Oblivious or disingenuous?
Mon Mar 05, 2007 at 08:38:13 AM PDT
(This has yet to be fleshed out and I am counting on readers to help do that - I don't have time to write too much and am hammering this out, based on my notes from the commute in today, paragraph by paragraph as able in between meetings and phone calls)
I was watching this video over at Crooks & Liars yesterday and I was disgusted by Barr's comment that the problem with conservatism today is that it is too tightly aligned with the GOP. I was disgusted to see Norquist as well and his comments since I see him almost every day as he walks down L Street, NW (his office is around 19th/20th & L), and I bite my tongue lest my company, family and self come under suspicion and are 'rendered.'
In any event, Barr's complaint means he is at best one of the two: oblivious or disingenuous. At worst, he is both and more. This has been the plan of conservatives ever since Nixon's downfall. They were all a bunch of snot-nosed punks in favor of the imperial presidency and, for those in the Nixon WH or affiliated with it, in love with the aura of power that surrounded them as part of that administration. They also carried the label of Goldwater conservative.
They then found themselves tossed aside by righteous indignation at the affronts committed to our Constitution, by a populace who at last saw that they really were anti-American, a press that was doing its job, and they felt defeated by a bunch of flower-power hippies. It was the last two aspects that have been the continuous thorns in the side of these pansy-asses who felt they had been undone by those they considered pansy-asses.
It isn't true as the hippies weren't instrumental in Nixon's downfall, nor were they responsible for the popularity of liberalism, nor was the press en masse liberal but a group doing what they were paid to do. They hippies were just the easiest, most visible, target (as a group generally regarded as outside all circles) and the press was a business vulnerable to public opinion and answerable to the bottom line.
So, wanting to recapture the magic of those days, because the millions they were making in the defense industry and conservative legal firms while advocating policies that would further benefit themselves monetarily wasn't enough, they devised a scheme to get back to power and they needed a national vehicle to commandeer for their purposes.
Enter Reagan and the Goldwater mystique. After two decades which had seen half of that time at war, a good period of economic stagnation, and a loss of national pride after enduring the loss in Vietnam and the humility of our Constitutional system, America was looking to feel strong and proud again. Reagan spoke like a Goldwater, except when RR was courting racists in the south, and reminded many of a simpler time with his 50s haircut, anti-Commie rhetoric, and "Father Knows Best" gentility. Not to mention, he brought the gilded aura of Hollywood (always a happy ending!), which brought the nation back to the time of our Camelot (with the chance that we may be able to reverse time and see what that horrible period would have been like had Goldwater not been so roundly defeated. Nonetheless, Reagan served as a puppet for the President-is-royalty crowd, albeit not as much a puppet as W until the Alzheimer's began to take over towards the end.
They couldn't have done it alone, however, and having used the hippies as a stain to tarnish liberals and Democrats, they were able to bring on board a newly powerful constituent, the religious right. The original intent of this was to marry two authoritarian groups and use the wide-reaching rhetorical appeal of the TV and radio pulpits to further the economic interests of an oligarchy which would sustain itself by buying the political system through laws which would allow them to do exactly that.
The message was massaged to suit both sides, i.e., let's go back to a better time (that never actually existed) when America was more rooted in the traditional values of Christianity and the President was honored as first among equals and was, relatively, untouchable.
They used their time within the halls of power to see where they could game things and learn what needed to be changed to enable further gaming. They used the rhetorical powers of the other side of the equation to find the appeal message that would cloak their actual intent and bury it in a values message (while rewarding handsomely the purveyors of this rhetoric by giving them access which allowed them to crow to their supporters about how influential they were which garnered more from fund raising and book selling).
The thing was that we still had an investigative press with the memories of Watergate glory still fresh in the minds of many journalists and the profession still having the Bly/Riis/Sinclair muckraking glow faintly in the background. Their work exposed Iran-Contra (most luminously but among other scandals) within the political halls and began to expose the hypocrisies at the pulpit. Of course, this then fed the anti-press propaganda issued by both of these investigative targets thus allowing them to claim, feeding their supporters and allowing more of the uninformed to get, "See? They are against us, just as we said."
They then set out to use the lessons learned inside the halls of power (as noted above) to destroy those who would investigate and dig too deeply. Since it was the oligarchy rapidly gaining more and more liquidity thanks to special connections to those in power, they were asked to give a little back. The money went to fund think tanks to spread the word further than the pulpit could and derive ways to twist the higher intellectual discourse to its favor in the media and the courts. The money also went to fund a buying spree of media enterprises that would only expand when the legal basis for the dissolution of the Fairness in Media ruling was complete and accepted.
Now, they owned the public's collective ear as well as the authority of what could be done with all those tax revenues. They were also in a position to do what they wanted because pardons were always looming on the horizon should someone get too close and force an issue to court.
This ended with Clinton's rise. Rather than learning that perhaps their message wasn't appealing, or that perhaps the public was tired of them, they assumed that: the public was stupid and they needed to re-craft their message to make it more simple for discursive digestion; the Democrats were completely evil and used some nefarious means to steal electoral victory; they needed more control in the private sector in order to buy that control in the public sector; and, the a certain nationalist party of the 20th century had good methods for dealing with all of these issues (read Krugman, Conason, and Hedges if you object to bringing the evil 'N' word into a debate).
This resulted in 7 years of investigation into the private lives of the president and affiliating him and his party with every evil endured by the US before, during and since his presidency. It also resulted in a very skeptical public, tired of controversy and ready to accept whatever politics would throw at them as long as they didn't have to think too deeply and ask too many questions. In other words, they developed a sense in the public that is more deadly to an open democracy than any other: APATHY.
This allowed for the rise of George 'What's a neo-con' Bush and the methodical takeover of many levers of power in both the public and private sphere in this country. The rest has been all too well documented by all of us here and in other places on the internets tubes so I'll leave it at the poll below.
(Call me on BS you find in this and help flesh it out where needed).
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