Katrina: Conservative Gold

Sensible people saw Hurricane Katrina as a horrific natural and human disaster. They also saw it as an illustration of the serious drawbacks of the anti-government mentality.

But our conservative friends are not sensible people. Rick Perlstein takes a look back at the aftermath of Katrina, when conservatives saw the disaster as a "golden opportunity" to demand everything from the suspension of wage regulations and the elimination of the capital gains tax, to the privatization of Social Security, to the abolition of the Public Broadcasting System.

Read the whole post -- though you may want to cover your eyes when you get to the part where Jack Kemp mutilates the memory of Bobby Kennedy.

Labels: conservatives, Katrina, Rick Perlstein

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:44 AM 0 comments

  Now at Large in the Blogosphere...

I've been remiss in not yet linking to the new blogs by Bill Scher and Rick Perlstein, at the Campaign for America's Future. Getting this kind of talent on board was a real score for the new organization.

If you're obsessed with the conservative movement to the point that you read alien & sedition regularly, you'll especially dig Perlstein's blog, The Big Con. The blog is co-sponsoring, with The American Prospect, a one-day conference next thursday on "the failure of conservatism." I'm thinking of playing hooky and heading down to DC for that event, particularly as I don't want to miss the featured debate between William Kristol and TAP's Robert Kuttner. Topic: whether "conservatives be trusted to govern." I know, I know -- they actually have to debate that question?

Labels: conservatives, Rick Perlstein, The Big Con

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:00 PM 1 comments

  Mitt: Working Hard to Bug the Liberals

Rick Perlstein reports on Mitt Romney's attempts to woo conservative support - not just by trying to make friends, but by making enemies. Exhibit A: Mitt's announcement speech at a museum honoring the notorious anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer Henry Ford. Perlstein notes that the controversy ended up helping Romney with many conservatives - thanks to the right's eagerness to lash back against media backlash:

Consider the sarcastic reflection of this denizen of the right-wing website Free Republic:

Allright, an AP hit piece! The MSM has more acute RINOdar than we. Real RINO's don't get rinky-dink MSM hit pieces such as this. This proves that the MSM believes Romney is a conservative, and therefore must be roughed up.

Translation: I used to suspect that Romney was only a "Republican in Name Only." But now I realize: He bugs the liberal media. By the tribal logic of right-wing identity politics, that is enough--Mitt Romney now can be called a conservative.

And Perlstein goes on to make a very interesting comparison between this move and Reagan's decision to launch his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where only sixteen years previously the Klan had murdered three young civil rights workers:

Then, the symbolism was absolutely deliberate: Reagan pledged fealty to "states' rights," a concerted attempt to nudge the tribal identities of Southerners into the Republican column once and for all. But it didn't mean Reagan, or anyone in his audience, was for bringing back Klan terrorism any more than Romney has Michigan anti-Semites dusting off their copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Reagan's benefit from speaking at Philadelphia, Mississippi derived primarily from all that outrage that he spoke at Philadelphia, Mississippi. He stood up to the Yankees. He proved to Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and the rest that he felt their pain: tribally, he was one of them--just as Romney has just demonstrated oneness with conservatives sick of being called "fascists" by liberals.

Whether Romney's intending to do this or not, it's fascinating. It still might not be enough to save his campaign, but it's yet another reminder that nobody's trying harder to get right-wing support than Multiple Choice Mitt.

Labels: 2008, Mitt Romney, Presidential election, Rick Perlstein, social conservatives

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 5:33 PM 0 comments

  Blogs: the Literature of Revolution?

Rick Perlstein has a nice article at the New Republic on how bloggers often outperform the major media, largely because of the same media weakness that politicians have learned to exploit so skillfully: ego. Quoting Marcy Wheeler's book, he draws a parallel to another age in American history:

"[T]he CIA leak case is a story about how our elected representatives exploited the weakness of our media." Part of that weakness was their overweening self-regard. At first, in the eighteenth century, when an anonymous writer launched charges against "gentlemen"--quite often in the rudest language imaginable--it was a scandal "in a social order of deference," Warner writes in Letters of the Republic. But, by striking down deference, pseudonyms forced arguments to be stronger; Warner even argues that the anonymous culture of print is what made republican consciousness possible.

I've thought about this, too. Perlstein refers to the work of historian Michael Warner, who observed that

many Founding Fathers insisted that public debates be carried out by pseudonym. "Publius," he points out--the pen name under which the newspaper arguments for ratifying the Constitution collected as The Federalist Papers were published--"speaks in the utmost generality of print, denying in his very existence the mediating of particular persons." In other words, it wasn't supposed to matter that the author was the distinguished gentleman Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, or James Madison. You were just supposed to judge according to the words on the page.

I've been reading The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, by the great scholar Bernard Bailyn, who begins his book by discussing "the literature of revolution": the pamphlets, which "had particular virtues as a medium of communication... [It] allowed one to do things that were not possible in any other form."

Bailyn cites a passage from Orwell:

The pamphlet is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and "highbrow" than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern ... All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.

Good advice!

As Bailyn says:

It was in this form that 'the best thought of the day expressed itself'; it was in this form that 'the solid framework of constitutional thought' was developed; it was in this form that 'the basic elements of American political thought of the Revolutionary period appeared first.' [...]

[Pamphlets] were always essentially polemical, and aimed at immediate and rapidly shifting targets: at suddenly developing problems, unanticipated arguments, and swiftly rising, controversial figures. The best of the writing that appeared in this form, consequently, had a rare combination of spontaneity and solidity, of dash and detail, of casualness and care.

Many of the pamphleteers were and remain anonymous; no doubt a great many of them are lost to us today. Some of the better remembered include Jonathan Mayhew, the patriotic liberal minister, Richard Bland, the Virginia planter with a gift for vicious satire who "succeeded to such an extent in ridiculing his antagonist by reversing roles with him and condemning him from his own mouth that the victim was forced to reply weakly by explaining to his readers who was really who," (a talent that is not entirely lost), and of course the well-known heroes like the radical Tom Paine and the Founders themselves.

The patriots' opponents, whom they so utterly defeated that the political line they represented disappeared from the American tradition, were the Tories: desperate conservatives like Samuel Seabury, Thomas Bradbury Chandler, whose American Querist "consisted of an even hone hundred rhetorical questions aimed at the pretensions of the first Continental Congres," (some historians seem to attribute this work to Myles Cooper) and Charles Inglis, whose True Interest of America took up the daunting task of rebutting Paine's Common Sense.

The pamphleteers fired back and forth in a familiar pattern, in

what might be called chain-reacting personal polemics: strings of individual exchanges - arguments, replies, rebuttals, and counter-rebuttals ... A bold statement on a sensitive issue was often sufficient to start such a series, which characteristically proceeded with increasing shrillness until it ended in bitter personal vituperation.

And this two centuries before Michelle Malkin was even born!

Leading figures of the day were not exempt from the mud-slinging:

[I]t took a degree of restaint no one sought to employ to keep from depicting George Washington as the corrupter of a washerwoman's daughter, John Hancock as both impotent and the stud of an illegitimate brood ... and Judge John Martin Howard, Jr., as a well-known cardsharper.

Nasty, brutish, short - and to the point.

The major media, who have in so many cases become far too smug, far too lazy, and far too weak to do the job of a vital democratic press, will point to the blogosphere and dismiss it as a cesspool of unpedigreed shouters, and their dismissal will give cover to those who want to crack down on the dirty bloggers. And yes, there's nastiness, and yes there's anonymity and pseudonymity and anyone with a computer and a grudge can join in. And yet, and yet.

And yet, it won't be the first time history is forged in such disreputable discourse.


Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

Labels: Bernard Bailyn, Blogs, Rick Perlstein, Tories

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:46 PM 2 comments

  What's the Matter with 'X'

Reader Ruthh emails:

I spent more than two decades in the South, as a civil rights attorney and a public defender. What I concluded was the source of developing “conservative” support and the explosion of the Republican party in the South had to do with 1) an historical background of anti-democratic government and economic structures by which of course I mean slavery and the consequent system of share cropping which oppressed non-slave poor folks as well 2) the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s which unlike populism in the 1890’s was literally unsuppressible (is that a word?) and which left moral structures like churches and church schools that supported racism looking like idiots 3) the fury engendered by actually having to share the economic and more importantly the political world with African-Americans 4)the rise of Ronald Reagan and his buddies with their thinly veiled racism and their attacks on institutions supporting poor people, public education, etc, etc. Gay marriage, abortion, all those “wedge” issues perform the same emotional and dramatic function that race did in the political intercourse of the pre-70’s South.

I haven't commented much yet on the social furies that have driven the modern conservative movement, but Ruthh's points are great. What I've been looking at in the Conservative Summit series has had to do with the elite-driven intellectual agenda of conservatism (though, as one conservative writer angrily pointed out to me some time ago, not all of those intellectuals come from elite backgrounds themselves).

But of course that "small-government" elite agenda, serving as it does primarily the interests of a small number of Americans, always struggles to gain much traction in the wider public. Despite what conservative intellectuals like to think, Americans are not much interested in "small government" beyond the level of pure abstraction, as something that sounds like a nice idea. Sure, they want low taxes, but the political tradeoff usually dampens that enthusiasm.

So, as we know, conservatives hitch their wagon to various kinds of populist reaction. Rick Perlstein has written some great things about these reactions - in fact, he's got a book coming out about it that I'm very much looking forward to.

I think that populist reaction in of itself is independent of conservatism - except inasmuch as conservatism is defined simply as a reaction against change. The Kansas populists of the last century were of course opposed to the conservative politicians of their time.

Likewise, elite politics is not always the same as small-government-ism. In the early 19th century it was the conservative elites - the Federalists and Whigs - who favored a vigorous program of national development, and the democrats (small-d) and radicals who represented the anti-government philosophy. And, of course, there are different kinds of elites - the powerful national economic elites, and the local, what you might call "petit bourgeois" or provincial elites. They're not always on the same side.

The various legacies twist and turn and provide all kinds of paradoxes for modern analogy-making. Who are the true forefathers of today's conservatives? The anti-government Jeffersonians whose words can be used to libertarian effect today, or the centralizing Federalists who were considered conservative then? It's all fun stuff and we'll try to follow the threads as we work our way through reading conservative history. You have to follow the interests of the various elites, but you can't forget that so much of what we call conservatism now is a social force having little to do with the sleek opinions promulgated in the National Review.

Labels: conservatism, conservatives, Rick Perlstein

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 5:26 PM 0 comments

  Two Tales of Hidden Conservative History

Rick Perlstein on Reagan's political conversion: brought to life by General Electric.

Sidney Blumenthal on Ford, Rummy, and Dick: why the ex-president's last words about the Iraq war will fall on deaf ears.

Labels: Gerald Ford, Rick Perlstein, Ronald Reagan, Sidney Blumenthal

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:45 PM 0 comments

  Conservative Rock and Roll: Here to Stay?

I expect that pretty much any liberal who has taken a moment to look at the style or the rhetoric of the conservative movement has been somewhat bewildered at how such a powerful force - one that has dominated all the branches of government in recent years and claims to represent majority opinion - is constantly acting so oppressed. It seems perverse to the point of monstrousness that the man with his boot on your neck can pretend to be your victim.

In other words, there's nothing worse than a bully with a persecution complex.

Rick Perlstein, whose magnificent history of the Goldwater Movement, Before the Storm, I'll be discussing in future posts, has a good article about this phenomenon at the New Republic. As familiar as Perlstein is with the history of conservative ideas in America, he argues that it's a distinct conservative culture that has really transformed American politics. And the defining feature of that culture is its sense of persecution:

Conservative culture was shaped in another era, one in which conservatives felt marginal and beleaguered. It enunciated a heady sense of defiance. In a world in which patriotic Americans were hemmed in on every side by an all-encroaching liberal hegemony, raw sex in the classrooms, and totalitarian enemies of the United States beating down our very borders, finally conservatives could get together and (as track twelve of the Goldwaters' Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals avowed) "Row Our Own Boat."

This sense of marginality has persisted even as conservatives have conquered American politics. "Conservatives are always beleagured, always under seige," Perstein observes.

Again, this is a cultural phenomenon, much more than a political or ideological one. Perlstein mentions bizarre cultural exercises like the National Review's John Miller listing the "top 50 conservative rock songs of all time."

Whiskey Fire delves deeper into the perverse psychology this involves, the simultaneous conservative urges to define themselves against mainstream American culture and to look for validation from it.

Modern American "movement conservatives" are obviously perplexed by American culture, in its high as well as pop flavors. On the one hand, they hate it -- we're all going to Hollyweird Hell; lie-berals run the colleges, oh my. On the other hand, they can be pathetically clap-hands excited about any sort of cultural production that they can somehow pretend is authentically "conservative." [...]

What really matters is the very palpable wingnut fear that you can't be a member of a distinct American social group if you don't have a distinctive set of cultural practices which gives your tribe its unique identity -- and it bugs the hell out of them that they lack the ability to dominate the mechanisms by which such identities are for better or worse nowadays commonly produced and recognized, namely, TV shows, movies, shit on the Internets, popular music, and so on. [...]

What do you do when someone else runs the game? You yell that it's fixed and you don't care about it really and that it's Evil and Corrupting. But that hardly means that you don't scream out in delight when you get any sort of momentary advantage. Never mind that denouncing the game and playing it to win are contradictory strategies. As Freud pointed out, when it's our identity and desires on the line, we're far more often convinced and comforted by the sheer number of arguments we can marshall to our cause than we are bothered by the fact that these arguments may be completely inconsistent.

Hence such absurdities as the wingnutty obsession with classifying movies according to whether or not they're "conservative" to the exclusion of all other criteria [...]

It's funny, but for all the whining about "identity politics," nobody is more tied to it than "movement conservatives."

Indeed, it illuminates why conservatives have had such a flair for fighting the culture wars - because they have approached those wars, not seeking to end them out of a liberal concern for universalism, but as one of any number of groups seeking "recognition" as Charles Taylor would have defined it.

For Perlstein, this is what holds them together as a movement against all the forces that might tear them apart. He cautions us not to be too optimistic about the prospect that the many contradictions within the conservative movement will lead to its destruction. On the contrary, he says:

What is remarkable about conservatism is how easily it hangs together. Conservative culture itself is radically diverse, infinitely resourceful in uniting opposites: highbrow and lowbrow; sacred and profane; sublime and, of course, ridiculous. It is the core cultural dynamic--the constant staging and re-staging of acts of "courage" in the face of liberal "marginalization"--that manages to unite all the opposites. It keeps conservatives from one another's throats--and keeps them more or less always pulling in the same political direction.

And, far from harming the movement, conservatism's current political troubles will only strengthen that unity:

That is how conservative culture works so well: the joy of feeling as one in their beleaguered conservatism. I've found, paradoxically, that, for this determined remnant, conservative identity becomes stronger the more discredited conservative governance becomes. They seem to take their lumps in stride and emerge all the more confident in their ideology from the challenge.

I have no reason to dispute Perlstein's analysis. But I would note one thing: while it explains why the conservatives may always be with us, it somewhat begs the question - or at leasts ignores the question - as to why conservatives succeed politically in some eras, and in some eras do not. If the sense of marginalization functions as a powerful internal organizing principle, and all the more so when the movement is out of political power, then what explains its political fortunes?

Some of this is no doubt contingent: conservatives can stumble into power when liberals and moderates screw up. Beyond that, though, how much of it has to do with the expansion and contraction of that conservative culture among Americans - and why does it expand and contract - and how much has to do with the success of conservative ideas and political tactics among Americans who aren't part of that culture? One gets the sense that this culture is immutable. But it can't be: if it were, it would either be permanently in power or permanently out of it. Moreover, sometimes it seems to articulate a politics that appeals to Americans more broadly, and sometimes it doesn't. That may be where the history of conservative ideas and political strategy does matter, and that's an area I'll be looking at a lot more as time goes on.

Labels: conservatism, conservatives, National review, Rick Perlstein, The New Republic, Whiskey Fire

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:07 AM 2 comments