Looking for Barry Goldwater - Democrats looking, that is

Barry Goldwater 1962

The references I'm seeing from liberals to the 1964 Goldwater movement are starting to worry me. Faced with an historic opportunity for progressive politics greater than any since 1965, some liberals and progressives seem to be getting stuck in the mud of decades past. On the one hand, there seems to be a fond illusion that the Tea Party movement represents a fringe crackpot movement that will bring electoral loss to the Republicans like in 1964. On the other, among some who recognize the potential majority appeal of a Jeb Bush or Sarah Palin, there's the panic that defending women's rights or the rule of law will make the Democrats lose on "culture war" grounds just like in 1968, or so that narrative goes. Maybe we're condemned to relive "the 60s" for decades more. But framing the present too strictly in terms of the past can be risky.

We saw Frank Rich doing this a couple of weeks ago, including a telltale quotation from Richard Hofstadter. Even Paul Krugman pulled out a Hofstadter quote in Paranoia Strikes Deep New York Times 11/09/09. His basic point is well taken. If the Republican Party nationally over the next four years shrinks to a chronically minority party, a rump party largely based on the votes of white Southern conservatives, they could adopt even more of a wrecker strategy than they currently follow. He uses California state government as an example of how that can happen, and how damaging that can be. But he also writes, "while the paranoid style [of politics] isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is." Krugman recognizes that even as a rump party, the Republicans can have a tremendously destructive effect, so he's not ready to indulge in Frank Rich's triumphalism. But he does accept the notion of the Sarah Palin/Tea Party types as a radical minority of a different kind than already runs the Republican Party.

Sarah Palin with her close ties to the neo-Confederate Alaska Independence Party and to "Third Wave" Pentecostalist theocratic religion does represent an intensification of the radicalization of the Republican Party. Max Blumenthal has a good piece on the appeal of Palin to the Christian Right base in How Sarah Palin Made Herself Indispensable While Destroying the Republican Party TomDispatch 11/15/09. The headline doesn't actually reflect his analysis. He writes, "If she doesn't prove to be the Party's future queen, she may have positioned herself to be its future king-maker - and potentially its destroyer." That is, unless conditions are such to make her an acceptable alternative on Presidential Election Day in 2012 or 2016.

Richard Kim and Betsy Reed in The Perils of Palinism The Nation 11/11/09 (11/30/09 issue) recognize that the Democrats are looking to Palin as the new "Goldwater":

In one way of looking at it, Sarah Palin is the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party.

Electorally, she is the GOP gift that keeps on giving. ...

With enemies like this, who needs friends? ...

It's tempting to cheer Sarah Barracuda on as she cannibalizes what remains of the Republican Party. The Going Rogue book tour, the 2010 targeting of moderates like Florida's Charlie Crist, a 2012 bid for the presidency--bring it on! While the percentage of Republican voters who say they would seriously consider voting for Palin for president stands at 65 percent, among all voters the figure is mired at 33 percent.

But they at least recognizes that in our current political culture - they don't mention the dysfunctional nature of our national press as a culprit - that some of Palin's most crackpot ideas get treated more seriously than their content deserves:

Those of us who reside in the parts of America Palin regards as unreal [i.e., not "real Americans"] may secretly enjoy watching the bubble bounce along, relishing her run-on sentences and looney-tunes lines. But the more we chuckle, the more indignant and impassioned the Palin army becomes. That's the bedeviling thing about Sarah Palin, and the secret to her success: neither the left nor the right can get enough of her.

Glenn Beck's current schtick also represents an intensification of the radicalization, with his promotion of outright John Birch Society style conspiracy theories, including those of the Bircher partisan Willard Cleon Skousen.

Greg Lewis in Following Limbaugh on his journey to the edge Media Matters 11/13/09 even suggests that Party chief Rush Limbaugh is going beyond what good loyal Republicans find acceptable! I would like to believe that is true.

The problem I see with all this is that while Palin and Beck may engage in a more crackpot form of marketing than we've seen previously, the radicalization of the Republican Party isn't new. Rush Limbaugh has been a commanding figure in the Party for two decades, even if his recent rhetoric is more rancid.

But, short of abolishing the Constitutional forms altogether, how much more radical can it get than the basic claims and many of the practices of the Cheney-Bush administration? Cheney's Unitary Executive theory was that the President can break any law and the Constitution itself as long as he claims it's for "national security" purposes. Their administration abandoned the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war, they instituted a blatantly criminal torture program, they set up a massive domestic surveillance program whose scope and nature we still don't really know, they instituted a pattern of partisan-political prosecutions, they invaded Iraq based on lies and in violation of international law and of the Congressional war resolution of October 2002. The Republican Party, including that bold Maverick John McCain and alleged "moderates" like Chuck Hagel and now-Democratic Arlen Specter, accepted a framework for authoritarian Party rule as well as the implementation of important elements of it during the Cheney-Bush years.

I want to repeat that because I don't mean it as hyperbole. Short of abolishing the Constitutional forms altogether, how much more radical can it get than the basic claims and many of the practices of the Cheney-Bush administration? Obviously, there are many worse things an administration can do to its own citizens than what happened during 2001-9. (Again the qualifier: we don't know the actual extent of the abuses.) But in terms of a theoretical/legal framework, and in terms of the Party accepting the authority of the Party above even the authority of the Constitution, how much more radical can it get?

Sarah Palin 2007

So Democrats and progressives should not be thinking or pretending to think that Palin and the Tea Partiers represent a radicalizing faction in a Party that is otherwise committed to democratic processes and concepts. Their version of the Party ideology would be a change in degree and in marketing, but not in kind. Even Beck's flirtation with isolationism doesn't change that. Old Right isolationism of the Beck/Bircher kind is just rabid nationalism and jingoism with different cosmetics.

In terms of understanding relevant political lessons of the 1960s, Frank Rich's triumphalist model based on a 1965 assumption of the political impotence of Goldwater-style "movement conservatism", is not a good one. Because the Republican resurgence began in earnest in mid-term elections of 1966, built on the basis of Goldwater's "movement conservatism". Not only did Republicans pick up impressive gains in Congress in 1966. Ronald Reagan also won the Governorship of California on a Goldwaterite platform, campaigning against rioting black people and stinking dirty hippies. One of his most Reagan and his "culture war" issues proved hard to ignore in the following years.

And neither Barry Goldwater nor Ronald Reagan espoused the Unitary Executive doctrine that is now the Republican template for Republican Presidents. Cheney and his faithful mouthpiece David Addington first elaborated that doctrine in the Republicans' minority report on the Iran-Contra Congressional investigating committee. The practice started as a major but isolated aspect of the Reagan administration's secret wars in Central America. But Reagan and his senior officials worried that he might actually be impeached and removed from office over the incident.

Today, the Republican Party is completely supportive of the Unitary Executive practice of the Presidency. We saw it during the Cheney-Bush administration where Iran-Contra was effectively the template for their entire foreign policy. A Sarah Palin-Liz Cheney administration taking office in 2013 will not have to worry about being impeached and removed from office for breaking the law if conditions remain the same as they are today.

Eric Boehlert in The GOP's looming (media) civil war Media Matters 11/10/09 makes a confusing argument. He argues that the FOXists and the OxyContin crowd are driving unable to nominate candidates who can win, using the recent example of Doug Hoffman in the New York 23rd district special Congressional election.

But he also points to John McCain's winning the Republican nomination in 2008 against the opposition of the most enthusiastic rightists as evidence that the FOXists are out of touch with the Republican base. But that doesn't set very well together with the other argument. After all, the supposedly less-rightist Republican base also nominated a candidate who lost.

He also mentions Barry Goldwater in 1964. Democrats in 1980 were also looking to the Republicans' 1964 fiasco for hope in the Reagan-Carter contest. Reagan had also been identified throughout his political career with the Goldwater wing of the Party. And he won the election.

Then we have Oliver Willis in Liberal Elitism? No. Some People Are, Sadly, Stupid Huffington Post 11/12/09 recognizing that radicalism doesn't mean that the Republican Party is doomed to disappear, arguing:

Far from the liberals in the '70s who were clearly not responsive enough to the middle class, leading to the rise of Nixon and resentment politics, today's left has gone to great lengths to be a big tent. So much so that some of our biggest fault lines are internal and don't involve the Republicans at all. But far from the pre-Clinton great society types, today's liberals understand that without blue collar people on our side we don't advance as a movement. ...

While the concerns of many white, middle-class people are worthy causes and should be addressed by liberals (and are), it is not elitism to treat this roving band of conspiracy nuts for the cretins they are or associate with. This would be akin to President Johnson in 1964 undertaking a federal committee to study the mind control powers of fluoridated water. That would be asinine.

Liberals have in the past allowed the ivory tower set to exert too much control over the Democratic party. [my emphasis]

All this sounds very Broderian and "sensible" by Beltway standards. But were Republican victories in 1966 and after because the Democrats were "not responsive enough to the middle class"? Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats got Medicare passed, which is one of the major government programs benefiting "the middle class" (a vague term in itself). Lyndon Johnson won his landslide victory in 1964 running against Goldwater primarily on two issues: support of civil rights for African-Americans and opposition to Goldwater's demands to escalate the Vietnam War.

It was probably inevitable in retrospect that there would be the famous "white backlash" against civil rights legislation. But if Johnson had withdrawn from Vietnam rather than escalated the war, the entire political scene would have looked different in both 1966 and especially 1968. I know this is "what-if" history. But Democratic Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey barely lost to Nixon. If it hadn't been for the war issue - or if Johnson had been willing to publicize what he knew about the Nixon campaign's interventions to delay the peace talks - it's very conceivable that Johnson could have won.

And when I see comments like, "But far from the pre-Clinton great society types, today's liberals understand that without blue collar people on our side we don't advance as a movement." If Oliver Willis thinks that Great Society "types", otherwise known as liberal, pro-labor Democrats were unaware of the need for blue collar voters or unresponsive to their economic needs, he needs to do more research. So far, the post-"great society types" in the Obama administration haven't been able to get health care reform passed, they are escalating a needless war in Afghanistan much like LBJ did in Vietnam, they're playing patty-cake with the fiscal hawks who want to phase out Social Security, and they are postponing (indefinitely?) fulfilling their pledge to Labor on the Employee Free Choice Act to facilitate union organizing and selling out women's rights to a handful of Blue Dog Democrats.

If there's a strategy by the Democrats that could make even Sarah Palin President in 2013, it would look a whole lot like this one of the post-"great society types". Willis sees that the new "Goldwaters" could threaten the Democrats. It's just his answer seems to be following policies that would toss independent voters into their laps.

My favorite media critic, Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby, seems to veer between taking civil-rights concerns seriously and worrying that they are a distraction from the important issues. This past week was a "bad hair week" for him in that regard. Scolding the hapless star pundit Ruth Marcus for just now noticing that the Republicans have been lying their hineys off about health care reform, he concludes:

Warning: If Marcus decides to address this disgrace, she’ll find herself with little help. Now that she is fully awake, she will see how much of our world is really about culture war - about looking away from corporate rule, about keeping us rubes entertained. [my emphasis]

Women's rights, immigrant rights and civil rights are not about "looking away from corporate rule". And if the Democrats want to build a long-term coalition that not only won't flinch at hearing the phrase "corporate rule" like our Blue Dogs would but actually do something to increase people's power against corporate rule, selling out the rights of women, Latinos and African-Americans - most of whom would count as "workers" by any reasonable definition and certainly as "middle class" and/or poor - isn't going to get them there.

I'm all for learning lessons from "the Sixties". But I prefer reality-based lessons, not Blue Dog ideology for keeping Republican policies dominant for decades to come.

Tags: democratic party, paranoid style, republican party, sarah palin