I guess we owe the right an apology for understanding them all too well. They are having a fight among themselves that is more hurtful and meaningful than is their fight against librulism and goddam Obamaists. Their struggles been going on forever, or so it seems. Very few, if any, in their party handle the public spotlight with grace. They have stacked up a lousy economic record and their campaigns over the past several decades have been embarrassing.
The New Yorker offers two illuminating pieces centering on two aggravations suffered by the Republican regulars — in addition, you might say, to Trumpism and the disappointment of candidate Carson and/or strong masculine values vs. the ridiculous and embarrassing femininities embraced by the left. One article centers on the longterm damage done by John Birch and the other on a determination to drown the legitimacy of the federal gubment in the bathtub. In both cases, it’s not about “we the people” but about “we vs. the people. ”
First, the libertarian Bundys and the Hammonds in Malheur County, Oregon. (Malheur, incidentally, means “sorrow,” “misfortune.”):
Second-generation radical propagandists tend to be more tempered. You see your father denounced as a loon, and you learn to round off your edges. When the Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy appeared before news cameras twenty months ago to explain why he and his family had escalated a legal dispute over grazing fees on federal land into an armed standoff, he dressed in white button-downs and ties, a costume of civilization and rationality, but spun off-topic badly, into floridly racist monologues about African-Americans. (“I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves?”) There is less pulpit rage in his son, Ammon Bundy, who led an armed militia takeover of several empty buildings in an Oregon National Wildlife Refuge, this weekend. “We pose no threat to anyone,” the younger Bundy told reporters. He wanted more followers to come, and asked them to bring their arms, but he also tried to sound like something other than the symbol of furious resistance that his father had become. He said he had plans to build a libertarian community on the land. “We’re planning on staying here for several years.”…NewYorker
The other piece, also in the New Yorker, is about Goldwateritis and the heritage of John Birch. For the writer, Goldwater was a blemished hero. We don’t talk much these days about Birchers. But they scared the hell out of moderate Republicans (not to mention the left) for years and still should.
There were things about him not to like, chief among them his constitutionally based refusal to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. There was also his ongoing attempt, in the run-up to the nomination and throughout the Presidential campaign, to thread the needle in the matter of the John Birch Society. Founded in 1958 by the businessman Robert Welch, the society was the most robust political fringe group of its day, intent upon thwarting any U.S.-Soviet coöperation, withdrawing America from the United Nations, exposing Communists in the federal government, and impeaching Chief Justice Earl Warren. Rick Perlstein, in his 2001 book, “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus,” summarizes the trimming strategy: “Goldwater would take the line that Robert Welch was a crazy extremist but that the Society itself was full of fine, upstanding citizens working hard and well for the cause of Americanism.” Throughout the 1964 race, Goldwater availed himself of Bircher money and manpower at the risk of being soldered, by his opponents, to the Birchers’ more addled views, the most notorious of these being Welch’s suggestion that Dwight Eisenhower had consciously acted as an agent of the international Communist conspiracy. …NewYorker
Goldwater is long gone. But John Birch is a continuing threat to the sanity of the right.
Cross posted from Prairie Weather
PHOTO: “Barry Goldwater” by User:Beachanchor, cropped and retouched by Kjetil_r – Image:1-4-2007-16.jpg. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barry_Goldwater.jpg#/media/File:Barry_Goldwater.jpg