The Trouble with Normal

We all have certain words or phrases that rub us the wrong way.  High on my list is "I. Can't."  Or better yet, "I. Can't. Even."  I first noticed these in the Facebook posts of some post-structuralist multiculti feminist academics on Facebook, used as commentary on egregious right-wing misbehavior, and since then they've turned up among some male leftists as well.  With the best will in the world I can't see them as anything but liberal whining, a First World Problem fueled by privilege.  Can you imagine someone in, say, Yemen responding to the latest horrific Saudi/US bombing with the Arabic version of those words?  Or an Afghan feminist writing it in Pashto about a Northern Alliance attack on a teenaged girl for going to school?

But that's by the way.  The Word for this week in liberal-Democrat social media appears to be "normalize."  Okay, I know that it was used during the campaign, but it looks like it's taking off as a way of trying to put limits on political discussion.  If you point out continuities between Trump and Obama, Clinton, or the Bushes, you're "normalizing" Trump.

Look, it's really too late to worry about that.  I still feel like throwing up a bit in the back of my mouth when I remember that Donald Trump is now the President of the United States.  Even if his regime goes down in flames, even if he's impeached and removed from office (Hello, President Mike Pence! -- a thought which also makes me want to throw up) Trump will still be in the public record and in history books as an American President.  But I remember feeling the same way when George W. Bush became President, and Ronald Reagan before him.

And I'm annoyed when our gatekeeper media are unable to find "Trump voters interviewed" who were unhappy with the man.  As Jim Naureckas tweeted, "46% voted for Trump. He's got 36% approval. If you don't find unhappy Trump voters, you're not looking hard enough."  Or again, when the same media "express amazement that Republicans in Congress seem to accept Trump’s ideas—most of which are longstanding GOP policies."  Something about writing "President Trump" evidently shuts down many journalists' and editors' critical faculties.  He's POTUS, you have to respect him! You can't just go out and start screaming in the streets like a dirty hippie.

Pointing out that much of what Trump is doing constitutes continuity with Obama, Bush, Bill Clinton and Reagan brings on accusations of trying to "normalize" him, and I'm not sure why.  Of course it wouldn't do to recognize how many awful policies Obama, especially, could get away with without a peep of protest from most liberal Democrats, and often with celebration of his greatness.  Even when Obama took those policies, such as endless war, the surveillance state, and erosion of civil liberties, from Bush, loyalists didn't just ignore the continuity, they denied it.  So it follows that Trump's continuity with his predecessors must also be ignored and denied. It's in the interest of both his allies and his enemies to ignore it.

I was thirty years old when Ronald Reagan became president, so I remember that period very well, and I see the similarities: in the way the Religious Right celebrated Reagan's advent as their Vindication; in Reagan's cabinet of crony capitalists and reactionary crazies; in his chest-thumping, bellicose foreign policy; in his record of hostility to social programs and Civil Rights legislation.  (Clarence Thomas, one example of a Reagan legacy that keeps on giving, was appointed to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission deliberately to undermine and bring it down.  But there's also a resemblance in their shared media backgrounds -- Reagan's in Hollywood and TV, Trump's on TV -- their fondness for recreational lying, and gleefully provocative (but ostensibly playful) bigotry.

Jon Schwarz pointed this out at The Intercept, recounting some of Reagan's greatest hits.  He recommended "the truly essential 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor by comedy writer Paul Slansky," which is available online at a really ugly web page, but it starts in 1980; I prefer to point to Mark Green and Gail McColl's There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error (Pantheon, 1983), which provides numerous examples of Reagan's all-American bullshit from the 1960s.  That's important, because when Schwarz tweeted the article this weekend, the reactions were revealing.  "Normalizing Trump" was the least of it.

For example:

@tinyrevolution @theintercept Reagan was senile.Trump has a certified mental disorder.Quite different, & far more dangerous.Can’t mitigate.

— FUD Buster (@FUDbuster) January 25, 2017

The claim that Reagan was senile, or suffered from Alzheimer's, recurs in the replies to Schwarz's tweet.  I'm not sure why it's less "dangerous" for someone with senile dementia to have access to the nuclear codes than for a supposed narcissist.  I say "supposed," because despite a great deal of remote armchair diagnosis, it's not clear to me that anyone has actually proven that Trump is a narcissist by the American Psychiatric Association's criteria.  Notice FUD Buster's claim that "Trump has a certified mental disorder"; what Buster presumably means is that narcissism has been "certified" by virtue of being listed in the APA's DSM-IV manual.  It doesn't mean that Trump himself has been "certified" as clinically narcissistic.  As a homosexual who was "certified" mentally ill by the APA until 1973, I tend to take such diagnoses with a grain of salt.

It also seems unimportant to me, because any person who runs for high office, especially for the American Presidency, should be suspect from the get-go as narcissistic.  The DSM-IV criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder seem to me to fit both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, yet Democratic loyalists never connected those dots.  Consider, for example, "(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations" -- doesn't that describe Clinton's conviction, shared and enabled by her fans, that she was entitled to be the Democratic candidate, and ultimately the President?  Or "(7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others"; that is recognizably Obama joking about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones (to say nothing of those in the audience who laughed at his wit), or defending the mistreatment of Chelsea Manning (via).  The rest can be left as an exercise for the reader.

Reagan was a professional liar and fantasist long before dementia got him, which is why I point to There He Goes Again, with its examples of Reagan in his prime.  But he was also canny.  Gore Vidal wrote in 1983 that when he said "how odd it was that a klutz like Reagan should ever have been elected president," a California journalist who'd covered Reagan as governor told him:

He's not stupid at all.  He's ignorant, which is another thing.  He's also lazy, so what he doesn't know by now, which is a lot, he'll never know.  That's the way he is.  But he's a perfect politician.  He knows exactly how to make the thing work for him.

... You see, he's not interested in politics as such.  He's only interested in himself.  Consider this. Here is a fairly handsome ordinary young man with a pleasant speaking voice who first gets to be what he wants to be and everyone else then wanted to be, a radio announcer [equivalent to an anchorperson nowadays (G.V.)].  Then he gets to be a movie star in the Golden Age of the movies.  Then he gets credit for being in the Second World War while never leaving L.A.  Then he gets in at the start of television as an actor and host.  Then he picks up a bunch of rich friends who underwrite him politically and personally and get him elected governor twice of the biggest state in the union and then they get him elected president, and if he survives he'll be relected.  The point is that here is the only man I've ever heard of who got everything that he ever wanted.  That's no accident.*

The correspondence between Reagan and Trump isn't perfect, of course -- Trump, unlike Reagan, was born into money -- but there are enough similarities to be worth noticing.  (Such as that "narcissistic" trait that I put in bold.)  I wince when I see people denouncing Trump as "stupid," and "idiot," "crazy," not because it's rude but because they're underestimating him.  (And overestimating themselves.) That his enemies underestimated Trump is why he won the nomination and the election.  We cannot afford to do that anymore.

The writer Mark Hertsgaard showed in his 1988 book On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) that Reagan and his team began courting the media as soon as he was elected, and Reagan enjoyed an unusually positive relationship with the press despite his blatant dishonesty and even inaccessibility.  If Trump had shown similar cordiality to the media, he'd be having an easier time of it now, but I wouldn't assume, given most Americans' hostility to the press, that being criticized by the liberal media will really hurt him with his base.

I'm noticing more and more liberals calling Trump "mentally ill" as an epithet, very much the way right-wingers used to hiss "Barack Hussein Obama."  To treat mental illness as a moral evil is itself a moral evil (though not a mental illness).  If Trump really were mentally ill, which I doubt, liberals should treat him with compassion rather than condemnation.  Why not simply condemn him morally? The English language has a fairly abundant vocabulary for moral judgment, so why do liberals find it necessary to throw in accusations of mental illness, of overweight, of the size of his hands and penis.  At least I haven't noticed them calling him retarded.  I can only suppose they haven't thought of it yet.

The irony in the fuss about normalizing Trump and trying to defend Ronald Reagan is that Reagan inspired the same apocalyptic warnings when he became president.  Liberals quickly adjusted, of course, and indeed hid behind Reagan to justify their own sexism, antigay bigotry, racism, and classism.  It wasn't that the country "swung to the right," as many pundits claimed; it was government and media elites who did so.  The Democratic Leadership Council, which gave us Reagan Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton, was intended to normalize Reagan's policies and assimilate them to the Democratic Party.  Barack Obama followed suit, claiming that Reagan would have been too liberal to win the nomination now, and praising what he thought Reagan stood for.  We can expect the Democrat leadership to do the same for Trump.  It won't be the left who will "normalize" him, it'll be the sensible middle.

The furious, concentrated response to Trump's executive order restricting entry to people from seven majority-Musim countries is an encouraging sign.  But we have a long haul ahead of us.

* Gore Vidal, "Ronnie and Nancy: A Life in Pictures," originally published in the New York Review of Books; as reprinted in United States: Essays 1952-1992.(Random House, 1993), pp. 986-7.  Boldface added.  On those rich friends who helped Reagan's political career, see Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal (Norton, 2009).

Hi! I'm From the Reagan Administration, and I'm Here to Help

Oy, what a week!  Just a quickie for right now: Daniel Larison wrote another good column the other day on the perils of Reaganolatry.

The trouble for the GOP isn’t just that younger voters don’t remember Reagan, but that most of them have fairly clear memories of the last administration and/or the current Republican leadership. Presidential candidates can talk about Reagan all they like, but it won’t change the fact that for most people that became politically engaged over the last fifteen years Republican governance has a horrible reputation of incompetence and recklessness. Republican candidates almost have to fall back on praising someone who hasn’t been in office in a quarter century, since for most of the time since then their party has become synonymous with failed and disastrous policies.

I do disagree somewhat, since "incompetence and recklessness" were practically Reagan's middle names, and his corrupt regime contributed a lot to our present problems.  Which is, no doubt, why Barack Obama admires him so much.

The comments under the post are a mixed bag, but I especially liked this fine example of Reaganolatry by a self-identified Reagan supporter:

That’s why Reagan, were he here and in sound mind, would regard Snowden as a patriot, just as Democrat Wyden and Republican Rand do.

I didn't believe that for a second, so I looked around to see if I could find what Reagan had said about Daniel Ellsberg, and I didn't have much luck for a while.  But I was sure that he must have said something, since Reagan was a constant and vocal presence on the American political scene during that period. Knowing his reactionary politics, I did not believe that Reagan approved of whistleblowers exposing American's delicate privacies to the harsh light of day.  I finally found this, from a June 28, 1983 press conference during which President Reagan was asked about reports that his 1980 presidential campaign had used briefing books stolen from the Jimmy Carter campaign.  He replied:

Well, my answer is that it probably wasn't too much different from the press rushing into print with the Pentagon Papers, which were stolen. And they were classified. And it was against the law. Now, I want the Justice Department to find out if anybody did anything that broke the law.

Which is roughly what was said about Bradley / Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden thirty years later.  So no, I doubt very much that Reagan would have thought either of them to be patriots.

"Special Rights" for Me, But Not for Thee

You know what's funny about this?

Columnist Cal Thomas, radio host Dana Loesch, and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins took part in a CPAC panel on religious freedom Saturday, and they pronounced that times were dire for followers of Jesus Christ.

“I feel like it’s time to make Christians a protected class,” Dana Loesch said, as the discussion reached a fevered pitch of self-pity.

This is what's funny about it, from the 1964 Civil Rights Act, emphasis added:

TITLE II--INJUNCTIVE RELIEF AGAINST DISCRIMINATION IN PLACES OF PUBLIC ACCOMMODATION
SEC. 201. (a) All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

In other words, Christians are already a "protected class." And as apologists for bigotry have been saying for fifty years, if your civil rights are now guaranteed by law, you have nothing to complain about anymore, so shut up shut up shut up.

Of course, there's a catch. The Act doesn't specify which religions you can't discriminate against. Christianity is just one, and the Act refers to all of them. (There are Christians who would consider this persecution in itself, since they insist that Christianity is not a religion but a 'relationship with God', something like that.  So it's a hate crime to say that discrimination against Christians is discrimination based on religion, because Christianity should be singled out by name as a protected class of its own.)  Which means that Christians can't persecute members of other religions, or that right-wing Christians can't persecute other Christians -- and that, of course, they regard as persecution, a "dictatorship of relativism" as a noted Bavarian theologian called it. (Nor are they alone in this: the ultraorthodox Jewish Israeli men who got their jollies by spitting on and vilifying as whores eight-year-old Orthodox girls complained, when they were compelled by other Israeli Jews to stop doing so, that they were being persecuted, just like in Nazi Germany. Yes, really, they did.)

So, when the clowns at CPAC claim that Christians are being persecuted, what they mean is that some Christians -- their kind -- are being persecuted, because they aren't allowed to persecute others for their beliefs. Their kind of Christian isn't exactly a marginal, fringe sect -- there are quite a lot of them -- but they aren't all Christians and they don't speak for Christianity as a whole. But then, NO CHRISTIAN DOES. That includes liberal Christians, who also would like you to believe that they are the True Christians. They aren't. There is no true pure core of Christianity, or of Judaism or of Islam or of any other religion. Which is why the current fuss over whether ISIS is 'really' Islamic annoys me. Of course Isis is Muslim; so are the Muslims who repudiate them. But that's another issue.

Of course civil rights legislation doesn't address all the kinds of discrimination that people can suffer from.  But there is a lot of confusion over what "civil rights" are and what the law covers.  As I've noted before, a lot of people seem to believe that "civil rights" means specifically, the rights of black people.  One indication of this confusion is terminology like "the gay rights movement," which encourages gays and straights alike to believe that adding "sexual orientation" to civil rights laws will protect only gays and not heterosexuals or bisexuals.  (For the same reason, I suspect that there will be some unwelcome consequences as "gender identity" and related language is added to civil rights laws to protect transpeople.  These provisions will also protect cis people.  I can't think offhand of what cis people will need protection from, but as with "sexual orientation," I suspect we'll find out soon enough.)

P.S. While I'm on the subject of unforeseen consequences of legislation, I should mention the Equal Access Act of 1984, which I've seen mentioned in a couple of different books on gay youth that I've read lately.  Christian groups lobbied for the bill to force public schools to allow student religious clubs to meet in school buildings and use school resources, and it was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.  According to Melinda Miceli in Standing Out, Standing Together (Routledge, 2005) her book on gay-straight alliances,

... in the hearings leading up to the passage of the EAA, the point was raised that passing the act would also permit school clubs (such as a club for gay and lesbian students) that the religious leaders lobbying for the act did not approve of to meet on school property.  Passage of the EAA was so important to its advocates’ goal of fighting what they viewed as discrimination against religious speech in public schools that they were not dissuaded by this possibility. ... The EAA is now, perhaps, the single most important tool available to students who wish to start GSA clubs, especially after the Salt Lake City case made national headlines for over two years [39].

The EAA was probably intended to get the theocratic camel's nose into the tent, but it had consequences its advocates preferred not to consider.  No doubt they believed that, with Reagan in the White House, they could use the EAA to advance their agenda but no one else could.  But Reagan served his two terms and went back to private life, and imposing reactionary Christianity on the nation has proved more difficult than its adherents expected.  Not only GSAs but student groups espousing non-Christian religions -- or no religion at all -- have found the EAA a useful tool.  I love such little ironies.

Single Standard Dept.

Roy Edroso's latest post at alicublog:

Thursday, May 15, 2014

THIS IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW.

The guys who continue to worship the most senile President in history want you to think Hillary Clinton is too old and feeble to serve. 

Haw haw haw, those stoopid Rethuglicans!  It occurred to me that this cuts both ways.  The guys (and gals) who made much of Reagan's age back in the day aren't at all concerned about Clinton's age as it might affect her fitness to be President.  She'll be almost exactly the same age in 2016 as Reagan was in 1980.  He was born in 1911, so he was 69 in 1980; she was born in 1947, so she'll be 69 in 2016.  So if Reagan was too old to run, isn't she?  (I noticed during the 2008 campaign that Ralph Nader was older [seventy-four!] than both of them, but no one else, not even those who demonized Nader, seemed to notice or care.)

Reagan was always a flake, so his endless flubs, gaffes, and lies weren't necessarily early warning signals of what turned out to be Alzheimers.  Clinton seems to be more lucid than Reagan was, most of the time, but she's just about as dishonest and evil.  The difference between Reagan's fans and Clinton's fans once again comes down to which party they favor.

Somewhere Over the Reagan

I understand the anguish that produced this meme, and I sympathize with it.  But it happens to be false.  Which doesn't affect its claim that racism is behind a lot of the vilification of Barack Obama; of course it is.  It's not necessary to falsify history to make and defend that claim, however.

In order: Franklin Delano Roosevelt was attacked by the Far Right as the Jew Franklin Delano Rosenfeld: far from the Episcopalian Christian he pretended to be, they alleged, Roosevelt was descended from Dutch Jews, "surrounded himself with socialist Jews even when he was Governor of New York, and many were appointed to top jobs in the Roosevelt administration".  The source of that quote claims that there's nothing necessarily anti-Semitic about tracing Roosevelt's allegedly Jewish ancestry.  That's trivially true, but in historical context there was no other reason to dwell on it even if were true.  For example:

From the viewpoint of eugenics, it [FDR’s Jewish background] explains his natural bent toward radicalism … and proves unmistakably, that the Roosevelt administration offers a biological, as well as a political problem. It is therefore as natural to him to be radical as it is for others to be true Americans … HE IS NOT ONE OF US!”
- Gerald Winrod, Defender magazine, 1935

A major propagator of the "Jew Rosenfeld" claim was the notorious Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest who gained a radio audience of millions in the 1930s with a venomous spew of anti-Semitism and anti-Communism.  Coughlin

drew 40 million listeners in the early thirties to his Sunday afternoon program, double the 20 million that Rush Limbaugh has claimed for his audience. But he didn’t just talk; he urged action—illegal and terrifying. By1938, increasingly unhinged and openly anti-Semitic, Coughlin was using his radio pulpit and his 200,000-circulation newspaper, Social Justice, to advocate for the creation of a violent hate group, the Christian Front. The group soon boasted members numbering in the thousands throughout the cities of Northeast. It has largely been forgotten that Coughlin’s “platoons,” as he called them, were responsible for a months-long campaign of low-level mayhem in New York City: They attacked Jews with fists and sometimes knifes. They boycotted Jewish-owned businesses (guided by a “Christian index” of shopkeepers) and sometimes smashed their windows in the German fashion. This ugly episode culminated when 17 Coughlinites were arrested by the FBI in January 1940 and charged with planning acts of terrorism against Jewish individuals and institutions (and those deemed their allies). 

Although he didn’t have a role in orchestrating the plan, Coughlin, after a brief hesitation, gave his full-throated support to the “Brooklyn Boys,” saying in a January 21,1940, broadcast that “I take my stand beside the Christian Fronters … [and] … reaffirm every word which I have said in advocating [the Front’s] formation.”

Coughlin operated with the indulgence of his superiors in the Church; they took no action against him until after the US went to war against Germany.

He left the radio airwaves of his own volition in 1940, but he continued to publish Nazi propaganda in Social Justice until the spring of 1942, when the U.S. government suspended his second-class mailing permit, charging that the paper obstructed the war effort in violation of the 1917 Espionage Act. Coughlin’s boss, Detroit Archbishop Edward Mooney, was roused to put his foot down and demand that Coughlin not fight the government’s action in court. He bowed to ecclesiastical authority. At least, that’s been the standard story for decades. Author Richard Sipe, a former priest who has written several books about the sexuality of Catholic priests, offers evidence that Coughlin stayed silent only after Hoover called him up and threatened to go public with “proof of Coughlin’s homosexuality.”

Despite all this, Coughlin maintained "his pastorship until his retirement in 1966"; he died in 1979.  Of FDR he said as late as 1970:

Roosevelt is Jewish. Rosenfeld was the first name and he wasn’t regarded as one of the first founders of Jewry in this country, either. I have a book out there with the pedigree of all the Jews in it written by a Jew which I can show you ...some of them more famous Jews than he.

I first heard about the "Jew Rosenfeld" canard in the 1970s, from Gore Vidal's recollections of some

West Point generals who took some pleasure in denouncing that Jew Franklin D. Rosenfeld who had got us into the war on the wrong side.  We ought to be fighting the Commies not Hitler.  But then FDR was not only a kike, he was sick in the head -- and not from polio but from syphilis.  Anyway, everything could be straightened out -- with just one infantry brigade they would surround the White House, the Capitol, remove the Jew ...

So, as you can see, Obama is not the only President to have been denounced in such terms.  The kind of anti-Semitism described above is not dead yet, it's still alive on the Web and elsewhere, but for the most part its sentiments and rhetoric have been transferred to Muslims.

Of the other presidents in the meme, Dwight Eisenhower has been accused of being of Jewish descent, but on this level, who hasn't?  Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, claimed that Eisenhower was "'a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy, and that the government of the United States was 'under operational control of the Communist party.' It was, he said in the summer of 1961, '50-70 percent' Communist-controlled."  But by that time the new Right wing, people like William Buckley, were anxious to establish themselves as sane, rational extremists, so they attacked Welch.  He held a place somewhere in the American political imaginary comparable to that of the Westboro Christian Church: such an extreme, virulent nutjob that less extreme, slightly less virulent nutjobs could use him to make themselves look more moderate.  In this period, Red-baiting was standard political procedure, and Richard Nixon built his career on it.  But again, Obama is neither the first nor the only American President to have been the target of such smears.

As for Ronald Reagan, he was a right-wing Red-baiter himself.  His political support came from the same part of the political spectrum whose rightward margins were defined by groups like the Birch Society, though he too used the Birchers as an extreme to make himself look more moderate.  Democrats called Reagan an extremist, which was true for what little the label is worth.  But Dwight D. Eisenhower endorsed him for the governorship of California.  In any case, nobody was going to call Reagan a Red, or a Jew (hell, he bought a house under a "racial covenant" to keep it out of Jews' hands), or un-American; like Nixon, he was the one who did that to other politicians.

Reagan, then, is the one President listed of whom this meme's claim is true.  Whoever came up with it is evidently very ignorant of twentieth-century American political history.  But history isn't really its purpose, is it?  It's primarily another case of liberals crying "Oh, how can you say such awful things?" in response to right-wing smears, instead of buckling down, doing their homework, and fighting back in an informed, halfway rational way.

One more bit about Father Coughlin: the New Republic writer I quoted above discusses Coughlin's 1938 defense of Kristallnacht, the massive, organized Nazi attack on German Jews that outraged many people around the world:

Coughlin argued ... that the atrocity was merely a “defense mechanism against communism,” which was the product of “atheistic Jews.” He sneered at the attendant publicity, “attributable to the fact that Jews, through their native ability, have risen to such high places in radio and in press and in finance.”

As rhetoric, this is very similar to defenses of Israel's current attack on Gaza (now ended by a truce and ceasefire).  The "defense mechanism" should be obvious enough, but I've also seen numerous defenders of Israel claim that critics of the attack have been "brainwashed by the media" -- which is funny when you consider that the US corporate media have been uniformly supportive of Israel, now as always.  Am I comparing Israel to the Nazis?  No; I'm comparing Israel to the Roman Catholic Church.

There He Goes Again!

I still love Andrew Ti, but he screwed  up again yesterday.

 

Have it your own way, Andrew, but I don't think you realize that it means that the man who uttered these words must also be racist:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

There He Goes Again, and Again and Again

I'd put my copy of There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error into storage, partly because I hadn't realized it would come in handy later.  Compiled by Mark Green and Gail MacColl and published in 1983, it collected and corrected dozens of the Gipper's most significant falsehoods.  The age of Reagan is over -- or so I thought -- so There He Goes Again could safely be put aside.

But then, a few weeks ago, President Obama proudly asserted the Reagan Revolution as his heritage, and Reagan as a fellow centrist who couldn't have won the presidential nomination from today's Republican party.  The Right jeered -- one pundit asked "Where are the moderate Democrats?", thereby supporting Obama's, and Mike Huckabee's, and the Economist's (via) claim.  Obama's toadies jumped in line behind him, and stuff like the above cartoon began turning up on Facebook.  It was time, I realized, to dust off There He Goes Again.

I'd already noticed that a couple of minor details had been overlooked.  Take the notion that Reagan "was too reasonable," because he raised taxes, enacted tariffs to protect American industries, supported environmental protection, and as Obama put it, "understood repeatedly that when the deficit started to get out of control, that for him to make a deal he would have to propose both spending cuts and tax increases. Did it multiple times."  These were things Reagan did after he was in office.  He campaigned on a platform that rejected such measures. An apologist might argue that Obama did the same thing: he adjusted to political realities that hadn't been effective while he was running for office.  But that isn't true: Obama expressed his admiration for Reagan while he was campaigning, and the economy was already staggering before he was elected.  Obama had already supported Bush's TARP program, and defended it during the campaign.  He also spoke of the need for "reform" of Social Security, which he misrepresented as being in crisis.  While he did reverse himself on a public option for health insurance reform, and on support for labor, and some other matters, he was already obviously a politician of the Right before he took office.

Reagan, by contrast, was forced by political reality to move toward the left.  As with Obama, his devotees were ready to forget his lapses from small-government right-wing orthodoxy while he was governor of California, and his election was hailed by the Christian Right as their Vindication, the proof that Yes They Could.  That was because Reagan had a long history as a vicious far-right demagogue, at odds with his own record as a working politician, but true believers look to what their leader says, not what he does.

[P.S. The difference between them could be summed up this way: Reagan campaigned as a right-wing extremist, but had to govern as a relative moderate; Obama campaigned as a moderate, but governs as a right-wing extremist.  It should also be remembered that polls showed that people voted for Reagan because they liked him; they opposed his policies and hoped he wouldn't carry them out.]

Social Security is a good example of this.  I'll take as given that the Reagan quotation in the above cartoon is accurate, though a look at its historical context would probably be less flattering to Obama.  But a look at There He Goes Again shows that Reagan had campaigned against Social Security for decades; he had to moderate his rhetoric somewhat as a major-party nominee, but he continued to work against it.  In September of 1980, during the campaign, he told the New York Times, "I never suggesteded that Social Security should be voluntary."  Green and MacColl commented (page 87):

Not never.  Voluntary Social Security was a staple of Reagan's mashed potato circuit speeches of the '60s.  For example: "Social Security ought to be voluntary ... so those who can make better provision for themselves are allowed to do so" (Human Events, Nov. 1966).  Or, "Don't exchange freedom for the soup kitchen of compulsory insurance" (New York Times, 1/17/76).

In a radio address a year later (September 24, 1981), President Reagan declared: "There has been a great deal of misinformation and for that matter pure demagoguery on the subject of Social Security ..."

The misinformation is on the subject of just how much the President wants to cut.  He has acted to eliminate Social Security benefits for students who are children of deceased and disabled workers; proposed cutting the minimum benefit for Social Security recipients; and allowed his Health and Human Services Secretary to propose cutting benefits at 62 years of age -- a proposal rejected by the Senate, 95-0 [pp. 87-88].

In the long run, Reagan got his way.  There are calls to raise the retirement age and cut benefits, from President Obama's Catfood Commission for example.  (The Commission was unable to agree on a report, but the two chairmen, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, issued their own recommendations, which were widely misrepresented as speaking for the Commission as a whole, though it rejected them.)

But back to the first Reagan.

During the 1982 election campaigns, the Republican TV advertisement showed a white-haired mailman delivering July's Social Security Check, which contained an automatic cost-of-living increase in benefits.  "President Reagan kept his promise to the American people," the ad proclaimed.

In fact, Reagan opposed the increase in Congress, which passed it anyway.  Rep. Claude Pepper (D-Fla.) chairman of the House Committee on Aging, said that for Reagan to claim credit for the increase "lowers the art of deception to depths not explored since the Nixon Administration" (New York Times, 7/7/82) [p. 89].

As you can see, Obama learned to prevaricate from a master.

Reagan: The Other Third Rail

Thanks to my Tabloid Friend on Facebook, I know that Ron Paul was foolish enough to criticize Ronald Reagan some years ago. First below is the 1987 quotation from Paul, then Politico writer Ginger Gibson's commentary.

“I think we can further thank Ronald Reagan for doing a good job [on furthering the Libertarian Party]. He certainly did a good job in 1980 pointing out the fallacies of the Democratic liberal agenda and he certainly did a good job on following up to show the disaster of the conservative agenda as well.”

The first rule in modern GOP politics is that you do not diss Ronald Reagan. The Reagan embrace may not be as tight as it was, say, a decade ago, but he is still a revered figure in the party. Thus, the above line from Paul’s nomination speech at the 1987 Libertarian Party convention in Seattle may not go over well with GOP regulars.

Fortunately, some American presidential candidates are cannier and more cautious than Ron Paul where Reagan is concerned. Here's how you do it, Ron:

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

Yep, that was Barack Obama (via), during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Or was he aiming for the Republicans?

Trouble and Turmoil, and Reagan's Third Term

If I hadn't been off my feed for the past couple of weeks, my Right Wing Acquaintance 1 was giving me plenty of fodder for blog posts, like his link to this National Review Online article on Hugo Chavez, to which he added this comment:

Venezuela is in for trouble and turmoil, whatever Chavez's health. He has been Castroizing the country with the help of experts from Cuba, and the opposition is systematically being jailed, intimidated, and suppressed. It is probably not too late for the opposition to resist, but the situation looks precarious. This is caudilloism under the red flag.

The usual sack of lies. If Chavez really were a dictator -- a Mubarak, a Pinochet, a Suharto, a Duvalier, a Saddam Hussein -- RWA1 and the National Review crowd would be behind him all the way, with perhaps some faux-fastidious concern about his going over the top now and then but you can't be too fussy about a little torture and murder because he had to do something! Chavez isn't a patch on people like Mubarak or the usual run of Latin American dictators, and RWA1 was not happy to see Mubarak go. I doubt he even knows what Venezuela was like before Chavez came along. The prediction of "trouble and turmoil" for Venezuela is of course a hope, not a prediction: gotta punish those grimy yahoos for trying to throw off the benign yoke of American corporations and their local friends.  Give 'em a bloodbath, a constructive one, to teach them obedience.

Soon after RWA1 put that story up on his wall, I learned that the Guardian, the most liberal if not left of mainstream British newspapers, had tried to smear Noam Chomsky for writing a letter critical of Chavez (via). It wasn't the first time the Guardian had misrepresented Chomsky, either.

Chomsky said:

It's obviously improper for the executive to intervene and impose a jail sentence without a trial. And I should say that the United States is in no position to complain about this. Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is. The president in fact intervened. Obama was asked about his conditions and said that he was assured by the Pentagon that they were fine. That's executive intervention in a case of severe violation of civil liberties and it's hardly the only one. That doesn't change the judgment about Venezuela, it just says that what one hears in the United States one can dismiss.

(RWA1 has been silent about Bradley Manning, on Facebook at least. And it's not irrelevant that Human Rights Watch, which has criticized Chavez, also has called for an investigation of Bush-era torture by the US, which President Obama has no intention of doing, but of course Human Rights Watch are just a bunch of backward-looking extremists when they can't be used for US propaganda against its official enemies.)

Chomsky also told the Guardian:

We may compare [Venezuela's record] to Colombia next door. Colombia's human rights record is incomparably worse. The judges in the constitutional court have been investigating cases of corruption, crimes at the highest level, and they have been intimidated. They have received death threats, and they have to have bodyguards and so on. And apparently that's continuing under [President José Manuel] Santos.

RWA1 has been silent about Colombia too; but hey, human rights violations in countries that enjoy massive US support aren't news, it's like dog bites man. Besides, our allies around the world are under attack by Communists and terrorists -- they have to do something!

But it was RWA1's link tonight that was the most amusing: an opinion piece, "Winning Moderate Millennials," by one Elise Jordan. It's mostly a review of a book by Herbert Hoover's great-granddaughter Margaret.

... To attract the next generation of Republicans, Hoover says, we need to re-brand conservatism or risk extinction.

"Re-brand" -- you can tell RWA1 is depressed when he doesn't jeer at an article with that kind of marketing jargon in it.

Hoover nails how Millennials — that next generation of voters, ages 18 to 29 — view the GOP’s brand as almost exclusively socially conservative. She discusses what she calls “conservative tribalism,” the labels — neocon, crunchy con, paleocon, lib-con, and theocon — that are tearing the party apart in the absence of a unifying leader. She points out that when Millennials look at the infighting, they see only the most socially conservative ideas winning. But if we were to focus on conservative principles embodying individual and economic freedom, we could actually tap into this fifth of the electorate. Hoover’s message is that there are conservative issues that should be a priority — such as education reform, expanding legal immigration, and combating radical Islam — and there are those that should not — fighting gay rights, pushing intelligent design, or denying climate change.

But here's the punchline:

[Hoover] points out that Reagan himself was very “impure” — he raised taxes, left Lebanon, and cut deals with Tehran — yet he was still the most successful conservative president — thanks to his pragmatism, not in spite of it.

So let’s be on the lookout for the next Reagan, not the next Trump.

Um, the next Reagan is in the White House, right now. Of course he's wearing the wrong brand, but he's on record as admiring the Great Communicator and his party, and he's worked very hard to show that he means it.

I'm reminded of the way that some liberal writers have been wringing their hands over Obama's political future, and what will happen to the Democratic party. For party loyalists (and RWA1 is a party man, just like Elise Jordan and Margaret Hoover), the letters D and R trump everything, including the good of the vast majority of human beings.