Ira Eisenberg has a really good op-ed in Friday's San Francisco Chronicle about the critical Constitutional issues raised by Bush's unilateral ("unitary") Executive theory, i.e., the President can break any law or ignore any Consititutional provisions he chooses on his own discretion as long as he claims it's for "national security": Will the real conservatives please stand up? 03/10/06.
I mentioned his Constitutional position in a post at The Blue Voice. Here I want to focus on an historical point:
I'm old enough to remember when real conservatives valued freedom over security, and stood for strictly limited government, fiscal discipline, the sanctity of constitutional checks and balances and the rule of law over obeisance to power. I also have vivid, if not entirely fond, memories of that archetypal American conservative, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the GOP candidate for president in 1964, whose declaration that "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice" helped clinch an historic landslide victory for his opponent, Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Goldwater's conservative principles put him in opposition to most of the New Deal-era economic and social reforms that most Americans support. Yet those same convictions also prompted Goldwater to defend gay rights, support Roe vs. Wade, oppose the religious right, demand President Richard M. Nixon's resignation for abusing his constitutional authority and denounce the Vietnam War as "the biggest damn fool mistake we ever made."
This line of argumentation has long been an important aspect of how liberals and moderates talk about rightwing extremism. Looking back at the conservatism of a number of years ago, the "genuine" conservatism of back then is compared to the rawer version that one confronts in the present time.
I'm not sure when this approach got started. But one of its most famous applications was by historian Richard Hofstadter in his iconical book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965). In the central essay in that book, he compared the true, principled conservatism of "Mr. Republican" of a decade earlier, Sen. Robert Taft, with the radical-right approach of ... Barry Goldwater and his followers.
Fifteen years later, Barry Goldwater was known as "Mr. Republican" himself. And I remember reading one book on the rightwing radicalism of circa 1980 - I can't recall the title - that compared the radical-right ideas of Reagan and his followers to the principled conservatism of Barry Goldwater.
I don't mean to say that these types of comparisons are frivolous. On the contrary, if nothing else they are a reminder of how far to the right the "center" of American politics has slid in the past 40 years.
But it can also give a false sense of comfort about the state of our democracy. Hofstadter was closer to correct than his later imitators in this. Goldwater's movement of 1964 is generally recognized today as the beginning of the "conservative movement" that has given us our unilateral Republican Executive and a disastrous war in Iraq based on completely bogus justifications. One read of Hostadter's essay would clearly show the kind of ideas that were championed by the Goldwater movement of 1964.
It was a hard right approach that was opposed to essentially every advance in government since the New Deal. Bush's 2005 lead-baloon proposal to phase out Social Security was advocated by Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential campaign, and in a more raw form. There were two main issues in that election, in which Goldwater was running against incumbent Democratic President Lyndon Johnson: the Vietnam War and segregation.
Goldwater argued for rapid escalation of the Vietnam War, including a vast expansion of the bombing. Johson argued against it, although by 1968 he had implemented essentially all of the measures that Goldwater had advocated in 1964. The influential ecumenical journal The Christian Century editorialized in 1964 that religious critics of Goldwater "did not choose but were forced into a temporary party alignment by the candidacy of an international policy which even in its announcement sent tremors through an already shaky world". The Vietnam War was a major part of that policy, but bitter opposition to nuclear arms contral was, as well.
On segregation, Goldwater was for it and Johnson was against it. Hard as it may be to imagine today, the Congressional Republicans were actually more supportive of civil rights legislation at that point than the Democrats. The hadn't totally forgetten that they were the party of Lincoln. Goldwater's movement was a key turning point in making the Republicans the party of Southern segregationists.
No, Goldwater fans of 1964 would have seen the Bush administration as the fulfillment of their dreams, which it is. Nor was Robert Taft necessarily such a "principled" contrast to the Goldwater enthusiasts of 1964.
Taft served as a Senator from Ohio from 1939 to 1953. He was identified with the isolationist wing of the Republican party, which rejected international institutions. He joined in with former President Herbert Hoover in calling for a "fortress America". As I've mentioned in a number of posts here, that style of isolationism is actually a very nationalistic, even nativist view of the world. Bush's "unilateralism" may use a lot of Wilsonian rhetoric, but in essence its the same narrow nationalistic view of the US role in the world that the isolationists like Taft took.
Taft's most notable achievement was the anti-union Taft-Hartley legislation, aimed at undercutting the advances of labor unions during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. It's one of the worst pieces of anti-labor legislation ever enacted by the US Congress.
John Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage (1961) includes a chapter on Robert Taft. This book is a strong reminder that the liberalism that Kennedy came to symbolize was to a very significant degree a result of his experiences in the Presidency. His essay on Taft gives him credit for defending unpopular opinions. What was the unpopular opinion he defended on which Kennedy focused? Taft, who had opposed the Roosevelt administration's war preparedness efforts prior to the Second World War, was also bitterly opposed to the war crimes trials of German and Japanese leaders.
Ten days before the Nazi butchers convicted at Nuremberg were to be hanged, Taft protested their convictions and their sentences. And it wasn't out of any "principled" opposition to capital punishment. He said:
I question whether the hanging of those, who, however despicable, were the leaders of the German people, will ever discourage the making of aggressive war [the meaning of the terms is the same as "preventive war" in international law today], for no one makes aggressive war unless he expects to win. About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we shall long regret.
In these trials we have accepted the Russian [i.e., Communist] idea of the purpose of trials - government policy and not justice - with little relation to Anglo-Saxon heritage. By clothing policy in the forms of legal procedure, we may discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come. In the last analysis, even at the end of a frightful war, we should view the future with more hope if even our enemies believed that we had treated them justly in our English-speaking concept of law, in the provision of relief and in the final disposal of territory.
The premises of this diatribe defending the leading Nazi war criminals are painfully frivolous. The references to "Anglo-Saxon" heritage and "English speaking concept of law" were references to Taft's argument that the war criminals were being tried under ex post facto laws, laws that were not in effect at the time the crimes were committed. This was simply not the case. The charges at Nuremberg were formulated in a consolidated set of legal principles for the purposes of that trial. But the court was very careful to make sure that the crimes for which the defendents were charged were things that were illegal under German law at the time the acts were committed.
The reference to the "Russian idea of justice" was just sleazy "Red-baiting" as it was known then, when "red" was considered the color of the Communist Party instead of the Republicans as it is today. (I do enjoy hearing the Republicans referred to as "the reds", I must admit.) It could hardly have been more counter-factual a claim. The Soviets actually pushed for the Nuremberg Trials to be Soviet-style show trials. But the Americans insisted that the trial be a real one, with the defendents represented by competent counsel in a fair proceeding. Churchill, the hero of today's neoconservatives, had preferred to just summarily execute a few thousand German officers.
And, in fact, some of the defendents were acquitted. And because of those trials, the crimes of the Nazis, including the systematic slaugther of Jews, Gypsies, gays and others, were laid out carefully and credibly to the world. They were not at all "show" trials in the Russian sense as "Mr. Republican" so dishonestly claimed, but they did wind up "showing" the world a lot. One of the most dramatic moments in the proceedings was when films were shown of the trials of the "July 23" plotters who had tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944. The blatant unfairness of their trial, the judge screaming abuse at the defendents and calling them traitors, the obvious ways in which the defendents were humiliated, was a painfully sharp contrast to the due process of the Nuremberg Trials themselves.
Democratic Senate leader Alben Barkley said, accurately if with rather awkward phrasing, that Taft "never experienced a crescendo of heart about the soup kitchens of 1932, but his heart bled anguishedly for the criminals at Nuremberg".
So how could a hardline rightwinger, who expressed such blatantly sympathy with the convicted Nazi war criminals, be held up by Richard Hofstadter in 1965 as an example of "principled conservatism"? Largely because Hofstadter was indulging in a bit of a slight-of-hand trick. He could cite Taft's publicly declared support for New Deal programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance and contrast that with the more rightwing pronouncements of the Goldwater Republicans.
The reason it was something of a slight-of-hand trick is that the country generally had accepted those New Deal innovations, and Republicans felt it necessary to pretend to support them. Not unlike the way Bush in 2005 tried to frame his Social Security phase-out proposal as support for the solvency of the system. In fact, the frivolous arguments made for the impending doom of the Social Security trust fund in 2005 could be found almost verbatim in the Republican Party platform of 1936 and in the words of Barry Goldwater and his supporters in the 1960s.
In one of Franklin Roosevelt's most famous speeches, a campaign speech to the Teamsters Union in 1944 that has become known as the "Fala" speech because of a memorably humorous reference to "my little dog Fala", FDR talked about this kind of scam by the Republicans:
I got quite a laugh, for example - and I am sure that you did - when I read this plank in the Republican platform adopted at their National Convention in Chicago last July: "The Republican Party accepts the purposes of the National Labor Relations Act, the Wage and Hour Act, the Social Security Act and all other Federal statutes designed to promote and protect the welfare of American working men and women, and we promise a fair and just administration of these laws."
You know, many of the Republican leaders and Congressmen and candidates, who shouted enthusiastic approval of that plank in that Convention Hall would not even recognize these progressive laws if they met them in broad daylight. Indeed, they have personally spent years of effort and energy - and much money - in fighting every one of those laws in the Congress, and in the press, and in the courts, ever since this Administration began to advocate them and enact them into legislation. That is a fair example of their insincerity and of their inconsistency.
The whole purpose of Republican oratory these days seems to be to switch labels. The object is to persuade the American people that the Democratic Party was responsible for the 1929 crash and the depression, and that the Republican Party was responsible for all social progress under the New Deal.
Now, imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery - but I am afraid that in this case it is the most obvious common or garden variety of fraud. ...
Can the Old Guard pass itself off as the New Deal? I think not.
We have all seen many marvelous stunts in the circus but no performing elephant could turn a hand-spring without falling flat on his back.
I don't remember exactly what speech it was. But in one of his speeches he expounds on the same thing, mocking the Republicans (quoting from memory here) for claiming that even though the Democrats enacted the New Deal reforms against bitter Republican opposition, once they get in power they promise that "we'll take so much better care of them, honest to goodness we will!"
So, back to Goldwater. I don't think the principled stands to which Eisenberg refers were so much of a part of Goldwater's public persona in 1964. And he remained a staunch conservative for his whole career. But the rise of the Christian Right pissed him off terribly, and he never got along with them. Part of the reason could have been that Goldwater's parents were Jews who converted to Christianity. The John Birch Society, the mothership of the far right in the 1960s, was never terribly enthusiastic about a candidate who was that close to being Jewish.
Also, his irritation with churches who supported the civil rights movement may have evolved into a general dislike of people meddling in politics on religious grounds. He grumped during the 1964 campaign, "The leaders of the church don't have much time to worry about morals if they're worrying about partisan politics."
I also think Goldwater was a genuine libertarian in the sense that he not only didn't want the government sticking its nose into the racial hiring practices of private businesses; he also didn't want them dictating what went on in the bedroom between consenting adults. In the last years of his life, he supported having gays in the military. He said we didn't need people who are straight, we needed people who could shoot straight. In the later years of the Vietnam War, he joined liberal Democrats in opposing the draft, also on libertarian grounds.
But faced with today's authoritarian Republican Party, I worry that this little analytical trick of contrasting the "true conservatives" of past decades with the disturbingly untrue ones of today, entertaining as it is, may encourage false hopes. How many times do we have to see alleged Republican "moderates" shamelessly cave in to Bush on some key issue after faking a "principled" stand against it before we realize their principles are mostly inoperative when it comes to opposing Bush on something serious. It takes something like the UAE port-security deal, where there was a broad public sentiment against it, to jolt them into being sensible.
The principles of today's Republicans aren't going to be what causes them to stand up against the abuses that Eisenberg's article describes very well. Only public pressure ultimately expressed at the ballot box will.
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