One of the most profound political statements of the past decade was written by--give the gasbag his due--Pat Buchanan:
...Democrats have been psychologically damaged by 60 years of GOP attacks on them as the party of retreat and surrender.
He was crowing in 2006 that the Democrats, even though they won Congress, had already begun to retreat from the anti-war positions that so many of them ran on. Looks like he was right.
Of course, Buchanan’s hero is Joseph McCarthy. Even so, it’s hard to deny the "tell" in Buchanan’s statement. Or this one from the same column:
Scourged for 20 years over "Who Lost China?" they don't want to spend the next 20 years answering "Who Lost the Middle East?"
As if China was, and the Middle East is, "ours" to lose. In fact, the purge of the State Department’s China experts (on the grounds that if they know so much about Communism, they must really like it!--not making this up) cost us dearly during the Viet Nam years. David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest documents this in painful detail. It’s impossible to read Halberstam’s chronicle of how the U.S. muddled into the Viet Nam quagmire without being struck by how heavily influenced by the right wing Eisenhower, JFK, and LBJ were. Almost every move they made was calculated to appease the McCarthyites.
LBJ was terrified of the man he trounced in 1964. He really was. Meanwhile, for all the right-wing fulmination about the all-powerful scary left, here is how afraid LBJ was of the liberal wing of his party. April 1965:
...Johnson [was convinced] he could handle the liberals, that they had no real muscle, that they were divided among themselves. Even as he [Johnson] said goodbye to the ADA [ending a meeting with Americans for Democratic Action, supposedly one of the most powerful liberal groups at the time], he showed in the Joint Chiefs, plus McNamara and Rusk, for one of the pressing meetings on the use of ground troops. Because he liked to begin each meeting by referring to the one which preceded it, the President now reached into the wastebasket and scooped up the notes which the ADA people had brought to the meeting and written to each other during it. [I spy a small tactical error here on the part of the left] Then, mimicking his previous guests to perfection, he began to read the notes to the assembled Chiefs, pausing, showing great relish in ridiculing each, adjusting his voice as necessary, taking particular pleasure in the one [Joseph] Rauh had written: ‘Why doesn’t he take the issue of Vietnam to the United Nations?’ That one in particular broke them up. Then, the liberals dispensed with, they got down to more serious things, such as the forthcoming decisions on the ground troops (p. 573)
Good thing he didn’t listen to those barking moonbats.
Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics has been quoted so much by lefty bloggers I like that I finally broke down and read it (it seems to be out of print, so use your socialist public library). The title essay, and his subsequent ones on the Goldwater campaign, are well worth reading for the mirror they hold up to today:
...I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately describes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. (p. 3)
Shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, a great dead of publicity was given to a bill...to tighten federal controls over the sale of firearms through the mail. When hearings were being held on the measure, three men drove 2,500 miles to Washington from Bagdad, Arizona to testify against it....[O]ne of the Arizonans opposed it with what might be considered representative paranoid arguments, insisting that it was "a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of a one world socialistic government" and that it threatened to "create chaos" that would help "our enemies" to seize power. (p. 5)
Of course, there are differences between then and now. Religious fundamentalism was only beginning to make itself felt in the mid-60s. The wingnuts were only a minority of the Republican Party instead of its mainstream. And if Hofstadter was impressed by how tireless and well-organized the wingers were in 1965, imagine what he would say today.
If I had a vested interest in the status quo, I would want to move the center of the discussion as far to the right as possible. This is how they get away with things like keeping the wars going, denying us healthcare, and bailing out and paying bonuses to mega-banks instead of people. Call me paranoid if you like, but it’s not much of a conspiracy when it follows the normal laws of human behavior and is done in broad daylight.
I don’t have a single solution for the situation we have now, where a noisy minority dominates the conversation and gets the benefit of every doubt from media referees.
I suspect a better way has something to do with imitating what we grudgingly admire about the wingers: their organization and their tireless boundless energy.
Maybe it’s time we elected more candidates who really are not afraid of Republicans, like Alan Grayson and Al Franken. Not that I expected Obama to be a savior--that was a wingnut canard. But our recent experience with is making many of us understandably skeptical of expecting pols to do the work.
We might try some of this as well. Though I’m not sure that killing your cable or subscribing to The Nation or Democracy Now! is enough. Or even tweeting or LiveJournaling really hard about it.
I think this guy is on to something:
If you want to win, ORGANIZE. Develop parallel organizations willing to persuade with the power and intensity of a corporation. As long as people like me are out there, and most of them are willing to work for the highest bidder, you'll need to stop looking for saviors, and instead learn to fight fire with fire.
On one level, I'd rather not. Not exactly a joiner here. But the right-wing tail has wagged this dog long enough. So I'm open for suggestions on groups to get involved with.
(Cross posted from Social Capitalism, where I LiveJournal reasonably hard)