Today's GOP: Haven't we seen this somewhere before?

Joe Conason has focused in on one of many ways in which today's Republican Party has embraced the kind of ideas that once were the perspective of what liberals and conservatives both regarded as the Radical Right: John Birch lives Salon 12/03/04.

The title reference is to the John Birch society, a far-right group that still is around (do these groups ever disappear entirely?) but was far more prominent during the 1950s and 1960s.  The "Birchers" claimed "anti-Communism" as their driving ideology.  But since they thought that both the Democratic and Republican parties were controlled by Communists as evidenced among other things by their policies on just about everything, it's safe to say that they were pretty much hostile to democracy in general.  They beat the drums of resistance to racial integration in the early 1960s, and later they jumped on the Vietnam War bandwagon is a weird sort of way that combined paranoid conspiracy-mongering with jingo militarism.

In the Birchers' view, the country was controlled by a shadowy group called the "Insiders," who they were usually careful in their publications not to identify specifically as Jews.  But I'm not sure why, since everyone knew that's what they meant.  Their surviving remnant has kept up with the times enough to have a Web Site of their own.

"Get US out of the UN!"

During the 1960s, you used to see Bircher road signs in the South at least with that particular message.  I read once that the Birchers considered having the signs just say, "Get US out."  But they decided that some people might mistake that for an anti-Vietnam War message.  Which you might have thought would have been okay with them, too, since they thought US entry into the Vietnam War was a Communist conspiracy to, well, you get an idea of the thought process involved.

As Conason points out in his column, it seems that the Insiders are finally losing their grip on the Republican Party:

If American conservatism is truly the fount of "new ideas," as its publicists incessantly assure us, why do conservatives constantly promote the stale old ideas that obsessed themin 1962?

Back then, the extremists of the ultra-right regarded the United Nations as the advance guard of the international communist conspiracy. "Get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S.!" blared the bumper-sticker slogan of the John Birch Society, while the National Review called for the U.N. to be "liquidated."

Today, although the rhetoric is not quite so shrill, the Birch Society's ideological descendants still feel the same way. With the U.N. beset by scandal, the right can't resist the opportunity to sever American ties with the world organization. Heedless as always of damaging traditional alliances and America's global reputation, they have opened a campaign to undermine and ultimately destroy the U.N. It is a peculiar crusade for Americans to undertake just when the U.S. government is counting on the U.N. to help legitimize the Iraqi elections -- the kind of multilateral mission that is becoming even more essential on a planet where failed states threaten the security of everyone.

He goes on to explain a few relevant points about the current Republican hoopla over the alleged "oil for food" scandal.  It's not entirely fake; even pseudo-scandals often have something fishy at least marginally connected with them.  But it's also part of an effort by many Republicans to effectively wreck the United Nations.  As Conason notes, "What was lunacy in 1962 is no saner now."

Vietnam, we're against it but we think we should "win"

It's not only in suspicion of the United Nations that the legacy of the John Birch Society of the 1960s and other Radical Right groups like the White Citizens Council lives on in today's Republican Party.

The Birchers took a peculiar position on the Vietnam War.  (Actually, all their positions were peculiar, so there was nothing surprising about that aspect of it.)  The thought American entry into the war was a Communist/Insiders plot to damage the country.  But at the same time, they thought the US should fight the war more aggressively than the Johnson administration was doing.  It was a weird perspective, one which gave rise to the peculiar notion that became a favorite saying of many people who supported the war, "We never should have beenthere in the first place.  But now that we are there, we should go ahead and win it."  Actual definitions of "winning it" were less forthcoming.

Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab wrote of the Birchers in The Politics of Unreason (1970):

There seems to be some evidence that most recently the Society has been placing greater stress on "Nationalist" themes.  Vietnam did not appear in the page of [the Bircher journal] American Opinion in 1960 and 1964.  Up to the summer of 1966, [Robert] Welch [head of the group] took the position in speeches and pamphlets that American participation in the war was part of the Communist conspiracy designed to weaken us as a nation, to facilitate greater collectivism at home, and to divert our attention from elsewhere.  This position clearly put it in conflict with almost every other extreme conservative or radical rightist group.  In the summer of 1966, however, the Society shifted its position, and since then American Opinion has supported "a quick victory in Vietnam" position.

Robert Welch, however, still gives voice to his belief that the decision to enter the Vietnam War was part of a conscious plot to increase federal power, to put government controls, such as national price and wage controls and food rationing, into effect.  In 1969, he argued that we have a deliberate policy "to enable our Communist enemies in Asia to uphold their side of the war, to escalate it, and to keep it going. ..."  Thus Welch remains consistent in his analysis of the war; what has changed is that the Society now both presses for a more vigorous American military strategy, while urging that we get out if we do not fight to win.  The change in the direction of support for incresed military action has been paralleled by growing evidence of admiration for military leades.  in 1964 and 1965, only two of the men pictured on the front cover of American Opinion were military leaders; this figure rose to five in 1966, and continues high.  Increased nationalism may also be reflected in the fact that the space devoted to anti-UN items also increased.

This kind of weird "dove-hawk" sounding position is something we still hear today from many conservatives drawing lessons from the Vietnam War.  And it is through a prism like this that many conservatives have processed things like the now-defunct Weinberger-Powell doctrine, which emphasized using overwhelming force in military operations and having an exit strategy.  What's especially noteworthy about this particular perspective is that despite arguing that the war itself was wrong and contrary to American interests, the Birchers could also call for the most extreme military measures and pound the war drums like good jingoes and sentimentalize soldiers and military leaders.

We see a similar position today in neo-Confederate groups and Pat Buchanan-style "paleo-conservatives" who opposed the war but still seek ways to be war-loving superpatriots.  As the Iraq War limps on with its endless "tipping points" and breakings of the insurgency's back and so on, I expect we'll hear more of this "we shouldn't have been there in the first place but now that we're there we should win it" kind of position from Iraq War fans.  And definitions of "winning" will be as scarce as in the days of the Vietnam War.

Evil courts, evil system

In a recent post, I discussed the position of a Republican Values political philosopher (Chuckie) on reigning in the courts and how it was a continuation of a favorite Southern segregationist hobby-horse.  The following description from historian Richard Hofstadter, in which he uses the word "pseudo-conservative" to refer to what was then the Radical Right and what is today the dominant ideology in the Republican Values Party, provides an important reminder of what lies behind this particular enthusiasm for many.  This is from The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), and the reference is to the hostility of the Radical Right toward the Supreme Court's decision against legal racial segregation, an obsession of the Birchers and the White Citizens Council and most of the Democratic Party in the South at the time:

It is not the authority and legitimacy of the Court alone that the pseudo-conservative right calls into question.  When it argues that we governed by means of near-hypnotic manipulation (brainwashing), [Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press!] wholesale corruption, and betrayal, it is indulging in something more significant than the fantasies of indignant patriots:it is questioning the legitimacy of the political order itself.  The two-party system, as it has developed in the United States, hangs on the common recognition of loyal opposition: each side accepts the ultimate good intentions of the other.  The opponent's judgment may be held to be consistently execrable, but the legitimacy of his intent is not - that is, in popular terms, his Americanism is not questioned.  One of the unspoken assumptions of presidential campaigns is that the leaders of both parties are patriots who, however serious their mistakes, must be accorded the right to govern.  But an essential point in the pseudo-conservative world view is that our recent Presidents [Roosevelt, Truman Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson], being men of wholly evil intent, have conspired against the public good.  This does more than discredit them: it calls int question the validity of the political system that keeps putting such men into office.

"Each side accepts the ultimate good intentions of the other."  That seems like a quaint sentiment from a long-ago time in today's political atmosphere.  "His Americanism is not questioned."  That's become so routine among Iraq War fans today that you have to become a at least a little callous to it in order to not give idiots a easy way to set your teeth to gnashing and such.

The Southern Democratic Party of the 1960s still lives.  Today's it's the national Republican Party.