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Dark of Heartness
A Journey Into The (Reputed) Soul of Conservatism
By David Michael Green
04/13/07 "ICH"
-- -- I spend a lot of hours thinking about what goes on in
the hearts and souls of the regressive right.
Probably you’re already
thinking, “Boy, what a waste of your time”. Or maybe, “What
hearts? What souls?”
Far be it from me to disagree.
But I have been haunted this last quarter-century, and
especially this last decade, by the darkness that has descended
over the American political landscape, a long shadow unlike any
I remember from the first half of my life.
That’s a pretty remarkable
statement, if you think about it, since among the political
lowlights of my first decades were the deepest depths of the
Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the House Un-American
Activities Committee hearings, Vietnam, reaction to the civil
rights, antiwar, women’s and gay rights movements, three major
political assassinations, Watergate, the
Nixon/Kissinger/Pinochet coup in Chile, the oil shocks, the
Iranian Revolution and the Hostage Crisis. And while much of
that I was too young to fully appreciate at the time, you have
to admit that’s a helluva of roller-coaster ride for just a few
decades.
Just the same – maybe it was my
youth, and maybe it was my naiveté – but it sure seemed like
things were nevertheless different then, even through the worst
of times.
People hated Nixon, for example,
and for very good reason. You can even make a pretty compelling
empirical argument that his depredations were more lethal abroad
and more destructive at home than those of his profoundly
stunted present-day successor and sociopath sidekick.
Still, somehow there were limits
then that don’t seem to exist today. Somehow there was a
fundamental decency – though hardly universal – that has
disappeared in our time.
It’s hard to put your finger on,
exactly, but there’s a base meanness of spirit and a destructive
indifference attached to the likes of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay,
Antonin Scalia or Karl Rove for which it is hard to find
equivalents among the Gerry Fords or Nelson Rockefellers or
Harry Blackmuns or even Barry Goldwaters of old (though high
marks go to the likes of Spiro Agnew and Joseph McCarthy for
representing their generations well in the Most Debauched
Neanderthal competition). Something profound changed in the
forty years preceding 2007.
Things are different now. Not
only is the moderate wing of the GOP no longer dominant within
the party, today it represents a nearly vanished species, and
may be fully extinct after 2008. And no longer is there a lack
of public support for the worst tendencies of the sickest
Republican minds (though things have improved marginally in that
regard in the last year or so). Nor are there any longer
substantial limits on what the party is capable of doing.
Nowadays the inmates are in charge of the asylum, and a very
scary segment of the public has been applauding their reprobate
policies and their noxious tactics. These are not good signs.
This is not the mark of a healthy republic.
How did we get here?
You could begin to see it in the
1980s, though that was still a time of transition. The Reagan
administration was in so many ways a warm-up act for the current
calamity, though it was still qualitatively different. Perhaps
that is why Nancy is always at such great pains to disassociate
her Ron from the rabid feralites who inherited his party.
Usually I find her plaint unconvincing, but too often even the
deceitful and rapacious policies of the Reagan administration
look downright patriotic compared to the present crew.
By the 1990s, the ugliest
tendencies of the regressive movement were on full display,
though, of course, not nearly in the magnitude of what was to
come. The arrogance and sheer maliciousness of Gingrich and the
hounding of the decidedly not-liberal Bill Clinton made clear
that a new and destructive vector had been cut loose in American
politics, and that everything – including, if not especially,
the institutional and philosophical inheritance from America’s
Founders – was expendable if it got in the way of the will to
power. When we saw a bunch of Republicans impeach a president –
for only the second time in American history – for a less
egregious version of exactly the same thing they were all doing
(“But his lies about philandering were under oath!”, don’t you
see), you knew the country was adrift in some dark waters.
But the real emblem of
regressive malignancy circa the 1990s was the savaging that was
directed toward Hillary Clinton. Again, it is important to note
that Hillary, who had grown up Republican and conservative, was
never much of a liberal. Unless you think that giving people
access to healthcare or a decent childhood is a stealth project
of some Trotskyite anarchist sleeper cell attempting to corrode
America’s moral fiber from within. It is highly instructive to
remember that there were senators and congressfolk (who, by the
way, unlike Hillary had a real title and real governing
authority) with politics far to the left of hers, who never took
anything like the beating that she did. And also that there
have been women in leadership positions in the GOP then and now
– Elizabeth Dole, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe – some of whose
politics are, like Hillary’s, even rather centrist, and
obviously none of whom were subjected to any right-wing venom at
all, let alone the oceans’ worth dumped on the former Ms.
Rodham.
Something about Hillary struck a
primal nerve in the psychology of regressives – and not just
public ones like Gingrich and Limbaugh, either, but a whole lot
of ordinary folk as well. Why? I think, quite clearly, that
she posed some kind of profound and essential threat to a
certain kind of person, a threat which entirely transcended all
rationale calculus.
By the time we came to the era
of Caligula himself, the dark heart of contemporary regressivism
was on full display. You could see it in the post-election
debacle of 2000, as Scalia actually stopped the counting of
votes, as the Brooks Brothers Riot brought GOP congressional
aides to Florida for some wee brownshirting to the same effect,
and as Bush loyalists waved their ugly “Sore Loserman” signs in
an attempt to close down a legitimate legal process seeking to
determine the winner of the presidency.
Here, along with the prior
impeachment, was a bitter anger and destructive vengeance on
display rather unlike most of mainstream politics in the prior
century. No quarter would be given, and no prisoners taken.
Not only ideologically, but also tactically, the radical right
of the former fringe had become instead the Republican, and
later the national, mainstream. The barbarians had penetrated
the gates and were now occupying the very halls of power, while
the genteel dinosaurs from a more civilized era stood by
watching in stunned silence. Tom Daschle never knew what hit
him. This was a different breed altogether.
It would get worse, of course –
much worse. Like (the now gone native) John McCain before them,
war heroes John Kerry and Max Cleland would be savaged by a
smear machine for which conscience was an entirely foreign (and
undoubtedly Gallic) concept. It wasn’t that long ago that the
wearing of Band-Aids mocking Purple Heart recipients would have
been unheard of, even among the Reagan crowd. Next, in an act
of what can only be called treason, an undercover CIA agent
would be outed in order to destroy her husband, whose crime was
to expose one of the myriad lies told to sell a completely
fabricated national security crisis. Anyone who disagreed with
this most disagreeable of foreign policies had their patriotism
publicly questioned, and were accused of abetting the enemy.
Historic allies – some dating to the very beginning of America
itself, and all only a year earlier fully supporting the Afghan
invasion – were ridiculed, mocked and alienated. Longstanding
keystone treaties and international laws were shredded. And
there is much, much more. What is scary is that this could
happen in America, but what is scarier still is that it could
receive significant public support.
What happened here? What trauma
occurred during these decades, so extensive that it transformed
these people and their party into something no longer
recognizable even for the likes of former Republican senator Jim
Jeffords?
As an upstanding social
scientist trained to empirical caution, I’d want to see loads of
data before I’d proffer any definitive answers to that
question. But as a reckless armchair social theorist, I can’t
help but be struck by four highly significant macro trends that
have been temporally coterminous with this turn to the
mean-spirited right in the United States.
The first of these is economic
stagnation. Or, at least, for some of us. The hourly wage of
the median American worker has risen only 9 percent from 1979 to
2005. Not too good, eh? Well, more precisely, not too good for
the middle class. Certain other folks did just fine, thank you
very much. In 1982, CEOs made 42 times more in salary than the
average worker at their company. By 2001, that ratio had grown
to 525 to 1, meaning that a CEO today makes, over the course of
eighteen holes and two beers, what the average worker pulls down
in an entire year. Overall, the share of total national income
going to the richest ten percent of Americans has returned –
after holding steady from the 1930s through the 1960s at about
one-third – to pre-New Deal levels of close to one-half, thus
bequeathing to our happy country levels of economic inequality
only the Third World can match (welcome to Managua, my
friends).
The upshot of this stagnation is
that people have had to work harder and longer just to tread
water. Today’s household typically requires two breadwinners to
sustain what a single one could a generation prior. And even
that pathetic income is not exactly leaving exhausted workers
feeling content. Between globalization, layoffs, outsourcing,
and the corporate shedding of healthcare and pension benefits,
Americans feel the ground shifting beneath their feet every
day. It isn’t inevitable that such conditions would produce a
meaner politics, but it certainly provides fertile ground for
the purveyors of cheap scapegoats (e.g., welfare queens, ‘the
government’, immigrants) and cheaper-still solutions (reckless
tax cuts, beating up punky countries, etc.).
Meanwhile, if falling economic
standards are a first causal factor, almost certainly a second
one driving such politics is the unprecedented rise of social
equality America has experienced since the 1960s. In most
circles, it is no longer acceptable to be racist, sexist or,
increasingly, homophobic. ‘Worse’ yet, for America’s Archie
Bunkers, not only can such outgroups no longer be dominated and
disparaged, but they have now become officially privileged,
winning jobs and other opportunities on the basis of these
classifications, the product of a remedial equality program
based on reverse discrimination.
Third among these likely
explanatory factors, it must be noted that the driving cohort in
American politics (and economics) these last decades has been
the Baby Boomers. Stereotypes are just that, and
generalizations should be understood, by definition, to be
riddled with exceptions. That said, groups do sometimes have
tendencies, and the tendencies of this group have (well-)earned
it sobriquets like the Me Generation. Boomers have done a lot
of good in their life span, I’d argue, as well as a lot of bad.
What seems to unite it all is a certain pronounced
self-absorption, selfishness and self-reverence. What, you
disagree? Well, if you’ve got a problem with that, we can
gladly toss in a healthy slathering of self-righteousness too,
as we disabuse you of your foolish misconceptions.
Finally, all of these factors
have arisen against the backdrop of a fourth development, which
sets a sometimes subtle, sometimes not, context for the others.
That is the crossing of the imperial watershed. Even if
Americans, with their short attention spans and their profound
ignorance of history, can’t see it, it is nevertheless pretty
clear that the ‘American Century’ actually only lasted about
twenty-five years, and the empire is today seriously in decline
– not only in a relative sense, but now also in an absolute
sense. (It is true that this four-to-one projected to actual
life span ratio is considerably better than the one percent of
Hitler’s thousand-year Reich he actually managed to realize, but
then surely there’s no better sign of your empire’s sorry demise
than having to take solace in favorable comparisons to Nazi
Germany, eh?)
In any case, the signs are all
there. The crumbling of Bretton Woods in the early 70s, the
vulnerability to oil blackmail that decade, the superpower’s
drubbing by an impoverished Third World guerilla army clad in
pajamas, and now a latter day repeat of the same disaster, the
feel-good beating of collective chests represented by
politicians like Ronald Reagan and George H. W. (“By God, we’ve
kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!”) Bush, and their
yellow-ribbon-bedecked wars against such pathetically outgunned
‘enemies’ as Panama, Grenada and Iraq.
The list of such signs of
imperial apocalypse is endless. It would certainly include the
current insanity of our debt levels, the rapaciousness of our
predatory elites that seems to know no bounds, the inability of
the richest country in the world to provide basic services for
millions of its citizens, and the near-monarchical dynastic
tendencies of a polity that has produced the likes of George W.
Bush and Hillary Clinton as its leading political figures. And
don’t even get me started on American Idol! You don’t have to
be Hamlet to know there’s something rotten in the state of
Denmark.
Put all these factors together
and it’s easy to explain (though not excuse) America’s turn to
the ugly right. Opportunities are diminishing, foundations are
eroding, empire is fading. All this is happening especially to
a generation of walking ids, used as they are to wanting what
they want when they want it, and then getting it. And it has
been happening most, and longest, to middle- and working-class
straight white males.
The pinch is not
inconsiderable. And gone are the socially-acceptable
psychological safety-valve releases of yore which long provided
coping mechanisms to these dispossessed. Back then, you might
have been poor white trash, but you could at least feel better
about yourself every time you asserted your superiority to
blacks. No more. You might have been dealt some crummy cards
in life, but at least your woman knew who was boss, especially
when you brought home the sole paycheck. No more. And even
when elites humiliated you with their power, you could always
reassert your tenuous manhood by stomping a few queers here or
there while the cops looked away (or assisted). Nowadays you’ll
draw thirty years for committing a hate crime.
These people – these discarded
and existentially exposed denizens of a dying empire – were
walking targets for an angry ideology of greed, selfishness and
violence. Like so many wandering San Francisco street kids
seduced into attending a Moonie retreat, you could see them
walking through the door. Mix in a little 9/11 fear and
unfocused hatred at this or that brown-skinned foreign race, and
these dudes were fully locked and loaded, ready to rumble. If
you had to design a set of circumstances in order to sell tax
cuts, war, repression and the permanent rule of Wall Street in
America, you could hardly engineer a better program. And, to a
certain extent, that is exactly how it went down.
The political figureheads, at
the behest of their cynically clever marketing gurus, like to
mask it as a cool and efficient resolve. But you don’t exactly
need magnetic resonance imaging to pick up on the sheer
self-loathing fury raging just below the surface of a guy like
Newt Gingrich or George W. Bush. And just below that lies (and
lies often) what is really the operative emotion, a deep,
essential and defining terror. Without question, these
politicians resonate with our bedraggled Boomers not only for
their jejune policy prescriptions of belligerence abroad and
selfishness at home, but most especially because such voters
recognize in them a kindred spirit. One which hates Hillary
Clinton profoundly and viscerally, without really being able to
explain why. One which thinks blacks and Hispanics have gotten
to be more than a little uppity and are stealing ‘our’ jobs.
One which thinks that kicking some Arab ass might be a pretty
good idea just on general principles.
Maybe you’ve also gathered from
personal experience, as I have, that for many such ordinary folk
this has become a faith-based politics, in more than one sense
of the term. Regressives have nowadays become post- (actually,
pre-) empirical. It’s as if the Enlightenment and the Founders
and all of the last two centuries never happened (though,
somehow, they seem to like their SUVs and their atomic bombs
just fine). Rationality, as the primary cognitive system for
comprehending our world, has been rejected in favor of
unyielding dogmatic belief. For example, there exists today
plenty of evidence to clearly prove without question that the
administration willfully and purposefully lied about Iraq to
sell a war the American public didn’t otherwise want. The
Downing Street Memos alone are enough to make that case, but
there is also plenty more. (Just imagine if there was this much
proof against Bill Clinton how the right would have responded.)
But try presenting a regressive you know with this evidence, or
with the overwhelming evidence for global warming, and watch how
they put up the blinders and start quoting from the Limbaugh
gospels or the New Fox Testament. They can’t hear of it, and so
they don’t.
Given the prevalence of such
attitudes, it is no small miracle that we appear to have
survived our era’s toxic cocktail of regressive bile. We are,
of course, not out of the woods yet, and it is possible that a
new, new Pearl Harbor, or yet another Middle East war would
rally the persuadable middle of the American electorate back to
the flag of the Boy King. (Don’t forget he had 90 percent job
approval ratings right after 9/11 – despite the fact that he had
gone off hiding in Nebraska.) But I tend to think that is
probably no longer possible. I also tend to think that the fact
that they haven’t already done this suggests that they’re
probably not going to, though you never know what they’re
capable of once the impeachment process kicks in.
Americans have hardly become any
more secure in their own skins, however. To the contrary, the
loss of a second Vietnam and the economic disaster which
continually seems looming right around the personal debt /
government debt / trade debt / mortgage meltdown / globalization
corner is only going to make things worse on that score.
Ironically, what saved us (if we
are saved) in the long-term from a predatory regime of
regressive kleptocrats was the short-term experience of living
under a predatory regime of regressive kleptocrats. After the
utter and complete hash these people have made of everything
they’ve touched, who now wants anything to do with this absurdly
deluded ideology, apart from the frightened old ladies who still
allow their pastors to tell them how to think and vote (oh, and
how to donate too)?
There is massive opportunity
here. The combination of increasingly insecure Americans and
the patent failures of a disastrous turn to the right meant to
address those insecurities leaves one obvious prescription on
the table – a turn to the left. Already there is overwhelming
public support for a national healthcare system (wow, and to
think – only sixty years after every other industrialized
democracy in the world got theirs!). This would have been
unthinkable as little as five years ago. Expect similar
attitudinal swings as the trap door continues to open underneath
Americans on issues like pensions, global warming, jobs and
more. It is not exactly in the American tradition to favor
governmental solutions to personal and social problems. It just
so happens, though, that in so many of these domains they tend
to work (however imperfectly – which imperfections usually
having most to do with insufficient funding), and that the
alternative of the conservative market deity (Praise the one
true lord!) does not.
Americans have been slow to
learn this, and have paid the price accordingly. But learn they
now appear to be doing (it would sure help if somebody out there
from the so-called liberal party would frame the question
properly, and vocally), and we should perhaps be thankful that
the damage done during this particular life lesson wasn’t
greater than what has in fact been visited upon us. As awful as
its been, it could have been much worse.
There is hope, especially, in
the narcissistic selfishness of the Baby Boomers, whose only
consistent attribute has been a tendency to take very good care
indeed of Me (and, after all, who else really matters?). In
their formative years, that meant playing at socialism. When,
during their middle years, the bill for such policies would have
come due in the form of higher taxes (and therefore fewer wide
screen televisions), that meant playing – much more seriously
this time – at capitalism. Now that they are getting ready to
retire and will be dependent on external revenue sources to
maintain a decent lifestyle, they’ll be back to the government
teat again. You can bet, as Boomers usually do, somebody else’s
bottom dollar on that one.
John Stuart Mill once said that
“Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid
people... it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”
Mill was certainly on to something there, though I prefer the
term ‘ignorant’ (in its non-pejorative sense, that of simply
lacking knowledge) to his use of ‘stupid’.
Regardless, I suspect that what
is more significant to the determination of political
dispositions than even the absence of education, knowledge or
intellect is the question of personal security. We’d understand
our current predicament much better by realizing that not all
conservatives are insecure, but that most insecure people are
conservative.
Fortunately, conservatism is not
the only answer to insecurity, and in the end it’s no answer at
all. Writing in “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, Hannah Arendt
described how such movements “conjure up a lying world of
consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human
mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination,
uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never‑ending
shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings
and their expectations”.
It’s great magic, but, of course
it never lasts. However powerful your imagination, that empty
belly of yours is still going to require food. However potent
their propaganda, that medical condition you have is still going
to require treatment.
Given a bit more courage, a
smart progressive movement could successfully pitch its ideas to
an insecure public hungry for protection from a threatening
world, especially because the facts are so manifestly in our
corner.
Fortunately, this process has
already begun. Now it only remains to be seen just how
courageous and smart we are, and just how desperate is the
reaction of the regressive right to its own implosion.
The moment is ours.
David Michael Green is a
professor of political science at Hofstra University in New
York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his
articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net),
but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to
respond. More of his work can be found at his website,
www.regressiveantidote.net.
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