Demagoguery from Agnew to Trump

Peter Levy reminds us of one of Donald Trump's predecessors as Republican racial and political demagogue in Spiro Agnew, the Forgotten Americans, and the Rise of the New Right The Historian 75:4 (Winter 2013).

Agnew (1918–1996) came to national prominence as a moderate Republican governor of Maryland in the 1960s who changed his personal brand in 1968 to rightwing demagogue and agitator, joining Richard Nixon's Presidential ticket as Vice President in 1968 and 1972, though he resigned in 1973 after pleading No Contest in a bribery-related case.

We netroots blogger types often complain about the pathological media affliction of High Broderism, in which star reporters and pundits insist against overwhelming evidence that the US is a "center-right" country, and that there is always the possibility for a moderate compromise between Democrats and Republicans that would represent a desirably bipartisan outcome. Bipartisanship has long since become a fetish in itself in the High Broderist faith. Along with the correlate that Both Sides Do It, in which any "extreme" in one of the two parties must be balanced by some similar deviation from the sacred center in the other party. The actual content of the policies discussed and decisions made become secondary if not tertiary or non-existent in comparison to the "horse-race" status of electoral contests or the need for Bipartisanship.

The most destructive manifestation of High Broderism is the one Paul Krugman often criticizes. While "the GOP is no longer a normal political party," the Establishment press continues to treat them as though they are a basically sensible center-right political group (Style, Substance, and The Donald 08/05/2015):

... if you ask me, the people who are really mistaking style for substance [with Trump] are the pundits. It’s true that Trump isn’t making sense — but neither are the mainstream contenders for the GOP nomination.

On economics, both Jeb Bush and Scott Walker are into deep voodoo. Bush takes his experience of presiding over a giant housing bubble in his state, as proof that he can double America’s underlying growth rate. Walker is Brownback-light: his governorship on Wisconsin was premised on the proposition that tax cuts, spending cuts, and union-bashing can create an economic miracle, but the reality is budget deficits and subpar growth, lagging in particular the performance of neighboring Minnesota.

Is Trump any worse on economics than these guys? He’s suggested that a weaker dollar would be good for America (even though he also wants higher interest rates), which actually makes him more of an economic realist than his rivals.

His immigration proposals are extreme; but as Greg Sargent points out, the Republican base agrees with him ...

So why is Trump regarded as ludicrous, while Bush and Walker are serious? Again, on the substance they’re all ludicrous; but pundits are taken in by the sober-sounding personal style of the runners-up, while voters apparently are not. [my emphasis]

(The Shrill One also has a useful analysis of the social basis of Trump's support in Tea and Trumpism 08/11/2015)

Most delusions have some identifiable contact with reality. And that's true of High Broderism. The main point of contact with reality is that for much of American history since the Civil War, the advocates of civil rights for African-Americans in both parties. While the most hardcore advocates of segregation were in the Democratic Party in the South. During the Progressive and New Deal eras and in the postwar era until the mid-1960s, coalitions for liberal and for conservative causes were spread between both parties. Reagan election as President in 1980 is as useful a milestone as any for demarcating the point where the two major parties aligned in more consistently ideological left-right division.

So there has been some material basis in living memory for the notion that bipartisanship is essential to making government function normally in Washington.

Spiro Agnew's turn on the national stage occurred when that alignment was beginning to shift drastically toward today's positioning of the two parties. As Levy observes:

In the [Maryland] gubernatorial race in 1966, Agnew, running as a racial moderate, defeated the Democratic candidate William Mahoney (1901–89), whose campaign slogan was “Your Home is Your Castle—Protect It!,” a not so thinly veiled reference to his opposition to open housing legislation and residential integration. [my emphasis]

In other words, the Republican Agnew was the more racially liberal of the two candidates in that race.

Levy suggests that in that moment in US politics, Agnew's status as a convert to an anti-black position gave him a standing than Southern Democrats strongly identified with the Jim Crow/segregation system, particularly the Democrats' leading racist demagogue at the time, Alabama's George Wallace:

While race contributed to Agnew’s rise, Agnew’s appeal differed substantially from that of George Wallace or other symbols of white backlash. As suggested above, unlike Wallace, Agnew had not gained fame by defending the Southern way, espousing “segregation forever,” threatening to block the schoolhouse door, or preaching the doctrine of nullification. Agnew even enjoyed favorable relations with the press, winning strong endorsements from the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post in his run for the governor’s office in 1966. While many expressed doubts about whether Agnew remained an advocate of civil rights in the wake of his 11 April speech, his record made it easier for Americans who saw themselves as racial moderates to support him rather than George Wallace. Put somewhat differently, Agnew helped legitimate white backlash by breaking its association with an open defense of Jim Crow and casting it in terms that jettisoned references to skin color and proclamations of white supremacy in favor of language that emphasized orderliness, personal responsibility, and the sanctity of hard work, the nuclear family, and the law. [my emphasis]

Levy discusses several themes of Agnew's demagoguery, including the following.

White Racism

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Amazing Success Story of 'Spiro Who?' New York Times 07/26/1970:

The forgotten Americans, Mr. Nixon said, had become angry; and Mr. Agnew had already displayed his capacity for anger. "As Governor of Maryland," he later wrote, "I saw civil disobedience flare into full-scale insurrection." For anyone unaware that full-scale insurrection has recently taken place in Maryland, or indeed anywhere in America, Mr. Agnew was referring to the riots in Baltimore after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. [in 1968.] Furious, Mr. Agnew summoned and berated the moderate leaders of the black community. He recalls this episode as "a very significant moment in my life."

Levy notes that Agnew made a point to make no distinction between overt revolutionaries and more moderate and explicitly nonviolent African-American leaders: "Agnew distinguished himself by redirecting attention away from the radicals to moderate blacks, and by inference, liberals in general."

Agnew also focused on the alleged "cultural" problems of the African-American community, just as today's white supremacists do, along with the black allies like Herman Cain or, once anyway, Bill Cosby. Levy: "Agnew persistently focused not just on violence and the rise of crime but on the alleged cultural roots of the rise of disorder in American society. Cultural permissiveness, not social and economic hardship, Agnew insisted, underlay the riots." (my emphasis)

And in white-backlash mode, Agnew was particularly harsh about the findings of the Kerner Commission Report of 1967, which identified white racism as the primary cause of previous urban riots in the US in the 1960s. It's one sign of how much the partisan politics of race has shifted that the organization committed to preserving and continuing the analysis of the Kerner Commission on race relations is called the Eisenhower Foundation.

Levy quotes Agnew on the Commission's findings:

This masochistic group guilt for white racism pervades every facet of the Report’s reasoning. ... If one wants to pinpoint one indirect cause . . . it would be . . . that lawbreaking has become a socially acceptable and occasionally stylish form of dissent, [while Blacks in the 1930s rioted less not because they were better off, but because the] climate was less permissive. [my emphasis]

He talked about the whole notion of white racism as though it were a contemptible (and effeminate/masochistic?) notion. The denial of white racism started long before Agnew's conversion to the white-backlash cause. And of course continues to this day.

And Levy records, "Agnew also appealed to long-time Democrats by noting Nixon’s disapproval of busing and the Democrats’ opposition to the President’s nomination of Southern conservatives to the Supreme Court."

Anti-Feminism

Levy:

Agnew drew support for himself and to the New Right by appealing to concerns about gender. ...

[He established] his overall image as a champion of traditional values, which assumed a natural hierarchy of the sexes and fixed gender roles, where men were the patriarchs and women the caretakers. Moreover, in terms that presaged the rise of an anti-feminist movement personified by Phyllis Schlafly’s anti-ERA crusade, Spiro Agnew was soon to portray feminists as part and parcel of the “radlib” menace which, in his estimation, threated [sic] the very existence of the American republic. Agnew’s wife, Judy, reinforced this theme. A one-time parents-teachers-association president and Girl Scout leader, she openly criticized feminism and championed her role as a traditional housewife — even noting in one interview that rather than attending college she had “majored in marriage.” In contrast, during the same time period, a number of other prominent wives of politicians, from Betty Ford to Happy Rockefeller, openly campaigned for the ERA.

Levy notes that at one point, Agnew himself had stated his support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which was endorsed by the Republican Party in 1940 before the Democrats ever endorsed it. With some combination of sexism and pragmatic cynicism, the Democrats accused the Republicans of only wanting the Amendment to undermine laws protecting women in the workplace. Eleanor Roosevelt had opposed the ERA over that concern.

Fears of Loss of Masculinity (closely related to the previous)

Levy quotes a memorandum from Kevin Phillips saying how the 1968 Nixon-Agnew campaign "needed to 'impugn HHH’s [Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey’s, 1911–1978] manhood and capability,' to emphasize his 'womanish quality of verbosity' and 'how he bragged he’d lead a riot himself, [but Nixon] could not wield the hatchet himself.'”

As Vice President, Agnew liked to attack intellectuals as wimps, e.g., "A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." (quoted by Levy)

This is obviously related to the anti-feminist stance. As Levy notes:

The rise of the women’s liberation movement as well as the counterculture during the 1960s reignited fears about the decline of masculinity and Agnew’s appeal rested, in part, on his ability to cast himself as a real man as opposed to liberals, who he described as unmanly or “effete.” This was especially the case with regards to whether or not troops and police should be allowed to shoot rioters, with Agnew’s (and [Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard] Daley’s) pro-use of force stance portrayed as manly and the liberal non-use of lethal force as unmanly.

Contempt for Antiwar Protesters

Levy quotes this from Agnew: "I do not question that a degree of alienation exists. I do not deny that there is always room for academic improvement. But real or reasoned progress will never result from the abusive tyranny of students who ... take their tactics from Gandhi, their philosophy from the classroom and their money from daddy."

Notable here is that Agnew codes antiwar protesters as privileged children. The real existing antiwar movement was largely led by Vietnam War veterans, our current Secretary of State John Kerry being a famous example.

Identification of the Agitator with the Majority

Nixon famously posed as the representative and defended of the "silent majority" who supposedly agreed with him on the Vietnam War and the cultural war, as well. In one of his most famous speeches, his 11/13/1969 attack on the television news media, the Vice President who had agitated against black rioters and protesting students accused television news of exaggerating their importance:

Normality has become the nemesis of the network news. Now the upshot of all this controversy is that a narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news.

A single, dramatic piece of the mosaic becomes in the minds of millions the entire picture. And the American who relies upon television for his news might conclude that the majority of American students are embittered radicals. That the majority of black Americans feel no regard for their country. That violence and lawlessness are the rule rather than the exception on the American campus.

We know that none of these conclusions is true.

Perhaps the place to start looking for a credibility gap is not in the offices of the Government in Washington but in the studios of the networks in New York.

Thinly-veiled Anti-Semitism

Just as German and Austrian anti-Semites today use "the East Coast" to refer derisively to Jews, the American anti-Semites of 1969 could easily see the nudge-nudge wink-wink implications of "New York" in the following description of the Mean Libruls in the Evil Media. With it's picture of secretive, clannish, sophisticates who don't share the views of Real Americans, it resembles the conservatives' use of "Hollywood" as a political symbol today:

Now what do Americans know of the men who wield this power? Of the men who produce and direct the network news, the nation knows practically nothing. Of the commentators, most Americans know little other than that they reflect an urbane and assured presence seemingly well-informed on every important matter.

We do know that to a man these commentators and producers live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D. C., or New York City, the latter of which James Reston terms the most unrepresentative community in the entire United States.

Both communities bask in their own provincialism, their own parochialism.

We can deduce that these men read the same newspapers. They draw their political and social views from the same sources. Worse, they talk constantly to one another, thereby providing artificial reinforcement to their shared viewpoints. [my emphasis]

Pat Buchanan, not incidentally, was Agnew's main speechwriter in those days.

Since I began this post with a criticism of the groupthink of High Broderism, I obviously recognize there can be systematic problems with the dominant media.In Latin American countries like Argentina and Venezuela, the political alignments of major media companies are openly discussed and debated as part of normal political discourse. The demagogic nature of the Agnew/Buchanan approach in that speech is the way they plugged conservative attacks on the press into traditional far-right anti-Semitic stereotypes as well as the white-backlash rhetoric about the evils of the media which, in the segregationist view, had created a terribly unfair image of the segregated South by actually reporting on some of the ways the segregation system actually worked. And they did so by making broad accusations with only a tenuous factual basis.

Levy describes how the reception of the speech among Republicans responded to the Presidential Administration's positioning itself as fighting an uphill battle on behalf of the Real Americans against the Librul Media bogeyman:

Margo Ling of the Eagle Republican Women’s Club of Cincinnati praised the vice president for questioning the right of the “arrogant few” to “decide which news fits.” As with the response to his post-King assassination speech, many extolled Agnew for his courage and leadership, with Dr. N.M. Camardese of Norwalk, OH, proclaiming that history would place Agnew in the “Hall of Fame, wherein stands ... Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Winston Churchill.”69 Somewhat along the same line, a number of letter writers focused on Agnew’s willingness to criticize the eastern establishment. Or as Harvey Turkel of Detroit put it, for taking on “the whole ... New York Mentality and its disproportionate influence.”

Agnew's attacks on the press on behalf of the Nixon Administration were one big reason so many liberals were reluctant to recognize the depth of the national press dysfunction on the Whitewater pseudoscandal, the Clinton impeachment, the Republicans' actions on the disputed 2000 election results in Florida and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And part of why the Democrats have been slow to recognize and counter the way that Republicans effectively "work the refs" by their non-ending attacks on the Librul Press. They didn't want to be seen as aping Agnew's very illiberal attacks on the Librul Press.

Using His Own Criminal Behavior to Portray Himself as a Martyr to Persecution

It is often noted that Nixon became a hero to hardline conservatives after resigning from office due to the Watergate scandal. Despite his many heresies like the SALT arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union, resigning from office allowed conservatives to see him as a martyr.

Agnew struck the same posture as he came under fire from press leaks about the Justice Department investigation into bribery charges against him. Levy:

Without referring to any of the specifics of his case, he delivered a blistering attack on the Justice Department’s persecution of him, abetted by the press. “In the past several months ... I have found myself the recipient of undefined, unclear, unattributed accusations that have surfaced in the largest and most widely circulated organs of our communications media.” Proclaiming his absolute innocence, he questioned the motives and methods of the prosecution and challenged those who had borne witness against him by arguing that their testimony had been bought by offers of immunity. To the chagrin of the audience, which interrupted his address 32 times with howls of approval, Agnew asserted that the charges against him, though untrue, had so damaged his reputation that he would not be able to serve as their presidential candidate in 1976.

This was an attack on his own Administration's Justice Department!

While the press was largely critical of Agnew’s address, quoting Elliot Richardson’s “rebuke” of Agnew’s charges that his office was politically motivated and had leaked information, much of the public was not. Letters poured into Agnew’s and Elliot Richardson’s office that described Agnew as their Knight errant in the contemporary Holy War with Christianity and America on one side and the devil, communists, and un-Americans on the other. For example, “ROUT OUT THE FORCES OF EVIL which has put this nation in such a position,” implored Esther Pringle.99 “Dr. Robert Miller of Paragon, IN, concurred, warning that Agnew should not “overlook the Communists and the left wing skunks in high office” or the “long hand of Henry Kissinger.”100 “Those who control the new media have become a source of evil,” added Florence Williams.101 Similarly, Dr. Talivaldis and his wife declared: “Keep fighting, lest we all are forced to goose-step along with the power crazy media moguls.”

But times have changed (some, anyway!)

Speaking of netroots criticism of the press, our star pundits are now floundering around for a narrative on Trump's current popularity among Republicans that doesn't take them too far outside their comfort zone and doesn't distract them too much from Hillary Clinton pseudoscandals.

Returning again to the Shrill One, he notes something about the idolization of St. Reagan by the Republicans that is also an important reminder to nervous Democrats who worry that Bernie Sander is the second coming of George McGovern and the electoral defeat of 1972:

So right-wing Reagan-worship requires a heavy dose of historical ignorance. But that’s not the only weird thing about the way today’s Republicans pledge their devotion to his legacy: Remember, Reagan was elected 35 years ago. That’s a long time: the election of 1980 is as distant from us now as the election of 1944 was when he was running. The America of Reagan’s triumph was in many ways another country — a country of still-powerful unions and bad coffee, with no internet or cell phones, in which a plurality of voters disapproved of interracial marriage. It's quite remarkable that the right can’t find any more contemporary role models. [my emphasis]

Ted Kennedy and Spiro Agnew

I've been tormenting myself by skimming through a 1971 Audubon paperback called Collected Speeches of Spiro Agnew. Although his prose is on the tame side compared to what Republican Party head Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and many other spew out on a daily basis. But I'm still struck by the intensity of the bile in these speeches. A lot of Democrats are still telling themselves that the Spiro Agnews are some kind of aberration, and that soon that kind of politics will go away. Meanwhile, two generations of Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys have been practicing this brand of politics for decades and will keep on doing so for the foreseeable future.

In a speech to an Ohio Republican Dinner in Cleveland on 06/20/1970, the sleazy Vice President singled out Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was one of the leading critics of the Vietnam War. Agnew had been engaged for months in a verbal jihad against opponents of the war. At the time of this speech, the Kent State and Jackson State murders were just weeks in the past. Politics were polarized. College campuses had exploded with protest, including violent ones, after Nixon's April 30 announcement of his invasion of Cambodia, a significant escalation and widening of the war. Hundreds of colleges shut down for a period of time; dozens were occupied by the National Guard (most notoriously including Kent State). Vietnam veterans were playing an increasingly role in antiwar protests. Organized labor was turning against the war: the Teamsters, AFSCME and the United Auto Workers had come out against the war. Congress was putting tremendous pressure on Nixon to get US troops out of Cambodia immediately and out of Vietnam soon - hard as that may be to picture after our experience during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars up until now.

So Agnew was intent on denouncing and smearing the antiwar movement, in particular to downplay the role of Vietnam veterans and labor. In this Cleveland speech, he cited Ted Kennedy:

And what is one to believe is the position of the senior Senator from Massachusetts, Edward M. Kennedy?

In August of 1968, just prior to the Democratic convention, Senator Kennedy put forth to the world his program for peace in Vietnam. Let me read it to you.

"Specifically, our government should undertake as soon as possible:

First, to end unconditionally all bombing of North Vietnam;
Second, to then negotiate with Hanoi the mutual withdrawal from South Vietnam of all foreign forces, both allied and North Vietnamese;
Third, to accompany this withdrawal with whatever help we can give to the South Vietnamese in the building of a viable political, economic and legal structure that will not promptly collapse upon our departure; and
Fourth, to demonstrate to both Hanoi and Saigon the sincerity of our intentions by significantly decreasing this year the level of our military activity and military personnel in the south."

Let's assume for now that Agnew was quoting Kennedy correctly. Agnew here is indulging the ever-popular political trick of quoting an opposing politician seeming to contradict himself. Agnew says in what follows that Kennedy's "program and ideas were tried in their entirety" and didn't bring peace. I could write for hours about how dishonest a statement that was. Short version: Nixon was not seeking a negotiated peace and had even deliberately sabotaged the 1968 talks while he was running for President. In any case, it was even more painfully obvious then that it may seem from the perspective of four decades later that the situation in the Vietnam War in August of 1968 was quite different than it was in June of 1970. And no negotiated settlement had been reached.

But Agnew's polemics against Kennedy certainly have a contemporary ring after the kind of hoo-ha we have heard from supporters of the Iraq War for years:

As the Senator recommended, the President has stopped all the bombing of the north. He has cut all air operation over 20 per cent. He has announced the withdrawal of more than quarter of a million men. He has offered to withdraw all our men if they will withdraw theirs. He has agreed, along with the South Vietnamese to abide by the outcome of internationally supervised free elections. Every offer to negotiate we have made to the enemy remains on the table.

That August, Senator Kennedy said: "These steps would enable us to end our participation in this war with honor . . ." Well, we have taken all those steps and more—and the enemy has not reciprocated a gesture.

The Senator's program and ideas were tried in their entirety, and they have not moved the enemy an inch toward peace. Yet the Senator persists in blaming the continuation of the war on the lack of United States initiatives. Well, the President of the United States is not listening to the counsel of defeatists who blame every deadlock at the conference table and every impasse in negotiation on the United States. ... [three paragraphs quoting John Kennedy]

It is not President Nixon blocking the road to peace; it is Hanoi - and Hanoi's most effective - even if unintentional - apologists today are not in Paris [site of the peace talks]; they are they are in the United States - they are in high places, and their prescription for ending the war amounts to surrender.

It's very clear in this context that his reference to apologists for Hanoi was meant in particular to include Ted Kennedy, who in 1970 was the Democratic candidate that Nixon feared the most for the 1972 election.

This kind of intimation of (what Agnew doesn't quite call) treason in "high places" represented McCarthyist language that Agnew was newly mainstreaming into the Republican Party. Those familiar with the conspiracy theories that were very common among the John Birch Society and other far-right groups would recognize the language. We also see here the framing of criticism of bad, even disastrous US foreign policy decisions as stemming from what rightwing pundits now call "the Blame America First crowd."

Not that any of Agnew's fans then or Rush Limbaugh's today would actually care, but it's worth noting that nothing that Agnew quoted from Ted Kennedy even remotely qualifies as "blaming America first", much less anything remotely treasonable.

Today's Republican Party leader Limbaugh was telling Glenn Beck on the latter's FOX News hatefest on 08/26/09 that President Obama "is purposely using his Attorney General to make the United States the villain of the world." Same playbook as Agnew was using in 1969. Except that what Limbaugh is defending was a torture program ordered by a Republican President and Vice President.

At another Republican dinner in Las Vegas on September 14, 1970, shortly before the mid-term elections, Agnew returned to trashing Kennedy. It also has the most familiar kind of ring. Bill Ayers and the Weathermen/Weather Underground actually were active in violent protest back then, and the nation had seen large demonstrations and serious campus unrest that year.

Neither Kennedy nor any other Democratic Senator had endorsed political violence or condoned it. Since Kennedy had lost two brothers to political violence, that is not at all surprising in his case. But Agnew ridiculed him for speaking out against it:

In San Diego the other day, I started the Come-Lately Club. Its membership consists of those men in control of the opposition Congress [Agnew's odd phrase for the Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress] who have for years winked at disorder and in this Congress have blocked the President's anti-crime legislation. But now that election time is near, they suddenly lift high the banner of law and order.

Just today, we enrolled our newest member. He denounced campus radicals and compared them to the Palestinian terrorists. His blast at these "apostles of force" sounded tough. Oh, it sounded hardline - but it did not sound at all like the man who was saying it. Now, who do you suppose is the latest to lash out at what he calls "the campus commandos"? None other than that newest member of the Come-Lately Club, Senator Ted Kenned. Kennedy Come Lately - it's about time.

Not that Agnew bothers to cite even a single example of Ted Kennedy or another other Democrat "wink[ing] at disorder".

Agnew went on to attacks the advocates of "radical liberalism", pretty much a complete oxymoron in terms of American politics, and not a phrase that has survived in that form. But it's an older version of the conceptually bizarre conflation of liberalism, socialism, communism and fascism that today's Republicans so commonly use. He used language like the following, which has proved to be effective in rallying conservative whites to the Republican causes over the years. Citing a sentence from an editorial in the Las Vegas Sun criticizing Agnew's demagoguery, he said:

There you have it all, my friends - the contemptuousness, the elitism, the condescension toward the good people of this country that are the hallmarks of the radical liberal. ...

Well, people of Nevada, I don't believe that we are "unthinking masses" and I don't believe we need any "young intellectuals" to tell us how we should conduct our lives. I believe the people of America and the people of Nevada have the independence, the intelligence, the judgement and the wisdom to make up their own minds - and let's send the so-called "young intellectuals" back to the Ivory Towers where they belong.

In other speeches, he's careful to make some ritual acknowledgment that there are good young people out there after he's made cracks like this, but not in this case. This was part of a conscious strategy of trying to stigmatize the antiwar movement in particular as the work of irresponsible young college students with bad attitudes.

He goes on to beat the drums of a favorite culture war theme, drug abuse. He uses the theme to bitch about rock music, pointing out supposed drug references in the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends" and the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit". He didn't go into some of the more exotic ideas about secret messages instructing people to sin being played backwards on those sinister rock songs. (How that was supposed to induce anyone to do anything was never clear to me.) But he does pander to the aging Republicans who in 1970 were still thinking that Elvis Presley was a degenerate who played "race music" or whatever and that the Beatles with their long hair were making healthy young men into sissies. He told his Las Vegas audience:

These songs present the use of drugs in such an attractive light that for the impressionable, "turning on" becomes the natural and even the approved thing to do.

And all the while that this brainwashing [sic] has been going on, most of us have regarded it as good, clean, noisy fun.

I wonder what Spiro would have had to say about Rush's OxyContin habit?

In a reference to the Peter Fonda/Dennis Hopper movie Easy Rider, he says:

A popular recent movie - I will not name it here because I don't want to promote it - has as its heroes two men who are able to live a carefree life off the proceeds of illegal sales of drugs. When they come to a violent end, the villain, it turns out, is an allegedly repressive society. No sympathy is wasted on the wrecked lives of the people who bought their drugs and financed our heroes' easy ride.

Yes, this is superficial pandering to fears of problems real and imagined. But it has been effective for Republicans for decades.

By the way, I've seen Easy Rider more than once. But I never realized before that the end, in which a guy in a pickup-truck shoots the Fonda and Hopper characters with a shotgun, meant that "the villain" was "an allegedly repressive society". I would have thought it represented the end of a self-destructive course which their lives were taking. But who am I to question a great film critic like Spiro Agnew?

Tags: edward kennedy, spiro agnew

Spiro Agnew in Jackson, Mississippi 1969

Spiro Agnew (1918-1996) was Richard Nixon's Vice President from 1969-1973. He was the main point man for applying the strategy at the national level that Ronald Reagan had successful used in his 1966 campaign for California Governor, polarizing white voters against the bogeymen of scary black people, antiwar protesters and hippies. At the national level, this was part of the Southern Strategy, which by the 1980s had changed the South from a region which tended to elect (mostly conservative) Democrats to Congress and was competitive in national elections to a Solid South in favor of the Republicans.

To a large extent, the key changes in American politics since 1960 can be described in regional terms: the South became the Republican stronghold in Presidential politics, and California became a safe state for Democratic Presidential candidates. In ideological terms, it means that liberal/conservative disputes which in the 1960s split both parties, which is part of how "bipartisanship" came to be considered a prime virtue (at least among the Beltway Village crowd) now more closely align with Democratic-Republican splits. If partisanship seems distressingly more intense today to the David Broders of the world, it's largely because both parties are more ideologically aligned, though the Democrats are far from being so consistently liberal (in the American sense of the term) as the Republicans are conservative.

Spiro Agnew as Vice President was a prequel to Rush Limbaugh. He threw out red meat to the conservative base and struck a bullying, faux-populist tone that encouraged conservative white voters to think of themselves as being the natural partners of Republican plutocrats and robber barons.

Agnew made some waves at the time with a speech in Jackson MS on October 20, 1969, to a Mississippi Republican Dinner Jackson; the text I'm using here is from Collected Speeches of Spiro Agnew (Audubon Books; 1971). Reflecting the peculiar situation of the party line-up in Mississippi at that time, segregationist Democratic Gov. John Bell Williams was present despite its being a partisan Republican event. Agnew commented, "I particularly want to thank my good personal friend, your Governor, John Bell Williams, for his presence here under what might be characterized as rather unusual bipartisan circumstances."

The Republicans are still practicing the same sort of brand of bipartisanship that Agnew was at this dinner. It's just that where in 1969, there were coalitions of Republicans and Democrats on both liberal and conservative issues, today's bipartisanship means that some Democrats do what the Republicans all want.

Late in the speech, he throws out a standard article of Party doctrine: "The Republican Party does not believe that bigger government can masquerade as better government." But Mississippi's Gulf Coast had been hit a serious hurricane that same year, Hurricane Katrina Camille, the most severe to strike there until Katrina in 2005. So Agnew spends the first part of his speech after the opening pleasantries listing all the federal assistance the Nixon administration was providing to deal with the emergency:

The President has allocated an estimated $60 million from the President's disaster fund for Mississippi alone. In addition, twenty federal agencies have mobilized men and money to assist the victims of Camille. The Corps of Engineers has moved 374,000 tons of debris and will spend before this clearance job is over $17 million. The military sent in 8,900 troops. The Third Army served 164,000 meals. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has supplied more than 1,600 mobile homes. The Small Business Administration anticipates providing $140 million in loans. The Department of Agriculture, Mr. Under Secretary, is delivering over 5.5 million pounds of food.

Mississippi voters have generally been less worried about "pork" spending and more interested in who's bringing home the bacon in the form of federal taxpayer money. Agnew figured his audience well on that point.

And he used that as his segway for talking about race, more particularly the full racial integration of public schools which then, 15 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision had still not been implemented in most Mississippi schools:

Speaking of rebuilding, one incident that occurred during my inspection trip, I must confess, irritated me considerably. At a news conference, I was asked to comment on the statement of an H.E.W. [Department of Health, Education and Welfare] official to the effect that no Federal funds would be provided to rebuild schools which H.E.W. decided were in violation of its desegregation guidelines. Not only was this gratitious [sic] determination by a minor official repugnant as an example of overbearing bureaucracy, but if was an insensitive slap at a people already reeling from a natural disaster. I can assure you that that official has been disciplined and encouraged to correct the errors of his ways. [my emphasis]

I haven't researched that particular alleged incident to find out the particulars; I wouldn't recommend accepting Agnew's version at face value. But here we see the posturing to the segregationists, who still were fighting to prevent public schools from being integrated. Segregationists had been using "libertarian" slogans like "overbearing bureaucracy" and whiny-white-people words like "insensitive slap" to characterized federal officials' efforts to enforce the law and the Constitution there. The bit about how it was some "minor official" who had proposed this but had been diligently "disciplined" for "the errors of his ways" is part of a now-classic Republican pitch. This is the Vice President talking about the government his Party heads as though it were some alien force that the Republican President was struggling to control. He continues directly, assuring his audience that his administration is not racist, but ...:

Now let me make it very clear at this point that this Administration will never appeal to a racist, philosophy. Every American is entitled to assessment of his personal merit regardless of his race or religion. However, a free government cannot impose rules of social acceptance upon its citizens. Just so I won't be misunderstood by the pundits who read so many things into my speeches I don't say I mean that to be social acceptance between members of the religions. The point is this - in a man's private life he has the right to make his own friends.

Unfortunately, the legitimate cause of Civil Rights, a cause that I've fought very hard for in my State both as a county official and as a Governor, has been all too frequently diverted, and even perverted, in this direction.

Very shortly, the Supreme Court will consider a case involving desegregation of Mississippi schools. President Nixon is convinced that your public officials have made a strong case for additional time to implement the law without destroying quality education. The NAACP disagrees and has brought this case to compel immediate action. It is hoped that the result will provide a sensible solution. [my emphasis]

Agnew here is pandering to the kind of segregationist thinking that until today still manages to turn the minds of otherwise sensible people into hash. He defends the continued segregation of public schools on the completely false grounds that it's an attempt "impose rules of social acceptance" on the sorely put-upon and suffering white people of Mississippi. (Cue that world's smallest violin.) He makes this as explicit as he can: "in a man's private life he has the right to make his own friends". This of course was not disputed by civil rights advocates, who would extend that right to women, as well. But this deliberate and dishonest blurring of public policy and private, personal behavior was part and parcel of the (often-feigned) segregationist horror of "miscegenation."

Then he takes his audience into the heart of darkness in their worldview, to the evil doings of The Liberals (like I said, a prequel to Rush):

Much has been made of the Nixon Administration's attitude toward the Southern States — mostly - by the Northeastern liberal community. They've accused us of something, as you heard tonight, they call "The Southern Strategy." We have no Southern Strategy. [And Nixon wasn't a crook. Rii-iiigt!] We do have a conviction that the people of the United States irrespective of their point of geographic residence, have an inherent right to be treated even-handedly by their government.

For too long the South has been the punching bag for those who characterize themselves as liberal intellectuals. Actually, they are consistently demonstrating the antithesis of intelligence. Their reactions are visceral, not intellectual; and they seem to believe that truth is revealed rather than systematically proved. These arrogant ones and their admirers in the Congress, who reach almost for equal arrogance at times, are bringing this nation to the most important decision it will ever have to make. They are asking us to repudiate principles that have made this country great. Their course is one of applause for our enemies and condemnation for our leaders. Their course is a course that will ultimately weaken and erode the very fibre of America. They have a masochistic compulsion to destroy their country's strength whether or not that strength is exercised constructively. And they rouse themselves into a continual emotional cresendo [sic] - substituting disruptive demonstration for reason and precipitate action for persuasion.

This is worth parsing a bit. Because way too many liberals and not-so-liberal Democrats are still trembling in fear before these kinds of accusations today.

The first thing that strikes a former Mississippian like me is the astonishing amount of projection of unpleasant and antisocial traits onto The Liberals. These descriptions applied to the everyday behavior and attitudes of the segregationists of the day:

... Their reactions are visceral, not intellectual; and they seem to believe that truth is revealed rather than systematically proved. ... arrogant ones ... asking us to repudiate principles that have made this country great. Their course is one of ... condemnation for our leaders. ... Their course is a course that will ultimately weaken and erode the very fibre of America. They have a masochistic compulsion to destroy their country's strength ... They rouse themselves into a continual emotional cresendo [sic]...

And here, the condemnation of those unnamed "liberal intellectuals" - who really are a bunch of dumbass sissies, you know - is closely identified with the opponents of legal (de jure) segregation, i.e., the vast majority of Americans of the time. His pitch appealed to the chronic sense of grievance primarily directed against black citizens and their white supporters that so many Southern whites had cultivated among themselves for decades: "the South has been the punching bag for those who characterize themselves as liberal intellectuals." Actually, it was the white South, which in segregationist-speak was synonymous with "the South", that had come in for a great deal of criticism in previous years. Criticism provoked by literal punching and worse carried out by Southern police in front of TV cameras on peaceful civil rights protesters, as well as by other outrages against law and decency. Two of the most dramatic had been contributed by white Mississippians: the murder of two black and one white young civil rights activists near Philadelphia MS in 1964; and the violent resistance orchestrated by state officials and the Governor against the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962. The latter incident involved the death of a federal marshal.

In that excerpt, Agnew is plainly accusing those "liberal intellectuals" of treason. Though in the style beloved by conservatives of you're-one-what-am-I, by not using the word "treason". Agnew would later use that very defense when Sen. William Fulbright called him on his sleazy language from this and other occasions. But the segregationists were openly defying the Constitution and the law, and trashing "our leaders" as nastily as anyone. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. related that in the University of Mississippi fiasco, President John Kennedy literally considered pushing for charges of treason against Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett for his despicable and irresponsible role in those events.

It's notable in the flow of his speech how Agnew makes "liberal intellectuals" the buzz-phrase for a variety of villains in the minds of conservative white Southerners: African-Americans; integrationists; urban rioters; anti-Vietnam War protesters; professors; and, people who can read without moving their lips. Oh, and Commies, of course. He continues directly:

This group may consider itself liberal, but it is undeniable that it is more comfortable with radicals. These people use; the word "compassion" as if they invented it. "Compassion" is their weapon and their shield. But they apply compassion selectively. Crime is excused only when the criminal is "dis-advantaged."

That last sentence is enigmatic. He's accusing the Evil Ones of wanting to excuse crimes committed by the disadvantaged, again without actually naming any of these risible liberals who supposedly think that. It may be a Freudian slip, but the wording suggests he's criticizing these bogeymen more because the don't excuse crimes committed by the "advantaged". Later events would show why Agnew might be concerned about that particular bias.

They're equally selective as reformers. Waste in the Pentagon is a national outrage. Waste in welfare and poverty programs is a matter to be overlooked. Ladies and gentlemen^ if you don't think that there is waste in welfare programs just read your paper, and you'll find that a recent General Accounting Office survey uncovered the fact that $66 million in benefits were paid to people unqualified to receive them. This group I talk about is undeniably the group most likely to Succeed with the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society, a radical student group]. Both groups proclaim their instant expertise. They both think that anybody with a contrary opinion is stupid. Both spend endless hours telling us what's wrong with America and neither offers constructive ideas on how to right those wrongs.

It's striking how people spending "endless hours telling us what's wrong with America" without offering "constructive ideas on how to right those wrongs" could describe a typical Rush Limbaugh broadcast or an evening of FOX News. Psychological projection is a universal phenomenon not limited to politics or to one ideology. But it is particularly marked among authoritarians like Agnew and most of today's Republican Party.

This is the group that believes in marching down the streets of America to protest the war in Vietnam to our President, They would never think of protesting the continuation of this war to the government that is actually continuing it - the Government of Hanoi.

Finally these leaders on the new Left would have America abdicate its position of leadership throughout the world. The fact that this position of leadership was conferred - in trust and in respect - by the smaller and less powerful nations does not bother these men [sic] one whit. They would have us renounce our commitments and repudiate the 400,000 American lives sacrificed to the cause of world peace during this century. They would have America turn inward and vegetate in splendid isolation.

These are the ideas of the men who are taking control of the National Democratic Party.

All this is standard nationalist talk. As Andrew Bacevich has called especially to our attention, "isolationism" since the Second World War has actually been a marginal sentiment to the extent that it can be meaningfully said to exist at all. But it's a favorite strawman to beat up when arguing for wars and ever-increasing military budgets.

He clearly identifies this internal axis of evil with the Democratic Party. But he's a bit more selective than he successors today, speaking of the people taking leadership of the Democratic Party. There were still quite a few conservative Democratic governors like John Bell Williams and members of Congress that the Republicans weren't ready to alienate entirely in 1969.

Agnew goes on to recite some Republican platitudes and put in a pitch for Nixon's Supreme Court nominee Clement Haynsworth (1912-1989). Haysworth's record on civil rights and labor law was criticized by many Democrats and - another thing that's different from today - they actually organized themselves to successfully defeat his nomination! Agnew tries to frame this criticism in the context of the Evil Ones discriminating against the sadly put-upon white Southerners; Haynsworth was from South Carolina. The vote against Haynsworth was 55-45, including 17 Republicans in the majority.

Agnew's speeches are significant because they show what came to be the dominant authoritarian sentiment of today's Republican Party at a time when "the Sixties" were still happening. Agnew was the darling of the conservative culture warriors in 1969.

Tags: republican party, spiro agnew