On Wickedness (Part One in a Series)

I've mentioned before that some of the subjects I think most about are the ones, paradoxically, I blog least about. The reason is that I these are the subjects on which I want to do a really, really, really good job. I pull together dozens of links, sources, ideas, sentences, quotations, until I have so much I find myself overwhelmed, with far to much material for even the grandest blog post—by which time it's too late anyway, and the subject is no longer timely.

So I'm going to try something a little different this afternoon: a diary of what I've been thinking about one of these subjects I've been avoiding writing about because I've been doing to much thinking about it. ("Understanding stops action," Nietschze said.) Maybe it will add up to something equal to my literary aspirations. Maybe not. Here goes.

The subject I've been avoiding lately has to do with conservative turpitude. And liberal depression. And the annoying habit we progressives have of believing that the mere act of debunking conservative lies, "telling the people," and proving the cosmic correctness and justness of our positions, is enough to turn the political tide. It isn't. It doesn't. And that's what makes us depressed.

Right-wing turpitude meets goo-goo liberal naiveté; right-wing wins! I could write a book about that. You might say I have. [1]

One of my most favorite lines in NIXONLAND is one of the most melancholy. Adlai Stevenson, the honest, upright, and intellectual Democratic president candidate from 1952 and 1956 has just lost his second presidential race. Eisenhower launched his attack dog Nixon to, for instance, claim that the Republican administration once in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America." And that he was in possession of "a secret memorandum of the Communist party" proving "it is determined to conduct its program within the Democratic Party." Stevenson had called for a nuclear test ban treaty; Nixon excoriated it as "appalling...catastrophic nonsense...the height of irresponsibility...naive... dangerous." Afterward, Stevenson learned something extraordinary. In September of 1956, even as Nixon was barking these charges across the fruited plain, the National Security Council, of which Nixon was of course a member, had voted unanimously in favor of a test ban proposal similar to Stevenson's.

(I had to cut that little bitsy of Republican turpitude from my book; only so much slime you can fit between 800 pages. Had to cut this tidy little detail, too: that same September Nixon's father died after 12 days of agony. His first campaign stop after the funeral was in Buffalo, where he "honored" his beloved father's memory thus (I quote one of my favorite Nixon biographies [2]). He began, ”’My father’—then paused, as if to contain his emotions, gripping the podium, and went on--’I remember my father telling me a long time ago, ‘Dick, Dick,’ he said, ‘Buffalo is a beautiful town.’ It may have been his favorite town.’ Nixon flew on to Rochester, where he began his speech in exactly the same fashion... He repeated the performance in Ithaca. One efficient reporter kept notes.”)

Stevenson wrote to a friend after his second lost election: "The world is so much more dangerous and wicked even than it was barely four years ago when we talked, that I marvel and tremble at the rapidity of this deterioration."

Do you know the feeling?

I sure do. But that feeling, though certainly genuine, is wrong, and dangerous, and unhelpful. Our ideological adversaries aren't more dangerous and wicked than they were four years ago. Or eight years ago, or, as we see from my examples, 52 years ago. They are equally dangerous and wicked. This is just how the enemies of justice, decency, and progress, fight to keep an upper hand. And will do so four, eight, and thirty-two years from now.

And in subsequent posts I'll be making the case as to why, and what that should mean for us as political activists going forward.