The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    When the "Tea Party" took over the GOP the first time

    By Barth on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 3:04pm |

    In the year the Republican Party nominated Senator Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate, there was never any chance he could win.  The country was still reeling from the murder of its young, exciting president, and many people felt that his memory could best be honored by enacting the laws the late President had urged on the country. Aside from a certain reluctance in the nation to have another change in presidents after the one forced on us in November 1963, the assassination of a president in the city where handbills and newspaper advertisements accused him of all sorts of crimes including treason and being a secret communist sympathizer, had shaken the country to its very core.

    The night the President was killed, one of the anchors of NBC's nightly news program spelled out the prevailing opinion of a country suffering from the paranoia and hate which had replaced political discourse. For the moment, and at a horrible price, extremism was taboo.

    So, to some people, the Republican Convention the following July was a bit surprising. When Oregon Governor Mark Hatfield delivered a keynote speech against " "bigots in this nation who spew forth their venom of hate" he was called a "demagogue, a hate monger, a bigot, an anti-Christian and an ally of Moscow." When others proposed that the Republican platform include a plank denouncing extremism, it was thunderously voted down, with a presidential candidate, Gov Nelson Rockefeller of New York booed off the podium.

    Then came this, the single most remembered moment of that Convention.

    This is what we call today "tea party rhetoric" and, held by a small minority or not, it has engaged the beltway, and cable television, which has permitted the hate and fear to be, in Gov. Hatfield's word, "spewed" far and wide.

    Here's just a bit of what followed Senator Goldwater's call for extremism when he sang it from the podium of the Republican National Convention while accepting their nomination of him to be president:

    Time magazine, as reliable as ever in its opposition to all things new deal, hopefully suggested that "[i]n the abstract, the lines are unimpeachable" but even it had to observe that

    in the context that Goldwater used them, they were questionable. They drew tumultuous cheers from the delegates; they also got Barry embroiled in a thunderous dispute. New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller blasted Barry's remarks as "dangerous, irresponsible and frightening." Barry shot back: "Extremism is no sin if you are engaged in the defense of freedom." California's Democratic Governor Pat Brown said the remarks had "the stench of Fascism." Retorted Barry: "It's the stench of Brown—it's ignorance." Dwight Eisenhower too was disturbed, declared that the remarks "would seem to say that the end always justifies the means." Added Ike: "The whole American system refutes that idea and that concept."

    The New York Herald Tribune, the voice of the old "eastern establishment" Republican Party, ousted from their perch warned that

    The Republican party now does face a clear and present threat from the Know-Nothings the purveyors of hate and the apostles of bigotry... There is a real danger that a Goldwater campaign could become a captive vehicle for their own subversions of reason.

    Other newspaper editorials echoed the same fears, or, of course, trumpeted the demise of liberal thought. The elections that fall, less than year after President Kennedy's death, had the predictable result and crazy has not been the platform of a major political party since then, until now.

    Every morning, now, in between tut tut tuts by Mourning Joe and his acolytes about the President and absurd suggestions that he does not care about unemployment but that somehow by his unspeakably foolish, but perhaps politically astute decision to try to kill off a tunnel project under the Hudson River NJ Governor Chris Christie is the future of the Republican Party, those who live in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City, get to hear commercials by an ophthalmologist running to unseat our Congressman, John Hall, that Congress enacted "government run health care" which "could prevent you from selecting your own doctor." (Oddly, her advertisements also attack me every time I open up TPM, too.)

    The ophthalmologist raises money from the expected places---and lots of it, hence the ads on tv and TPM--- and adopts the same "let's privatize social security" rants that have energized people who have suddenly realized that while they were angry at President Bush, they replaced him with a black guy.

    And while it is unlikely that Sharron Angle or Christine O'Donnell will be in Congress when it convenes in January, this strange visitor from the land of crazy likely will if current polls and Nate Silver have it right.

    This is what it is like in the United States of America 46 years after the crazy dragon first seized control of a major political party but were crushed in the wake of the assassination of the President. Most voters today were either not alive then or too young to remember the noise, the fear and the craziness of that year. And to those of us who do, especially those of us just entering what is now called middle school in those scary days, the belated, but calming voice of the prior Republican president, General Eisenhower, and by many other Republicans who said they could not vote for Sen Goldwater (Senator Clifford Case and Congressman John V. Lindsay come immediately to mind) provided reassurance that the grown ups would not allow crazy to succeed.

    No such voices exist any more.  Even Governor Mitt Romney, the offspring of one of the voices who stood up to Sen. Goldwater in 1964---partly because the Goldwater supporters included virulent anti-Mormons---remains silent.

    It seems impossible that They will succeed where they have so often failed. The reassurance that that is so, is quite missing, though and the silence deafening.

    Comments

    Barth,  I unpublished your duplicate post. Please let me know if I removed the wrong one.


    by Michael Wolraich on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 3:21pm

    I think you got it right.  I have to just remember the drill every week.

     

    Thanks


    by Barth on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 3:38pm

    I remember those days very well. Things have changed since then.

    The crazies, the sons of the wild jackass haven't changed, but the situation has changed.

    America was unbelievably prosperous then. Growth was taken for granted, the American middle class was at its highest point then. The only thing that the paranoiacs had to be paranoiac about was godless communism, nobody was going to foreclose their house, everybody had a job.

    It has been all down hill since then. The crazies have an audience, people are afraid.

    Also in those days the real money wasn't much interested in fomenting paranoia. There was no mass market in 1964 for somebody as weird as Glenn Beck.

    Goldwater was crushed, his slogan, "In your heart you know he is right" morphed quickly into "In your head, you know he is nuts".

    Hitler and his brownshirts would have been laughed out of Germany in the spring of 1914... by 1930 thing were very different.  Times change.


    by David Seaton on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 3:41pm

    I don't agree with your Glenn Beck comment, by the way.  Father Coughlin and Gerald L K Smith had huge followings, as, later did cranks such as Fulton Lewis.  Don't kid youself.  Crazy has always had fans.  Many of them.

     

    The Roosevelt approach to Coughlin, to just pretend he didn't exist was probably the best idea, but it just gave rise to other whispers.  You can't win.


    by Barth on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 7:13pm

    To back up David and change your opinion of Goldwater, here's a snippet from Blowing Smoke. You can read this passage with gloom, but I suggest an optimistic interpretation. When Americans across the political spectrum publicly condemn the hatred, paranoid movements can fizzle incredibly fast:

    In January 1962, four of the founding fathers of modern conservatism and a public relations consultant met in a hotel room in Palm Beach, Florida, to discuss Senator Barry Goldwater's plan to run for president. They included Senator Goldwater; William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the National Review; William Baroody, head of the American Enterprise Institute (the think tank that would eject David Frum decades later); Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind; and Jay Hall the PR guy.

    One of the chief topics of discussion was the John Birch Society (JBS). The JBS had been growing rapidly and seducing conservative leaders across the country. From 1,500 members at the beginning of 1960, it had attracted between 60,000 and 100,000 members by the end of 1961. The five men in Palm Beach despised the paranoia of JBS founder Robert Welch, who had accused Dwight Eisenhower of being a communist agent. They were also concerned that the JBS's support of Goldwater would discredit his candidacy. So they came up with a plan to marginalize it, dividing up the responsibilities. William F. Buckley Jr. promised to expose Welch to "scorn and derision" in the National Review. Russell Kirk said, "I'll just say, if anybody gets around to asking me, that the guy is loony and should be put away." In the next issue of the National Review, Buckley published a five-thousand-word excoriation of Welch in which he encouraged conservatives not to "acquiesce quietly" to Welch's wrongheaded ideas. Senator Goldwater then published a response in the subsequent issue, writing, "I believe the best thing Mr. Welch could do to serve the cause of anti-Communism in the United States would be to resign . . . We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner."

    After Goldwater had lost his presidential bid, the National Review continued to attack Robert Welch and the JBS. In an even more scathing 1965 article, Buckley assailed Welch's "conspiratorial mania," "paranoid and unpatriotic drivel," and "psychosis of conspiracy." In the meantime, Richard Hofstadter published "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in Harper's magazine. The essay described the tactics and characteristics of paranoid political movements and singled out the JBS as the most prominent contemporary proponent of the paranoid style.

    Between the efforts of Buckley, Goldwater, and Hofstadter, the JBS became associated with pernicious extremism and outlandish paranoia. For instance, the California Fact-Finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities had praised the JBS in 1963, but two years later the same subcommittee declared that the organization had attracted "a lunatic fringe" and "emotionally unstable people." The JBS's membership evaporated, and it vanished into the political fringe where it has remained ever since. Almost. In 1997, Glenn Beck invited JBS spokesman Sam Antonio onto his CNN show to discuss Antonio's views of the government conspiracy to smuggle drugs across the Mexican border. "Sam, I have to tell you," Beck professed, "When I was growing up, the John Birch Society, I thought they were a bunch of nuts, however, you guys are starting to make more and more sense to me."


    by Michael Wolraich on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 3:51pm

    I am not saying that Sen Goldwater was the worst of Them.  He was not.  (They attacked him, too, when he said that he did not think government should decide who could have an abortion).  But when he was called upon to speak out against them, he did not, and said the scariest thing I ever heard from a convention podium (although Pat Buhanan came close years later).

     

    I have never before read a sentence which collected "Buckley, Goldwater, and Hofstadter" into a movement.  I think the last of that group would cringe at such a sentence.

     

     


    by Barth on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 4:09pm

    Regarding the Hofstadter reference, there's a little lost in context unfortunately. I was certainly not suggesting that they were part of a movement but that they happened to simultaneously attacked the JBS from both the right and the left. A similar nationwide consensus of revulsion hit McCarthy in 1954, transforming him from omnipotent ubervillain to pathetic creep in a matter of months.

    Nor did I mean to whitewash Goldwater's deliberate appeals to extremists, but I think it's worth noting that he and Buckley eventually drew a line at the JBS paranoia and spoke out publicly and repeatedly against them. If a few more Republicans had the cajones to condemn Beck and friends, we wouldn't be where we are today.


    by Michael Wolraich on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 4:30pm

    Here is a chart that will concentrate our minds wonderfully:

    Big money is scared nowadays. Taxes need to be raised, the financial and energy sectors need to be regulated. Most of all the middle class is hurt, frightened and angry... in such a state they might move to the left. Better have them move to the right direct the anger they feel against Wall Street into lowering billionaire's taxes.

    What we are looking at is a country that is based on limitless growth and endless possibilities facing a zero or near to zero-sum future. Here is something I wrote not long ago on this:

    What are the political consequences?

    If people really understood that there wasn't going to be future abundance on its previous scale, that it was going to be like in a lifeboat, or like the buried miners in Chile, with only so much water and so much food, survivors would demand, as in a lifeboat, that the provisions be shared equitably. This would mean that people with huge fortunes would have to take an enormous haircut, as their abundance would have to be shared out... they don't like that idea one bit.

    They don't want anybody else to like that idea either and that costs a lot of money to pull off.

    The key phrase would be, "if people really understood". So it is important for those who own the chairs to keep the chairless from thinking, from understanding what their situation really is.

    This is especially difficult for Americans to come to grips with, as America's whole culture, both the real everyday one and the Hollywood mythical one, are built around the idea of limitless horizons and unlimited opportunity. There has always been a lot of unreality in this, but it is the foundational myth and emotionally a very sustaining one, especially for Americans now going through a rough patch. It will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, for most Americans to face the new reality soon and to think clearly about its implications.

    That is what the Tea Party, Fox, etc is all about: keeping people from thinking straight. The idea is to play on people's emotions: fear, hate, racism, xenophobia, just to keep them from doing the math. The Teabaggers, Beck, Gringich and Fox are often criticized for not making any sense... this is not a failure of communication or an error on their part... that is the object of the exercise: to make rational thought difficult or impossible due to emotional overload. This is a slippery slope that usually leads a country that travels it into more emotions,  more war and less and less cool headed thinking.

    Is this too harsh a view of the "good and the great" of our fair land?

    During the Wiemar period in Germany, many of the country's richest industrialists, concerned about the rise of communism, saw fit to finance the rise of Adolph Hitler... was this a mistake on their part?
    In World War Two, Germany was burnt to the ground and nearly seven million Germans died, but the families that financed Hitler such as the Krupps and the Thyssens are still some of Germany's richest citizens. I think that answers the question. Obviously the vital concerns of the super rich and those of ordinary citizens often don't coincide and the ruin of nearly everyone is not necessarily the ruin of a few.

    To understand how dangerous the Glenn Becks can be it is important to understand how rich, civilized and developed Germany was before the richest industrialists of that country decided to support Hitler. If the country that produced Bach, Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, Hegel and yes Einstein and Adorno, could go as bad as it did, don't think for a minute that it couldn't happen in the USA.


    by David Seaton on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 4:29pm

    Actually, the causal relationship between economic decline and political extremism has never been substantiated, and a recent economic-historical study found, "The empirical results in this paper instead show that it is unlikely that even strong recessions can change political outcomes."

    1930s Germany offers a good example of correspondence between economic hardship and extremism, but correspondence doesn't prove causation. I also note that your graphs demonstrate that the historical periods of paranoid extremism in the U.S. we've been discussing in this thread do not correspond to economic hardship--counterexamples to your theory.

    Finally, polls show that Tea Party supporters tend to be wealthier and better-employed than their fellow Americans. They're not exactly the Donald Duck types presented in that video you posted.

    I make this point because I think the commonly assumed association between extremism and economic hardship fuels complacency among people who have more optimistic views about the economy than you. People seem to assume that the paranoia will just blow away as soon as the economy recovers. I've found no evidence to support that optimism.


    by Michael Wolraich on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 4:48pm

    What is beyond any doubt is that fear, hardship and distress create a political energy. The question is whether that energy is going to harnessed, for what or for whom, by whom.

    The ultraright wing is always there. Hitler's type of talk was always around in Germany, in beer halls or in certain lower middle class environments.There was nothing that new about it.. inflation and the radio turned a street corner ranter into a "star". Radio costs money.

    The important element is when, like in Wiemar Germany, the big money decides to finance extremists. That is when things begin to happen. They had the Krupps and the Thyssens and we have the Kochs and Murdoch. The Supreme Court ruling on campaign financing, in this context, is especially disturbing

    As to the graph, please notice that not one other line in it corresponds in any way to the line that describes the present situation. We are in terra incognita now. After 60 years of the greatest prosperity the world has even known, the USA is looking at what may be a permanent decline of American middle class living standards.

    The Tea Party supporters are perhaps more afraid of sinking back into the masses than any other group. They correspond directly to the sort of solid German middle class that saw their whole world in danger in Wiemar. Take a look at this link from today's Guardian, it is a must read. These are people that identify with the wealthy without really being that wealthy. They think of themselves as achievers and are horrified by the idea that what they have could be taken away by people less worthy than they.

    Now is a time for us to examine fear and distress very closely and understand how it affects different classes of people and analyze very carefully what those different classes are and what conflicts arise among them under this unprecedented stress.


    by David Seaton on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 5:30pm

    Note: Lenny Bruce had a wondeful routine about a comedian whose act is going flat: as they say in the business his jokes were dying, so he shouts out, "Fuck the Irish!" and some people in the crowd start shouting "Fuck the Irish!" too and then fights break out... a distraction from failure.


    by David Seaton on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 5:42pm

    I'm with David on the collapse of Weimar, Genghis. As the economy tanked, it wasn't just the Nazis and right-wing extremists who gained strength; the Communists also pulled support away from from the liberal and centrist parties. Not to excuse the industrial elite who threw in their lot with Hitler, but they had real fears that what had happened in Russia a decade earlier could happen imminently in Germany.

    Both those revolutionary situations have parallels in today's America: it's not just the economic collapse, it's economic collapse coupled with humiliating military defeat that undermines people's sense of nationhood. Like  the U.S. today, both Germany and Russia had experienced (or are experiencing) the sudden loss of imperial power. Somebody has to bear the blame for that, someone has to pay for that -- the kulaks, the Jews, the blacks, the illegal immigrants, the homos, whoever's handy. There's a pattern here.


    by acanuck on Sun, 10/10/2010 - 3:56am

    This reminds me of a Spanish friend's definition of Canadians:

    "Americans without all the horseshit"

    Laughing


    by David Seaton on Sun, 10/10/2010 - 4:22am

    I don't know that the Weimar example applies here (though it could.)  Germany had absolutely no history of what the post World War I government was trying to create and it was doing so during a period of a Europewide economic slump that was worse that what we are facing right now.  The implicit faith in democratic institutions, which we still have here, barely existed.

    Still, the idea that there are few "wise men" (or women) left to soberly approach our situation and do what has to be done, politics be damned, is obvious.  And, as Krugman and Herbert have written, the ridiculous stunt by the new GOP savior, Gov Christie, is proof enough of low low we have sunk.

    The downward spiral, a failed political system, and no hint of anything pointing in the other direction does have a Weimar ring to it, I will concede.  You know the old parlor game about what if there was no Roosevelt, like the what if Germany had succesfully invaded England or Philip Roth's what if Col Lindbergh ran against and beat Pres Roosevelt in 1940?  We may get our answers.

     

     

     

     


    by Barth on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 7:10pm

    We are seeing that the democratic institutions are being hollowed out. Campaign and political action finance are officially out of control. Prisoners are held for years without trial. Surveillance of private communication etc.

    Anything that America does will always have a uniquely American flavor. We are very original. When and if America becomes a fascist state, somehow it will all be done within the Constitution and will be totally legal and "democratic".

     


    by David Seaton on Sun, 10/10/2010 - 3:29am

    I was blind sided by the tea partiers. Just fascists dressed in new costumes. The good news: most of them look my age or older.

    The bad news: they sneak into primaries and vote for the most ignorant savages I have ever listened to.  I used to laugh at 6000 year old galaxies; constitutional renderings that come from comic books;speeches about welfare queens; freedom defined as total corporate control of our citizenry; world government conspiracies; secret death camps in this country; the end of Social Security; a federal sales tax to replace the progressive income tax....

    I aint laughin so much these days.


    by Richard Day on Sat, 10/09/2010 - 8:05pm

    I used to have some regrets that I never had had any children and thus have no adorable little grandchildren... not anymore... I leave no hostages.


    by David Seaton on Sun, 10/10/2010 - 3:22am

    I do have grandchildern and by no means are they hostage.  I see a good future in them.  They seem to understand we are in this together and need to look out for each other.   Something their grandparents don't understand because they have had it so good.   


    by trkingmomoe on Mon, 10/11/2010 - 3:19pm

    Very good post, Barth. A really good look at how we got here.


    by William K. Wolfrum on Sun, 10/10/2010 - 9:01am