Picking up on Dan’s quotation of Rev. Susan Thistlethwaite on the new era of hopeyness and changitude to be brought into being by Barack Obama:
This political campaign season often seems to me to be a kind of cultural theater, where we are seeing the end of one kind of politics, the politics of polarization (and even the religion of polarization) coming to an end and a new politics and religion of unity trying to break through. I have been reading Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein, and this excellent book describes this historical trajectory we have experienced since 1972…
Unfortunately for Thistlethwaite, Perlstein has already found her claim to be crazy talk:
A President Obama could no more magically transcend America’s ’60s-born divisions than McCarthy, Kennedy, Nixon or McGovern could, for the simple reason that our society is defined as much by its arguments as by its agreements. Over the meaning of “family,” on sexual morality, on questions of race and gender and war and peace and order and disorder and North and South and a dozen other areas, we remain divided in ways that first arose after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963… Pretending otherwise simply isn’t healthy. It’s repression — the kind of thing that shrinks say causes neurosis.
Not that Perlstein gets it entirely right, either. As George Will observed in reviewing the book:
By stressing the importance of Nixon’s character in shaping events, and the centrality of resentments in shaping Nixon’s character, Perlstein treads a dead-end path blazed by Hofstadter, who seemed not to understand that condescension is not an argument.
***
Having cast the Nixon story as a psychodrama, Perlstein has no need to engage the ideas that were crucial to conservatism’s remarkably idea-driven ascendancy, ideas like the perils of identity politics and the justice of market allocations of wealth and opportunity. Instead, Perlstein dwells on motives, which he usually presents as crass or worse. As a result, the book often reads as though turbulent waters from the wilder shores of cable television have sloshed onto the printed page.
That is pretty much what you might expect from Perlstein, who sees crypto-racism in candy bar slogans. As previously noted here regarding the political battles of the 1960s:
The Narrativeâ„¢ regards the right half of this picture  particularly its coarser elements  as “reactionary.â€Â The Narrativeâ„¢ generally does not consider that a reaction necessarily implies an action. When it is considered, The Narrativeâ„¢ dictates that this was a reaction against the civil rights struggle, the feminist movement, etc. so the reaction can be dismissed as beyond the realm of conventional political discourse. Moreover, The Narrativeâ„¢ on this point endures because there is a kernel of truth to it.
What The Narrative™ attempts to airbrush from the national memory is that the backlash was also against the New Left. It is fair to say that a movement born from Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin is going to be fairly extreme, and the the New Left does what it can to meet that expectation. In the US during the 1960s, it shattered the the traditional notion that policy disagreements stop at the water’s edge. The New Left characterized our troops in Vietnam as crazed killers; its celebrities openly supported the enemy. A minority movement, but large enough in the context of a difficult war to drive LBJ from seeking reelection, and to move the Democratic party from nominating Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to the the dovish George McGovern in 1972 and the batty Jimmy Carter in 1976.
As left as Perlstein is, he may be unable to grasp the degree to which his predecessors are the co-founders of Nixonland. And Thistlethwaite may remain oblivious to how the mainstreaming of the New Left continues to fuel the very divisiveness she deplores in the current campaign.
Having cast the Nixon story as a psychodrama, Perlstein has no need to engage the ideas that were crucial to conservatism’s remarkably idea-driven ascendancy, ideas like the perils of identity politics and the justice of market allocations of wealth and opportunity. Instead, Perlstein dwells on motives, which he usually presents as crass or worse.
This is exactly what Glenn Greenwald does on every issue.
“Over the meaning of “family,†on sexual morality, on questions of race and gender and war and peace and order and disorder and North and South and a dozen other areas, we remain divided in ways that first arose after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963”
Umm, I think this happened just a little earlier than that. Especially the North-South thing. Seems like I remember hearing about something in school.
Read between the lines here, folks–somehow the lefties have come to the conclusion that it’s someone else’s fault that they make poor choices in presidential candidates. Think of it as pre-emptive spin for the fall.
Abdicating responsibility has reached an all-time low.
wishbone – Hope you are safe back in the sandbox.
I wish I was in Nixie, away, away!
Nixon’s the one!
Re: #3
All of history began in the 1960s. It was in the memo so it must be so.
Yeah, the North-South thing goes back at least as far as the founding of the country — but that only underscores the point about debate defining us as much as unity.
One of the more depressing things about modern pundits is that they believe reality started with their youth. Failing to read the original authors, even conservatives are riding on the men who wrote books about these previous authors or even a second generation removed. Don’t read Buckley or Limbaugh, read Locke and DeTocqueville, don’t read someone’s version of these thoughts, don’t listen to the professors, read the originals. We have a whole generation of pundits and politicos who know the Reader’s Digest or Cliff Notes versions of these thinkers, who think that all the struggles and troubles of our times were forged in the crucible of the mighty boomer generation. It’s pathetic.
The cynical part of me thinks it’s simply Boomer arrogance that makes them claim to have done absolutely EVERYTHING.
BTW, Perlstein is not a boomer, so it’s now multi-generational.
Fantastic. Just when I thought there might be hope for this country, I learn that crap’s contagious.
Christopher Taylor
You’ve got something there in #10. I think it could be called St. John’s College.
I learned far more after college studying on my own about civics, history, politics, and economics than I ever did in school. I got a great score on this civics test because of that, I’d have done terribly in school. And it didn’t cost me 12 grand a year (that’s what it was back in 1983 baby).
I don’t know as it really is all that wise to attend a college or university any more. The quality is low, the cost is immense, the indoctrination overpowering, what do you gain, really? Lab space?