Wickedness

On Wickedness (Part V)

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:37:54 -0700

But these are all golden dreams. Oh, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does no know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see is own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity he would be doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

I've been blogging over the last week on the permanence conservative wickedness: on the wickedness you see when you turn on your TV, and see the progressive standard-bearer in this current presidential election painted via insinuating smears as a crypto-fascist; on the wickedness you see when you're in the library stacks and you stumble across Republican National Committee pamphlets dated 1940, and see the progressive standard-bearer painted via insinuating smears as a war-mongering Communist. I've been promising my reflections upon how best to confront this apparently permanent state of affairs, but I've been delaying that post, just like I'd been delaying writing about the permanence of conservative wickedness in the first place. Why? It's hard to write about. It's elemental it gets at the guts.

How do I know this one will get at the guts? When I have something really difficult and deep to write, I develop certain strange psychosomatic illnesses that keep me in bed. Ask my wife and she'll tell you: that's when I usually have the most interesting things to say.

I spent several mornings last week, and this morning, in bed. Easy to describe the situation. Very difficult to express my very complicated, clouded, and perhaps unpleasant ideas about what the consequences should be.

Read the Dostoevsky quote above. Then read one of the comments I received after describing the latest bout of conservative wickedness—the kind of comments I always receive during bouts of conservative wickedness:

I have a really hard time understanding how the U.S. could possibly be so poor at listening.... Then I remember that I learned how to research at home from my Mum, a librarian. My Dad has a Ph.d., and tells me that she taught him how to research as well... So it sounds like a lot of our problems can be traced back to our fundamental education. So why is it o unimportant to the majority of the people in the country?

How to summarize a sentiment like that? Like this: "I'm smart. If only everyone were as smart as I was, they would see the world as I do, and my political adversaries could never prevail."

This is not, to put it mildly, a notably effective political appeal—as Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and '56, famously quipped when one of his supporters, overflowing with exuberance after one of his speeches, cried, "Governor Stevenson, you'll have the vote of every thinking American!" Stevenson replied: "But I need a majority."

Techically, a true thing to say. But politically, so very, very wrong. In wryly congratuling himself and his audience for comprising some sort of superior intellectual elect, he was calling everyone who didn't like Adlai Stevenson an idiot. And no one likes to hear that they are an idiot. Especially if they are, in fact, an idiot.

Every likes to hear that they are smart, however—even if the person they are hearing it from is him or herself.

Here's another response I read to the latest bout of conservative wickedness. This one is related to the "if only the rest of the country was as smart as we are" conceit, but comes at the problem from a slightly different angle: it is that if we could only explain to the masses exactly why they are dupes, slowly enough, cleverly enough, carefully enough, firmly enough (perhaps with vigorous application of CAPITAL LETTERS), and the scales will fall from their eyes. "Address the surface meaning of the ads and claims, and attack the press for promoting them too," this commenter suggests:

Address the surface meaning of the ads and claims, and attack the press for promoting them too. Like with 'presumptuous.' Ask why all the press people are now using that exact word, and what exactly do you mean saying that Obama is presumptuous? Follow up the question and keep pressing it.... what do Britney Spears and Paris Hilton have to do with Obama? Why would John McCain embarrass a friend and campaign contributor in order to attack Obama?... When they defend it by telling a lie, like how they're teh three biggest celebrities, you go, "no they're not," you say something like they're all better known and more popular than John McCain, but how is it Obama's fault that he's more popular than McCain? Why isn't it McCain's fault? And what do Paris Hilton and Britney Spears have to do with anything? Just keep asking over and over and over, what does ANY of this have to do with Obama? The key to understanding all this that NONE OF IT SAYS ANYTHING ABOUT OBAMA, IT ONLY TELLS US HOW THE SPEAKER FEELS ABOUT OBAMA.... Calling it "presumptuous" says something about the SPEAKER, namely, that for whatever reason, the speaker believes that Obama is claiming somethign that is somehow above his station.

Note the appearance and reappearance of the word "just": if we just do this; if we just do that, if we just keep doing it over and over and over, wickedness will lose its force. Explain it just right, and our ideological adversaries will confess the error of their ways. How comforting if it were so. Remarkably comforting. Pleasurable, in fact. So pleasurable that people pay to watch it happen.

There is a genre of movie that reached a peak in mid-century America, around the time Adlai Stevenson was acknowledging his political difficulties in a nation where not every American was "thinking," that I like to call "liberal narcissist." The gold standard is Twelve Angry Men. A jury is about to convict a Hispanic kid of murder because their every instinct, and a relatively thorough consideration of the evidence as presented, clearly suggests his guilt. A single juror, played by Henry Fonda, insists on slowing down the train, re-examining the evidence piece by piece. Slowly, he's able to persuade more and more of his fellows that reasonable doubt does, in fact, exist. All, that is, except for one juror: a brutish conservative who ends up admitting that the reason he's sure the kid is guilty is that that was just the way "those people" are. Then something extraordinary is depicted, as the picture ends: the conservative, realizing he has just revealed himself as an irrationalist and a bigot, slinks into the corner in shame. The film proposes, just like Dostoevsky's accused pure, innocent child, that thus "enlightened," "man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble." Wickedness shrinks away, humiliated. "Thinking Americans" triumph, as they ever must.

Movies like this, TV shows, books, feel really, really good for liberals watch; that is why liberals keep on making and watching so many of them—the entire run of West Wing; the Joan Allen film The Contender from a couple of years ago, which has been running frequently on HBO these days.

Fairy tales feel good, too. And for the same reason: because they stage scenarios that aren't true—that are better than brute truth.

But no one hustles onto comment threads of blogs and says, "If only we can make things work like fairy tales work, by gum, progressives can win every election!" We recognize this is childish. But liberals don't, to their detriment, tend to recognize that wishing everyone were purely rational is just as childish. I reacquainted myself with that Dostoevsky quote by stumbling upon the blog of "a low-level academic who likes to vent his spleen a little to much." He or she does a pretty good job of it, I'd say. The post in question is called "The Problem With Liberalism," and, using Carl Schorske's account of defeat of liberalism in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, and my own account of the defeat of liberalism in Nixonland, notes that, "In both Austria and America, liberals held to core principles that betrayed them. Liberalism has its roots in the Enlightenment, and like good Enlightenment thinkers, liberals in both cases thought that being on the side of reason would win them a political victory." He concludes, in thunder:

This conceit might be liberalism's biggest blind spot, that humans will stop doing wrong when they know better. While we humans can think, knowing that something is wrong has never stopped us from doing it, in fact it makes the pleasure of doing bad all the more sweet.

Conservatives wickedly play to unreason because being unreasonable is part of what human beings are. Indeed, it is part of the pleasure of being human. The recognition of this is part of what makes conservatism conservative. And it's not going away.

I'm reading what I wrote above, and still haven't got to the bottom of what I want to convey. So expect more soon. Trust that I am not offering a counsel of despair. Here, in fact, is a fine piece of writing that gets at why, to tide you over until I figure out a better way to explain that the human reality of unreason does not ever have to be an alibi for progressive defeat, and has, indeed, underwritten many of progressivism's most famous victories.

Wickedness (Last Cri de Coeur Detour—Promise!)

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:35:50 -0700

I'm at my favorite place today, the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, doing what I like best, wandering the stacks for a research project (I just now got a contact high from the bindery smell). Took a wrong turn at the JK 2359's while searching for this indispensable masterpiece and spied book-stack nirvana: a manila envelope. In this particular neck of the library, that usually means a satchel-full of ancient political pamphlets. My heart raced; and the enveloped, which now sits at my elbow, did not disappoint. I've meant not to dwell any longer the inherent malevolence of conservative campaign rhetoric, for reasons that will become clearer in tomorrow's posts. But I just had to share this.

It's marked "1940 Campaign, Unbound Material," and consists of of pamphlets meant to elect Wendell Willkie, widely considered by history a moderate Republican (and, by conservatives, a quisling liberal Republican), and defeat Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The other day I dated the kind of right-wing smear that targets the lizard brain while pretending to offer rational argument back to RN and 1956. It goes back way further, of course. I have before me what purports, in its interior, to be a dry 72-page pamphlet from the Republican National Committtee filled with column after column of budgetary numbers from Roosevelt's administration.

And whose startling scarlet-colored cover reads, "THE ROOSEVELT RECORD IN RED!" ("'It has taken courage for the Federal Goverment to go into the 'red',***but it has been worth it."'—President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at Covingto, Ky, July 7, 1938.")

Oh, to be a liberal blogger in that halcyon year of 1940, pointing out the obvious fact that the Republicans were insinuating that FDR was a Communist. Oh, to read the outraged cackles of the Depression-era wingnut trolls! "Paranoid Perlstein's smoking the reefer! Obliviously 'red' means deficit spending! For God's sake, we quote Roosevelt himself! Perlstein's the one calling FDR a Commie, not us!"

(Snaps suspenders.) "Heck, our pamphlet's even got a two-page index!!" ("Glass, Carter, on bank holdings of gov't obligations, 45.")

Here's a palm card:

THINK!
"Who nominated Hitler"—Hitler.
"Who nominated Mussolini?"—Mussolini.
"Who nominated Stalin?"—Stalin.
"Who nominated Roosevelt?"—Roosevelt.
"Who nominated Willkie?"—THE PEOPLE.
VOTE FOR WILLKIE

Another palm card neatly played to that year's Republican isolationist sentiment; Willkie was promising no foreign wars, claiming Roosevelt simply pined for one. Top says:

YOU WILL GET A
Roosevelt
And
WWallace
DEAL WITH THE NEW DEAL.

Turn it over 180 degrees, and the bottom, upside down, reads:

YOU WILL GET A
WWallace
And
Roosevelt
DEAL WITH THE NEW DEAL.

Down the side, rightside down and rightside up:

Either Way It Spells DISASTER.

Niftily, that shares the envelope with a pamphlet full of testimonials from the likes of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver and Lessing J. Rosenwald for "Wendell L. Willkie, Uncompromising foe of dictators and valiant defender of democracy • Lifelong enemy of Intolerance and Bigotry." No isolationist he!

(At least in pamphlets distributed in Jewish neighborhoods.)

Another lalapalooza, though, "Why a Third Term?" was surely reserved for gentiles. It explains why, "Rolling about the country to inspect military and naval establishments, Roosevelt is endeavoring to convince the American people that noother man can direct the defense program."

But why all this sudden concern with armaments? Not, the RNC assures us, because of any gathering war clouds. The section is entitled, "National Defense Smoke Screen," and continues:

But the country has awakened to the realization that his real desire is a complete and totalitarian authority over business, labor, agriculture, and all sources of public information under the guise of national defense."

After all, as this 1940-vintage Swiftboat concludes:

Andrew Jackson, whom Roosevelt has adopted a his patron saint, expressed his opposition to a Third Term with his customary vigor, though he easily could have been reelected for life.... There is, however, one outstanding endorsement of a Third Term for Roosevelt, delivered in 1939, it reads:

"The tradition of the Third Term in the Presidency must be set aside and President Roosevelt reelected."

Earl Browder, candidate of the Communist party for President, made that statement. He is now in a Federal penitentiary, serving a term for use of a false passport.

Do the voters of this democratic nation agree with Washington, Jefferson and Jackson—or with Earl Browder?

Shall we restore democratic government with Wendell Willkie, or lose it with Franklin D. Roosevelt?"

My friends, that's not change we can believe in.

On Wickedness (Part Four: One Last Vent)

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:58:38 -0700

"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."

—Adlai Stevenson, 1956

Just so we're absolutely, several more data points to demonstrate that the conservatives are running a presidential campaign that is, objectively, wicked; and that we should make no mistake about it.

• Building the cornerstone of the campaign not merely on lies, but lies bought and paid for by corporate donors in what appears to be a direct quid pro quo. [UPDATE: Think I'm exaggerating? See here.]

• A flood of obviously racially charged FNB language and imagery from right-wing leaders, the Republican National Committee, and the Republican nominee's campaign itself

• John Birch Society-level "global tax" conspiracy theories, signed by the chairman of the Republican Party himself, that not only inflate the cost for a proposed piece of legislation by a factor of 8.45 million. (And don't forget Lee Atwater's helpful admission that fear-mongering about taxes is an excellent way to signal disdain for the kind of people—hint, hint—who freeload off them.)

• A cunningly successful campaign to inoculate all conservatives against against the "racism" charge by braying that the real racists are the people who say blacks might just have it rougher in America.

But here's a thought—one to anchor my further reflections. It comes from one of our brilliant commenters:

I worked for Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder back in the day and he faced an equally difficult task in becoming the nation's first elected black governor. The hardest point to get across to a campaign and its supporters is that any kind of baiting -- race baiting in particular -- doesn't work if you don't take the bait.

So Democrats have to fight off our instinct to find and illuminate every Republican instance of racial code words.

With exceptions, he's right. That's why I dumped all this in one final cri du coeur posts. Around the corner in our "wickedness" series: why that pleasurable feeling we get pointing out such perfidies plays, not to progressives' political strengths, but our most abiding political weaknesses.

Why? Here's a hint: Henry Fonda. More soon.

Wickedness (Part Three in a Series)

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:51:01 -0700

In an , Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention just said his followers would prefer "a third-class fireman over a first-class arsonist."

"Arsonist"—that isn't a racially loaded word at all:

Wickedness (Part Two in a Series)

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:04:31 -0700

Just a quick observation about the durability of right-wing wickedness. This just in from my friends at Newsmax.com, on how "Obama Will Cause 'Mammoth Depression'" (as an extra treat I include a few lines—on how to cure cancer, obesity, arthritis, etc., via secrets medical science won't tell you about!!—to illustrate a favorite old perennial here at The Big Con: that Conservatives Treat Their Constituents Like Suckers®):

Here's that same old chestnut from the 1984 presidential contest, in a letter to fund the shock troops of College Republicans probably drafted by Jack Abramoff and signed by Jack Kemp (h/t The Wrecking Crew)

our nation is in grave danger of sliding into another depression.... That's right A depression worse than the so-called Great Depression.

More on what to do and what not to do about this sort of stuff soon.

On Wickedness (Part One in a Series)

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:28:33 -0700

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.

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). 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.