Letters to the Editor
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In China's Great Wall ~ the game is not rock, scissors, paper.
O, and a Pol Pot didn't ask, "you a blacker or a whitier, a demo or a replug. Prey on old Mabel or old geezer Bozo?
Maybw we people will reap what is sown, nationally?
O, Maybe we will get to know some civil unrest and be wiser?
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Conflating Islamicism and the Left
I know we find it absolutely laughable when they do this, because it is so absurd. Liberalism is almost entirely antithietical to Islamicism from any number of perspectives.
So why do they try? I think it's because communism went away as a viable political force, and ceased being scary. The right floundered for a few years going on about rogue missiles because they couldn't really come up with a scary enough straw man to attack, and accuse the liberals of being "soft on."
It was much easier for them with communists because there are obvious points of agreement between communists and liberals. Liberals are not communists for anyone with a political understanding more sophisticated than a 5 year old's, but there's no denying they're perhaps cousins, once or twice removed.
The real point is to find some way of distracting the public from our very valid and increasingly compelling econmic and social critiques of conservative policies. Universal health care works everywhere else it's been tried, and the US health system is a running joke, yet by appealing to the threat of "socialized" medicine they were able to beat it back in the US in the 40s when Truman proposed it, and LBJ never even tried, and then even after communism went belly up in 1995.
The irony is (not totally lost on conservatives) that they in fact have much more in common with Islamic extremists. They even call it "Islamofascism" which pretty accurately puts it on the right extreme of the spectrum (which Goldberg tries to put on the left in no coincidence). After all, who else appeals constantly to religious texts for moral justification, hates gays, and wants a very traditional patriarchical society? It's not liberals that fit this bill.
So by trying to conflate the left with the Wahhibism, they're just avoiding picking out the beam in their own eyes. But I don't think it's working, if the public's abhorrence to the Terri Schiavo incident is any guide.
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Scientician
But LBJ did try it and the part of it he managed to pass is called Medicare.
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@Scientician
Their "commie" slur is just as much projection, though, in my eyes. If you look at spending patterns, the current GOP takes more American citizens' money (by pretending debt doesn't count) than any American party in history. It's centrally distributed to those party members who are considered most worthy. They launch huge federal projects with no hope of succeeding and no plans for completion. They blow all sorts of money on spying on people to make sure folks stay in line.
The GOP brand of "free market capitalism" (which is anything but) seems to have gone awry from the ideal theory in the same way Stalinism swerved off from Marx's idealism: what's yours is mine.
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A Rare Miss by Glenn
I love your work, Glenn, but I think you missed the boat on this one. Hindraker's full post, which you linked, is full of wonderful screwy observations, but the one's you chose isn't about how persecuted the Right is - it's that (1) good politicians are tougher than good businessmen [(a) more willing to lie (b)more willing to do whatever it takes to be on top] (2) McCain is tougher than Romney and (3) thus McCain is going to eat Romney's lunch. The last part of the post observes that (4)an even temperment is important for a politician and (5) McCain doesn't have an even temperment. I am so glad that I am not a Republican for this election cycle. As Glenn observed earlier, the box for the Democrats could read "any of the above" and for the Republicans "none of the above."
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Lynx:
Actually, that's a fair point. But he didn't get a universal one, despite his historic landslide.
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I mean...
... how "socialist" is a national health care program, REALLY, when the alternative we are being offered is more corporate handout culture that has spent over 5x what any national healthcare program possibly could?!
When the alternatives are "give us some money so we can fund healthcare" and "give us ALL your money so we can kill some poor people and give it away to our corporate friends", liberalism vs. conservatism as ideal philosophies hardly come into play!
Every GOP opponent of national health care supports federal policies with far less obvious benefit that cost far, far more!
Who are the "socialists" here?! Do these labels even make any sense in the modern context anymore?
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salonned
There may be something in what you say?
Sometimes critics (me too?), may seem as silly as getting a tatoo of a new boy/girlfriend on the neck, and we only met the "new luv" just last week?
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Malkin is a Leftist
Michelle tells Glenn Beck: I won’t vote for McCain over Hillary
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/01/30/michelle-tells-glenn-beck-i-wont-vote-for-mccain-over-hillary/
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Businessmen: Deals with a handshake
They shook hell outta the Enron employees, didn't they?
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Paranoid Myths and the Right
The "paranoid myths" that sustained Reagan (not to say the entire history of the Cold War, e.g., Nixon, McCarthy, and HUAC; Goldwater; et. al.) have been with us since the beginning. I had the privilege many years ago of reading an excellent book (thought not without its flaws) entitled The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Politics in America, 1790-1977 (Seymour Martin Lipset, 581pp, University of Chicago Press (1978), ISBN-10: 0226484572). Indeed, a degree of paranoia was present in our own Framers' understanding of the project they were carrying out; viz. the Declaration of Independence,
...when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism,...The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States....He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions....
The King of England, of course, had no such intention, and did no such thing. One could argue that this was agitprop, but the use of agitprop in a document such as the Declaration of Independence is not commonly understood to have begun for at least another century.
The difference is the precise actors, the stakes of the game, the efficiency and reach of the channels of communication, and the conscious design of the language, not the modus operandi. Reagan was far from the first to ride the paranoid wave to power, he was just one of the more successful persons to do so. The question is, of course, why?
I've addressed this issue in the past, briefly, and will give a brief outline again: the New Deal was accepted by enough people because Capitalism was in crisis. There were a few groups among the elite and the hoi polloi that were against it, and never accepted it, but they were marginalized because it was so successful at saving the US from a socialist revolution and managed to shackle the labor movement (which had been the heart of the revolutionary movement). After FDR died, a more reactionary faction took over, which wasn't able or willing to really do away with the New Deal, but was not about to grant any more concessions if it didn't have to; this was the Truman Presidency. The Chinese Revolution and the Korean War spooked them, and since they couldn't understand the real structure of international Communism, they figured Moscow had to be pushing for more than what they'd agreed upon at Teheran. Since, at Yalta, we'd already started going back on our agreements and divided Germany and Churchill put one over on Stalin with his Iron Curtain speech (Stalin had already withdrawn support for the Greek CP), the Soviets probably had good reason to be probing the perimeter (they weren't, really, but why let facts interfere with a good lie?). That the various national CPs outside of Eastern Europe (excluding Yugoslavia and Romania) were acting on their own initiative was not something they were prepared to accept; even Viet-Nam was understood as part of an international communist conspiracy. It served their purposes, even if they knew somewhere in their minds that it wasn't true, because it allowed them to never actually deal with the grievances that were provoking the rebellion in the first place.
Then the fiscal crisis of the '70s hit, and the New Deal had to be re-examined. Viet-Nam was already a problem, but LBJ did his level best to maintain the welfare state while prosecuting the war. Ché has been writing a little about the crisis in Progressivism on his blog, and deals somewhat with the Race Problem, which was another reason the paranoid fantasies of the Right have become so popular. Indeed, Southern culture was one paranoid fantasy after another, and (as I talk about in dealing with Ron Paul on my blog, linked to in my sig) the Civil War was a product of their inability to not push for more, more, more, 'cause they thought they were defending themselves against "northern aggression" (viz. the mythology that has sprung up there around the Civil War, such as the label "The War of Northern Aggression). The Republican Southern Strategy tapped into this aggressive paranoia and, rather than regarding the South as the eccentric Uncle that everyone had to deal with out of respect for family but really didn't want around as they had previously, allowed it to take center stage. All of a sudden, naked aggression and overt repression were becoming acceptable again. The fiscal crisis required a very fundamental re-evaluation of the priorities of government; suddenly, Capitalism was in crisis again, and profits were threatened. The war had virtually bankrupted the state, but transfer payments up the economic ladder were mandated. The economy was collapsing, but profits had to be generated; Wall Street demanded more, more, more! The collapse of the Soviet Union under the weight of the Cold War arms race removed the last obstacle (but removed a bogeyman, for which Islamic Terror must be substituted).
Thus the Reagan Revolution, and the continual reinforcement of the repressive apparatus of the state coinciding with continual dismantling of stability mechanisms such as welfare. Taxes on the wealthy and on corporations must be cut in order to allow them to hoard their wealth in the face of the coming collapse. All manner of back-room dealing to allow artificial profits to be generated were made. Drugs flood the country to break down resistance and generate profits for the CIA and its right-wing proxies abroad to make the rest of the world safe for the capital that's being transferred there to get away from the masses here and their irksome demands for wages, health care, better working conditions, corporate accountability...all of which are inimical to unlimited profit!