Bugging The Liberals

by digby

Michael Barone has long decried the unfair, hyper-partisanship of the Democratic Party. Back in 2000, during the recount, he characterized it this way:

By all accounts, including those of the Democratic legislators who campaigned for him around the country, Bush is a good listener, responds candidly and with respect to others’ arguments, is willing to compromise, and keeps his word–qualities useful in building legislative majorities. In contrast, Al Gore seldom worked closely with his former colleagues on Capitol Hill and is widely disliked by many, even in his own party. His strong partisanship, evident now in the way his campaign is challenging the Florida results, means that he would have to go against the grain to seek bipartisan action on the Hill.

When Bush won in 2004 he put it like this:

Love is stronger than hate. That is the lesson of the 2004 election results. Millions of Democrats and leftists have been seething with hatred for George W. Bush for years, and many of them lined up before the polls opened to cast their votes against him — one reason, apparently, that the exit poll results turned out to favor Democrats more than did the actual results.

But Republicans full of love, or at least affection, for George W. Bush turned out steadily later in the day or sent in their ballots days before. They have watched “old media” — The New York Times, the broadcast networks CBS, ABC and NBC — beat up on Bush for the past year, and they have listened to the sneers and slurs directed at him by coastal elites for a long time. Now they had their chance to speak. They did so loudly and clearly, giving Bush the first popular-vote majority for president in 16 years.

A year ago he wrote:

This summer, one big story is replaced by another — the London bombings July 7, the speculation that Karl Rove illegally named a covert CIA agent, the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, more London bombings last week. But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media — The New York Times, etc., etc. — to delegitimize yet another Republican administration.

This project has been ongoing for more than 30 years. Richard Nixon, by obstructing investigation of the Watergate burglary, unwittingly colluded in the successful attempt to besmirch his administration. Less than two years after carrying 49 states, he was compelled to resign. The attempt to delegitimize the Reagan administration seemed at the time reasonably successful. Reagan was widely dismissed as a lightweight ideologue, and the rejection of his nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 contributed to the impression that his years in office were, to take the title of a book by a first-rate journalist, “the Reagan detour.” As time went on, as the Berlin Wall fell and Bill Clinton proclaimed that the era of big government was over, it became clear that Reagan was a successful transformational president — something the mainstream media grudgingly admitted when he died in 2004 after a decade out of public view.

You think they’d learn. But for the past five years, the same folks have been trying to undermine the presidency of George W. Bush.

I guess Barone was in a coma during the 90’s.

But you can see that throughout Bush’s presidency he has been very upset at Democratic partisanship. In fact, he thinks the Democrats have been trying to delegitimize Republicans for decades.

But it’s more than just partisanship now. Here’s Barone today:

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington’s) transnationalism.

[…]

We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don’t want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

The poor conservatives are always on the run from the liberal enemy. And recently we have learned that the hippies are even worse than the commies were— or at least there are more of them. It’s a wonder they have managed to survive this onslaught of treasonous liberalism as long as they have.

In all seriousness, I shudder at the implications of Barone’s beliefs should things get really out of hand in this country and people like him feel compelled to use the vast police powers they covet. It’s a very dangerous way of thinking among some people who have huge chips on their shoulders.

But I also admit that this up-is-down-ism simply drives me up a wall. A reader sent me the link to Barone’s column this morning with the header, “this will make smoke come out of your ears” and he was right. I read this and it made me feel as if I’m living in an alternate universe.

But I have to remember that Barone is exhibiting the most fundamental characteristic of conservative culture and recognize that the smoke coming out of my ears is what keeps the conservative movement together.

Rick Perlstein’s recent article on conservative culture spelled it out very well:

Purple Hearts are constitutive of conservative culture. So are Purple Heart Band-Aids. Both (conservatives feel) bug liberals. So is the simple pre-adolescent pleasure of blowing things up. That really bugs the liberals. The tone of conservative culture shades easily into a righteous lust for pissing people off. A billboard off the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago for a talk-radio station reads, “Liberals Hate It!” For, if you piss people off, that proves you are beleaguered.

Over the last few years, as their own success challenged conservatives’ feelings of marginalization, they just started working harder to sustain it. Fox News helps; that is why the vice president of the United States insists that any television in any hotel room he uses already be tuned to it before he’ll deign cross the threshold. For conservatives, moving right will always be a losing career move, a sacrifice: “Veteran ABC newsman John Stossel … abandoned his liberal perspective, became a libertarian — and paid a heavy price, he recently told NewsMax in an exclusive interview…”

And don’t expect any of this to change much if Republicans lose the House in 2006 and the White House in 2008 — or if Stossel somehow ends up in the gutter. A true conservative loves a test of faith: It only proves him stronger in his convictions. I often exchange e-mails with two favorite conservative activists. I started out with a plan: One of them posts frequently on FreeRepublic; another writes on his blog of FreeRepublic’s “shrieking lunacy.” I’ve tried to get them to fight each another. It never works. They’ve got me, a liberal, to bug. That is how conservative culture works so well: the joy of feeling as one in their beleaguered conservatism. I’ve found, paradoxically, that, for this determined remnant, conservative identity becomes stronger the more discredited conservative governance becomes. They seem to take their lumps in stride and emerge all the more confident in their ideology from the challenge.

(Read the whole thing. It’s a corker.)

As we contemplate a possible take-over of the congress this fall, I think we have to keep this in mind. It is ingrained in conservative culture to “bug the liberals.” In fact, at this point it’s the only thing holding them together and we are going to have to gird ourselves for the fact that being in the minority will only make it worse.

I am going to do some study to figure out how I can resist being “bugged.” You cannot ignore them. They simply won’t let you and society demands that you interact. (And anyway, we tried that and wound up with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh being considered “mainstream.”) You can’t try to become more like them. They will only try harder. You can’t lock them all up and you can’t kill them. They never grow out of it. It’s a dilemma.

What would the psychologists say about how to deal with people who embrace victimization as their organizing principle, no matter what the circumstances, and whose tribal identity is dependent upon annoying and demeaning the other tribe? I think it’s a good idea to think about this because if it’s true that conservatism as we know it is only held together by its shared sophomoric need to bug the liberals, then it is key that we find a way to deny them what they need. (Clearly, the reality of holding all political power in the most powerful nation on earth didn’t do it. Barone is on the verge of calling for an new HUAC.)

So what will work?

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