Doomed To Repeat

by digby

HTML Mencken over at Sadly No smartly chides liberals for being unwilling to learn from the past, choosing instead to be born again in each new era and like mewling newborns make themselves vulnerable to the same old right wing shit over and over again:

In contrast, wingnuts never forget what they are about. They also know history; and since they get so little pushback from people who oh-so-can’t-be-bothered with all that fucking hippie bunk, they are free to revise or rewrite it. Like a coral reef, the calcified wingnut lies and bullshit build and build out of the sea of truth until the liberal ship is wrecked, and pirates murder the survivors. Every wingnut argument about Vietnam was stupid and wrong and immoral, and has been recycled about Iraq; so liberals, who just wanted to forget about that Vietnam shit, were susceptible to the lies. And now that Iraq has inevitably ‘gone’ Vietnam, by which I mean that it’s a pointless quagmire, clueless liberals wonder where, where are the wingnuts getting their surge-ey won’t-cut-and-run, beware-the-dolchstoss rhetoric from?!?! (The answer: from the archives, of course.) No, it never will end. If the next Dem president ever fucks someone other than his spouse, the same wingnutty Clenis-is-WMD arguments will recycle. When the next Dem president does anything for the poor, the same ’90s-wingnut Contract On America themes will recycle (which were recycled from Reaganite bullshit, itself recycled Goldwater rhetoric, which itself was recycled from 1930s anti-New Deal screeds, which were in turn recycled from anti-Progessive propaganda; you see the lack of imagination at work here — as St. Barry of Arizona said, his ideas were old). If the next Dem president does anything about the Israel-Palestine issue or stops American warmongering in the Middle East, the same late-’70s ZOMG-Jimmy-Carter-is-Neville-Chamberlain bullshit will recycle. Wingnuts regurgitate their arguments, and hope that if they do it enough, then what’s demonstrably false in them will be perceived as plausibly true. Wishing this phenomenon away won’t stop it. The only thing to do is to remember why these arguments were wrong in the first place.

Read the whole post. One of the main political lessons liberals continuously fail to absorb is that none of this is new, the world wasn’t created yesterday — and human nature is pretty predictable. Conservative argument keeps coming back, again and again and they succeed because liberals always want to “turn the page” and “let bygones be bygones” so we can “get things done.” It doesn’t work. They repeat these things like a mantra and they take on the patina of “truth” because well, everybody keeps saying it, it sounds familiar, it’s always “out there.” If liberals would resist the urge to forget everything they’ve learned about the right every few years they might be able to sustain the counterargument and have that take on the patina of truth. I’m pretty sure the last time that happened was Herbert Hoover.

.