Emotional Tidal Wave

by digby

Glenn Greenwald wrote an interesting piece yesterday about neoconservaitsm in which he posits that a real political realignment is taking place. And he asks an important question:

The idea that Lieberman is some sort of “centrist Democrat” and that the effort to defeat him is driven by radical leftists who hate bipartisanship is nothing short of inane. Why would Sean Hannity and Bill Kristol be so eager to keep a “centrist Democrat” in the Senate? Lincoln Chafee is a “centrist Republican.” Are there any Democrats or liberals who care if Lincoln Chafee wins his primary? Do leftist ideologues run around praising and defending and working for the re-election of Olympia Snowe or Chris Shays or other Republican “centrists”? Do Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity love other Democratic “centrists,” such as, say, Mary Landrieu or Joe Biden? The answer to all of those questions is plainly “no”.

The love which right-wing extremists have for Joe Lieberman isn’t based on the fact that he’s a “centrist.” If Lieberman were a “centrist,” extremists would not care about him. They would not be vigorously urging his re-election, or praising his potential appointment as Bush Defense Secretary, or touting him as a Vice-Presidential running mate for George Allen. They do that because he is one of them — a neoconservative extremist who is with them on virtually every major issue of the day.

This is more than simple ideology, although there’s plenty of that at work. I suspect that some of the support for Joe on the right comes from the shared neurotic sense of beseigement the conservatives have developed as their cultural identity.

Rick Perlstein wrote this very insightful (and vastly entertaining) piece recently in an obscure political journal examining the strange, overwrought nature of conservative culture:

Listen to conservatives now, and they’re still in the catacombs. “Just because a rock song is about faith doesn’t mean that it’s conservative,” National Review explains of U2’s “Gloria.” “But what about a rock song that’s about faith and whose chorus is in Latin? That’s beautifully reactionary.” Note the tone of sturdy defiance: So few bold souls, these days, are brave enough to publicly profess that underground faith, Christianity.

The liberal colossus is somehow still just as colossal, despite the fact that Republicans have controlled Congress and the White House and shifted the news media’s center of gravity to the right for several years. I have one 2005 book–forworded by Steve Forbes and blurbed by Evans, Buckley, and former Senator Jesse Helms–called Free Choice for Workers: A History of the Right to Work Movement. The flap proposes: “George C. Leef chronicles the thrilling ‘David and Goliath’ struggle between the bosses of Big Labor and the American citizens who oppose their lust for coercive power.” Somehow, the conservatives have even pulled off making Wal-Mart sound like the little guy.

There’s a precedent for acting beleaguered even in victory. In 1964, the Goldwater faction had just won a party presidential nomination. Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals was part of an avalanche of Goldwater kitsch–the more ostentatious the better–that loyalists lined up to purchase at campaign events: gold Goldwater pins, Goldwater cowboy hats, books, pamphlets, and magazines galore to pass on to your liberal neighbors. It was only one part proselytizing. It also proved the bearer’s stout-heartedness. Its meaning relied on Goldwater remaining unpopular in an overwhelmingly “liberal” culture.

That is why, now that conservatives own the government, conservatives are still stuck in their past: Their marginal self-identity is who they are. The trick is inventing new ways to soak in one’s marginalization.

I think this is an extension of a tribal impulse that goes back even farther than Goldwater — that’s just modern conservatism’s manifestation. Perhaps long-time readers of this blog will remember this:

It’s clear to me that during the first 70 years of the country’s existence, the old South and the slave territories that came later (as defined in that famous map from 1860) created a culture based largely on their sense of the rest of the country’s, and the world’s, disapprobation. Within it grew what Michael Lind describes as its “cavalier” culture, which created an outsized sense of masculine ego and “fighting” mentality (along with an exaggerated caricature of male and female social roles.) Resentment was a foundation of the culture as slavery was hotly debated from the very inception and the division was based on what was always perceived by many as a moral issue. The character and morality of the south had always had to be defended. Hence a defensive culture was born.

The civil war and Jim Crow deepened it and the Lost Cause mythology romanticized it. The civil rights movement crystallized it. A two hundred year old resentment has created a permanent cultural divide.

Why a bunch of cosmopolitans from New York adopted this is subject for another post, but the neoconservatives have certainly joined the party.

The latest example of this comes from none other than Martin Peretz in today’s Wall Street Journal, who in one short diatribe demontrates the conservative sense of beseigement and class consciousness, the irrational fear of hippies, the contempt for uppity blacks and the habit of making dire prognostications that Democrats are writing their death warrant by listening to any of that riff-raff that forms the base of their party. (I wonder what that’s supposed to mean in 2006, exactly — that we will be an even smaller minority party?)

Like most establishment elites, Peretz believes it’s still groundhog day, 1968:

We have been here before. Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue “peace candidates,” and the one in Connecticut, like several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de haut en bas, and almost entirely because he can. It’s really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of “having arrived” up the spines of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him. Superficially, one may think of those who thought they were already middle class just by being enthusiasts of Franklin Roosevelt, who descended from the Hudson River Dutch aristocracy. But when FDR ran for, and was elected, president in 1932, he had already been a state senator, assistant secretary of the Navy and governor of New York. He had demonstrated abilities.

Just as an aside, Lamont’s political pedigree goes back further than FDR, which I didn’t know until I read this by Sara at The Next Hurrah. But that, of course, is Peretz’s gripe. The “limousine liberal” is second only to the “hippie protester” as an iconic boogeyman for political insiders of a certain age — although the class resentment and red-baiting on display in this piece would make even Richard Nixon blush.

Then, here come the commie hippies (also known as “peaceniks”):

But he does have one issue, and it is Iraq. He grasps little of the complexities of his issue, but then this, too, is true of the genus of the peace candidate. Peace candidates know only one thing, and that is why people vote for them. I know the type well. I was present at its creation. I was there, a partisan, as a graduate student at the beginning, in 1962, when the eminent Harvard historian H. Stuart Hughes (grandson of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes) ran for the U.S. Senate as an independent against George Cabot Lodge and the victor, Ted Kennedy, a trio of what in the Ivies is, somewhat derisively, called “legacies.” Hughes’s platform fixed on President John F. Kennedy’s belligerent policy towards Cuba, which had been crystallized in the “Bay of Pigs” fiasco. The campaign ended, however, with Hughes winning a dreary 1% of the vote when Krushchev capitulated to JFK just before the election and brought the missile crisis to an end, leaving Fidel Castro in power as an annoyance (which he is still, though maybe not much longer), but not as a threat.

Later peace candidates did better. Some were even elected. Vietnam was their card. One was even nominated for president in 1972. George McGovern, a morally imperious isolationist with fellow-traveling habits, never could shake the altogether accurate analogies with Henry Wallace. (Wallace was the slightly dopey vice president, dropped from the ticket by FDR in 1944, who ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket, a creation of Stalin’s agents in the U.S.) Mr. McGovern’s trouncing by Richard Nixon, a reprobate president if we ever had one, augured the recessional–if not quite the collapse–of such Democratic politics, which insisted our enemy in the Cold War was not the Soviets but us.

I’ll leave it to the historians to deconstruct that odd rendering of disparate events. But I think we can see within those two paragraphs that in the person of Martin Peretz exists the perfect synthesis of the right’s dark Nixonian impulse and neoconservatism.

Finally our hero steps forth:

It was then that people like Joe Lieberman emerged, muscular on defense, assertive in foreign policy, genuinely liberal on social and economic matters, but not doctrinaire on regulatory issues. He had marched for civil rights and is committed to an equal opportunity agenda with equal opportunity results. He has qualms about affirmative action. But who, in his hearts of hearts, does not? He is appalled by the abysmal standards of our popular culture and our public discourse. Who really loves our popular culture–or, at least, which parent? He is thoroughly a Democrat. But Mr. Lieberman believes that, in an age of communal and global stress, one would do well to speak with the president (even, on rare occasion, speak well of him) and compromise with him on urgent matters of practical law.

Thoroughly a Democrat? This is the very definition of neoconservatism.

From the Encyclopedia Britannica:

neoconservatism

U.S. political movement. It originated in the 1960s among conservatives and some liberals who were repelled by or disillusioned with what they viewed as the political and cultural trends of the time, including leftist political radicalism, lack of respect for authority and tradition, and hedonistic and immoral lifestyles. Neoconservatives generally advocate a free-market economy with minimum taxation and government economic regulation; strict limits on government-provided social-welfare programs; and a strong military supported by large defense budgets. Neoconservatives also believe that government policy should respect the importance of traditional institutions such as religion and the family. Unlike most conservatives of earlier generations, neoconservatives maintain that the United States should take an active role in world affairs, though they are generally suspicious of international institutions, such as the United Nations and the World Court, whose authority could intrude upon American sovereignty or limit the country’s freedom to act in its own interests.

For a more nuanced definition, see Irving Kristol’s from 2003. Note that he explicitly affiliates neoconservatism with the Republican Party, which is probably the most succinct explanation as to why Joe Lieberman is having difficulties in a Democratic primary. He’s a living oxymoron — a Democratic neoconservative.

And now for more paranoid Nixonian red-baiting and hints of treason:

Yes, Mr. Lieberman sometimes sounds a bit treacly. He certainly is preachy, and advertises his sense of his own righteousness. But he has also been brave, and bravery is a rare trait in politicians, especially in states that are really true-blue or, for that matter, really true-red. The blogosphere Democrats, whose victory Mr. Lamont’s will be if Mr. Lamont wins, have made Iraq the litmus test for incumbents. There are many reasonable, and even correct, reproofs that one may have for the conduct of the war. They are, to be sure, all retrospective. But one fault cannot be attributed to the U.S., and that is that we are on the wrong side. We are at war in a just cause, to protect the vulnerable masses of the country from the helter-skelter ideological and religious mass-murderers in their midst. Our enemies are not progressive peasants as was imagined three and four decades ago.

If Mr. Lieberman goes down, the thought-enforcers of the left will target other centrists as if the center was the locus of a terrible heresy, an emphasis on national strength.

Ann Coulter says it with much more flair, don’t you think?

Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America’s self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant.

Of course a piece like this couldn’t be complete without at least a passing reference to Neville Chamberlain:

Finally, the contest in Connecticut tomorrow is about two views of the world. Mr. Lamont’s view is that there are very few antagonists whom we cannot mollify or conciliate. Let’s call this process by its correct name: appeasement. The Greenwich entrepreneur might call it “incentivization.” Mr. Lieberman’s view is that there are actually enemies who, intoxicated by millennial delusions, are not open to rational and reciprocal arbitration. Why should they be? After all, they inhabit a universe of inevitability, rather like Nazis and communists, but with a religious overgloss. Such armed doctrines, in Mr. Lieberman’s view, need to be confronted and overwhelmed.

Man, I’ll bet Joe’s consultants were just thrilled when they read that part. Even far right Republicans are getting antsy about the megalomaniacal, war of the worlds thing. But hey, in for a penny, in for a pound. Put Joe not just to the right of the entire Democratic party, but to the right of everybody in the country but Bill Kristol and Michael Savage. With friends like Peretz making the case for him, Lieberman might find he’s too wacky even for the Bush administration.

And finally we get to the race baiting. No complaints about the Democratic party would be complete without it. After all, when you get down to it, those uppity negroes are what ruined the party for nice people way back in …you guessed it … 1968:

The Lamont ascendancy, if that is what it is, means nothing other than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters have stumped for Mr. Lamont. As I say, we have been here before. Ned Lamont is Karl Rove’s dream come true. If he, and others of his stripe, carry the day, the Democratic party will lose the future, and deservedly.

Now where have I heard something like that recently? Oh yes, that’s right: “Ned Lamont can have Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton,” Liebermen said. “I’m proud to have had Bill Clinton, Senator Dodd, Senator Inouye, Senator Salazar and a lot of other great Democrats.”

Now who’s pulling the flaps down on the big tent again? The limousine, hippie negroes of Connecticut who want a Senator who represents them or the political elites whose bigotry comes quickly to the fore when threatened by small-d democracy?

Whether it’s overly sensitive Democrats who have been traumatized by decades of “bug the liberal” taunts or just mainstream members of the old resentment tribe like Peret, those who feel such terror and revulsion at passionate liberalism are obviously in the grip of some sort of emotional tidal wave. I don’t think there is any hope for the latter; they are a permanent fixture in American politics. But the first need to start questioning their assumptions if they want to keep up. Their knee jerk evocations of 1968 are no less anachronistic than are Peretz’s throwbacks to McCarthyism. This is psychology at work not political analysis and the chattering classes need to take a good hard look in the mirror and recognize that.

You really can’t read this histrionic classist, racist, red-baiting tirade without wondering why Peretz maintains the fiction that he is a Democrat — or why Democrats should henceforth concern themselves with his opinion any more than they worry about William Kristol’s. Is it possible that we’ve finally seen the overdue conversion? I certainly hope so. Clarity is bracing and good for the body politic at times like these. Go ahead and jump Marty — and take Joe with you. You’ll feel better and so will we.

Update: A reader just sent me the following quote from Peretz circa 1971:

Source: Fred Dutton, Changing Sources of Power, p. 61 (1971), speaking on Vietnam: “These are times of moral enormity, when cool reasonableness is a more pathological and unrealistic state than hysteria.”

If I had ever said anything half so idiotic–just like if I’d aided and abetted a Black Panther murder like D-Ho–I’d devote my life to living it down, too.

True. But the hysteria itself — as with D Ho — remains.

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