Here's a big question that I want to start addressing in upcoming posts: what is conservative rule doing to our nation's soul? How is it rewiring our hearts and minds? What kind of damage are they doing to the American character? And can we ever recover?
So: what is the American character? Hard to say, of course. But I daresay we know it when we see it. Let me put before you an illustrative example: one week in September of 1959, when, much like one week in September of 2007, American soil supported a visit by what many, if not most Americans agreed was the most evil and dangerous man on the planet.
Perlstein then goes on to give, in detail, a contrasting picture of the treatment of Nikita Kruschev by the Eisenhower Administration and the treatment of Mahmoud Ahmedinajad by various right-wing pundits, state legislators in Albany, members of Congress - and the differences could not be more stark. Perlstein asks, in the midst of the comparison:
Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Had the general running the country—the man who had faced down Hitler!—proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?
No. Nikita Khrushchev simply visited a nation that had character. That was mature, well-adjusted. A nation confident we were great. We had our neuroses, to be sure—plenty of them.
But look now what we have lost. Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess. (emphasis added)
I think it is important to remember here that the sentence I highlighted in the above quote misses a key factor in the difference between Eisenhower Republicanism and our current crop who use the same name. Our present GOPers are in fact the intellectual descendants (if such a phrase can be used) of the very Birchers who excoriated Ike as a comsymp pinko. For all its insanity, John Birch-think rules our political discourse, and the result is that it resembles less the calm, considered approach of rational people and more the rantings of paranoid schizophrenics who see threats around every bend, threats to be destroyed rather than dealt with rationally.
In his The Farther Shores of Politics: The American Political Fringe Today (New York: Clarion/Simon & Schuster, 1967, 1968), George Thayer delineates five distinctive characteristics of members and sympathizers of the John Birch Society. See if they ring any bells, alarm or otherwise (the list is taken from, with editions, from the above-named book, pp. 175-176):
First of all, their [the Birchers] image of America and the world is wholly conspiratorial. . . .
Second, Birchers refuse to believe in the integrity and patriotism of their fellow Americans. . . .
Third, they reject the political system as a betrayal of truth. . . .
Fourth, they reject even the most minimum programs dealing with the current social, economic, and international problems. . . .
Finally, they advocate, among other things, the use of dirty tactics to change the situation, tactics that are entirely alien to the American political tradition.
Perlstein ends his piece thusly:
How cowardly our conservative Republic of Fear has made us. How we tremble at the mere touch of a challenge. It's conservatives who started it, of course. Here's what they're reading in their own media: a letter from Human Events editor Tom Winter headlined "Are You Ready for a New Dark Ages?":
Dear Fellow Conservative:
Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a Muslim muezzin. Millions of Europeans already do.
And liberals will still tell you that "diversity is our strength" -- while Talibanic enforcers cruise our cities burning books and barber shops... the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn't violate the "separation of church and state" ... and the Hollywood Left gives up gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy.
If you think this can't happen, you haven't been paying attention, as the hilarious and brilliant Mark Steyn -- the most popular conservative columnist in the English-speaking world -- shows to devastating effect in his New York Times bestseller, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It....
This stuff is mind-numbingly hysterical—literally. Such rhetoric is literally calculated to numb the mind, to render any rational calculus impossible, to reduce democratic deliberation on the most subtle and difficult issues of our time to mere grunts and snorts, turning readers' minds to mush. That's what the conservative media is all about.
It is impossible to deal rationally with a paranoid schizophrenic. It is also impossible to deal rationally with those whose political views are the social equivalent thereof. The question, of course, is, what now? The answer, sadly, is beyond my grasp.
