| The Stab In the Back: (Re)Birth of A Trope
As Baker points out, the "stab in the back" trope already had cultural resonance in Germany--from Wagner:
The word dolchstoss--"dagger thrust"--had been popularized almost fifty years before in Wagner's Götterdämmerung. After swallowing a potion that causes him to reveal a shocking truth, the invincible Teutonic hero, Siegfried, is fatally stabbed in the back by Hagen, son of the archvillain, Alberich.
In sharp contrast to the notion that Germany's downfall came from Jewish slackers, as Hitler imagined, or from "soft" civilian leaders, Baker writes:
It didn't matter that Field Marshal Ludendorff had in fact been the virtual dictator of Germany from August of 1916 on, or that the empire's civilian leaders had been stunned by his announcement, in September of 1918, that his last, murderous offensives on the western front had failed, and that they must immediately sue for peace. The suddenness of Germany's defeat only supported the idea that some sort of treason must have been involved. From this point on, all blame would redound upon "the November criminals," the scheming politicians, reds, and above all, Jews.
Yet it was necessary, for the purging that the Nazis had in mind, to believe that the national degeneration went even further. Jerry Lembcke, in his brilliant work, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, writes of how the Nazis fostered the dolchstosslegende in ways that eerily foreshadowed returning veteran mythologies in the United States. Hermann Göring, the most charismatic of the Nazi leaders after Hitler, liked to speak of how "very young boys, degenerate deserters, and prostitutes tore the insignia off our best front line soldiers and spat on their field gray uniforms." As Lembcke points out, any insignia ripping had actually been done by the mutinous soldiers and sailors who would launch a socialist uprising shortly after the war, tearing them off their own shoulders or those of their officers. Göring's instant revisionism both covered up this embarrassing reality and created a whole new class of villains who were--in his barely coded language--homosexuals, sexually threatening women, and other "deviants." All such individuals would be dealt with in the new, Nazi order.
Authoritarian Logic
Before continuing with Baker's chronology, it's worthwhile to take a quick step back to look at what's going on here. The authoritarian mind glorifies the strong leader, and sees enemies wherever it is told to see them. Indeed, Robert Altemeyer defined rightwing authoritarianism thus:
Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) is a personality and ideological variable that is defined by three attitudinal and behavioral clusters which correlate together:- Authoritarian submission -- a high degree of submissiveness to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
- Authoritarian aggression -- a general aggressiveness directed against deviants, outgroups, and other people that are perceived to be targets according to established authorities.
- Conventionalism -- a high degree of adherence to the traditions and social norms that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.
While America, as a democratic republic, crucially depends upon the sepation of powers to create a system of checks and balances intended to force public debate and deliberation, the authoritarian mind sees all this as a dangerous subversion of the authority and power of the all-knowing leader. The great strength of a democratic republic--at least in theory--is that it forces such debates so that lessons learned from past mistakes can help us avoid future ones, at least those that repeat the past. If a democratic republic is going to make mistakes, it should always make new ones. Authoritarians, however, are deeply hostile to democracy, a fact that can be hidden, so long as their preferred leaders are elected, but that becomes increasingly hard to disguise when they are out of power, and become increasingly hysterical. However, when crisis arises, and the entire population gets siezed with hysteria--as often happens with unexpected military defeats or more general overseas reversals--then an opening occurs for authoritarians to sieze power once again. And this, indeed, is the pattern Baker traces.
Yalta
Baker goes on to note a strange historical twist:
The dolchstosslegende first came to the United States following not a war that had been lost but our own greatest triumph. Here, the motivating defeat was suffered not by the nation but by a faction. In the years immediately following World War II, the American right was facing oblivion. Domestically, the reforms of the New Deal had been largely embraced by the American people. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations--supported by many liberal Republicans--had led the nation successfully through the worst war in human history, and we had emerged as the most powerful nation on earth.
As George W. Bush was about to take office in January, 2001, The Onion satirically quoted him say, "Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over!" But Clinton's accomplishments were decidedly mixed and minimal compared to the sweeping changes brought by Roosevelt and Truman. Still the underlying psychology was much the same--rightwing authoritarian culture simply refused to accept that anyone else could truly constitute legitimate government, And so they seethed. Someone had stabbed them in the back. The only problem was figuring out who. But, of course, that someone was themselves. Not for the first time since the dawn of the Italian Renaissaince, conservatives had been caught napping by fundamental changes in how the world worked that left them floundering and disoriented. Not for the first time they lashed out blindly at whatever they bumped up against.
As Baker notes:
Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow liberal internationalists had sounded the first alarms about Hitler, but conservatives had stubbornly--even suicidally--maintained their isolationism right into the postwar era. Senator Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican," and the right's enduring presidential hope, had not only been a prominent member of the leading isolationist organization, America First, and opposed the nation's first peacetime draft in 1940, but also appeared to be as naive about the Soviet Union as he had been about the Axis powers. Like many on the right, he was much more concerned about Chiang Kai-shek's worm-eaten Nationalist regime in China than U.S. allies in Europe. "The whole Atlantic Pact, certainly the arming of Germany, is an incentive for Russia to enter the war before the army is built up," Taft warned. He was against any U.S. military presence in Europe even in 1951.
Sentiment for NATO was so strong that Taft and his allies didn't put up much of a fight. But that would change, as Baker goes on to discuss. Before hurrying on with his tale, however, I want to draw a little extra attention to two things--first, the indifference, at best, toward Hitler. Others on the right were quite openly enamored with him--and not just lesser lights. In fact, J. Edgar Hoover maintained close relations with the Nazi intelligence agencies right up to the last days before war was declared.
Second, while many on the right were obsessed with Communism, Taft's oppositon to NATO--which was shared by others--shows a bizarre disconnect between the Communism of their imaginations and the actually existing Communists in the Soviet Union. For decades this seemed exceptionally strange to me. Then 9/11 happened, and the leading conservatives did the exact same thing again, studiously failing to go after bin Laden and those who had helped him create him--most notably the Saudis and the Pakistanis--while attacking perhaps his greatest ideological foe, Saddam Husseim, who had nothing at all to do with the attacks on us.
Thus, it's important to realize that the conservative's attack on liberals using the "stab in the back" mythos, although terribly powerful and important, is only one example of many in how they misdirect their attention against supposed enemies. They are, quite literally, the original gang who can't shoot straight.
Baker continues, explaining just how solid Roosevelt's accomplishments were seen as being at the time, with an unprecedented degree of broad, bipartisan support:
No reasonable observer would have predicted in the immediate wake of the Yalta conference that it would become an enduring symbol of Democratic perfidy. Yalta was, in fact, originally considered the apogee of the Roosevelt Administration's accomplishments, ensuring that the hard-won peace at the end of World War II would not soon dissolve into an even worse conflict, just as the botched peace of Versailles had led only to renewed hostilities in the years after World War I. The conference, which took place in the Soviet Crimea in February 1945, was the last time "the Big Three" of the war--Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin--would meet face-to-face. The U.S. negotiating team went with specific goals and was widely perceived at the time as having achieved them. Agreements were reached on the occupation of the soon-to-be-defeated German Reich, the liberation of those Eastern European countries occupied by or allied with Germany, the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan, and, most significantly in Roosevelt's eyes, on the structure of a workable, international body designed to keep world peace, the United Nations.
FDR's presentation of these agreements before a joint session of Congress that March met with almost universal acclaim. This was not surprising. Roosevelt, who had been at Versailles as a junior member of the Wilson Administration, was preoccupied with making sure that his vision for the postwar world did not founder on any partisan bickering with Congress. Before leaving for Yalta, he had briefed a group of leading senators from across the political spectrum on what he hoped to accomplish, and solicited their opinions and questions. The delegation he took with him to the Soviet Union was a bipartisan team of senior diplomats, advisers, and military men, and he continued to cultivate support from all quarters on his return to the United States. Such prominent Republican figures as Arthur Vandenberg, the once-isolationist senator from Michigan turned internationalist, and Thomas Dewey, Roosevelt's fierce opponent in the 1944 presidential race, expressed general support for the results of the Yalta conference. Taft and the right wing of the Republican Party were more skeptical, but offered no substantial criticisms.
This was, in short, a picture of dramatic diplomatic accomplishment at the end of a war that saw dramatic military accomplishment. It also represented the very essence of learning from the past failure of Woodrow Wilson, and the League of Nations. But it was not to last, primarily because it was just too good:
Save for a few congressmen, newspaper publishers, and columnists on the extreme fringe of the right, this early Cold War consensus would survive until 1948. Then, Dewey's and the Republicans' stunning losses in the elections that fall, combined with a confluence of American setbacks abroad, served to revivify the right.
Not only did the Republicans lose a presidential election against a badly divided, national Democratic Party; they also lost the congressional majorities they had just managed to eke out in 1946, following fourteen years in the political wilderness. It now seemed clear that the Republicans would never return to power merely by supporting Democratic policies, or by promising to implement them more effectively, and the right wing gained traction within the party.
Actually, Eisenshower soon would pull off the trick of gaining power and governing as a most effective Republican administrator of Democratic policies. But the fact that it took a war hero--who was courted by both parties--to pull this off only served to underscore the underlying point Baker is making.
Meanwhile, the exposure of Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent followed, in relatively rapid succession, by the fall of Czechoslovakia's coalition government to a Soviet-backed coup, the Soviet attainment of an atomic bomb, and the victory of Mao's Communists over Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang regime in China, cast the entire policy of containment into doubt. Never mind that the right's own feckless or muddled proposals for fighting the Cold War would not have ameliorated any of these situations. The right swept them into the memory hole and offered a new answer to Americans bewildered by how suddenly their nation's global preeminence had been diminished: Yalta.
The rightwing myth of Yalta stood in sharp contrast to the actual history. Instead of a broad consensus process widly supported across the political spectrum, what really happened at Yalta, according to the emerging rightwing myth, was a secret conspiracy known to only a small cabal--a conspiracy that aimed to sell out American interests:
The right wing's dolchstosslegende was a small but fateful conspiracy, engineered through "secret diplomacy" at Yalta. Its linchpin was Hiss, a junior State Department aide at Yalta who was now described as a major architect of the pact. Hiss was a perfect villain for the right's purposes. He was not only a communist and a spy; he was also an effete Eastern intellectual right down to his name--and, by implication, possibly a homosexual. He had been publicly exposed by that relentlessly regular guy, Dick Nixon, as an unnatural, un-American element who had used his wiles to sway all of his superiors in the Crimea.
Just how he had accomplished this was never detailed, but it didn't matter; specificity is anathema to any myth. Bullitt [author of an influential essay Baker refers to earlier] and an equally flamboyant opportunist of the period, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, offered a more general explanation. The Democrats, Mrs. Luce had already charged, "will not, or dare not, tell us the commitments that were overtly or secretly made in moments of war's extermination by a mortally ill President, and perhaps mortally scared State Department advisers."
The idea of the "dying President" at Yalta was plausible to much of the public, who had seen photographs of Roosevelt looking suddenly, shockingly gaunt and exhausted throughout much of the last year of his life. To the right wing--which had conducted a whispering campaign against Roosevelt throughout his term in office, claiming that his real affliction was not polio but syphilis, and that he, his wife, and various advisers, including Hopkins, were "secret Jews" and Soviet agents--it all made perfect sense. To the many Americans who still loved Roosevelt and whose votes the Republicans needed, FDR himself could now become the Siegfried figure, a dying hero betrayed by the shady, unnatural Hiss.
Note how cleverly this myth "unites left and right." This is the essence of successful hegemonic discourse--it excludes genuine opposition, by setting terms that include those with opposing views, but not on terms of their own choosing.
All of this, of course, falls apart under the most cursory examination. Hiss was a "technician" at Yalta, relied upon mostly for his expertise regarding the planned United Nations, and--already suspected of espionage--he had played no policymaking role in a large, bipartisan delegation that included most of the nation's military and diplomatic leadership. Roosevelt was in severe physical decline and would die from a massive stroke some two months later, but his mind was still active and engaged....
Far from handing over anything to anyone, Roosevelt had actually persuaded Stalin to sign onto a "Declaration on Liberated Europe" that affirmed "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live" and committed the Big Three "to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people." More was not possible. The salient fact about Eastern Europe at the end of World War II was that the Red Army enjoyed an immense numerical advantage there. To dislodge it, the United States would have had to embark immediately upon another epic struggle, a vast new war for which the American people, already clamoring for demobilization, showed absolutely no enthusiasm. It is likely that the United States would have eventually prevailed in such a struggle, but only at a cost of American lives that would have dwarfed the total lost in World War II itself, and the further devastation of the very European countries we had sought to liberate.
Just to underscore Baker's last point, here's a map of the Eastern Front, showing the advanced of the Soviet forces in the eight months previous to Yalta:
Given that Taft was the leading rightwing voice in America at the time, and that he remained opposed to US forces in Europe as late as 1951, it was clearly absurd for rightwingers to be attacking Roosevelt for not being willing to fight an undeclared war against the Soviet Union on behalf of the people of Eastern Europe. The two stances are diametrically opposed to one another. But, then, contradictory beliefs are not really a problem for the rightwing authoritarian mind.
Korea
Baker continues:
Republicans now began an almost continuous campaign against alleged Democratic conspiracies. Following Chiang's defeat, conservatives in Congress demanded to know "Who lost China?" and Robert Taft, discarding his much vaunted integrity, egged on Joe McCarthy's witch-hunt against the Truman Administration, urging him to "keep talking and if one case doesn't work out, he should proceed with another." Yet it would take another hot war--and another expansion of the dolchstosslegende--to permanently enthrone the idea of a vast, treasonous left-wing conspiracy in the American psyche.
The significance of the Korean War in this story cannot be understated. On June 1, 1950, less that four months after Joe McCarthy's imfamous "Wheeling Speech," moderate Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith delivered her "Declaration of Conscience" which six other Republicans had signed onto, in which she defended the right to dissent, and deplored the witch-hunting atmosphere that was being generated. Yet, the Statement actually embraced the logic of the stab-in-the-back myth, when Smith said:
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 though key officials of the Democratic Administration. There are enough proved cases to make this point without diluting our criticism with unproved charges.
But the logic without the passion was nowhere near enough for the right. Smith's stand might have had an impact, but the Korean War broke out just weeks later, on June 25, and with that, all bets were off.
The outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950 was disturbing enough, but the defeat of General Douglas MacArthur that winter by invading Chinese forces sent shock waves throughout the United States. More than anyone else, MacArthur had brought about his own defeat, launching his troops up the Korean peninsula in separate columns, divided by mountain ranges, ignoring both orders from the White House to halt and plentiful signs that a massive Chinese force had already infiltrated the Korean peninsula. But while his subordinates scrambled to rally their reeling men, MacArthur moved swiftly to salvage his military reputation and his hopes for the presidency.
What McCarthur proposed was a massive escalation, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons:
MacArthur insisted the "only way to prevent World War III is to end the Korean conflict rapidly and decisively"--as if a massive, atomic attack upon the world's most populous nation would not, in itself, constitute World War III. When the Truman Administration rejected his proposals, the general announced that he was not being allowed to win--"An enormous handicap without precedent in military history."
In short: a stab in the back. The same thing would later be alleged in Vietnam: the refusal to use nuclear weapons was tantamount to betrayal.
MacArthur conveyed similar sentiments to his conservative allies in Congress, writing House Minority Leader Joseph Martin that he was only trying to "follow the conventional pattern of meeting force with maximum counter-force, as we have never failed to do in the past," and concluding: "There is no substitute for victory." Martin gleefully aired the great man's views in a speech in Brooklyn, thundering, "If we are not in Korea to win, then this Administration should be indicted for the murder of thousands of American boys." He added that "the same State Department crowd that cut off aid" to Chiang in 1946 now opposed invading China because this would show up their earlier mistakes. The only way to "save Europe and save Asia at the same time" was "to clear out the State Department from top to bottom." After Martin repeated MacArthur's views on the House floor, Truman finally removed the general from his command. But the move seemed only to confirm that something was very wrong.
McCarthur's complete politicization of military command genuinely threatened world stability. The American right was so in love with Chiang Kai-shek, and so deeply racist that killing 20-30, heck even 100 million Chinese with nuclear weapons to put Chiang back in power seemed like a perfectly reasonable military plan to them. The fact that it would have turned the entire developing world against us till the end of time seemed to never quite enter their heads.
By stopping this madness--though not soon enough--Truman saved the world (not to mention the US) untold suffering. But cutting off rightwing fantasies of omnipotent power from their realworld consequences only allowed the fantasies to grow more bizarre in different ways:
The right seized the opportunity to renew--and expand--its charges of dolchstoss. Republican Senator William Jenner of Indiana bellowed from the floor of the Senate that "this country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. We must cut this whole cancerous conspiracy out of our Government at once. Our own choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction." Nixon, his new colleague, agreed in barely coded language, attacking "the whining, whimpering, groveling attitude of our diplomatic representatives who talk of America's fear rather than of America's strength and of America's courage." He claimed that "top administration officials have refused time and time again to recognize the existence of this fifth column" or "to take effective action to clear subversives out" of the government.
In fact, as Bruce Cummings argues in Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947, the US immediately sided with forces that had collaborated with the Japanese during WWII, rather than those who had lead the opposition--much the same as we did in Vietnam. In both cases--as with Italy in Europe--the opposition was spearheaded by Marxists. Rather than accept that these forces had a role to play, and seeking to moderate their influence by offering support for them entering into a democratically elected government, we chose various forms of warfare against them. Thus, the logic of "anti-communism" (seeing all Marxists as part of a monolithic conspiracy, and ignoring everything else about them) entirely overwhelmed the logic of self-determination, and democracy--principles we had supposedly been fighting for throughout WWII. In both Korea and Vietnam this meant that we allied ourselves with extremely unpopular factions, while at the same time creating conditions that empowered the most hardline elements in opposition to us as well. War always has a dynamic that favors those willing to go to extremes on both sides, and this is what our initial policies produced. Yet, because Truman believed we could carry out our foreign policy largely through proxies, and that there were limits to how much we should risk, his anti-Communism was regarded as a sham by the right.
Douglas MacArthur now became the martyred Siegfried, stabbed in the back by weaklings at home who were for some reason afraid of victory. It was the fault of these "whimpering," "soft," "cowardly," "lavender" "appeasers," so unnatural they were willing to "murder" American boys to cover up their own misjudgments. Communist treachery and appeasement were blended seamlessly with an emerging, postwar sex panic.
An entire, seemingly plausible narrative of treason was now firmly established. The conspiracy of spies, or sexual deviants, or both, had now expanded beyond Alger Hiss to include pretty much the entire State Department and maybe the rest of the executive branch. Taft, launching his third run for the Republican nomination, offered to name MacArthur as his vice president, and the general, while still harboring hopes of winning the nomination himself, agreed on the condition that he would have a voice in foreign policy and be put in charge of national security.
Let's step back here for a moment, and realize what was going on. Just five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the highest levels of the American right were calling for a massive nuclear attack on the most populous Asian nation, and denouncing the Democrats as traitorous conspirators in league with our enemies for opposing this monsterous insanity.
It is impossible to envision what the world would be like if we had followed McCarthur's perscription. But it would certainly have been a great deal crazier than the world we live in. And America would have become indellibly branded with the worst aspects of the racism that it was just starting to legally repudiate at the time.
In their desire for power, Republican centrists soon joined this right-wing chorus. John Foster Dulles, now Eisenhower's secretary-of-state designate, denounced the very strategy of containment that he had helped to formulate and promised to "roll back" Communism everywhere, including in Eastern Europe. Eisenhower himself refused to disown McCarthy, even after the senator had impugned the patriotism of his longtime friend and mentor, George Marshall.
Eisenhower would, of course, also display a totally contradictory attitude of peacemaking. Not just in his famous farewell address, when he warned of a "military-industrial complex," but also in his earliest major address delivered outside of Washington--"The Chance for Peace" (aka "Cross of Iron"), on April 16, 1953, Eisenhower denounced the waste of human resources in military spending. Yet, at the same time, he continued playing footsie with rightwingers who made it utterly impossible for Democrats to join with him in actually changing our spending priorities--and, at the same time, he began the practice of using the CIA to overthrow governments that were not friendly enough to predatory American companies--first Mosadegh in Iran, then Arbenz in Guatemala. These were not even "communist" regimes we were overthrowing. They were, simply, developmental nationalists, who wished to build their economies for the benefit of their own people.
Further complicating matters, when the Hungarian people rose up against Soviet occupation in 1956, Eisenhower and Dulles did nothing to help them. When push came to shove, they were every bit as deidcated to, and constrained by the logic of containment as the Democrats they had railed against. It was one thing to knock off a Mosadegh here, an Arbenz there. But to risk all-out nuclear war over the people of Hungary? Not gonna happen.
And yet, the greater the contradictions of the center-right itself, the greater the fury at the left, the greater the intensity feeding the myth of the stab-in-the-back.
Baker again:
The Republican platform that Ike ran on in the fall of 1952 was a freefall into fantasy, a fatal compact by party moderates with a right wing that would eventually push them into extinction. For the first time since the Civil War era, one major American political party charged another one with treason. Democrats were accused of having "shielded traitors to the Nation in high places" and creating "enemies abroad where we should have friends." Democrats were responsible for all "110,000 American casualties" in Korea, where they had "produced stalemates and ignominious bartering with our enemies" that "offer no hope of victory." Republicans promised to "repudiate all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslavements."
Of course, there were no such "secret understandings" which made it all the more easy to repudiate them. But gosh it was fun to run against traitors, with a war hero leading the way!
United once more, Republicans brought this compilation of hysterical charges and bald-faced lies before the American people--who swallowed them willingly. Once in power, Eisenhower and Dulles immediately returned to managing the Democratic system of containment. Dulles met with MacArthur, listened respectfully to his plan to nuke Manchuria, allowed that it "could well succeed," then shelved it without another word. No "secret understandings" to "aid Communist enslavements" were repudiated because, of course, they did not exist. The idea of "rolling back" Communism from Eastern Europe was taken seriously solely by the Hungarian people, who launched a brave rebellion against their Soviet occupiers in 1956, only to find that Dulles and Eisenhower were willing to offer them nothing more than sympathy.
As McCarthy eventually overplayed his hand, and was belatedly censured by the Senate in 1954, the CW crowd of the day smugly and cluelessly crowed over the demise of "McCarthywasism." Yet, the fundamental logic of McCarthy had not been repudiated--only its unfettered extension from the State Deparment, where everyone was considered fair game, to the Pentagon, where everyone was not.
This was particularly well understood by Lyndon B. Johnson, who took over Senate leadership of the Democratic Party as the youngest leader ever after the Democrats lost their majority in the 1952 election, for the first time since 1932. Robert Taft became the Republican's Senate Majority Leader until his death in the summer of 1953. Johnson would never forget the circumstances that allowed the Republicans to paint the Democrats as traitors, and drive them from power. As Robert Mann explained in detail in his book, A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam, this experience proved crucial in shaping Johnson's determination to fight in Vietnam, despite the fact he saw it as a no-win proposition.
Baker again:
Vietnam was the sort of war Republicans had been clamoring to fight for two decades. A liberal administration had started it, with misplaced bravado, but it had been egged on--even dared--to take the plunge into full-scale war by prevailing right-wing dogma. When the war soured, Republicans first tried to blame not the failed premise of the domino theory or the flawed diplomacy of the Kennedy Administration or the near-universal American failure to recognize Vietnam's boundless desire for self-determination--no, it was the old fallbacks of appeasement, defeatism, and treachery in high places.
Once again, we were told that American troops were not being "allowed" to win, if they could not mine Haiphong harbor, or flatten Hanoi, or reduce all of North Vietnam to a parking lot. Yet Vietnam was a war with no real defeats on the ground. U.S. troops won every battle of any significance and inflicted exponentially greater casualties on the enemy than they suffered themselves. Even the great debacle of the war, the 1968 Tet offensive, ended with an overwhelming American military victory and the Viet Cong permanently expunged as an effective fighting force. It is difficult to claim betrayal when you do not lose a battle.
This is more than a bit facetious, and probably the weakest part of Baker's essay. Guerilla forces usually lose virtually every battle they fight. During the Revolutionary War, for example, George Washington endured an almost unbroken string of defeats--save for his famed crossing of the Delaware on Christmas Day, 1776, and subsequent victories at Trenton and Princeton. Indigenous forces fighting for independence need not win more than an occasional skirmish here or there, provided they can keep alive the spirit of resistance--and this the Vietnamese clearly did from 1945 all the way to 1975.
However, Baker is quite sound in what he says next:
Worse yet, Republicans could not provide any meaningful alternative strategy. Nixon was able to take office in 1969 only by offering a "secret plan" to get the boys home from Vietnam, not by promising to hugely escalate the fighting or risk a wider conflict. Richard Nixon became the first Republican president since the turn of the century to take office while a major war still hung in the balance, and now all the fantasies began to fall away. More than 21,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam during Nixon's time in office, and there were no Democrats to blame it on.
The only political hope for the administration was to turn its gaze outward--to blame the people themselves, or at least a portion of them. Nixon, as historian Rick Perlstein has observed, "had a gift for looking beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties," and he had been on hand at the creation of this game. Initially, the divisions he sought to exploit were much the same as those he had manipulated back in the 1940s, though they were now aimed at broad swaths of the general public--the children of the New Deal, as it were. The leading tactics included employment of the same sorts of code words so bluntly wielded twenty years before, along with a good deal more street muscle.
Over and over, antiwar protesters were called Communists, perverts, or simply "bums"--the last epithet from Nixon's own lips. The large percentage of college students in their ranks were depicted as spoiled, obnoxious, ungrateful children. Older, more established dissidents were ridiculed by Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, in a series of William Safire-authored speeches, as "nattering nabobs of negativity," and, unforgettably, as "an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." These invectives were, of course, doubly disingenuous; it was Agnew and Safire who very much wanted such persons to be known by the damning label of "intellectual," and what the vice president was really calling them was fags.
Here was the simple truth: Nixon lost Vietnam, because it was already lost in 1945, and nothing he could do in 1970-something was going to change that--even committing treason by undermining LBJ's efforts to end the war in 1968. But Nixon damn sure could blame-shift, because that's the one thing the Richard M. Nixon knew how to do with his eyes closed in his sleep.
The Culture War
It's not just that we lost Vietnam, however. As Baker notes, there was something much more fundamentally wrong, from the rightwing POV--we lost the war, and nothing happened! Instead of hordes of Communists streaming through the Golden Gate--nothing!
Neither Nixon, nor Agnew, nor the war would survive a second term. With the shameful, panicked helicopter evacuation of Saigon, U.S. prestige in the world dropped precipitously--but none of the other dominoes followed. Once again, by 1975, the American right should have found itself utterly discredited. A war that conservatives had fervently supported had ended in defeat, but with none of the consequences they had prophesied. Instead, the entire operating right-wing belief in "monolithic communism" was debunked in the wake of our evacuation from Saigon, as Vietnam attacked Cambodia, China invaded Vietnam, and the Soviet Union and China clashed along their border.
Ooops! Fortunately for the right wing, their beliefs have nothing to do with reality, or they would have been in a state of total collapse. Their beliefs are purely and simply the rationalization of their own narcissistic delusions, and as such they can readily shift focus at the drop of a hat:
Yet the cultural division that Richard Nixon had fomented to try to salvage the war in Vietnam would take on a life of its own long after the war was over and Nixon had been driven from office in disgrace. It cleverly focused on the men who had fought the war, rather than the war itself. If Vietnam had been an unnecessary sacrifice, if world Communism could no longer be passed off as a credible threat to the United States, then the betrayal of our fighting men must become the issue.
Vietnam, for the right, would come to be defined mainly through a series of closely related, culturally explosive totems. The protesters and the counterculture would be reduced to the single person of Jane Fonda, embalmed forever on a clip of film, traipsing around a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun. The soldiers, meanwhile, were transformed into victims and martyrs. It became general knowledge that they had been savagely scorned and mocked upon their return to the United States; those returning through the San Francisco airport were especially liable to be spat upon by men and women protesting the war.
Of course, those who were able to return at all were the lucky ones. Soon after we had bugged out of Saigon, millions of Americans became convinced that American prisoners of war had been left behind in Vietnamese work camps, by a government that was too cowed or callous to insist upon their return. Numerous groups sprang up to demand their release, disseminating flags with a stark, black-and-white tableau of a prisoner's bowed head against the backdrop of a guard tower, a barbed-wire fence, and the legend: YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN POW*MIA.
It would do no good to point out that there is no objective evidence that veterans were ever spat upon by demonstrators or that POWs were ever left behind or that Jane Fonda's addle-headed mission to Hanoi did anything to undermine American forces. The stab-in-the-back myth is much more powerful than any of these facts, and it continues to grow more so as time passes.
Indeed, as Baker goes on to argue,
What Nixon and a few of his contemporaries did for the right was to make culture war the permanent condition of American politics.
On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan's mythical "welfare queens" through George Wallace's "pointy-headed intellectuals"; from Lee Atwater's characterization of Democrats as anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and "out of the mainstream," the entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam. Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies--from the "gay agenda," to the advocates of Darwinism, to the "war against Christmas" last year.
This has become such an ingrained part of the right wing's belief system that the Bush Administration has now become the first government in our nation's history to fight a major war without seeking any sort of national solidarity. Far from it. The whole purpose of the war in Iraq--and the "war on terrorism"--seems to have been to foment division and to win elections by forcing Americans to choose between starkly different visions of what their country should be. Again and again, Bush and his confederates have used the cover of national security to push through an uncompromising right-wing agenda. Ignoring the broad leeway already provided the federal government to fight terrorists and conduct domestic surveillance, the administration has gone out of its way to claim vast new powers to detain, spy on, and imprison its own citizens, and to abduct and even torture foreigners
Obama's Dilemma
Barack Obama wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, he wants to "turn the page" on the culture wars, which he blames on the same Boomers that Nixon blamed. On the other hand, he wants to keep echoing the stab-in-back narrative that lies at the heart of the culture wars--but only, mind you, to distinguish "good dissent" from "bad dissent."
But you can't simply end the culture wars by unilaterally declaring them over. Ten percent or more of Americans believing you're a "secret Muslim" ought to be proof enough of that. And that's how things stand with the GOP utterly discredited. Imagine what folks will think once the Democrats have to try to govern, and start dealing with the incredible disaster that the GOP has produced--a state of systematic disaster unlike anything our nation has faced since 1932. Because the simple fact is, there are no easy solutions. You don't blow a multi-trillion dollar hole in the long-term federal budget without causing some fairly intractable problems--and that's just one of the little goodies that the last eight years of conservative rule has bequeathed us.
If one does not directly and frontally attack the logic of the culture war, then that logic will inevitably be used directly against you. It's simply a matter of time. Indeed, it's already happening with Obama, as McCain has called him "an extremist" and declined to say whether or not he may be a socialist:
In an interview with the Kansas City Star, John McCain says Barack Obama was labeled as having the "most extreme" record in the Senate.
"Extreme? You really think hes an extremist? I mean, he's clearly a liberal," interviewer Dave Helling asks.
"That's his voting record," McCain responds. "All I said was his voting record, and that is more to the left than the announced Socialist in the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont."
"Do you think hes a socialist, Barack Obama?" Helling asks.
McCain responds with a with a shrug, "I don't know."
Barack Obama's idea that this sort of thing will just somehow magically "go away" shows that he is, in his own way, as utterly delusional as the culture warriors themselves. Barring an utter and complete catastrophe, the Democrats will win an historic landslide election this coming November. But because they have done little to articulate a coherent alternative or even a coherent critique, they will remain incredibly vulnerable to irrational attacks when they try to address some of the truly monumental problems that conservatives have left for them to deal with.
In the conservative worldview, problems are simple to solve--give eveything to the rich folks, kill all the bad guys and everything else will take care of itself. The only thing that stands in the way of such glorious success is evil liberals who just don't want our problems solved. Those are the terms of battle in the culture war, and all the wishing in the world will not alter them a bit. |
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