The New Anger
by digby
A reader tipped me to this fascinating review by Stanley Kurtz of a book called “A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Today.” It’s fascinating because it once again illustrates the degree to which conservatives have absolutely no self-awareness.
You see, this “New Anger” is a cultural phenomenon pretty much confined to the left. Indeed, it was invented on the left (during the 60’s, naturally.) And left wing bloggers are especially angry. Glen Reynolds is characterized as being merely “sardonic” — Atrios is something else, Kutz doesn’t say what, apparently wanting to spare our innocent eyes from the beating the author gives him.
This “New Anger” is compared to an old Gary Cooper style of anger which was constrained and mature — much like the right is today, at least by comparison to the crazed left which is under the influence of Jimmy Hendrix, Jack Nicholson and “Return of the Jedi.”
He admits that the right is angry too, but that’s mostly because we of the angry left goad them into it. And they feel guilty about it while we don’t.
Now, I would have to take just the tiniest exception to some of this. Being an angry liberal blogger, I am probably going to lose my cool at some point because when those Hendrix licks start coursing through my brain I get a little crazy. I haven’t read the book Kurtz is reviewing so perhaps the absurd thesis is more balanced than it appears. I will read the book and then write some more about it. It sounds very intriguing. But I will take the time to address one particular question that Kurtz poses:
I doubt that even Barack Obama can save us from our anger now. That’s because the anger that lately pervades our politics is more than just an after effect of six years of Democratic setbacks (although the strikingly angry Democratic response to their six bad years does call for an explanation).
Six bad years? Set backs?
We could point out that the Republicans seized the presidency in 2000 under extremely dubious circumstances and then acted as if they’d won 49 states. We could protest that we were called traitors for failing to fall to our knees as they did and worship this incompetent they foisted on the country as he proceeded to take this country into a completely unnecessary war for inexplicable reasons. We could go back even further and say that we’ve been quite angry ever since the Republicans impeached a duly elected president just because they could and turned this country into a circus for his entire eight year term.
And then there is the toxic waste dump that is right wing talk radio in which the highest reaches of the Republican party cater to disgusting creeps like Rush Limbaugh who say things like this:
I mean, if there is a party that’s soulless, it’s the Democratic Party. If there are people by definition who are soulless, it is liberals — by definition. You know, souls come from God. You know?
He is the most powerful Republican voice in the country, reaching many millions each day along with his various clones. They have been at this for decades now, talking about liberals and Democrats as if we are animals.
As for the angry blogosphere, one can find examples in any bloggers’ writings that sound intemperate. It’s that kind of medium. But please don’t try to tell us that the right is more civil than the left. It’s absurd.
For instance, one could easily pick this post from the delightfully “sardonic” Instapundit and find that he is just a tad angrier than one might assume from his usual “heh” and “indeed.”
There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn’t a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.
I guess the “sardonic humor” in that might be in the eye of the beholder, but lets not pretend that the right wing bloggers are strong silent types. It’s so absurd that I feel as if I’m going back down that Republican rabbit hole we were in two years ago when everyone demanded that we see George W. Bush as Winston Churchill.
The right has an entire industry devoted to liberal bashing. They have conventions where people meet and sell trinkets that say things like“Happiness is Hillary’s face on a milk carton”. Conventions where they simultaneously fete Dick Cheney and Bill Frist and Ann Coulter, who gets rock star applause for her civil statements like this in which she says her worst moral dilemma was when she once had a shot at President Clinton.
None of this developed overnight — certainly not in response to the liberals inexplicable anger at the last six years of “setbacks.” The real history goes back a ways (all the way back to McCarthyism, really) but there is one person who is most responsible for the angry rhetoric in recent politics. He isn’t a liberal. It’s this guy, who knew a thing or two about the “Old Anger”:
Back in the 80’s when he was a young back-bencher he started down the road of take-no-prisoners politics and he consciously set out to popularize angry, divisive, abusive rhetoric:
It is not easy to become the most disliked man in Congress in the space of three terms, but Newt Gingrich was no ordinary congressman. Even before he got to Capitol Hill, when he was making his first run in 1974, he said, “I intend to go up there and kick the system over, not try to change it.” It was not your usual sort of campaign promise, but then, Gingrich did not keep his word on it. When he arrived in Washington, he ignored the traditional course for freshmen congressmen of quietly taking backseat and doing party and committee grunt work while learning the ropes. Instead, he openly cultivated the press and, of course, he developed his romance with C-SPAN.
Nothing was so sweet a piece of happenstance as the arrival of Gingrich and C-SPAN in the House of Representatives at the same moment. They were made for each other. A Washington newsman, Brian Lamb, had had the idea of bringing the proceedings of both houses of Congress to American television viewers as a nonprofit public service. Congressional leaders, accustomed to the clubby seclusion of Congress and frankly skeptical about the television appeal of their work, were doubtful –particularly since Lamb wanted gavel-to-gavel coverage –but House Speaker Tip O’Neill eventually gave the go-ahead.
Gingrich, the new face, quickly recognized an opportunity. The House, which limits the length of debate over legislation, has a rule allowing so-called special orders –permission to give lengthy speeches at the end of each legislative day. These have long been a means by which congressman could read into the Congressional Record various matters of importance to their constituents, usually matters of trivia. But Gingrich, concerned less with the Record than with the potential television audience, began to use special orders regularly as his platform for advancing ideas and, especially, for attacking the Democratic majority.
At first, his approach gave the impression that he was a brave young crusader, taking on the opposition in heated floor encounters, but, in truth, most of his diatribes were delivered before a virtually empty House. When, in 1984, he escalated his attack on Democrats to the point of questioning their patriotism– accusing them of being “blind to Communism” –Speaker O’Neill lost his cool. In a legendary head-to-head encounter on the floor of the House, the Speaker blasted Gingrich : “You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House, and challenged these people, and challenged their patriotism, and it is the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my thirty-two years in Congress.”
The end of the story, however, was a Gingrich coup: Trent Lott, who was then minority whip, protested O’Neill’s attack on Gingrich as being out of order, and O’Neill’s remarks were stricken from the record. It was the first such rebuke of a Speaker of the House since 1798. Gingrich was famous.
He became famous (with some help from his cohorts) for being a manipulative, vicious asshole and the lesson was well learned. He went on to create a lexicon of derision, used by Republicans everywhere, to describe Democrats and liberals. He called these words “contrast”:
Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.
* abuse of power
* anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs
* betray
* bizarre
* bosses
* bureaucracy
* cheat
* coercion
* “compassion” is not enough
* collapse(ing)
* consequences
* corrupt
* corruption
* criminal rights
* crisis
* cynicism
* decay
* deeper
* destroy
* destructive
* devour
* disgrace
* endanger
* excuses
* failure (fail)
* greed
* hypocrisy
* ideological
* impose
* incompetent
* insecure
* insensitive
* intolerant
* liberal
* lie
* limit(s)
* machine
* mandate(s)
* obsolete
* pathetic
* patronage
* permissive attitude
* pessimistic
* punish (poor …)
* radical
* red tape
* self-serving
* selfish
* sensationalists
* shallow
* shame
* sick
* spend(ing)
* stagnation
* status quo
* steal
* taxes
* they/them
* threaten
* traitors
* unionized
* urgent (cy)
* waste
I realize it is churlish of us liberals to attempt to defend ourselves from this kind of bad faith and even worse for us to lose our Gary Cooper cool. But, you know, when you push people far enough and hard enough they start to fight for their survival. The level of vitriol and hate emanating from the right — and encouraged by Republicans leaders of all stripes — has been overwhelming. These past twelve years alone have been characterized by smears, toxic rhetoric, impeachments, abuse of power, stolen elections, power mad governance, corruption and ineptitude. So yes, we’re angry — but more importantly, we are fearful for our country.
Until Republicans admit what they have wrought and recognize that their trash talking and boot-to-the-throat mode of fetid politics are responsible for our state today, then for the good of the country, I hope the left remains angry and battles them back with everything they’ve got.
This is ugly, I admit. But the country just can’t take another couple of decades of Republican politics and Republican rule. We have to stop it — and it won’t be stopped if Democrats play nice. The Republican undead never learn their lesson. We must defeat them at the ballot box until they get tired of being defeated and change their ways.
Update: talk about angry… Via TRex.
Update II: Dear God.
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