What’s Brook’s argument? That conservatives’ tragic misunderstanding of freedom has produced exactly what Goldwater feared most: stifling the energy and talent of the individual, crushing creative differences, forcing conformity - and, yes, even leading us to despotism (and I’m not talking about habeas corpus or NSA spying). By methodically undermining the public’s will and ability to underwrite the public good, systematically accelerating economic inequality, and making turning oneself into a commodity - “selling out” - the only possible route for young people who wish a reasonably secure middle class existence, conservatives killed liberty. The canary in the coal mine is the death of young people’s “freedom to live adult lives typified by choice rather than economic compulsion.” And, despite all Goldwater’s guff about honoring “our founding fathers,” conservatives did it by dragging our founders through the mud. Rick Perlstein ☀
Watching the rise of the Tea Party movement has been a frustration to me, and not just because it is ugly and seeks to traduce so many of the values I hold dear. Even worse has been the overwhelming historical myopia. As the Times’s new poll numbers amply confirm — especially the ones establishing that the Tea Partiers are overwhelming Republican or right-of-Republican — they are the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within U.S. government. Rick Perlstein ☀
As Rick Perlstein documented in his two books on Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, modern American conservatism was built on these same themes. From “Morning in America” to the Rapture-ready religious right to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various gradients of racist groups, it’s easy to trace how American proto-fascism offered redemption from the upheavals of the 1960s by promising to restore the innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America. This vision has been so thoroughly embraced that the entire Republican party now openly defines itself along these lines. At this late stage, it’s blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage. Worse: it doesn’t have a moment’s shame about any of it. No apologies, to anyone. These same narrative threads have woven their way through every fascist movement in history. Fascist America: Are We There Yet? ☀
How many Facebook groups are there dedicated to impeaching Barack Obama? I lost count before I got to one hundred. This one, with 8,123 members, proposes to stop “the crime wave he intends to preside over once enthroned.” The fact that millions of Americans, a priori, will not even consider any Democratic president legitimate, is a theme we’ve been worrying since the debut of this blog. It’s part of my argument for a liberal shock doctrine—that Obama needs to get done anything he wants to get done fast, because of the millions of dollars and man-hours that will be devoted to delegitimizing his presidency from Day One. Or, as we’ve seen, Day Negative-Seventy-Five. Rick Perlstein ☀
That’s what the conservative obstruction strategy means. The Associated Press, as good as their report on the whistleblower crisis is, neglected the most important part of the story: progressives have advanced legislation to end it. And conservatives have conspired to keep the corrupt status quo in place. Rick Perlstein ☀
I’ll never forget the time I arranged to spend all day debating Freepers. I introduced myself as a proud leftist. Someone posted the famous picture of the pile of skulls from the Khmer Rouge massacre and asked if I was proud of that. It’s nuts. America leaving Vietnam had nothing to do with that—unless you agree with the historians who argue that it did, for opposite reasons: that the conditions for the rise of the lunatic Khmer Rouge was the massive American bombing that left Cambodian society a bloody, nihilistic wasteland. Indeed American ground troops hadn’t been in Cambodia in 1971, by statute—so how could our leaving Cambodia have caused it? Indeed, leaving Southeast Asia itself, with the subsequent unification of North and South Vietnam under a Communist government, ended up producing the conditions that stopped the genocide—because Communist Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978. That was what ended the genocide.
Rick Perlstein
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Since the 1970s, the American right has circulated a series of lies about how the liberals who ended the war in Vietnam were the ones responsible for the humanitarian catastrophes caused by the war in Vietnam. Today a draft-dodger from that war has degraded the presidency by making these lies his own.
Rick Perlstein
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The notion of a disinterested civil service, of government officials chosen for their ability to do the job rather than their loyalty to political bosses, is one of the great accomplishments of the modern world. The nation’s corps of 93 United States attorneys are not civil servants in the strictest sense—they’re not part of a system in which merit is measured by formal examinations, nor are they protected against firing without cause. But by sound tradition, written and unwritten—the kind of sound tradition conservatives once felt themselves duty-bound by definition to respect—they have always been considered something close: political appointees serving a non-political, even anti-political, function.
Rick Perlstein
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