For those who read my column on rage in US politics, and for others as well, no doubt, here is an interesting article by Lou Cannon (noted biographer of Ronald Reagan, among other distinctions) on "the once and constant opposition".
My foray in the archives casts doubt on two assertions that have been made so often they seem as if they have the force of fact. The first is that Obama faces slurs and slanders of unprecedented magnitude. This is sometimes been attributed to racism but more often to the coarsening of the public dialogue arising from the decline of newspapers and the rise of talk radio, 24-7 cable news, and an Internet that puts legions of amateur bloggers on equal footing with professional journalists and historians.
The second assertion is that conservatives and/or Republicans are out of ideas and time, a contention made provocatively by Sam Tanenhaus in his new book, "The Death of Conservatism." "Today's conservatives resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology," Tanenhaus writes.
I'll come back to Sam Tanenhaus and his fine new book another
time, but for the moment let me respond to the first assertion, which
goes to the issues raised in my column. Yes, I agree, slurs and
slanders and attacks on a politician's legitimacy are hardly
unprecedented in US politics. But does this mean that the syndrome I'm
complaining about is just business as usual, no cause for alarm? I
don't think so. The usual historical examples are hardly reassuring.
Lincoln's legitimacy was furiously attacked--and (as Cannon notes) the
divisions of his time literally tore the country in two. FDR's
legitimacy was furiously attacked, and (you could argue) the outcome
was uncertain until global war restored the country's sense of unity
and purpose. If US politics is again as divisive and unreasoning as it
was in Lincoln's and FDR's times, the country has something to worry
about.
By the way, I have had emails taking issue with part of my column
for "equating" views of unequal merit. For instance, one correspondent
wrote:
[Y]ou do a disservice to your readers when you equate right-wing birthers questioning whether Mr Obama was born in the US and leftwing counterparts who argue that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election. There is absolutely no evidence that Mr. Obama was born anywhere outside Hawaii, whereas there are serious grounds to question the legitimacy of the outcome of the 2000 election. At least four Supreme Court judges would agree. Furthermore comparing conservative claims that Congress' (not Mr. Obama's) healthcare plan is a plot to turn the US socialist to former president Jimmy Carter's (impolitic) suggestion that much of the opposition to Mr. Obama is mere racism is also misguided. Carter clarified his (arguably misinterpreted) remarks saying that some attacks on President Obama were tinged with racism. Few Republicans have backpedalled on claims of a socialist plot.
I take the point (though I think this way of putting it is pretty
generous to Jimmy Carter). I wasn't trying to equate these views, or
compare their merits, only to give examples from each side of attacks
that question not the judgment but the legitimacy of the other.
Charges of that kind, which seem to be becoming the standard line of
attack, are uniquely toxic. They are saying, in effect, that democracy
itself has broken down. Flawed as the Supreme Court's decision on the
2000 election may have been--and for what it's worth I thought it was a
mistake--its ruling should have settled the matter. The fact that there
were dissenting judges--when are there not dissenting judges?--does not
make their judgment half-binding. To persist in believing and saying,
as many Democrats did, that George Bush was an illegitimate president,
was anti-constitutional and anti-democratic. Those are bad habits to
pick up.
Though I would think if his birth certificate wasn't in Hawaii, someone would have said something by now, this guy is the most secretive about documents relating to him. He may not have a thing to hide, but he sure doesn't act like it. Just google "unreleased obama records". A lot of us don't trust politicians on either side of the aisle, for starters. Why give us more paranoia?
When a republic comes to be profoundly dominated by corporate lobbyists who actually write legislation and then spend hundreds of millions of dollars to see it passed; or who - perhaps owning the huge corporate media outlet - work in the most Machiavellian manner to distort discussion and make dialog as toxic as possible, then sir, we have what is rightly called a legitimation crisis. That is what America faces. That is also why to apply the term "democracy" to this republic is a gross distortion. James Madison in Federalist #10 was extremely concerned about the dangers of a rebellious public; a mortal fear of "mobocracy" was why the elite even of those colonial days were greatly in favor of locking down the potential for a real democracy. Mr. Madison would have far more to worry about today perhaps when corporations have bought the government, control the flow of discussions, and pollute any possibility of public debate. This makes for "bad habits" as well. We have an aristocracy not a democracy. You are trying to defend something that, sadly, does not exist. And the same applies at the State level...even here in radical republican territory called Oklahoma.
So the common folks of America, liberals, progressives, rightists, conservatives, Democrats and Republicans...are right to be extremely angry with their government and its toxic compromise of core concepts...like representation, dialog, and truth. What we have now is defamatory power politics, not cooperative politics. We have government filled with elitist robber barons...not stewards of the republic.
Sincerely yours, Chris Barrett / Tulsa Oklahoma.
As Jimmy Carter was once told, "there you go again." "Many Democrats" said that Pres. Bush as illegitimate? Which ones? Were they running the party? Was acting on that animosity the raison d'etre of the party-- did the entire Democratic party refuse to vote for anything Bush proposed?
False equivalence, yet again.
As annoying to me as your false equivalence between intemperate assertions on the far left and far right, nicely flagged by the reader you cite in this post, was your false equivalence between actual policy positions allegedly on the far left and far right. There are few Democrats left who would tax at 1970s levels, given their heads; there are plenty of Republicans who think, or pretend to think, that tax cuts are the solution to every social problem. The Democrats' health care reform bills pending in Congress, as Paul Starr has documented, are composed entirely of ideas proposed by Republicans over the past fifty years. In the same vein, you suggest that Obama is governing from the far left, when he's consistently frustrated his base by trimming the stimulus and making it 1/3 tax cuts, refusing to fight for the public option, leaving "too big to fail" banks intact, and defending preventive detention, the Patriot ACT and the FISA revision.
As a British-born centrist of sorts yourself, you've got to recognize that the U.S. has swung so far right over the last thirty years that its "center" by any outside measure is somewhere around the center of the Democratic party. Why in this column do you pretend otherwise?
Actually it was just TWO dissenters and they did NOT say that the Republicans had stolen the election. Two separate issues were decided by the Supreme Court:
SEVEN justices -- including Stephen Breyer and David Souter -- held that the Democrats were not advancing any Constitutionally permissible method for counting the vote. (You'll recall that the Democrats wanted to leave decision-making to local partisan officials without suggesting a set of objective standards, and to recount only in heavily Democratic locales). That bipartisan seven-justice majority decision was the heart of the matter.
FOUR justices, all Democrats, dissented from the decision of FIVE justices, all Republicans, on the question whether time had run out for the Democrats to come up with a different method for counting the vote. Given how poorly the Florida statute was drafted, the question of how the cumbersome Florida challenge process was supposed to fit within the federal timetable for certifying the election was a difficult one, and ought to have been decided on purely technical, dispassionate grounds. The fact that the vote fell precisely on partisan lines is therefore troubling, but surely that fact is equally troubling for both sides, not just for one side?
For leftists to allege that Steve Breyer and David Souter were part of a Bush conspiracy to steal the election really is equivalent to what the birthers allege.