vulnerable, not to mention a Republican majority in both houses of Congress easily within reach, the Republican presidential field looks like a collection of rejects from the Island of Misfit Toys. And the one candidate who might possibly win the general election is, in some ways, the biggest “misfit” of all — someone movement conservatism considers to be an outsider.

How did this happen? How is it that such a dominant movement does not have a “deep bench,” so to speak, of respectable candidates that the establishment could market to the masses?

Part of the answer, IMO, is that “movement conservatism” has long been an empty shell of a movement. Beneath the facade of long-discredited ideas and deceptive talking points are nothing but resentment, bigotry, greed, and a deep sense of privileged entitlement.

Plus, the several factions within it don’t seem interested in going in the same direction. The neocons these days seem well outnumbered by isolationist social conservatives, for example, although the neocons still have a pretty big media megaphone.

On top of that, years of “politicking” with nothing but lies and dog whistles have left Republicans with a base that is utterly out of touch with majority public opinion, not to mention reality. Any candidate who might clean up well enough to have a shot at the general election couldn’t possible pass muster with the base.

I’m not saying that movement conservatism is about to dissolve away into the political ether. The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy still has the money and the media. And between gerrymandering and voter suppression laws, they are as much as glued into federal and state legislatures. I expect them to continue to hold power way out of proportion to their actual support among voters for many years to come.

No, I’m just explaining to George Will how movement conservatism came to this.

The Power of (Right Wing) Myth

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Regarding Bush’s Vietnam speech and other manglings of history — Glenn Greenwald wrote last week:

On a different note, is the curriculum for history classes in some American states restricted to learning about Hitler and the Nazis and 1938 and Hitler and Germany? It must be, because there are many right-wing fanatics whose entire understanding of the world is reduced in every instance to that sole historical event — as though the world began in 1937, ended in 1945, and we just re-live that moment in time over and over and over:

Love war? You are Churchill, a noble warrior. Oppose war? You’re Chamberlain, a vile appeaser. And everyone else is Hitler. That, more or less, composes the full scope of “thought” among this strain on the right.

These words gave me an epiphany: The key to understanding right-wing rhetoric can be found in an episode of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation.

In “Darmok” (originally aired 1991) the crew of the Enterprise encounters the Tamarians, a people with an incomprehensible language. “We come in peace,” say the Enterprise crew. “Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra,” reply the Tamarians. “Temba, his arms wide.” The Next Generationers are baffled.

But then Captain Picard and Dathon the Tamarian have an adventure together battling an invisible beast, and during this adventure Picard has a “Helen Keller at the water pump” moment and realizes that Tamarians speak in metaphors taken from stories. For example, “Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra” refers to two enemies, Darmok and Jalad, who became allies at Tenagra. As a phrase, it means “Let’s put aside our differences and be friends.” So after much suspense and drama and the death of the unfortunate Dathon, by the end of the episode Picard knows enough Tamarian to say, “Bye. It’s been real.”

When I saw this episode I wondered how a people who speak only in metaphors could develop technology. I imagined them trying to fix plumbing, saying “Toona and the floods of Wippawop” to mean “who’s got the basin wrench?” It seems cumbersome. But let’s worry about that some other time. The point I want to make here is that when righties talk about history, they are not talking about what actually happened in the past. Instead, they are evoking historical persons and events as archetype and allegory.

Thus, when they speak of Winston Churchill, they are not speaking of the real Winston Churchill. They are speaking of what Winston Churchill represents in their minds, which is the stubborn refusal to back down from a fight. In fact, the real Winston Churchill wrote a letter to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1922 advising him that British troops should abandon Iraq.

I think we should now put definitely, not only to Feisal but to the Constituent Assembly, the position that unless they beg us to stay and to stay on our own terms in regard to efficient control, we shall actually evacuate before the close of the financial year. I would put this issue in the most brutal way, and if they are not prepared to urge us to stay and to co-operate in every manner I would actually clear out. That at any rate would be a solution. … At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.

But instead of actually studying the life and words of Churchill for understanding, righties simply evoke the man as an archetype of bulldog, never-give-up tenacity. I’ve read that Bush keeps a bust of Churchill in the oval office, for inspiration. And perhaps there’s something like tantric identity yoga going on here; Bush imagines himself to be the great Churchill, the wrathful Archangel of Stubbornness.

Very likely righties associate Churchill with his great oratory of World War II and know little else about him. They don’t stop to consider that in his “blood, sweat, and tears” speech Churchill was talking about a major military power capable of raining bombs on London (and, in fact, preparing to do so). Hitler’s Germany and today’s Iraq are in no way equivalent — except in the minds of righties, for whom “Hitler” has become the Demon Enemy whose spirit infests the bodies of all enemies, whoever they are and whatever their capabilities and intentions.

By the same token, Neville Chamberlain is the archetype of cowardly appeasement. Righties may know little else about the man except that he “appeased” Hitler — not an uncommon practice among right wingers of the 1930s, who considered Hitler and Mussolini to be swell guys who hated communism as much as they did.

In fact, former White House correspondent Lynne Olson argued awhile back that Bush was a lot more like the real Chamberlain than the real Churchill:

Like Bush, and unlike Churchill, Chamberlain came to office with almost no understanding of foreign affairs or experience in dealing with international leaders. None the less, he was convinced that he alone could bring Hitler and Mussolini to heel. He surrounded himself with like-minded advisers, and refused to heed anyone who told him otherwise. In the months leading up to war, Chamberlain and his men saw little need to build a strong coalition of European allies to confront Nazi Germany – ignoring appeals from Churchill and others to fashion a “grand alliance”.

Unlike Bush and Chamberlain, Churchill was never in favour of his country going it alone. Throughout the 1930s, while urging Britain to rearm, he strongly supported using the League of Nations – the forerunner of the United Nations – to provide smaller countries with one-for-all and all-for-one security. After the league failed to stop fascism’s march, Churchill was adamant that Britain must form a true partnership with France and even reach agreement with the despised Soviet Union, neither of which Chamberlain was willing to do.

Like Bush, Chamberlain laid claim to unprecedented executive authority, evading the checks and balances supposed to constrain the office of prime minister. He scorned dissenting views, inside and outside government. When Chamberlain arranged his face-to-face meetings with Hitler in 1938 that ended in the catastrophic Munich conference, he did so without consulting his cabinet. He also bypassed the House of Commons, leading Harold Macmillan, a future Tory prime minister and then an anti-appeasement MP, to complain that Chamberlain was treating parliament “like a Reichstag, to meet only to hear the orations and to register the decrees of the government”.

Olson goes on in this vein for a while — really, there are a number of startling parallels between Bush and Chamberlain, so do read the whole thing. About a year ago Keith Olbermann also made some Bush-Chamberlain comparisons on Countdown.

In the rightie mind, any attempt to avoid war is “appeasement.” In his new book A Tragic Legacy, Glenn Greenwald writes (p. 177) that when Ronald Reagan signed the INF treaty with the Soviet Union in 1988, rightie editorialists everywhere evoked Neville Chamberlain and accused Reagan of “appeasement.” Earlier, in 1984, Newt Gingrich scorned Reagan’s rapprochement with Gorbachev as “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolph Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich.”

Got that? All “enemies” are Hitler (whatever you think of Gorbachev, he’s hardly Hitler). So much as meeting with “enemies” is Chamberlain and Hitler at Munich. So how do we deal with nations whose interests don’t harmonize with ours? Rightie mythos leaves us with no option but war.

Speaking of Reagan — this past January, conservative Ron Dreher spoke on NPR about why he became a Republican:

My first real political memory came in 1979. It was listening to Jimmy Carter tell the nation about the failed hostage rescue mission. I hated him for that. I hated him for the whole Iran mess, shaming America before our enemies with weakness and incompetence.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president the next year, I stayed up late to hear his victory speech. America was saved. I was 13 years old, and I was a Reaganite from that moment on.

My generation came of age politically under Reagan. To me, he was strong and confident. Democrats were weak and depressed. Like so many other Gen-X’ers, I disliked people I thought of as hippies, those blame America first liberals so hung up on Vietnam. They surrendered to the communists back then, just like they want to do that. Republicans were winners, Democrats defeatists. What more did you need to know?

The point of Dreher’s essay is that the Iraq War caused him to realize, suddenly and painfully, that the dirty bleeping hippies (whose spirits infest the dark nightmares of righties, who still fear them, even though I haven’t spotted a live one since about 1974) had reasons to be opposed to the Vietnam War. This, apparently, had never dawned on him before. Dreher seems to have believed that hippies oppose war for the same reason swallows return to Capistrano — it’s just the nature of the beast.

I call today’s righties the “Reagan generation” because so many of them are Gen-X’ers whose first memories of politics and national events involved Carter and Reagan. They weren’t so much taught politics as imprinted with the Reagan mythos. For them, all Democrats are Jimmy Carter, an archetype of wimpy passivity. Reagan represents confidence, action, sunniness. The two of them together represent opposing forces that tell the entire story of American politics. Nothing more needs to be understood or thought through. Democrats bad, Republicans good, end of argument.

The actual persons Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan are/were far more complicated than the Carter and Reagan archetypes, of course, and they both have/had their virtues and flaws. Today’s righties have forgotten the “Reagan and Gorbachev sign the INF treaty” story, and it has passed out of rightie mythos. They also persistently overlook Reagan’s raising of taxes after he lowered them and his quick skedaddle out of Lebanon after the Marine barracks tragedy. What’s important to them is not what Reagan actually did as President, but what he represents emotionally and mythically.

In fact, the mythical Carter/Reagan dichotomy — Carter as murky, depressed, weak, passive and Reagan as clear, sunny, strong, and active — is exactly the yin/yang dichotomy. I could write a whole ‘nother post on gender politics and the many associations of liberalism with femininity and conservatism with masculinity, never mind reality. In fact, I did write that post awhile back. But for now, I just want to point to this as another layer of the right-wing subconscious and postulate that men with gender insecurity are more likely to lean right than left.

So yesterday, after years of denying historical comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, President Bush delivered a speech comparing Iraq to Vietnam. To which much of America responded, WTF? Today America’s newspapers are peppered with complaints from historians that Bush’s speech distorted the facts of the Vietnam War. But of course; what actually happened during and after the war was not the point. He was speaking to those still inclined to support the war, and to them, Vietnam represents national disgrace. It also represents allowing the forces of darkness to scamper unhindered over the land. When Bush spoke of “killing fields,” for example, rightie listeners could relate. There was a movie about that, after all, never mind that the killing fields of Cambodia didn’t happen because America withdrew from Vietnam, but because we were bleeping there.

“It is undoubtedly true that America’s failure in Vietnam led to catastrophic consequences in the region, especially in Cambodia,” said David C. Hendrickson, a specialist on the history of American foreign policy at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

“But there are a couple of further points that need weighing,” he added. “One is that the Khmer Rouge would never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam — this dark force arose out of the circumstances of the war, was in a deep sense created by the war. The same thing has happened in the Middle East today. Foreign occupation of Iraq has created far more terrorists than it has deterred.”

Ah, but let us not bother with facts. Facts are for wonks and women. Real men, heroic men, listen to their hearts, or perhaps something else located along the lower part of the brain stem. We need not fear actual consequences of our actions. Our quest is to re-enter the heart of darkness and slay the demon therein, even though he is probably us. And if we fail, the failure will not be ours, but will be the Democratic Party’s. Win/win.

We lefties sometimes persist in trying to reason with righties. I’ve given up, mind you, but there are those who still try. But I say this is futile. As with the encounter between the Enterprise and the Tamarians, we don’t understand each others words. “We want what’s best for America,” we say. “Chamberlain and Hitler at Munich!” they cry. “Sam Waterson and John Malkovich in Phnom Penh! FDR at Yalta!” Perhaps they would listen to us if we convinced them we were channeling the spirit of John Wayne at Iwo Jima.

How the Democrats Lost Their Spines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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