Perlstein's excerpt continues:
"Thank God for the hard hats!" Nixon cried. He had been so delighted by the liberal Pete Hamill's exposé of the political alienation of the white working class in New York magazine in 1969 that he ordered a Labor Department study on the question. Assistant Secretary Jerome S. Rosow had just delivered his report "The Problem of the Blue Collar Worker." It described a population "on a treadmill, chasing the illusion of higher living standards," fighting via the only apparent weapon at their disposal: "continued pressure for high wages." Their only champions "seem to be the union leaders spearheading the demand." But to reduce the problem to economics, Rosow suggested, was to miss more than half the story. The more profound distress was cultural -- a problem of recognition. Negroes at least had a clamoring lobby -- Daniel Moynihan's "hysterics, paranoids and boodlers" -- making noise on their behalf. Blue-collar whites "feel like 'forgotten people' -- those for whom the government and society have limited, if any direct concern and little visible action."
Here was the germ of a revolution in the Republican's message. Unless they took workers' votes from the Democrats -- as Ronald Reagan had in California in 1966 -- Nixon would never be able to achieve the New Majority he dreamed of. But to do so with ongoing economic concessions -- previously the only way politicians imagined working-class voters might be wooed -- offended a more foundational Republican constituency: business. And contributed to the inflation that was driving the stock market into the low 600s.
But to extend to blue-collar workers the hand of cultural recognition -- that was a different ball game altogether. It's not that right-leaning politicians hadn't tried it before -- Nixon had done something like it in the Checkers Speech, when he styled the people accusing him of corruption as hopeless snobs, and himself as an ordinary striver just trying to make an honest living. But the hard-hat ascendency set into motion a qualitative shift: the first concerted effort to turn the white working class, via its aesthetic disgusts, against a Democratic Party now joining itself objectively, with their Cooper-Church and McGovern-Hatfield amendments, to the agenda of the smelly longhairs who burned down buildings.
The Democratic Party: enemy of the working man. It was the political version of that New York Times photograph of the stockbroker and the pie fitter joined in solidarity in the act of clobbering a hippie -- their common weapon the American flag....
The Republican business class, small-town America, backyard-pool suburbanites, Dixiecrats, calloused union members: now it was as if the White House had discovered the magic incantation to join them as one. Nixonites imagined no limit to the power of this New Majority: "Patriotic themes to counter economic depression will get response from unemployed," Haldeman wrote in a note to himself. Then no one would be a Democrat anymore.
Nixon, of course, was the perfect person to exploit such a moment. No major American politician in recent memory was thoroughly defined by resentment as was Richard Nixon. He knew exactly what those construction workers were feeling. Nixon succeeded wildly in the 1972 election--but only at the top of the ticket. Democrats remained firmly in control of Congress.
The complete realignment he, Haldeman and his other true believers had hoped for never did materialize. Republicans would eventually briefly eclipse Democrats in some measures of self-identification--but not for several decades, and not for more than the briefest of moments. And yet, the fractures he helped bring about, and new arrangments he sought to make solidifying new arrangements came to dominate the new era, putting Democrats almost permanently on the defensive, even though the people continued supporting Democratic policy positions more often than not, and even thought the GOP would not control all branches of government until 2001--and even then by the barest of margins.
Pulling back a bit, it's important to realize that Nixon did not create this moment, so much as he managed it. The war was already lost, and Nixon was battling to turn that loss to his political advantage. As Perlstrein wrote in a 2005 review of a book about Jane Fonda:
Every time Nixon ratcheted down the US commitment to the war, he launched an attack on the people who called on him to ratchet down the commitment. Che Guevara spoke of creating a New Socialist Man. The president's upright vanguardists in the Operation Homecoming travelling circus did a much more effective job of inventing a new sort of capitalist subject: New Republican Man, willing to believe anything to preserve some semblance of faith in American innocence.
The hippies that the construction workers attacked, as well as Jane Fonda, were objects of displaced fury. Recall:
- Displacement: Defence mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion to a safer outlet; separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening. For example, a mother may yell at her child because she is angry with her husband.
It was easy to lash out at hippies or Jane Fonda. The Viet Cong? Not so much. If, indeed it was even the Viet Cong that the construction workers were really angry with.
But it's not my purpose here to probe the ego defense psychology of this point in time--fascinating as that might be. I merely want to raise this point into awareness, to mark it, as one might mark the presence of dangerous rocks just below the surface of the sea. By the time this moment had come, it was far too late for anyone to do anything about it. I want to look farther back in time to when that was not the case.
Break Points-From Nixon Backwards
The conditions Nixon inherited resulted from choices Lyndon Johnson made in the face of powerful historical forces.
First was the defection of Southern Whites, as Johnson himself reputedly predicted after signing the Civil Rights Act. Second was the fallout from the Vietnam War, which Johnson had never wanted to fight, but which he felt was a political necessity. "Well, they'd impeach a president, though, that would run out, wouldn't they?" he said to his friend and mentor Senator Richard Russell, in a White House conversation
on May 27, 1964.
In his book A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam--the only history of Vietnam-era policy centered on the Senate's foreign policy role and its relationship to the Administration, Robert Mann makes a compelling argument that LBJ was driven by a determination not to let the Democrat's disasterous defeats of the Korean War era be repeated. It was Johnson who became Minority leader when the Democrats lost control of the Senate, and Johnson who had the responsibility of leading the fight to retake, rebuild and defend their majority. He was not the only one affected this way, but he was the most powerful of them.
Writing for Publishers Weekly I described the book thus:
Mann, a former Senate aide, puts Senate-president politics at the center of this masterful political history of America's involvement in Vietnam, which began with Truman's commitment to support the French in the wake of charges of "losing" China to the Communists. Many of the senators who attacked the Truman administration were isolationists who voted against the realistic anti-Communist institutions such as NATO and the Marshall Plan. Yet such contradictions mattered little, as the Democrats' disastrous political defeat in 1950 and 1952 convinced them to never let another "loss" be blamed on them. The twin strands of ideological surrealism and political realism interweave throughout Mann's account in various forms, illuminating the persistent patterns and underlying motivational logic of presidential lies and congressional acquiescence.
Eisenhower promised to end Truman's containment policy, but he delivered the Korean armistice and refused to fight in Vietnam. Two major congressional resolutions authorizing use of force led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Johnson promised "no wider war" while escalating for fear of "losing" Vietnam. Mike Mansfield - the Senate's foremost Asia authority, as well as majority leader - opposed America's deepening involvement, but his concept of his institutional role made him publicly loyal to Johnson's policies, which in private he strove mightily to change. Each participant responded distinctively to fundamental contradictions, brilliantly elucidated by Mann's highly nuanced account of presidential policy and the tortured evolution of Senate opposition. This book's unique perspective in illuminating Congress's role in the Vietnam War should permanently alter and deepen our understanding of that conflict.
McCarthyism and Korea
The Korean War, of course, is tightly connected to the McCarthy Era. Before the war broke out, Margaret Chase Smith, a moderate Republican senator from Maine, initially a supporter of McCarthy, turned against him after inspecting his "evidence" and finding it wanting, to say the least. With the support of six other moderate Republicans, on June 1, 1950, she delivered a stern rebuke to McCarthy's methods (abiding by Senate custom, she did not mention him by name).
While her "Declaration of Conscience" is historically remembered as a courageous stand against McCarthy, it also bore some of the distinct characteristics of moderate Republicanism that have come to give it such a disreputable name today. In a "fair and balanced" manner, Smith directly attacked the Democrats in terms that, from afar, are not all that different from McCarthy himself:
As a Republican, I say to my colleagues on this side of the aisle that the Republican Party faces a challenge today that is not unlike the challenge that it faced back in Lincoln's day. The Republican Party so successfully met that challenge that it emerged from the Civil War as the champion of a united nation--in addition to being a party that unrelentingly fought loose spending and loose programs.
Today our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of "know nothing, suspect everything" attitudes. Today we have a Democratic administration that has developed a mania for loose spending and loose programs. History is repeating itself--and the Republican Party again has the opportunity to emerge as the champion of unity and prudence.
The record of the present Democratic administration has provided us with sufficient campaign issues without the necessity of resorting to political smears. America is rapidly losing its position as leader of the world simply because the Democratic administration has pitifully failed to provide effective leadership.
The Democratic administration has completely confused the American people by its daily contradictory grave warnings and optimistic assurances--that show the people that our Democratic administration has no idea of where it is going.
The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people by its complacency to the threat of communism here at home and the leak of vital secrets to Russia through key officials of the Democratic administration. There are enough proved cases to make this point without diluting our criticism with unproved charges.
Smith was, in short, all in favor of McCarthy's purported aim. She just wanted it done right. But, of course, the Republicans could not win if it was done right, because the implications that Smith and other Republicans drew were not that widely shared by the American people.
Korea changed that, when war broke out on June 25. Smith's group, already under pressure before that, melted away once war began. Only Wayne Morse, of Oregon, remained firm in his opposition to McCarthy, which began his political transformation, first to independent, then to Democrat.
McCarthyism and Korea: The Roots
The confluence of McCarthyism and the Korean War is not the beginning of this story, however. Both are stories unto themselves, whose beginnings lie even earlier. For simplicity's sake, I will limit my discussion of these stories to a few salient points:
(1) McCarthyism was portrayed in its time as a "populist" uprising, but it was actually deeply partisan. Use of the "populist" label was not limited to McCarthy and his supporters. Liberal intellectuals viewed it this way as well. However, far from being a popular expression from below, it was intensely promoted through rightwing and Republican channels.
(2) Even with the aid of wild-eyed McCarthyite attacks, and the shocking stalemate of the Korean War, the Democrats lost control of Congress only briefly, and the Republican President--Dwight D. Eisenhower--was both a war hero whose partisan allegience was completely unkown until he declared to run, and a decided policy moderate who clearly accepted the basic premises of the New Deal, and sought to improve upon them. This is consistent with the broader pattern of mid-system "failed realignments," exemplified most clearly by Woodrow Wilson's victory in 1912 and Bill Clinton's in 1992.
While subdominant parties ordinarily do win scattered victories during a period dominated by the other party, they characteristically do not set the terms of the debate, do not hold power for long, and generally don't pass major legislation. However, they sometimes give the very strong impression that all these things are about to happen. Indeed, Wilson came remarkably close to delivering. However, Wilson was not all that different from Teddy Roosevelt, who was actually more progressive than Wilson. One can simply regard Wilson as advancing certain ideological aspects of the 1896 realignment at the expense of others.
Furthermore, Wilson's weakness can be seen in the whipsaw change of direction on the most fundamental of issues, as he ran for re-election in 1916--winning very narrowly--on the slogan "He kept us out of war," and then proceeded to take us right into war, an act that ultimately shattered the progressive coalition. Likewise, Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 ultimately did more to weaken the Democrats, losing control of both the House and Senate for the first time in fourty years, and moving the party in a more conservative direction.
The McCarthy Era was just such a failed realignment, but rather than responding self-confidently to this ultimately failed attack, Johnson and other Democrats remained deeply scarred--and scared by it. The Vietnam War was one result of this scarring/scaring.
(3) The Korean War was, in several ways, a direct consequence of a fatal mistake in choosing directions at the dawn of the Cold War. By choosing a military-based orientation, we committed ourselves to pathway in which our values were often at odds with our actions--a fact that was far more obvious to those we were trying to win over than it was to ourselves. Furthermore, it was a pathway deeply at odds with the flow of history. I have previously noted (here here and here) a remarkable paper, "Kennan's Long Telegram and NSC-68: A Comparative Analysis," East European Quarterly, Vol. 31, no. 4, January 1998, by Efstathios T.
Fakiolas, that analyzes two key documents from the formative days of the Cold War, highlighting the fundamental differences between them in terms of different underlying conceptual models.
As I wrote last Novermber in "Where's Obama? Questioning v Reinforcing [Foreign Policy] CW #3 (Political Duality of Rep v Dem 6c)":
Fakiolas used the framework of foreign policy realism for his analysis, but he determined that the two documents employed significantly different models within that tradition. Although they seemed to many people to be kindred documents, Fakiolas uncovers striking differences. I'm going to do a separate diary delving deeper into his argument, but the bottom line for us now is this: Kennan's Long Telegram and Nitze's NSC-68 appear similar, they depend on different models of international relations within the same realist tradition.
Kennan relied on the "tectonic plates" model, in which there many other non-state actors, the world is not "zero-sum," and there is often opportunity for mutual cooperation. Nitze relied on the billiard ball model, which sees the international system as "composed solely of egoistic sovereign states interested in maximizing their relative power capabilities at the expense of others," and sees "world politics is a 'zero-sum' game in which national security conceived of in military and territorial terms is the one and only states' national objective."
As a result, Kennan favored a strategy of containment that emphasized strengthening the West socially, economically and culturally, addressing its flaws which the Soviets exposed. In contrast, Nitze ignored issues of the Wests internal flaws, and focused almost exclusively on military force to combat the Soviet Union.
It's my own observation, based on this analysis, that we fought Nitze's Cold War, but we won Kennan's. It was not, in the end, our military strength that defeated the Soviet Union, it was the appeal of our culture of openness and freedom. [Emphasis added.]
The Nitze/Kennan Divergence
The stress on military strength had many consequences, one of which was that we were committed to the logic of fighting wars whereever they might break out. We initially did not envision fighting in Korea, and the failure to foresee this eventuality is one of the factors that deeply wounded Truman politically. On the other hand, had we embraced Kennan's approach, and take it to its logic end, we would not have allied ourselves with the forces that came to dominate either South Korea or South Vietnam. Both were outside of the nationalist mainstreams of their countries, mainstreams that were much more sympathetic to communists because the communists had supported their anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist yearnings.
Buying into Nitze's framework, we failed to appreciate how much these same nationalist mainstreams identified with and admired America, which they saw as more of a precursor of their own yearnings for national self-determination than as a successor of the previous imperialist powers.
We therefore never seriously considered that the nationalist communist leaders in both countries--whose power depended on broad coalitions--could actually be negotiated with. Instead of neutralizing both countries, which could have significantly advanced Kennan's goal of isolating communism, and pressuring it to join the Western rule of law regime, we ended up fighting disasterous, unwinnable landwars.
At the same time, embracing Nitze's framework rather than Kennan's essentially put liberals in bed with conservatives, while fragmenting the liberal coalition. There were two key elements to this: (1) Once one embraced a military approach, the limited logic of war-fighting took on a life of its own, inevitably leading to situations and consequences that could not be foreseen in advance.
(2) Abandoning Kennan's stance of constuctive self-criticism placed all critics in the position of potentially being labled "anti-American," thus substantially solidfying and deepening divisions between left-liberals and more centrist liberals.
This was the setup that made the Korean War not just possible, but virtually inevitable. If it hadn't been Korea, it would have been somewhere else. The logic of Nitze's assumptions demanded it, sooner or later.
But it was also the setup that made the Obama/Wright controversy inevitable as well. In a Kennan-style context, there is space for the prophetic voice, challenging the flaws of orthodoxy in fundamental moral terms--the same space occupied by Dr. Martin Luther King, for example. In a Kennan-style context, Barack Obama need never have turned his back on Jeremiah Wright. He could have remained in open dialogue with him, whatever the differences in outlook they might have, and whatever differences in priorities their roles might require.
This fatal mistake--choosing Nitze's model over Kennan's--is one that haunts us to this day, and it's one that we absolutely need to challenge and reverse if we are truly to make a new beginning, and to have a chance of dealing with the problems of terrorism and the other challenges that confront us in the 21st Century. For Kennan's model creates space for us to acknowledge our own imperfections, and work on changing them. Nitze's model does not.
Kennan's model is consistent with Melanie Klein's depressive position:
The general depressive position
In the more general depressive position, projective identification is used to empathize with others, moving parts of the self into the other person in order to understand them.
To some extent, this is facilitated when the other person is receptive to this act. The experience that the projecting person through their identification is related to the actions and reactions of the other person.
When the thoughts and feelings are taken back inside the projecting person from the other person, they may be better able to handle them as they also bring back something of the other person and the way they appeared to cope. It can also be comforting just to know that another person has experienced a troublesome part of the self.
The depressive position is thus a gentler and more cooperative counterpoint to the paranoid-schizoid position and acts to heal its wounds.
While Nitze's model is consistent with Klein's paranoid-schizoid position:
Anxiety is experienced by the early infant's ego both through the internal, innate conflict between the opposing life and death drives (manifested as destructive envy) and by interactions in external reality.
A child seeks to retain good feelings and introjects good objects, whilst expelling bad objects and projecting bad feelings onto an external object. The expulsion is motivated by a paranoid fear of annihilation by the bad object.
Klein describes this as splitting, in the way that it seeks to prevent the bad object from contaminating the good object by separating them via the inside-outside barrier.
The schizoid response to the paranoia is then to excessively project or introject those parts, seeking to keep the good and bad controlled and separated. Aggression is common in splitting as fear of the bad object causes a destructive stance.
The child's ego does not yet have the ability to tolerate or integrate these two different aspects, and thus uses 'magical' omnipotent denial in order to remove the power and reality from the persecuting bad object.
This splitting, projection and introjection has a frighteningly disintegrative effect, pulling apart the fragile ego.
It should be blindingly obvious which of these we should choose.
Tie-Back To My Diary Title, and Starting Point
Need I point out the further parallels between Fox News and the paranoid-schizoid position, and between Bill Moyers Journal and the depressive position? Need I further point out that there is nothing particularly populust about the paranoid-schizoid position? |
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