by Bob Dorn
Back in 1967, when I was still basically a kid, a 24-year-old graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, freshly aflame with notions about social justice and the proper role of America in the world, I visited my parents in Phoenix and got into an argument with my father over Vietnam.
It would be unfair to try and recreate it; I’m older now than he was then, and memory often serves our egoes more faithfully than it does the truth. But I can say for sure that he finally grew so exasperated that he proclaimed to me that he was ready for another World War to end the horror and, by God, we should start it and get it over with.
I told him I had nothing more to say to him about that tragic war. But even then I knew this was not considered a radical notion among many, many Arizonans.
American politics has long accepted the notion that its only radicals are on the left. My father, being an adult when he took his kids to Phoenix, had long since become a Goldwater Republican.
And of course, it was Goldwater who famously proclaimed, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
The extreme clarity of that statement never quite made it into the cerebellums of the press and politicians; most of the country for the last 40 or so decades have accepted the notion that it is Democrats, Socialists, blacks and browns (don’t even mention Native Americans) and anti-war, anti-gun, pro-choice citizens, union laborers and craftsmen, feminists, gays, envioronmental protectionists, professors and students… activists of all kinds, the Irish in Boston, MexAms in San Diego, Hollywood stars, rock and rollers and hipsters, smooth midnight hustlers and atheists, the what-have-yous … who are the radicals.
Now we know better.
It’s the Right in America that is radical. The Gingrichs and Cruz’s have shut down the national government after trying unsuccessfully to launch impeachment of the twice-elected Obama. They try to undo federal law by attaching amendments to the funding of government that effectively overturns that law, and fashion House rules adapted to their immediate purposes. Their Representatives feel free to scream “Liar” during a presidential address on the floor of the capitol, or to accuse that president of being a “Terrorist” at their rallies. They appear at rallies and encourage drivers to shut down the Capitol beltway with semi-trucks.
This sort of behaviour has made enough noise as to enable Big Media to redefine the political center of America so far to the right that it can include the undoing of modern social legislation passed during the terms of Teddy Roosevelt through Woodrow Wilson’s and on to FDR’s and Eisenhower’s and LBJ’s. According to Big Media, so long as this retrenchment is done in a bipartisan way the reduction of Social Security benefits, the privatizing of local primary and secondary education and the maintenance of a minimum wage at poverty levels are all okay with today’s moderates and centrists.
This manipulation of standards has been so effective that Lindsay Graham and John Cornyn in the Senate have been called moderate Republicans simply because they’ve spoken in the hallway to Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid. Even a good Democrat who writes for this site can define North County’s rep in Congress, Scott Peters, as “left of center,” another marker of how far this distortion has reached, willed or not.
Another wild card in the radical agenda– maybe still a trump – is racism. Certain people will look at a black president not simply as an historical anomaly, but as an injustice. They’ll figure that he was elected because he violated some law (his foreign birth, say) and if that bucket leaks they’ll launch an impeachment try (on grounds I can’t describe because I’ve never clicked on the popups at the occasional (Liberal!) website I’ve encountered).
My friend John Ratajkowski, an artist/teacher in North County, says this naked reaction to color was caused by a kind of neural fault line; a trip wire snapped when certain people stumbled over it.
“It (Obama’s election) just unleashed all these Civil War fantasies, that America had been lost, and anything they could do, no matter how crazy and destructive, would be justified to regain it. They just can’t help themselves.” In other words, their fantasies gained the status of reality.
To be certain, the leaders of the Republicans probably don’t share these fantasies; they just make their livings off them. Do the Republicans have an African-American Congress member? No, they don’t. The last was Allen West, defeated by voters in his Florida district in 2012. That same year, Tim Scott won election to the Senate, from South Carolina. That’s it. That’s all they’ve got; one of the nation’s legislators of the 535 in the House and Senate is black and Republican. One.
Republican leaders are forced to take race into consideration when they appeal to their party’s lessers. Over the weekend I was listening to NPR when Paul Ryan, the GOP’s most recent nominee for vice-president, repeatedly referred to Barak Obama as “This president,” accent on the modifier – THIS – like the strike of a certain gong. “THIS president” will not negotiate, will veto (would kill your mother if no one was looking). He never used the president’s name. Obama is still unrecognizable in that fantasy world Ryan was invoking.
But, back to Goldwater.
“I have little interest in streamling government,” he said, for I mean to reduce it’s size… My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
And there’s not much distance between Goldwater’s message of the 70s and that of Newt Gingrich. Of course, it was Gingrich as House Speaker who engineered the shutting down of the federal government back in the 90s, the only other injection of paralysis in the nation’s history. More recently he swelled thusly on Glenn Beck’s radio program of May 17, 2010:
“The goal that the Obama team has is to fundamentally replace the historic America of self-reliance, independence, the work ethic, the people who go out and achieve because they spend their lifetime doing the right things. And they want to replace it with a politician-dominated redistributionist bureaucracy. Which in the essence would mean the end of America as it has been for the last 400 years.
Let’s leave alone the fact that the “redistributionist bureaucracy” doesn’t exist. In its absence banks have been bailed out after they created monstrous investor traps and brought on the Great Recession. They’re reporting huge profits now. Today, the incomes of 1 percent or 2 percent of Americans exceeds half the country’s, and the middle class has been shrunk in size. In San Diego, you have to be earning $75,000 a year to get a mortgage allowing you to buy a 1000-square-foot house.
This is radical. But keep it to yourself.
Bob Dorn
Latest posts by Bob Dorn (see all)
- The Old Man and the City - December 5, 2018
- The Ups and The Downs | My Reporter’s Life, Part Three - October 17, 2018
- Some Big Developments | My Reporter’s Life, Part Two - October 16, 2018
Amen.
I agree. As I see it, the last “sort of ” sensible Republican was Eisenhower and I have ingrained in my brain his comment about the fact that we must always be wary of the military industrial complex. Then the radicalization of purpose became fashionable and acceptable for the Republican side of politics (senator Mc Carthy, etc.). Thus we inherited the major split over Viet Nam and all it’s fallout via Nixon and Agnew along with all their baggage. Social justice dealt us a dead JFK, RFK, MLK and so forth which was fermented by the aforementioned climate of political hate, racial bigotry, and religion based intolerance. Then there was Goldwater. But he is only one of a long list of national and local Republicans who have nothing but selfishness, self righteousness, and sanctimonious blather as a mantra. The Bush family dynasty is another good example nationally and must include the feeble minded, slogan tossing (Bonzo) Reagan. Then there is the Hunter family along with Issa (need I mention Goldsmith?) closer to home which all are blaring in their anti-reason thoughtless stances. No wonder Colin Powell chooses not to affiliate with the Republicans and throw his hat into their ring. The GOP is awash with those who claim and utter the “less government is better” slogan as if it was heaven sent but the fear of reprisal from the Tea Bagger side of THEIR party is alive, real, and growing in its grip over the current Republican representatives should any one of them act reasonably and do the right thing for the whole. The primary elections is where they do their dirty deeds and we all suffer for the ignorance, or toleration of it, by those voters who support that posture else where in the country. I have yet to see any instance where the Republicans are in the majority and the government has ever been reduced. The Republicans, for sure, are the war loving party and that has untold costs that linger for generations.
A long time ago I learned that radical was to the left of liberal on the political spectrum and reactionary was to the right of conservative. Somewhere along the line radical has come to mean any extreme political ideology right or left. I think reactionary would still be an apt description of the extreme right Republicans, but nobody uses that term any more.
As far as the right being for less government, they are only for less government in terms of helping the poor and middle class. Their lobbyists see to it that a lot of tax breaks are slipped into the tax code that give benefits to the rich. The result is more government as long as it benefits the rich and less government as long as it benefits the poor. We should call them out on that. And why didn’t Obama and the Dems call them out for shutting down the government instead of saying it was “Congress” that shut down the government. They need to do more to defend Obamacare as well instead of leaving it to the Repubs to demonize Obamacare on a daily basis.
Shutting down the federal government, even putting an end to all but the military and policing function of the federal government, is part of the right-wing fantasy, and that is radical.
For me, reaction describes a party or a movement’s program to return to practices, imagined or real, in the past like segregation, isolation in foreign policy (not forestalling, however, invasions of Mexico, Guatemala and other dark-skinned nations in this hemisphere and elsewhere), the limitation of voting rights to white men and other passions of a small segment of the population accustomed to ruling.
But, what the hell, we can call what’s just happened obscene, if you prefer.
” I have yet to see any instance where the Republicans are in the majority and the government has ever been reduced.”
I would say that you are absolutely right but I believe this Congress actually reduced spending (although the idea for sequestration was technically from Gene Sperling in the Executive Branch). Nonetheless, that’s tinkering around the edges. One of the great criticisms I’ve had with the GOP is that it campaigns like libertarians but governs like progressives
“The Republicans, for sure, are the war loving party and that has untold costs that linger for generations.”
That’s simply not true, The last four Presidents loved their foreign military adventures. Clinton had us involved in three different wars on three continents, Bush in two on one continent, and Obama in two on two continents. If you call economic sanctions an act of war (and I do), Clinton’s Iraq sanctions were horrible.
The Executive Branch loves war. It loves it because war is the health of the State.
Preach!