Keep Your Eye on the Dolchstosslegende

William Kristol is an intellectually bankrupt thug. It's a point that hardly needs elaboration, but Jon Chait elaborates quite satisfyingly on it anyway, coming to a nice summation of the state of the Dolchstosslegende:

The theme of traitorous liberals is becoming a Standard trope. Last week's cover depicted an American soldier seen from behind and inside a circular lens--as if caught in the sights of a hostile sniper--beneath the headline, "does washington have his back?" The Weimar-era German right adopted the metaphor of liberals stabbing soldiers in the back. Kristol is embracing the metaphor of liberals shooting soldiers in the back. I suppose this is progress, of sorts.

There was a time when neoconservatives sought to hold the moral and intellectual high ground. There was some- thing inspiring in their vision of America as a different kind of superpower--a liberal hegemon deploying its might on behalf of subjugated peoples, rather than mere self-interest. As the Iraq war has curdled, the idealism and liberalism have drained out of the neoconservative vision. What remains is a noxious residue of bullying militarism. Kristol's arguments are merely the same pro-war arguments that have been used historically by right-wing parties throughout the world: Complexity is weakness, dissent is treason, willpower determines all.

Ross Douthat objects to Chait's piece -- not on the merits, but because Chait's magazine, the New Republic, has never taken a coherent stance on the war.

This, to me, seems entirely beside the point. Matt Freeney agrees, pointing out the structural reasons why TNR hosts a range of opinions on the issue. He also invites Douthat to offer his own opinions on whether Kristol's buffoonish rants should be taken at face value, or seen as something a little more performative.

To my mind, authentic or not, the Dolchstoss discourse has the same effects. And what's peculiar is that Douthat himself has denounced it in the past:

Myself, I think that liberals should be praying that the Right embraces the "stabbed in the back" theory of what went wrong in Iraq (and possibly Iran as well), because it will push conservatives toward political irrelevance. Yes, many conservatives have long nursed the belief that we could have won in Vietnam if liberals hadn't turned gutless and anti-American, but this belief hasn't won the Right any elections ...

So when Dinesh D'Souza tells conservative cruisegoers that "it's customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who's 'we'? ... The left won by demanding America's humiliation," he isn't broadening conservatism's base - he's shrinking it. Which is what a post-Bush conservatism that obsesses over how the liberal media undid the Iraq Occupation by failing to "report the good news" would do as well.

This is a pragmatic argument, not a principled one, though there's no reason to believe that Douthat has any sympathy for Dolchstoss talk on any level. Maybe he was simply using Chait's piece as an opportunity to grind an axe over TNR's editorial policy. But it sure would be nice if he, as a conservative, would also take the opportunity to denounce the thuggery of his ideological cousin.

Labels: Dolchstosslegende, Jonathan Chait, Ross Douthat, William Kristol

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:48 PM 0 comments

  Don't Fear the Dolchstosslegende?

Check out the snazzy new American Scene. Not only does the site look great, but Reihan Salam has brought on board an excellent group of co-bloggers, ideologically diversifying the site in the process.

The new team includes neo-paleocon Daniel Larison (an opponent of the Iraq war), who suggests that liberals shouldn't be so worried about a revival of Dolchstoss politics:

A turn to Dolchstoss rhetoric would be the final act of self-discrediting by mainstream conservatives in this country. Not satisfied with their own handy knife work in the area of the national spinal column with the Iraq war, they will be only too happy to find scapegoats for a disaster in which they acquiesced and indeed cheered on through each stage of deepening failure. Instead of four or eight years out of power, the right would risk losing its chance at the White House for a generation if it engaged in the active vilification of two-thirds of the country. It would be the ultimate act of blaming America first, which, as they are only too well aware, is not a vote-winner. Watching progressives gird for the coming battle against Dolchstoss is rather amusing, when it seems clear from where I'm standing that nothing could better suit the cause of progressivism in this country than a perpetually imploding, paranoid and delusional conservative movement. Indeed, things would have come full circle, since it was in no small part thanks to the implosion of the left brought on by the excesses and absurdity of the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s that helped lay some of the foundations for later conservative success.

Larison also suggests that Dolchstoss is less likely to catch on in a situation where 1) it's effete AEI intellectuals, not the military, doing the complaining, and 2) millions of Americans (or even tens of thousands) haven't died.

Larison certainly has a point about the right's descent into paranoia, though it's something of an incoherent process (isn't it always), particularly in that even pro-war conservatives themselves are vehemently at odds with each other -- and often with themselves -- as to whether the Iraq war is a booming success or a plain failure. One almost gets the sense that they look forward to the days when they can be done with it -- just ditch the cognitive dissonance and settle on a nice revisionist fairy tale that blames the whole thing on the libs. But the paranoid style in America sells books but not candidates, not over the long run anyway, and if conservatives want to revert to a kind of John Birch mentality (and again, Johann Hari's experience suggests that the process is fairly advanced at this stage) then perhaps they'll ultimately settle into a John Birch-style marginality.

We can certainly hope that will be the case, anyway. In the meantime, progressives are intimately familiar with the potency of the conservative noise machine, having been beaten bloody by it on a regular basis over the past quarter century. And we're aware that Dolchstoss is being pumped through the machine at a considerable rate, with the usual message discipline across all manner of movement institutions. So I, for one, might be cheered by Larison's line of argument, I might even believe he's right, but in the meantime, I'll continue to gird.

Update: Ross Douthat makes the same case as Larison:

Myself, I think that liberals should be praying that the Right embraces the "stabbed in the back" theory of what went wrong in Iraq (and possibly Iran as well), because it will push conservatives toward political irrelevance.

Go read the whole post.

Labels: Daniel Larison, Dolchstosslegende, The American Scene

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:00 PM 0 comments

  Tales from the Dolchstosslegende, Part XXVIII

It's becoming ever more clear that Republicans are planning to put the Dolchstosslegende at the center of their 2008 strategy. Consider, for instance, Eli Lake's op-ed in today's New York Sun, "welcoming" Senator Brownback back into the anti-anti-war fold. Brownback, who has been waffling artlessly on the escalation, ultimately came out against the latest anti-surge resolution in the Senate:

In prose Vice President Cheney might use, he said the Reid resolution, which lost 50 to 48, played directly into the hands of Al Qaeda. Today, the senator's campaign Web site says the situation in Iraq is "precarious, but hopeful."

Of course, it was in fact the Iraq war itself that has played directly into the hands of Al Qaeda - succeeding beyond Osama bin Laden's wildest dreams. But bracket that. Here's Brownback, for one, embracing the Dolchstosslegende. Lake argues that the Senator flipped because he didn't like the Democrats' timetable - and because he was frightened of Hugh Hewitt-esque backlash against anti-war Republicans. One might suggest that Brownback's change of heart in fact had a lot more to do with the latter than with the former.

So we know that Senator Brownback is a real man of principle. Meanwhile, Lake sounds curiously optimistic describing the situation on the right:

In other words, Messrs. Hewitt and [Mark] Levin, along with such figures as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Reagan, are defining the base. While taxes, immigration, and values are important, this year the war trumps all. The people who will show up in New Hampshire and Iowa to pick the Republican nominee are victory voters.

Hence for all of their flaws, the big three contenders for the Republican prize talk about winning in Iraq. Mayor Giuliani may be too left on the social issues. Senator McCain may be too much of a lick-spittle to the liberal press. Governor Romney may be too new to the struggle. But none of the three wants to sabotage the mission the way the liberal Democrats do. It was Mr. Brownback who sputtered on the war, and when it became clear that it was not a winning course, he made a course correction.

Now, if I were a Republican strategist, passages like this would have me buying Tums by the carton. The GOP's presidential candidates are gambling that a year and eight months from now, the American public will still be in the mood to hear their leaders yakking about the need to stay the course in Iraq. Even worse, the Republican field is, apparently, beholden to the political strategy advice of people like Hugh Hewitt, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh.

So there's that self-marginalization again. But maybe they're counting on the intensity of the Dolchstosslegende to overcome it - after all, they pulled off something similar in 2004. Now that the Democrats have at last more or less come out against the war, it's clarified. Democrats are not seeking the support of "victory voters." They, to use Lake's execrable phrasing, "want to sabotage the mission."

You can see, theoretically speaking, the utility of the stab-in-the-back myth. It can be used against Democrats while the war still sputters along; it can be used just as effectively - perhaps moreso - after the war is over. So in one sense, it's a way for Republicans to hedge their bets on the question of whether or not the war will end before November '08. In another sense, as we've discussed, it's a way to try and shift the blame for the failure in Iraq from where it clearly belongs - with the Republican party - to the Democrats.

To be successful in 2008, the Democrats and their nominee will have to find an effective way of dealing with this. I always like ridicule, but maybe there are other approaches. Meanwhile, as pretty as the Dolchstosslegende sounds to conservatives, they might consider that, these days, their Hannity- and Limbaugh-composed tunes don't actually resonate so well outside the conservative echo chamber.

Labels: 2008, Dolchstosslegende, Iraq, Presidential election, Sam Brownback

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:28 AM 0 comments

  Tales from the Dolchstosslegende, Part XXIV

HTML Mencken over at Sadly, No! has this quote from genocidal Canadian basement-dweller Adam Yoshida:

The Knife and the Back

From the very beginning what has frightened me most about the Global War on Terrorism is this: that the United States and the West simply do not, in their present condition, have the stomach to bring this war to a successful conclusion. I have never really been given a satisfactory answer to the question, “how do you win a war against the enemy in front of you while ignoring the knife-wielding enemy behind you?”

At every step, the left – and its many allies on the rest of the political spectrum – have sought to obstruct all efforts to win this war. At every turn they’ve handcuffed our forces and circumscribed our options.

[…]

rather than join in the effort to defeat this enemy, certain treasonous elements within lurking here at home have seized the opportunity for their own petty political advantage – or, in certain cases, out of genuinely-felt but nonetheless objectively evil moral principles.

The enemy within acts as a form of heavy artillery on behalf of the wider enemy conspiracy.

[..]

When liberals betrayed us during Vietnam and stabbed our soldiers and our allies in the back, the result was millions of dead. Not that many people noticed because it happened in a far away land about which we know little. But, if we let them pull off their betrayal this time, the millions of dead will be in our own cities. They will come from our own towns and our own homes.

Which leads to the inevitable Yoshida-riffic eliminationist conclusion:

What is required today is what has been required from the very beginning: an all-out and total offensive against the enemy on all fronts and without the least shred of compassion or restraint.

The operating premise of S,N! is that the batshit loopy wingnuts of the right blogosphere tend to express, in its purest form, the murderous insanity that underlies so much right-wing thought, yet which "respectable" conservative pundits are too polite to make explicit. And it's a good premise.

But we can take it a step beyond where HTML Mencken takes it. Discussing Yoshida's ravings, he argues that "it takes Adam Yoshida to say in the plainest way what Glenn Reynolds, Rush Limbaugh, Redstate.com White Trash, Mark Steyn, Jim Pinkerton, Patrick Bateman Stephen Green, Marie Jon’, Michael Barone, and, especially, Jeff Goldstein really mean."

But why stop at the bloggers? This Dolchstoss nonsense goes all the way up to the oh-so-respectable think tanks and journals of the besuited, "intellectual" right. To Noemie Emery of the Weekly Standard. To Jonah Goldberg of the National Review (and the LA Times Op-Ed pages). To Mackubin Thomas Owens, also of the National Review. To the very architects of the "surge" themselves, Kagan & Kristol. To the Heritage Foundation. To the American Enterprise Institute.

The new Dolchstosslegende is not just a pastime of nutty right-wing bloggers. It is a careful and deliberate creation of the the best and the brightest of the conservative movement, an effort by certain of our political elites to avoid blame for their own prodigious failures and incompetencies by portraying their domestic opponents - us - as traitors to the nation. This is not a passing fad; it's a generational battle.

If I seem to harp on the Dolchstosslegende a little too often, it's because I think it is very, very dangerous.

Labels: Dolchstosslegende, Sadly No

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:42 AM 0 comments

  Everyone's Favorite Subject: Republicans in Disarray

Two tales - via Daily Kos, so you've seen them already, but for the record...

Revolt at the RNC: Mel Martinez is not a popular man.

And,

Iraq war uniting Dems, dividing Republicans:

A generation ago, a war—Vietnam—launched a realignment of American politics. Now, it seems increasingly clear, Iraq is doing the same. In 1968 college students flocked to the New Hampshire primary to protest Lyndon Johnson's policies, sparking a civil war in the Democratic Party on foreign policy that lasted for a generation. By contrast, Vietnam united the GOP around an anti-communist crusade that endured for decades. "Ronald Reagan was gung-ho about Vietnam," says Craig Shirley, a GOP operative and Reagan biographer. "It solidified his world view, and the party's."

Now a mirror image is developing. Democrats seem to be uniting around a theme—the primacy of global diplomacy and congressional review. Republicans, by contrast, have lost the unity that they had during the cold war and the early years of the war on terror.

As Republican divisions grow, Democrats, pressed by their antiwar grass roots, are drawing together.

Eventually the Republicans will get their act together. But the more the Democrats can stay focused and keep pressing the political attack, the longer they can delay that regrouping. And, the more united and on-message the Democrats are, the harder they'll make it for the right to frame the Dolchstosslegende.

Labels: Democrats, Dolchstosslegende, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 6:45 PM 0 comments

  Eternal Victory

d. at Lawers, Guns, and Money has more on the right's - specifically, Jonah Goldberg's - increasingly shrill attachment to an abstract idea of "victory."

Proceeding from the false dichotomy that Americans are divided between those who "want the war to be a success" and those who "want the war to be over," Goldberg congratulates the preznit on his insatiable desire to win. [...] And the fact that Bush's plans gang aft agley only makes Goldberg more upset with the Democrats:

He may be deluding himself, and his plan may not work, but he at least has done the nation the courtesy of saying what his position is, despite an antagonistic political establishment and a hostile public. What is maddening is that the Democratic leadership cannot, or will not, clearly tell the American people whether they are the party of "end it" or "win it."

This is beyond pathetic. Goldberg finds such "stubborn emphasis on victory" to be courageous -- "wise," in fact -- and so Bush's desire for victory immunizes him somehow from responsibility for what happens from here onward.

Again, what is at work here looks, to me, like the rapid crystalization of the conservatives' new stab-in-the-back myth.

The fiction called "victory" in this context is something that can be defined in real, if unlikely, terms - "a secure Iraq that defends itself and is an ally in the war on terror" - but can only exist on the far end of a near-infinite regression. We have been driving at "victory" for three and a half years now, and "victory" has only gotten further away. However, as long as we continue to fight in Iraq, we can claim to be pursuing it. Again, this can go on indefinitely. It could continue for a decade, and "victory" might be no closer, but neither would it cease to exist as a concept towards which we are oriented. The right will never - never - be willing to call time, to cut the cord. The Democrats will have to do it.

And thus we have the real function of "victory" - even if the war's supporters cannot or will not admit it yet. "Victory's" primary purpose is to exonerate the right for the failure of the war. It is the war supporters' historical escape mechanism. The "victory" phantasm is a tool for shifting the blame from those who foolishly created the war, and who idiotically supported its indefinite continuation, to those who opposed the war. The Democrats will have to put a stop to the war, because the right never will. And ever after, the war party will be able to point to the still-unsullied - because un-reached, unrealized - "victory," and point out that it was the peace party who turned us away from it.

It would be nice, though perhaps it's expecting too much our our media, if there were a lot more scrutiny of this notion of "victory." In the meantime, the task for progressives is to clearly and loudly describe the formation of the Dolchstosslegende as it happens, the better to strangle it in its cradle.

Labels: Dolchstosslegende, Iraq, Jonah Goldberg, Lawyers Guns and Money

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:10 AM 0 comments

  Dolchstosslegende Sighting

Who else but the great Ann Coulter? Oh, and some stupid dog site. Dave Neiwert has it, in his round-up of all the latest in right-wing eliminationism.

Labels: Ann Coulter, Dave Neiwert, Dolchstosslegende

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:40 PM 1 comments

  Caution: Dolchstosslegende Ahead

Why is Bush waiting until January to announce his Iraq policy?

Perhaps because he wants to force a Democratic Congress to deal with his request for a "surge."

Labels: Dolchstosslegende, Iraq

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:09 PM 1 comments

  Getting Stabby

At the Weekly Standard (I'm a few days late on this one, but catching up), Robert Kagan and William Kristol manage to blame the failure in Iraq on . . . the Iraq Study Group. It's a neat trick, actually - to equate those searching for ways out of the disaster (which, by definition, would mean withdrawing troops) to the Rumsgoat who can be blamed for not sending enough troops in the first place. Evidently there is no strategic difference between 2003 and 2006-7. In a similar vein, the Germans, having failed to take Moscow in 1941, should really have made an effort to do it in the spring of 1945, instead of wasting all that time mucking around in the streets of Berlin.

I mention the German analogy because, while I have complete respect for Godwin's law, I can't read a sentence like this:

That means the president will have to be, much more than he has been, his own general and strategist.

without imagining the little man ranting over maps in a bunker somewhere, cursing the fecklessness of his generals. With, no doubt, similarly effective results. Anyway, it's probably moot: Hitler was a (demented, evil) overachiever, whereas Bush goes to bed far too early to take on the task of being "his own general and strategist."

Oh, but so: the whole point of the Weekly Standard piece is to beat the drum, yet again, for "more troops" - about 30-60,000 should do (which may be crappy turnout for a Jets game, but is apparently enough people to finally secure a major mideast nation which is currently locked into a savage civil war).

What is all this? This is a Dolchstosslegende in its formative stages. About which more later, but you can see the basic shape, which is always the same: after the war situation has gone well past the point of being disastrously untenable, the hawks are finally relieved of authority and the grown-ups do what they can to clean up the mess. This, in turn, frees the hawks to spend the next two or three decades crafting the myth that, in fact, it was the grown-ups who lost the war - that things were going so well until the nation was stabbed in the back. After all that time, the details - timelines, lies, blunders, elections - tend to get fuzzy, but the stab-in-the-back legend reorganizes, clarifies, provides a bright and convincing new way to remember all those things that happened during that late unpleasantness so many years ago.

That's the historical dilemma facing the Democrats. They were elected, clearly, with a mandate to clean up the Iraq mess. But so often, a party elected with a mandate to clean up messes and do unpleasant things is punished years later, when the crisis is past and the party winds up being identified with the very messes and unpleasant things it had to deal with.

Anyway, here's a proposal: the Democrats should consent to the additional troops, on the condition that any increase in troop levels be directly indexed to the percentage of card-carrying Young Republicans and College Republicans who enlist in the armed forces.

After all, they've got to come from somewhere.

(Paul)

Labels: Dolchstosslegende, Iraq, Republicans, Weekly Standard

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 8:29 AM 0 comments