One thing I've recently observed is the degree to which America self-corrects when selecting its leaders. It's very interesting to compare successive presidents; the new president nearly always lacks the weakness the previous president had. Though of course he comes with his own flaws.
I'll start with Jimmy Carter. Carter was known for being honest and a bit naive, in stark contrast to his predecessor Richard Nixon.
Carter, however, had a negative reputation for being an obsessive micromanager. He was replaced by Ronald Reagan - who was famous for leaving the details (and sometimes the whole plan itself) to his aides.
Reagan and the elder Bush were criticized as too old for the job. So along came Bill Clinton and Al Gore, the youngest presidential team in history, as the next presidential group.
Of course, Bill Clinton is remembered for his sexual indiscretion and the Monica Lewinsky affair. His replacement - George W. Bush - was widely characterized as morally upright and religious.
He was also characterized as stupid. Which is a criticism nobody would level at his successor Barack Obama - one of the most intellectual persons who has ever graced the high office.
The problem of tossing around the notion of Reagan winning a realigning election popped up again this week in the discussion thread of Chris's Monday diary, "Wall Street Bailout Thwarting Democratic Realignment", and so I decided it was time to take another solid whack at it, something to bookmark, perhaps. Which is why I'm going to give you some picture first, and then explain what they mean.
First, here's Reagan's election in 1980, along with averages of Democratic House share for 6 elections before that, and six elections from 1980 on. You will note that there is very little difference between the averages.
Next, here's the same thing, with Nixon's election in 1968--the de-aligning election that kicked off the Sixth Party System, the only party system in which divided government is the rule, not the exception. You will note that again there is very little difference between the averages:
Finally, here's an example of what a true realigning election looks like--in fact, the weakest example of one using this particular tool. The difference between averages is just over eleven points (for other realigning elections it's roughly 20-25 points):
That's step one in the demonstration to be explained below, showing quite clearly that Reagan did not win a realigning election.
Students at Stanford stood still as they listened to former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice speak. As the scholars pondered the words of the prominent woman who presented her case for waterboarding, many mused; "Is it Richard Nixon, or Condoleezza Rice? Which person thinks a President is above the law?" One might wonder. Those who viewed a video taped classroom conversation with Secretary Rice, today express astonishment as well. In her defense for actions she took to advocate for this extreme interrogation techniques Condoleezza Rice both blamed her former boss, George W. Bush and justified his decision.
"The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture."
"Location! Location! Location!" The three most important things in real estate.
And for quality journalism, it's "Context! Context! Context!"
But you'd never know it, for the simple reason that we don't have good journalism. We have the other kind.
Case in point: the recently released tapes of LBJ talking about Nixon's treason in sabotaging the Paris Peace Talks in October and early November of 1968, so he could win the election. AP ran a story on it, and it's just about all the media notice there was. Context has it none.
Oh, sure, it was possible to pick up coverage from the NY Times or Washington Post--they both ran the AP piece themselves. There was a time when they'd be embarrassed to do such a thing. But after the last two or three decades they are utterly beyond embarrassment. Actual journalist Robert Parry, who broke the first story about the Iran/Contra scandal six months before the rest of the DC press corps caught on (working for AP at the time), wrote this about AP's story:
In line with how the mainstream U.S. press corps has treated this controversy for decades, the AP article ignores the substantial body of evidence that Nixon and his presidential campaign did sabotage the peace talks, out of concern that a last-minute agreement would hurt Nixon and help his rival, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
But instead of citing any of this evidence--which first surfaced in Symour Hersh's Kissinger biography, The Price of Power, in 1983--AP makes it seem like LBJ was just ranting against a political enemy, in a baseless Nixonian manner.
So, John McCain has taken to calling Barack Obama a "socialist". Why? Because Obama wants to "redistribute" the wealth. Of course, every time you tax someone, you redistribute wealth. And every time that government spends some money that benefits someone, that, too, redistributes wealth. By McCain's criteria, every government that ever existed in human history was "socialist." You might think that's sort of a whacked-out extremist position, somewhere two football fields to the right of the John Birch Society. And you'd be right. Because by John McCain's standards, I'd like to introduce you to four of the most prominent members of the Republican Socialists of America:
Politicians lie. Heck, pretty much everyone lies. But we're particularly aware that politicians lie. Still just because two people, or two politicians lie, that doesn't mean they lie for the same reasons or in the same ways.
Some people lie reluctanctly, as a sort of last resort, when they feel they have no other option. Others lie quite freely, saying whatever comes to mind, whether true or not. Some people merely want to please, they lie to make others feel good, and then they lie some more, to keep their lies from being discovered. Some lie out of embarrassment, to avoid feeling badly themselves. Some lie quite strategically, to achieve very specific goals. And some simply lie tactically, to get themselves out of lifes little jams--or into them, as the case may be.
In the current presidential campaign, the GOP ticket gives us quite a pair of liars, with very different profiles. But before looking at them specifically, it can help if we survey some other recent examples, in order to get ourselves oriented. So let us begin with Richard Nixon, aka "Tricky Dick," and work our way forward from there. I'm not arguing that any of these are pure examples. Rather, each of them is best understood in terms of a different landscape of lies.
As ABC is set to run a puff-piece celebrity interview with Sarah Palin, I would hit her hard ahead of time, if I were running Obama's campaign. The hard hit would go directly at the GOP's illusion of change, and serve to underscore how totally bogus the ABC interview will be.
How would I go about it? Simple: I'd link her to Richard Nixon, via Dick Cheney and GW Bush. The script I'd use is on the flip.
In parts 1-4 two weeks ago, I wrote a series of articles quite critical of Barack Obama's echoing rightwing narrative frames demonizing forms of dissent.
those who attack America's flaws without acknowledging the singular greatness of our ideals, and their proven capacity to inspire a better world, do not truly understand America.
Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself - by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day.
In part 3, "Patriotism Smackdown: Barack Obama Vs. Jane Fonda?", I expanded the critique of Obama's echoing rightwing Vietnam-era myths by taking on the image of Jane Fonda. I drew on Jerry Lembcke's paper, "Gender, Betrayal, and Public Memory: America's Lost War in Vietnam" to illuminate how Jane Fonda was reinvented as an icon of cultural betrayal years after the fact, in stark contrast to the historical realities of the time, and how this reinvention fit into some of the oldest myths of American identity.
Then in part 4, "Patriotism Smackdown: "Hanoi Jane" vs. Tricky Dick", I looked at how it was actually Richard Nixon who was responsible for the senseless deaths of tens of thousands of Americans in South Vietnam, as he schemed along with Henry Kissinger to prevent the signing of a peace treaty in 1968, before the November elections.
Collectively, these aticles go to show that Barack Obama tacitly--at the very least--embraces a view of political history since the 1960s that is deeply shaped by rightwing fantasies of liberal treachery, and that deliberately ignores and excuses the actual reality of rightwing treachery. The charge is not that Obama makes such a fantasy the cornerstone of his politics. He clearly does not. But he does allow this fantasy to define the limits and outline the shape of his politics. It is defines the box in which he lives--and in which he would have all of us live with him.
This fifth installment--unfortunately delayed by illness--completes the series by taking a longer historical view of the underlying dynamic in terms of one of its classic metaphors--the "stab in the back" that played such a crucial role in the emergence of Naziism after Germany's defeat in WWI.
In doing so, I'm going to hitch a ride through the 20th Century with Kevin Baker, who wrote a fantastic piece for Harpers a couple of yearrs ago, "Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth". In it, Baker makes specific reference to Lembcke and The Spitting Image, which we'll get to shortly. But he begins with a very tight thesis paragrph that cuts to the chase
Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.
This is what we're up against--to this very day. But it's not just fighting off this profound evasion of responsibility and the wildly proliferating demonology it produces. There's also the little detail about getting past all this delusion to actually come up with something that makes sense as foreign policy--something we can't even get close to doing so long as we're spending all our time fighting off--or even worse, being seduced by--rightwing demons. If you don't believe me, just ask Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. She tried to have a normal life, but, well. You know.
It was post-WWI Germany, and a fellah named Adolph something-or-other who really got the ball rolling on this whole stabbed-in-back fantasy, in a way that the American right later picked up on, "big time," as America's #2 war criminal would say. Gory details on the flip.
The last diary in this series, Patriotism Smackdown: Barack Obama Vs. Jane Fonda?, looked at how a mythology was created after the fact to use Jane Fonda ("Hanoi Jane") as a symbol for blaming the loss of the Vietnam War on the anti-war movement. In particular, Fonda was presented as a betrayer of the troops. But, as is almost always the case with rightwing narratives, whatever accusations they may make about others are almost invariably true about themselves. "Projection" is the name of the game, and this episode is no exception. Indeed, there is now compelling evidence that Richard Nixon himself is fully deserving of all the calumny that has been heaped on Jane Fonda, and much, much more besides.
You see, in 1968, records now show, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger interfered with the Paris Peace Talks, to prevent the war from being ended before the 1968 elections. As a private citizen at the time, Nixon had no right whatever to be doing such a thing. In fact, what he did could arguably be construed as treason. Whatever the legal situation, however, one thing is clear: 20,763 American troops died on Nixon's watch, while another 111,230 were wounded. That's over 130,000 American troops who would have lived, or not been wounded had Nixon not interfered, and Johnson secured the peace treaty he so desperately sought to rescue his reputation as best he could. Over 130,000 American casualties that Richard Nixon is directly responsible for, simply in order for him to become President.
And the right wants to paint Jane Fonda as a betrayer of American troops?
In Part II of this series, I referred to Jerry Lembcke's book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, and his examination of the myth that anti-war protesters commonly spat on returning veterans. I quoted from an interview in which he touched on an important aspect of his book, the attempt to make sense of the myth in terms of blame-shifting, similar to that which took place in Germany after WWI, blame-shifting that would, eventually lead to the rise of the Third Reich. In this installment, I want to quote extensively from some more recent work that Lembcke has done focusing on another aspect of that same phenomena--the demonization of Jane Fonda.
There is a striking similarity between the two subjects. Just as Vietnam vets and the anti-war movement were close allies, rather than antagonists back in the late 60s and early 70s, Jane Fonda was a very popular figure with the troops, one of the priniciple organizers of the counter-culture alternative to the Bob Hope USO shows, known either as "Free the Army," or in its more colloquial form, "Fuck the Army."
After Dennis Kucinich introduced his impeachment resolution in the House earlier this month, the Huffington Post featured an analysis by occasional contributor Elizabeth Holtzman, whose biography there is given as:
Elizabeth Holtzman served for eight years as a U.S. Congresswoman and won national attention for her role on the House Judiciary committee during Watergate. She was subsequently elected District Attorney of Kings County (Brooklyn), the only woman ever elected DA in NYC, serving for eight years. Holtzman was also the only woman ever elected Comptroller of New York City. She currently works with Herrick Feinstein, LLP, and lives in New York City.
Omitted from that brief encapsulation of a 30+ year career of public service is the fact that her most important role in the Watergate hearings may simply have been getting elected in the first place.
In Part 1, I took note of the reportage casting Fox News as "populist" highlighted by Kargo X, and wrote:
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
In this diary, I want to dig back into history, and uncover some key turning points that brought us from the economic populist solidarity of the New Deal to the sorry state we find ourselves in today, where the Democratic Party is still virtually clueless about how to respond to such outrageous lies. A key figure in this story is the pivotal Republican President of the past 75 years--Richard Nixon.
While Barack Obama and legions of his supporters insist on seeing Reagan as his hagiographers have painted him--as a trascendental transformative figure--the simple reality is that he was nothing of the sort. He was the beneficiary of an enormous amount of high-power myth-making. But Nixon was the one who made it all possible.
I've argued elsewhere about why 1968 was a de-aligning election--ending the "New Deal" Fifth Party System, in which Democrats dominated Congress and the presidency as thoroughly as any party has ever dominated a party system, and ushering in the only party system in American history in which the dominant "party" is divided government. Now, in an excerpt from his new book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein provides a striking snapshot of how that deeply split 1968 election sent down much deeper splits into the bedrock of American politics. The excerpt, "Then No One Would Be a Democrat Anymore" (at American Prospect Online) describes the progression of blue-collar anti-anti-war violence, rioting, and eventual mass marching that thrilled Nixon with the prospect of a vast political realignment:
Nixon had tried to talk to the student demonstrators. He concluded he preferred the hard hats. "Thinks now the college demonstrators have overplayed their hands," Haldeman wrote in his diary, "evidence is the blue collar group rising against them, and [president] can mobilize them."
New York construction workers now took every lunch hour for boisterous patriotic demonstrations. So did hard hats in San Diego, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Some of the rallies were not entirely spontaneous: "Obviously more of these will be occurring throughout the nation," White House staffer Stephen Bull wrote in a memo to Chuck Colson, "perhaps partially as a result of your clandestine activity." Peter Brennan, the combative head of the Building Trades Council of Greater New York, accused of organizing the "hard hat riot," defiantly denied it -- then showed what he could do as an organizer: one hundred thousand marchers on May 20, complete with a cement mixer draped with a LINDSAY FOR MAYOR OF HANOI banner. Signs read GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT and WE SUPPORT NIXON AND AGNEW. Time called it "a kind of workers' Woodstock."
In the wake of the disasterous Bush presidency there are two possible responses. One is that, just like the last time conservatives controlled the country--1920-1932--they are destroying the country. The second is that both sides are to blame. They're both fighting, instead of solving the problems we face. Obama represents the second response, and he is, quite simply, utterly, totally and dangerously wrong. Whatever his intentions may be, action based on this worldview cannot fundamentally reverse the damage that movement conservatism has done to our country. Because of the fierceness of movement conservative opposition, his worldview demands that we change things only modestly in the grand scheme of things.
This is what's at the root of the problems Obama has faced recently, epitomized by his remarks praising Ronald Reagan, however you interpret them. Obama claims he has been misunderstood. But really, it is Obama who fundamentally misunderstands history, and it his misunderstanding that it is the root cause of the confusion he spreads to others. His misunderstanding is based on three inter-related things--a lack of historical knowledge, an acceptance of the dominant political discourse, and a devaluing of material causes and conditions. In particular, the dominant narrative blaming both sides for our political problems, and attributing the cause to bad attitudes in people's heads and hearts, is not just historically inaccurate, it results from a virtual rightwing takeover of the media and many other institutions--a material cause that affects the nature of our political narratives regardless of the actual evidence at hand.
Specifically:
Our problem is not that people are too partisan. The problem is the opposite--there are too many people with divided loyalties, and this has produced a 40-year period dominated by divided government, unlike any other time in our history.
The problem is not that Democrats are too combatative, just like Republicans. There is nothing the Democrats have done that is remotely close to the GOP impeachment of Clinton. To the contrary, the Democratic leadership has refused to even consider impeachment for a list of literally dozens of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The problem is not individual attitudes preventing politicians from agreeing. There are real, fundamental differences, driven by a widening wealth gap, and loss of political power by average people.
Kennedy and Reagan were not transformative leaders. FDR and Nixon were--not necessarily because of who they were, or anything to do with personal charisma, but because they came to power at the true turning points in political alignment--or in Nixon's case, de-alignment.
Let's take these up, one-by-one. The order will change a bit, because of how the evidence flows.
