CHAPTER ONE
PRELUDE:
THE REVENGE OF THE RADCONS
WEALTH AND POWER
It might help you to know a few things about me so that you understand where I’m coming from. I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a rural part of New York State, near the Connecticut border. My father worked six days a week and my mother five days a week at their two clothing stores. We weren’t poor, but I remember my father worrying a lot about paying the bills. Another thing you should know is I was very short for my age. I still am. Both my parents were normal size, so my short height was something of a puzzle. But being a very short boy, it was natural I got picked on at school.
There’s no way of proving these things, but I suppose my early worries about paying the bills and being bullied had a few long-term effects. As an adult, I’ve been teaching and writing about the economy and government—that is, about wealth and power. I’ve also had the honor of serving under three presidents, most recently in Bill Clinton’s cabinet. In these roles I’ve tried to help people without much money get better jobs, and also tried to stop some corporations from abusing their power.
The market is where wealth is accumulated; politics is where public power is exercised. In a democracy, they are supposed to be kept separate. But in fact, people with a lot of wealth exert significant political power, and people with a lot of power can arrange things so that they end up with a lot of wealth. When wealth and power are concentrated in a relatively few hands, democracy can become a sham and a lot of bullying can occur. The great liberal Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis put it best more than sixty years ago: “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”1 We are now losing our democracy, and we have to get it back.
I never used to think of myself as being a liberal. Compared to most students in the sixties, I was considered pretty conservative. I went to Dartmouth College, whose political epicenter in those days was about 25,000 miles to the right of Berkeley.
I rejected a lot of the values and politics of the student New Left of the sixties. Taking over college buildings and burning American flags seemed dumb to me. I viewed the Vietnam War as morally wrong but never drifted into the cynicism or anti-Americanism of some of my leftist friends, who started spelling America with a “k.” I always believed it possible to reform the nation by working within the political system—and still do. I spent much of my senior year campaigning for Eugene McCarthy, by then the only presidential candidate who vowed to end the war. And I’ve spent a big portion of my life since then in public service. While I’ve never refrained from criticizing our political leaders when I thought they were wrong, I’ve always had a deep love for this country. To me, America is a great, noble, continuing experiment. We haven’t achieved our ideals by a long shot. But the ideals are still worth working for: protecting the weak from the strong, overcoming prejudice, providing broad opportunity to everyone, creating a vibrant democracy.
My first full-time job after law school was working for Robert Bork at the Justice Department, in Gerald Ford’s administration. Bork, you may remember, was the person who fired the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, during the Watergate investigation. Cox had been trying to get the White House to hand over tape recordings of conversations that would show if Richard Nixon was involved in the Watergate break-ins. Nixon finally handed over the tapes anyway, on August 5, 1974. He knew their contents would condemn him. Four days later, Nixon resigned. A few weeks after that, I arrived in Washington and reported to Bork.
Bork had been one of my professors at law school. I didn’t share his political views but I respected him. So when he asked me to come to Washington, I accepted. My job was to write briefs on behalf of the United States in cases that were to come before the Supreme Court. I stayed two years before moving to the Federal Trade Commission, after Jimmy Carter was elected president. Bork went on to become one of the most thoughtful radical conservatives in America. You may recall that in 1987 Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court, setting off an intense battle over his confirmation. I quote Bork at some length in this book because his writing has been so influential among radical conservatives. I still disagree with him, but I still respect him.
It’s possible to disagree and yet still be respectful. I strongly disagree with, but know and respect, several of the radical conservatives I quote in this book—not only Bork but also Bill Bennett, a former Reagan administration official who has become the Radcon voice of public morality; Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, who has articulated much of Radcon foreign policy; and Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House. Their ideas deserve a fair hearing, and a clear case should be made for why they are dangerously wrong.
In the sixties (a period that in political and cultural terms actually ran from about 1964 to 1972), the New Left was the source of most of the political passion and intensity in America. Liberals were considered wimps—wishy-washy, bourgeois. The militant organizer Saul Alinsky adopted the definition of a liberal as someone “who leaves the room when a fight begins.”
Now it’s hard to find any sixties lefties, except maybe in the rarefied precincts of a few universities where aging radicals still debate Marxism and deconstruction. Most of the political passion and intensity these days are on the radical conservative right.
But the two extremes—what remains of the sixties left, and the Radcons—share much of the same sense of moral superiority, the same unwillingness to consider alternative points of view.*2 There’s an important difference, though: The left never gained the power in America that the Radcons now have.
In my view, both extremes are wrong. Liberals, on the other hand, doubt that anyone has a monopoly on the truth. That’s why liberals place such a high value on tolerance and democracy. That’s why liberals have insisted on a clear separation between church and state. And it’s also why liberals worry about wealth and power. When wealth and power become concentrated in the hands of a relatively few citizens, the strong become stronger; everyone else, more vulnerable.
The word “liberal” was used by George Washington to indicate a person of generosity or broad-mindedness, as opposed to those who wanted to deprive Catholics and Jews of their constitutional rights.2 Franklin D. Roosevelt defined a “liberal” this way: “[S]ay that civilization is a tree which, as it grows, continually produces rot and dead wood. The radical says: ‘Cut it down.’ The conservative says: ‘Don’t touch it.’ The liberal compromises: ‘Let’s prune, so that we lose neither the old trunk nor the new branches.’ “3 FDR himself expanded and altered the common understanding of liberalism. Before the New Deal, liberalism was mostly about protecting people’s freedom. But the Great Depression taught America that unemployment and bad luck could be just as harmful to personal freedom as tyranny. Protection against these required a larger role for government.
Henceforth, liberals were assumed to be in favor of a big government. But that’s way too simple. The government’s size or reach isn’t the issue. It’s what government does and whose interests it represents. Does it guard our civil liberties or intrude on our privacy? Does it protect the weak or promote the strong? I don’t want a big government eavesdropping on my private telephone calls or e-mail, checking the books I’ve borrowed from the library, monitoring my movements, telling me what I can and can’t say. I don’t want a big government pouring billions of dollars into big companies—energy behemoths, agribusinesses, pharmaceutical giants, whatever—because they’ve made large political donations. And I don’t like the idea of a giant military machine mounting “preemptive” wars without international backing. I don’t want a big government that’s the center of an intimidating, unaccountable empire.
Being a liberal isn’t at all the same as being in favor of big government, despite what Radcons claim. Most liberals would prefer a small government that supported and protected the little guy over a big government that did the bidding of the wealthy and powerful. Frankly, people I know are more worried that our democracy is being corrupted by an increasing flow of campaign money from rich people and corporations to politicians. I also don’t want a big government imposing any particular religious view on me or my kids, or on anyone else. In my view, government has no business telling people how to run their private lives or dictating personal morality. I don’t want government giving or withholding funds to promote marriage, discouraging childbearing by welfare mothers, or pushing religion in our public schools.
Again: Government’s size isn’t the issue. It’s what it does, and for whom.
RADCONS AREN’T REAL CONSERVATIVES
Here, briefly and in its most undiluted form, is the Radcon agenda for America:
• prevent sex before marriage
• ban abortion
• condemn homosexuality
• prohibit gay marriage
• require prayer in the public schools
• give large tax breaks mainly to the rich
• cut social services mainly for the poor
• “privatize” social insurance
• eliminate regulations on business
• allow pollution of the environment
• ban affirmative action
• impose long prison sentences and, for the most serious crimes, the death penalty
• make English the official national language
• invade and occupy countries that may harbor or help terrorists
• go it alone in foreign affairs, disregarding the United Nations and avoiding international treaties
• squelch dissent about foreign policy
• restrict civil liberties for the sake of national security.
Most open-minded Americans will grant that there are arguments for and against each of these positions. What defines a Radcon is not openness to the case for them but fervent certainty they’re correct and necessary, and disdain for those who disagree.
This list, of course, doesn’t cover all radical conservative goals. And not every radical conservative subscribes to every one of them. But most radical conservatives agree on most. The consensus among Radcons is strong because these goals are based on a common worldview—both about the forces America is battling at home and abroad, and about how these forces can best be overcome.
Most of this book is about why these views are wrong, what a vigorous liberalism stands for instead, and why our future depends on the latter. But it’s important at the outset to understand the roots of radical conservatism. Radcons, it must be noted, are very different from real conservatives. A real conservative is somebody like the late Senator Robert A. Taft, of Ohio, or Senator John McCain, of Arizona—someone who wants to conserve many of the things that are great about America: the value we place on hard work, our dedication to family and community, our love of freedom, our storehouse of generosity and tolerance.
Real conservatives are cautious. They’re skeptical of big ideas, grand plans, risky moves. When change is necessary, they prefer doing it gradually, carefully, methodically, step-by-step. And they’re meticulous about laws and procedures: Means are as important to them as ends. They admire the great eighteenth-century British philosopher Edmund Burke, for whom the French Revolution offered a lesson in how easily radical change could get out of hand, how quickly the good could be destroyed along with the bad. “When the subject of demolition and construction is not brick and timber, but sentient beings,” Burke wrote, “multitudes may be rendered miserable.” Burke believed in going slowly. “Circumspection and caution are part of wisdom.”4 I believe that, too.
But radical conservatives are revolutionaries. For them, ends justify means. They’ll do whatever it takes to win. Listen to Paul Weyrich, prominent Radcon founder of the Heritage Foundation and coiner of the term “Moral Majority": “We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country.”5
Radcons are intent on dramatic change and are willing to bet the ranch on unproven theories. For example, even if you believe that giving giant tax breaks to rich people who are already fabulously wealthy will cause them to invest the extra money in new factories and machines, and hence grow the economy, you’ve got to admit it’s a big gamble. If the Radcons are wrong about this, a lot of things go wrong: The federal budget goes bust, long-term interest rates go sky-high, and baby boomers don’t get the Social Security or Medicare they’re counting on. Real conservatives wouldn’t take this gamble. They’re wary about public debt; they’re fiscally prudent to a fault.
Even if you think it’s smart to disregard the United Nations and international law, and unilaterally declare war on and then occupy nations capable of passing weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, surely you’ll admit it’s a giant roll of the dice. If the Radcons are wrong, we could end up stirring up more terrorism rather than less. We could find ourselves fighting guerilla wars all over the planet, and suffering a police state at home.
Real conservatives are concerned about civility. They have codes of honor and rules of conduct. They worry about the “coarsening” of American culture. And they’re wary of demagogues who stir people up. Edmund Burke, again: “Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”6
When I was about ten, I sat for hours at a time on the porch of an old codger who lived down the street. He told me Franklin D. Roosevelt was the worst thing ever to happen to this country and that communists were taking over America. Even at that young age I knew he was spouting nonsense. But I kept returning to his front porch for two reasons. First, he bribed me with lemonade and cookies. Second, he was one of the nicest people I’d ever met. He was a gentleman. I appreciated that. He taught me that traditional conservatives were polite. They were even willing to argue a point.
But radical conservatives are uncivil in the extreme. They fill the public airwaves and bookstores with nastiness. Listen to Radcon talk radio or cable TV news and what you mostly hear are venomous diatribes. Read the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, Washington Times, New York Post, New York Sun, or any other Radcon outlet, and you find vicious attacks. Open a Radcon political best-seller and you find more mean-spirited screeds. Radcons typically reduce political debate to nonsensical statements that seem to be making a point but are nothing but vague and angry assertions, unsupported by facts.
• America is “being overrun by psycho-lib Commu-Nazi organizations like the ACLU who defend child molesters and terrorists.” This from Michael Savage, talk-show host.7
• “The liberal catechism includes a hatred of Christians, guns, the profit motive, and political speech and an infatuation with abortion, the environment, and race discrimination. . . . [T]hey hate ‘flag-wavers,’ they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam (post 9/11),” writes Ann Coulter, author and pundit.8
• “The Democrats—far too many of them—are evil, pure and simple. They have no redeeming social value. They are outright traitors themselves or apologists for treasonous behavior. They are enemies of the American people and the American way of life,” says Joseph Farah, web logger.9
• The American people reject what is “abnormal or perverted” including “commie libs,” “feminazis,” and “environmental wackos.” This from Rush Limbaugh, talk-show host.10
• Why did 9/11 happen? “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’ ” This from the Reverend Jerry Falwell. (Falwell subsequently backed away from this televised remark.)11
• Islam is a “very wicked and evil religion,” says the Reverend Franklin Graham.12
•"A little nutty, a little slutty.” This was how David Brock described law professor Anita Hill after she testified against Clarence Thomas; the description was used repeatedly by other radical conservatives.13
• “Head shots. Head shots.” This is the way G. Gordon Liddy, a radio talk-show host, instructed his listeners on how to assassinate government agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.14
• “Barney Fag” is how Dick Armey, then House majority leader, referred to Representative Barney Frank, a gay member of Congress. (Armey subsequently apologized.)
By offering this sampling of quotes, I don’t mean to tar all Radcons with the intemperate words of a few. Nor do I want to blame anyone for a slip of the tongue or a thoughtless gaffe later regretted. I want only to point out an incontrovertible pattern. I could have offered any number of quotations from the books, broadcasts, and political campaigns of radical conservatives. What unites them is their stridency and meanness.
Nasty politics is hardly new to America, of course. The two major slogans of the 1884 presidential campaign were “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine,” and “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!” (the latter referring to Grover Cleveland’s alleged illegitimate child). If you’ve entered the public arena, you’ve got to expect mud to be slung in your direction. I’ve run for office and let me tell you: If you don’t already have a thick hide, you’re in trouble.
Radcons aren’t alone in their capacity for nastiness, either. Liberals and Democrats have also smeared opponents. They treated Robert Bork during his Supreme Court nomination fight as shabbily as anyone has been treated in public life.
But what we’re now witnessing is something far more corrosive of civic life than the normal political vitriol: It’s a viciousness directed toward anyone holding a view other than the prevailing radical conservatism. Insults are also calculated to belittle and ridicule entire groups who have relatively little power in our society—blacks, the poor, Hispanic-Americans, Arab-Americans, immigrants. Or who are judged to be “different”—gays, feminists, Muslims.
This kind of generalized venom closes off reasoned debate, chills dissent, and cuts people off from one another. It is especially dangerous to democracy when it’s bankrolled by large amounts of money; when its perpetrators ally themselves ideologically with those who run our government; when it so dominates the media—talk radio, talk television, books, and the Internet—that the public hears and sees little else; and when it’s repeated so often it becomes the accepted norm. Unfortunately, all of this is now the case.
The liberal tradition values free speech and debate. No one should be deterred from speaking his or her mind for fear of offending some group. I have little patience for “political correctness.” But liberalism also values civility and a fair exchange of views. The mindless, mean-spirited trash talk that fills Radcon books and radio and television broadcasts panders to the worst in us and demeans us all. It may sell, but that’s no defense; so does hard-core porn. Shame on those who poison our public life this way.
THE RADCON THEORY OF EVIL
I’ve asked myself repeatedly why Radcons are so often vicious and uncompromising, so willing to sacrifice means to ends. Marxists would say they’re just shilling for the rich. Ordinary cynics would say they’re motivated by the lure of great wealth or the headiness of power. But I think these interpretations are unfair. In my experience, most radical conservatives hold their beliefs sincerely. They’re convinced they are speaking the truth—though often imprecisely or illogically—and are acting in the interest of the broad public.
To understand their radicalism, you need to understand their notion of evil.
To Radcons, the major threat to the security of our nation, the stability of our families, our future prosperity, and the capacity of our children to grow into responsible adults is a dark, satanic force. It exists within America in the form of moral deviance—out-of-wedlock births, homosexuality, abortion, crime. It potentially exists within every one of us in the form of sloth and devastating irresponsibility. It exists outside America in the form of “evil empires” or an “axis of evil.”
There’s no compromising with such evil. It has to be countered with everything we have. Religious faith and discipline are the means of redemption. Punishment and coercion are the only real deterrents. Fear is the essential motivator.
This overarching principle connects Radcon foreign policy and domestic policy with evangelical Christian fundamentalism. It forms a coherent system for thinking about and dealing with any problem. Sexual urges must be constrained, lest they cause the moral rot of America. Crime must be dealt with harshly or it will multiply. All of us must be subject to the discipline of the market, lest we succumb to lassitude and irresponsibility. American power must be asserted forcefully all over the world or foreign evil will overwhelm us.
Unless it is disciplined, the evil that lurks within all human beings will push civilization into chaos. “Every new generation constitutes a wave of savages who must be civilized,” writes Robert Bork in his apocalyptic and influential 1996 best-seller, Slouching Towards Gomorrah. An undisciplined society “cannot summon the will to suppress public obscenity, punish crime, reform welfare, attach stigma to the bearing of illegitimate children, resist the demands of self-proclaimed victim groups for preferential treatment, or maintain standards of reason and scholarship. That is precisely and increasingly our situation today.”15
To Radcons, unconstrained sex is evil. Sex outside marriage is evil. Homosexuality is evil. After the Supreme Court voted to strike down a Texas law criminalizing homosexual behavior in 2003, the Reverend Pat Robertson, the television evangelist, told his followers that the Court had “entered into the arena on the side of evil” (while praying that ill health would disable those responsible for the ruling).16
Radcons took the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as confirmation of their moral mission to extirpate evil around the world. “A calculated, malignant, devastating evil has entered the world,” explained Attorney General John Ashcroft.17 “And we know God is not neutral,” added George W. Bush.18
It’s true, of course, that there are terrible people in the world who have done, or may yet do, abhorrent things to their fellow human beings. Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden and others responsible for 9/11, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milosevic all deserve to be called evil. So do those who presided and carried out genocide, or “ethnic cleansing,” in Cambodia, Rwanda, Armenia, Kashmir, Burma, and elsewhere.
But there’s a vast difference between calling someone or some group “evil” because of what they have done and using “evil” as an explanation for why they acted as they did and as a description of their goals. To think of “evil” as a satanic force that has “entered the world” suggests that our only alternative—and only hope for survival—is to expunge it. Evil cannot only be contained, reduced, negotiated with, offset, limited, impounded, constrained, or embargoed. If it is truly evil, it must be eliminated. You cannot be partly evil or potentially evil. You cannot, as someone who is not evil, occasionally side with evil, or think evil might have a point. You are either evil or you are good. If you are evil, or in league with evil, you must be eviscerated. If you have allowed yourself to be overtaken or tempted by evil, you must be cleansed, converted, and reborn. All or nothing. You are either with us or against us. For the Radcons, it’s that simple.
Likewise, if you’re good, you needn’t bother yourself with second thoughts or subtle reasoning. You don’t have to think through the consequences of your choices since there is no risk they will have evil effects.
The liberal tradition has never seen the world in such starkly Manichean terms. Where Radcons seek to expunge or destroy evil, liberals instinctively try to prevent or contain bad actions, even if the acts are abominable. The classic liberals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rejected the medieval notion that satanic forces could take over human beings. They opposed religious persecution, the stoning of witches and wizards, and the common view that strangers and foreigners were contaminated. Modern liberals celebrate diversity and preach tolerance. They believe that what consenting adults do in private is no one else’s business. They are willing to punish crime, but prefer to give young people a good education and job opportunities so that they don’t fall into it. They accept the disciplinary force of the market, but think that people need to be protected against unforeseen risks or bad luck. They unambiguously oppose tyranny and brutality, but would rather find ways to prevent it through the spread of prosperity and democracy than by responding in every instance with military force.
These are more than differences of degree. They represent fundamentally different views about what threatens the human race and how best to deal with such threats.
In its moral absolutism, its faith in the redemptive power of discipline, its emphasis on punishment, and its theory of evil—in all these respects, radical conservatism sees itself as the counterforce to the sixties left. No matter that the sixties left has all but vanished. According to Radcons, it released an evil into the world that still imperils American civilization. Redeeming America requires that every trace of that sixties thinking and culture be erased—its sexual promiscuity, its radical egalitarianism, its godlessness, its disdain for authority, its humiliating defeat in Vietnam.
THE ABOMINABLE SIXTIES
The poet Philip Larkin writes:
Sexual intercourse began
in nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.19
Dartmouth College is in Hanover, New Hampshire, about halfway up the border between New Hampshire and Vermont. I arrived in September 1964, before coeducation and before the interstate highway reached there. In other words, I went to school in Siberia. The college handbook warned that “fornication” was grounds for expulsion, but the college had little reason to worry. Girls (if you could find them) were allowed in dorm rooms only on weekends during daylight hours. Doors had to remain ajar and at least three of your feet had to remain on the floor, which resulted in some creative positioning. By the way, Dartmouth wasn’t alone in its commitment to abstinence. I distinctly remember a sign in the lobby of one Wellesley dorm, solemnly instructing that “Men Will Withdraw By Ten.”
All this changed in three years. The ground had shifted—not the granite under New Hampshire but entire tectonic plates underlying much of the Western world. The college handbook no longer banned fornication. Although Dartmouth hadn’t yet gone co-ed, young women seemed to be all over the place at all hours. In fact, I began knowing some of them as people rather than the objects of my frustrated libido. And many of them started viewing themselves in a new light as well. They saw no reason they shouldn’t become lawyers or doctors or business executives or anything else we young men aspired to be.
Marijuana also arrived on campus, in such quantity it must have been delivered daily in Mack trucks. Then, as if on cue, the Beatles turned hallucinogenic, the civil rights movement turned militant, hair lengthened considerably, Lyndon Johnson ordered up 50,000 more soldiers for Vietnam, and students began burning American flags. Sex, feminism, drugs, rock and roll, black power, flower power, power to the people, make love not war—the boomers came of age and America was never the same.
We boomers comprised the largest generation in American history. We began appearing in this world about nine months after my father, Ed Reich, and millions of other men from the “greatest generation” returned from war in 1945. By the spring and early summer of 1946, hospitals everywhere were jammed, diapers and cribs in short supply, baby clothes unavailable.
My mother gave birth to me on June 24, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Twelve days later, on July 6, in New Haven, Connecticut, George W. was born. On July 21, Kenny Starr arrived. Kenny’s future nemesis, Bill Clinton (born Billy Blythe III), came along a few weeks after. And on and on they emerged: George’s future wife, Laura, that November; adorable Danny Quayle, the following February; Tom DeLay, later the fierce Republican majority leader, in April; Hillary Rodham, in October; Tom Daschle, December; sweet little Clarence Thomas, the next June; and within two years, several million other boomers, including cute Rush Limbaugh and cuddly little Bill O’Reilly.
Many of the boomers were raised according to the progressive dictums of Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose Baby and Child Care was first published that same boom year of 1946. Spock’s book became the bible of post–World War II parenting, eventually selling more than fifty million copies. It told young parents that their children’s needs were as legitimate as their own. Parents were to be rational and flexible with the little darlings, not arbitrary and absolute. They were to reason with and respect them, listen to their counterarguments and be prepared to be persuaded, and use approval rather than punishment as a way of motivating them.
Why did so many boomer parents accept Spock’s advice? Perhaps they were reacting to the fresh scars of Nazi fascism and Soviet totalitarianism. Harsh, authoritarian discipline and punishment may have seemed uncomfortably close to the agonies the world had just endured. Maybe American society concluded, at some deep level of collective unconsciousness, that it had to reject the previous generation’s model of strict fathering in favor of nurturing mothering.20 Whatever prompted boomer parents to alter the older patterns of child rearing, emphasizing obedience to authority, the results were indisputable.
Taking these boomer adolescents out of their homes simultaneously in the 1960s, squeezing so many of them into holding bins called universities, letting their hormones rage, allowing their anti-authoritarianism free rein, and you had a formula for spontaneous combustion. Add in a civil rights movement that ignited the hopes of blacks until it got bogged down in northern inner-city poverty, and you had an explosion. Mix in a deeply unpopular war in Vietnam whose casualties were escalating, and a draft that threatened to force most young men to fight it, and you had a revolution.
The revolution occurred elsewhere around the world, too. A similarly giant wave of boomers hit Europe and parts of Asia, bringing America’s anti-authoritarian boomer culture with them.
Of course, not all boomers were revolutionaries, by a long shot. Many of those who would become the advanced guard of the Radcon movement were also in college when the revolution occurred. Unlike most of the boomers, many of them were appalled by what they witnessed.
Some were intimidated by the wild goings-on. Others were college Republicans who had patiently worked the system and resented that it was now falling apart. Many southerners and westerners from churchgoing or military families were horrified at the decline of authority and at the casual anti-Americanism. There were also the children of Jewish intellectuals who fell under the spell of the University of Chicago’s Leo Strauss, who taught that the goal of political life ought to be an objective sense of virtue and social order, not freedom and tolerance.
Many of them would eventually become counterrevolutionaries. As early as 1978, in his first successful race for Congress from Georgia, Newt Gingrich declared war on the sixties. “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz,” he said. “I see evil around me every day. . . . We were promised all the multi-partner sex you wanted and penicillin would take care of it. We were promised all the recreational drugs you wanted and it wouldn’t be dangerous, wouldn’t be addictive. . . . The left-wing Democrats represent the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness, and the total right to cripple innocent people in the name of letting hooligans loose.”21
A lot of America’s traditional blue-collar families agreed. To them, the student radicals of the sixties represented the opposite of everything that was good about America—personal morality and the family, order, the value of hard work, and patriotism. Some of these white working-class families, especially in the South, had already been alienated by the civil rights movement; some in the North were turned off by forced busing and affirmative action. The hedonism of the student lefties was enough to send them careening toward the hellfire-and-brimstone of the radical conservatives.
Radcons continue to exploit the white working class’s disgust. “What a mess the sixties were. A real nightmare. We almost lost the country,” writes Radcon talk-show host Michael Savage in his 2003 best-seller, The Savage Nation. “The joy of America in the fifties was unmatched. . . . I loved the values of the fifties. . . . Everything was normal. Then, all of a sudden, the freaks popped up out of the woodwork and ruined America. . . . Tragically, we’ve never recovered from the sixties’ madness.”22
For Radcons, the sixties left was the source of America’s subsequent moral decline. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb blames it for “the collapse of ethical principles and habits, the loss of respect for authorities and institutions, the breakdown of the family, the decline of civility, the vulgarization of high culture, and the degradation of popular culture.”23
Bill Bennett, the Radcon “morality czar” who was secretary of education under Reagan and in charge of the anti-drug campaign in the first Bush administration, finds in the sixties a “root cause” for the subsequent rise in divorce and out-of-wedlock births in America. The American family fractured because of “the massive shift in cultural, personal, and sexual values that began in the mid to late 1960s and took hold in the 1970s.” In “the years of the New Left and the counterculture, of campus rioting and the spread of recreational drugs, Americans came to place a much higher premium on individualism, on unrestricted personal liberty, and on personal choice. Authority and traditional institutions were called into question.”24
The editors of the Wall Street Journal are even able to assign a specific date for “when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks.” It was “August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.” The Journal editors don’t blame the protesters. They blame the “intellectuals—university professors, politicians and journalistic commentators—who said then that the acts committed by the protesters were justified or explainable.” The editors continue: “That was the beginning. After Chicago, the justifications never really stopped. America had a new culture, for political action and personal living. . . . [The establishment] defended each succeeding act of defiance—against the war, against university presidents, against corporate practices, against behavior codes, against dress codes, against virtually all agents of established authority.” Henceforth, the shapers of American opinion “would blow right past the broken rules to seek an understanding of the ‘dissidents’ (in the ’60s and ’70s) and ‘activists’ (in the ’80s and now). Concurrently, the personal virtue known as self-restraint was devalued.”25
This is nonsense, as I will show.
Radcons also link the disdain for established authority on the part of sixties rebels with America’s defeat in Vietnam. To Radcons, Vietnam wasn’t just a national humiliation; it represented the ultimate erosion of authority and discipline. “Something is still at stake in the argument over Vietnam,” writes Bork. “The debate about that war is a contest between two opposed ways of viewing the world, whose current form is the war in the culture.”26
The Vietnam War marked the epitome of leftist anti-Americanism, but the Radcons saw it as just the beginning. “The profound tremor that went through American society starting in about 1965 was not just about the Vietnam War,” writes Mona Charen, Radcon columnist and author. “Some deep wellsprings of dissatisfaction, petulance, and irritability were tapped by the war. All at once, everything about American society—from its ‘materialism’ to its supposed ‘militarism’—was decried and despised. . . . [I]n the mid-1960s, leftist anti-Americanism went mainstream. They condemned America for its poverty and at the same time for its consumerism. They demanded (and got) sexual license and grade inflation.”27
In the Radcon worldview, the anti-war flag burnings, protest marches, and critiques of American values that emerged from the sixties also undermined America’s military resolve. For liberals and Democrats, writes Charen, “the Vietnam War was immoral . . . and America as a nation was a depraved predator whose power represented a danger to the rest of the world.”28 Bill Bennett believes that “since Vietnam and especially since our defeat there, our culture has undergone a process that one observer has aptly termed debellicization. Military virtues have been devalued and shunned, and along with them the very idea that war solves anything or is ever justified.”29
This presumed legacy explains, in part, why the Radcons have been so determined to reassert American power around the globe. Winning the Cold War wasn’t enough; America won because the Soviet Union fell apart from the inside. To redeem America’s greatness and to purge the nation of the anti-Americanism of the sixties, America must maintain preeminent military power. It must mount preemptive wars against potentially hostile nations. And it must disown any international organization or treaty that stands in the way of American hegemony.
This Radcon view emerged long before the terrorist attacks of 9/11. As early as 1992, a “Defense Planning Guidance” statement, drafted for then defense secretary Dick Cheney by Paul Wolfowitz (who became deputy defense secretary in the George W. Bush administration), called for “preemptive” attacks on nations that posed potential threats to the United States, and increases in military spending to the point where American power could not possibly be challenged.30 In 1998, Donald Rumsfeld, among others, urged Bill Clinton to make removal of Saddam Hussein and his regime “the aim of American foreign policy.”31
But the sixties occurred more than three decades ago, you might say. Why would radical conservatives continue to blame the sixties? They do so because, in the Radcon worldview, the sixties are still with us. “[W]e see at work in today’s culture the same attitudes, indeed many of the same people, that undermined America then,” writes Bork. “Our division over the Vietnam conflict has been called America’s second Civil War. ‘Healing’ will not happen until the people who remember have passed from this world.”32
Surgeons have long known of a phenomenon called the “phantom limb.” Someone who loses an arm or leg often continues to feel the limb despite its absence. The nerve endings haven’t adjusted to the fact that the appendage is no longer there, and send signals back to the brain as if the arm or leg were still attached.
The Radcons’ continuing obsession with the sixties left is roughly analogous. Radcons simply refuse to accept that the sixties are over and that the left of those days has disappeared. In point of fact, the limb is gone. Some of the student radicals of the sixties became aging hippies and moved to rural enclaves in Vermont, northern California, and other leftie preserves. A few drifted to university faculties. Some are still active in left-leaning politics. But most are middle-aged adults who do ordinary things like sell insurance or aluminum siding and bring up their families as best they can. They no longer burn draft cards or bras. Their politics is far more moderate than it was thirty years ago. Some, as I’ve said, have even become Radcons.
Yet to the Radcons, the student revolutionaries of the sixties are still poisoning America. “The Sixties may be seen in the universities as a mini–French Revolution that seemed to fail, but ultimately did not. . . . They and their ideology are all around us now,” writes Bork. “It is important to understand what the Sixties turmoil was about, for the youth culture that became manifest then is the modern liberal culture of today.”33
Herewith, the deep paranoia of America’s radical right: They fear that sixties revolutionaries went underground after graduating, only to reappear in recent years as adults holding the same revolutionary values they did before. They’re more dangerous now because they’re disguised as normal, mild-mannered people. Some are in positions of leadership and their radicalism is secret. Here’s Bork again:
The temporary abeyance of the Sixties temper was due to the radicals graduating from the universities and becoming invisible until they reached positions of power and influence, as they now have, across the breadth of the culture. They no longer have need for violence or confrontation: since the radicals control the institutions they formerly attacked, the Sixties temper manifests itself in subtler but no less destructive ways. . . .
[S]tudent radicals provided the McGovern cadres that took the party left in 1972. Later, as Capitol Hill staffers and elected congressmen, they moved the congressional Democrats well to the left of most Americans who consider themselves Democrats. . . . [T]he formulations of the Sixties are now deeply embedded in our opinion-forming institutions and our culture.34
This paranoia goes far to explain why Radcons hated Bill and Hillary Clinton from the moment the two arrived in Washington at the end of 1992. The first boomer inhabitants of the White House, they represented what the Radcons detested most about the sixties—its lack of discipline, its self-indulgence, its sexual permissiveness, its anti-war softness, and its in-your-face feminism. Rumors of Clinton’s extramarital history had dogged his 1992 campaign; he famously avoided the draft; his first act as president was to issue an executive order allowing gays to serve in the military. Then he put his wife in charge of the most important initiative of his first term, health care.
“The spirit of the Sixties revived in the Eighties and brought us at last to Bill and Hillary Clinton, the very personifications of the Sixties generation arrived at early middle age with its ideological baggage intact,” sniffs Bork, on the second page of his book.35
When I read Bork’s words in 1996 my mind immediately flashed back to a quarter century before, when Bill, Hillary, and I listened obediently to Bork’s law school lectures and eagerly answered the questions he put to us in class. Clarence Thomas sat in the same classrooms. None of us bore any resemblance to sixties revolutionaries. We were the very models of ambitious young people, seeking law school degrees so that perhaps one day we could, at most, help reform the system.
The Lewinsky scandal during Clinton’s second term seemed to confirm for Radcons what they had suspected all along. Bill Bennett chided Americans who said they believed the charges against Clinton but didn’t care about them. It was like “making a deal with the devil.”36 The challenge was not just removing Clinton from office but eradicating “decadence” in the country.37
Tom DeLay, then House majority whip, told a Baptist delegation in Texas that Clinton had to be impeached because he had “the wrong world view.” DeLay told them God was using him to promote a “Biblical world view” in American politics instead.38
I don’t excuse Clinton’s behavior with Monica Lewinsky. His behavior was wrong; his lies about it even more so. Yet now, as I look back on the entire sordid business from a time when the nation is grappling with terrorism and war, it seems woefully trivial.
Like other puritanical upheavals in history, the Radcon movement is a counterrevolution against perceived moral lassitude. To Radcons, global terrorism and domestic degeneracy are symptoms of a deeper threat: an evil that exists around the world and also within each of us, an evil that was released in the sixties and never eradicated. The only sure remedies are coercion, self-discipline, punishment, and religious orthodoxy.
The counterrevolution against the sixties began when Ronald Reagan became president. It gathered momentum in the eighties and nineties, and is now in full force.
THE COUNTERREVOLUTION
By 1980, I was a low-level official in the Carter administration. But it didn’t take long for the Reagan White House to find me. I left Washington just as I had begun there six years before—fired with enthusiasm. I got a job as a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which is a kind of preserve for people who get fired by new presidents.
When I returned to Washington in the early nineties as Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, I discovered a different city from the one I’d left. Washington had been transformed into warring camps. In the intervening years, conservatives and liberals had gone to battle over two Supreme Court nominees—Bork and Clarence Thomas. The battles were intense because the Court was so closely divided on hot-button issues like abortion and prayer in the public schools, and either of these nominees might have tipped the scales. The tactics on both sides were shameful, with liberals demonizing both nominees and conservatives demonizing the liberal demonizers.
After Bork lost his nomination fight, Newt Gingrich announced that Radcons were declaring war: “The left at its core understands in a way Grant understood after Shiloh that this is a civil war, that only one side will prevail, and that the other side will be relegated to history. This war has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars. While we are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the ballot box, not on the battlefields, nonetheless it is a civil war.”39
Gingrich understood it would be necessary to resurrect the sixties left in order to inject the nascent radical conservative movement with vitality and purpose. But, in fact, the fights over Bork and Thomas represented the only significant times during the Reagan and elder Bush administrations when the remnants of the left stormed into battle. Most of the student left of the sixties had by then moved on into the Big Chill of careers and families. Most older liberals of the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society were sliding into late middle age or retirement. Gingrich’s upcoming savage “war” would be notable for the paucity of troops and weaponry on the other side.
Both sides became nastier, but radical conservatives marshaled more resources to promote their nastiness—more money, a more disciplined political organization, more media “shock troops” to back them up. Consider each, in turn:
1. Money. The first thing I noticed when I returned to Washington was its new wealth. Washington in the late seventies had still been somewhat tacky. There were far fewer lobbyists then, but whenever one of them wanted to take me out to lunch I’d suggest a small dive called Barney’s, right across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Federal Trade Commission. The fanciest meal you could get at Barney’s was ham and cheese on two-day-old rye. Barney’s also had a fleet of cockroaches. I rarely saw the lobbyist again.
But now Barney’s was gone. Pennsylvania Avenue glittered with the polished facades of refurbished hotels, restaurants, and bistros. The dazzle stretched from Georgetown to Capitol Hill—office complexes of glass, chrome, and polished wood; well-appointed condominiums with doormen who knew the names and needs of each inhabitant; hotels with marble-floored lobbies, thick rugs, soft music, and granite counters; restaurants with linen napkins, leather-bound menus, and heavy silverware.
Most of the money came from large corporations, now supporting an army of lobbyists, association executives, communications specialists, media advisers, political consultants, and, of course, political candidates. All were in hot pursuit of deregulation, privatization, and lower taxes—an agenda vigorously promoted by Ronald Reagan and radical conservatives. But Democratic legislators, some of them even liberals, had begun drinking from the same corporate trough. They assumed, correctly, that they held such an iron grip on the House (Republicans hadn’t been in control since 1954) that corporations would support them just to gain access. “Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed Democratic Representative Tony Coelho, who became head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 1981.40 Democrats became so dependent on this funding that they would be disabled once they lost power. This dependence would also blur their message and limit their vision in future years, as became evident when many congressional Democrats voted against Bill Clinton’s health care plan in 1994 and for George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.
Money also started flowing into Washington from an avid group of right-wing billionaires and their family foundations, all with the goal of funding the counterrevolution. Out of their benevolence grew a wide assortment of Radcon think tanks, and also the Federalist Society, which became the center of Radcon judicial activism. This story has been well chronicled, and I will not repeat it here.*3
2. Political power. The Radcon political revolution actually started two years after Reagan became president, when House Republicans lost twenty-six seats in the 1982 elections. Three members—Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott of Mississippi, and Dick Cheney of Wyoming—were spurred to create the Conservative Opportunity Society, dedicated to infusing the Republican Party with a new and more virile form of radical conservatism. Their strategy was to appeal to southern white voters wary of the Democrats’ continuing support for racial integration and affirmative action, to working-class “Reagan Democrats” whose earnings were dropping and who felt alienated from the remnants of the sixties left, and to the Christian right.
The strategy succeeded. Cheney became House minority whip. When the first President Bush named Cheney secretary of defense in 1989, Gingrich took his place. In 1994, when Republicans gained control of the House for the first time in forty years, Gingrich became Speaker, finally putting the Radcons in charge.
The emerging Radcon political organization, as well as its increasing stridency, was also fueled by evangelical Christian fundamentalists. By 1980, Protestant evangelicals constituted about 40 percent of southern white voters. They steadily shifted into the Republican camp. As many as 42 percent of the delegates to the 1992 Republican convention in Houston were connected with the Christian Coalition. It was there that the coalition’s Pat Robertson warned that “unless America returns to her Christian roots . . . she will continue to legalize sodomy, slaughter innocent babies, destroy the minds of the children, squander her resources, and sink into oblivion.”41
There was no effective counterbalance. By the mid-1980s, liberalism had gone into eclipse. Congressional Democrats were increasingly dependent on corporate donations; New Deal liberals were getting old; and the remnants of the sixties left—having rejected liberalism—had by now turned inward toward “personal development,” the “identity politics” of race and gender, and academic theories about deconstruction. Democrats had nothing of any relevance to say to the vast number of working-class men and women whose incomes were growing increasingly precarious. Hence, American politics moved steadily rightward. Bill Clinton ran for office in 1992 as a middle-of-the road southern moderate with positions almost indistinguishable from those of moderate Republicans in the seventies.
I had seen Clinton occasionally since we were at law school together. I admired his efforts while governor of Arkansas to modernize the schools there, and was eager to lend a hand in his campaign. I contributed to his campaign plank, Putting People First, but the resulting document was hardly a liberal manifesto. “Our policies are neither liberal nor conservative, neither Democratic nor Republican,” it read. It emphasized “the forgotten middle class” and spoke of “providing opportunity, taking responsibility, and rewarding work.” Clinton pledged to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement, end welfare, and put more police on the streets and more criminals behind bars—positions that would have been barely recognizable to the Democratic Party of the seventies.
Yes, Clinton also promised to “guarantee every American affordable, quality health care,” but this wasn’t considered especially liberal at the time. Most Americans wanted affordable health care, and still do. Big corporations were also looking for ways to control the spiraling costs of employee health care. Medical costs had tripled between 1980 and 1992. The plan that emerged from the Clinton White House was way too complicated (I didn’t even understand it and I was supposed to help sell it), but I doubt even a simpler plan would have succeeded. Republicans didn’t want to give Clinton a legislative victory. They launched a multi-million-dollar campaign to kill it, featuring “Harry” and “Louise,” two characters who appeared repeatedly on radio and TV in select media markets, warning that the plan would take away people’s choice of family doctor and destroy many of the health benefits Americans already had. “Experts” from Radcon think tanks echoed the claims. Radcon talk-show hosts amplified them. These were trumped-up charges—the plan wouldn’t limit choice of doctor and would expand most people’s benefits—but they stuck. Republicans were united and steadfast; Democrats were disunited and unsure of themselves. Despite a Democratic Congress, the plan died.
After Gingrich’s Republicans took over the House at the start of 1995, Washington turned even more bitterly partisan. I was secretary of labor then, and I remember the sharp change in barometric pressure, as if a hurricane had blown in. Almost overnight, the Labor Department was deluged with demands from new Republican House chairmen for documents and information about all sorts of mundane things that went on in the department—meetings, telephone calls, expenditures. I knew they were fishing expeditions intended to find any small error or omission that might be used to catch me, and then fry me.
As Speaker, Gingrich was the Radcon commander in chief. I met him several times and each time went away with the impression he was a military general in an age where party politics had turned into warfare. He liked to describe himself as a revolutionary force, but he often behaved more like a naughty boy—grinning uncontrollably when I congratulated him on a particularly devious legislative ploy, or overly defensive when I gently chided him for misusing a certain historic fact. His office was adorned with figurines of dinosaurs, as you might find in the bedrooms of little boys who dream of one day being huge and powerful. To characterize him as “mean” missed this essential quality of naughtiness. It was the meanness of a nasty kid rather than a tyrant.
Gingrich’s key lieutenants were southerners and westerners. Almost nine out of ten of his new committee chairs were from the South or West. This was no accident; these precincts were the sources of Radcon power. In many of these states, religious conservatives controlled the local Republican Party machinery. These new GOP leaders were virulently pro-life, anti-gay, pro-military, scornful of Democrats and liberals, especially repulsed by the legacy of the sixties left.
There is no need here to recount the subsequent events in detail—the shutdowns of the federal government; the charges against Clinton, culminating with impeachment; the bitterness and the brazenness of the 2000 presidential election. My point here is to place all of this in the larger context: the right-wing money that bankrolled the Radcon strategy; the political battle lines formed even before Clinton came to office; a Radcon legal establishment eager to pounce; and the Radcon media. Combine all this with a profound sense among Radcons that Bill and Hillary Clinton, and even Al Gore, personified the evil of the sixties left, and you begin to understand the intensity of the war. It continues today.
3. Media “shock troops.” The third element of the counterrevolution has been an ever-growing cacophony of pundits and talk-show hosts who advance the Radcon agenda as they rage against immigrants, environmentalists, feminists, gays, the poor, the American Civil Liberties Union, the French, Arabs, Bill and Hillary, Democrats, and, especially, liberals. The media outlets for these “shock troops” were bankrolled by a new group of Radcon media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon; and they have been regularly echoed and supported by the formidable editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Rush Limbaugh’s radio show went national in 1988. By 2003, it was carried by more than six hundred stations, listened to by some twenty million people, and spawned imitators across the radio spectrum. Televised versions of Radcon talk shows began in the late nineties with Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, commanded by Republican political strategist Roger Ailes. Fox News’ slick brand of opinionated, right-wing talk began to attract a following that, by 2002, overtook CNN as the leader in cable news ratings. Its success also bred imitators. Soon, MSNBC television was featuring a similar right-wing formula.
I have often appeared on these programs as a token liberal. I do so because they present at least a chance to debate issues before the public—an opportunity that’s becoming rarer and rarer. But unfortunately I’ve come to think that straightforward debate is the last thing on my hosts’ minds. They only want the appearance of giving the “other side” a forum, not the reality. Typically, a booker for the program phones me in the late morning, asking my opinion about some issue in the news that the Radcon producer or host wants to highlight. If I say I strongly disagree with the prevailing Radcon position, the booker is pleased, and asks if I’m available that evening at a particular “hit time” (when the segment is tentatively scheduled to begin). Usually, I’m pitted against a Radcon analyst from the Heritage Foundation or some similar right wing–funded institution, or a Radcon politician. The five-minute exchange is intended to look like a balanced debate, although the host sides with my opponent and often interrupts me in mid-sentence.
It amazes me that Radcons continue to get away with charging America’s news media with a “liberal bias.” To support this accusation they rely on right-wing “media watchdog” groups bankrolled by wealthy Radcons. Even when Radcons admit to the right-wing bias of most radio and cable-television talk shows, they say it’s necessary in order to balance the liberal bias of major newspapers, television networks, and public radio and television. This is utter nonsense. The argument equates right-wing political commentary with news reporting done according to well-established standards of journalism. The reality is this: To the extent that political opinions are offered in the media, they’re overwhelmingly from the right. This has been well documented.*4
As I’ve said, I first came to Washington right after the Watergate crisis of the early seventies. During that constitutional emergency, Republicans and Democrats alike distinguished themselves by their determination to preserve and protect the institutions of government, while forcing the resignation of a man who abused the power of the presidency. The system worked as it should.
After I returned to Washington in the nineties, a band of radical conservatives, intent on winning at any cost, undermined Bill Clinton’s presidency, laid the groundwork for a new and risky foreign
policy, abused the election process, and forced the Supreme Court to take sides in a presidential election. The system stopped working, and it hasn’t worked since. Our public debate has become increasingly one-sided, and shrill; our political campaigns, engorged with money; our government, even including our courts, bitterly partisan. By the start of the twenty-first century, Newt Gingrich’s notion of politics as a war “to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars” has become a shameful reality. It is turning Americans against one another, and against much of the rest of the world. And it is undermining our democracy.
VALUES
The Radcons’ dominance isn’t due only to their money, discipline, and tactics. More fundamental has been the Radcons’ capacity to shape the public debate around their idea of evil. Put simply, Radcons have offered America a set of ideas—about morality, prosperity, and patriotism—that celebrate “us” and condemn “them.” We are virtuous; they are venal.
We are heterosexual, married, and clean-living. They are gay or lesbian, sexually active outside marriage, and in favor of abortion.
We are hardworking, white, and middle class. They are idle, poor, black, or Latino or Asian immigrants who don’t speak English but benefit from our social services.
We are Americans. They are terrorists. They are also Muslims and Arabs. They are even French and Germans, or anyone else who is not with us.
Unless our values prevail, they will triumph.
This dangerously oversimplified way of looking at the world offers many Americans who feel angry and frustrated an easy explanation for what’s gone wrong in their lives. And a lot has gone wrong.
Not the least, the rise of the Radcons has in fact corresponded with the widening drift of workers across America into two different worlds—one rich, the other economically anxious. Consider: The after-tax income of the top one percent of American earners has more than doubled since 1990, while the after-tax income of families in the middle has grown only slightly.42 The richest one percent of Americans now have almost two-fifths of the nation’s wealth. That’s more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent. The wages and benefits of America’s blue-collar and low-level white-collar workers stopped rising in the late 1970s, and have barely budged since then. White men without four-year college degrees have actually experienced a decline in their pay. Meanwhile, the costs of staples of the middle class—education, health care, housing, and medicine—have risen faster than median family incomes.43
Naturally, many Americans have looked for someone or something to blame. Radcons conveniently offer “liberalism” and everything associated with it. And they manipulate the elemental passions of morality, family, and patriotism to explain why they’re right and liberals are wrong.
You’d think America’s large, anxious middle and lower-middle class would have the most to gain from a bold agenda focused on getting them good jobs, affordable health care, and excellent public schools, financed with progressive taxes. But there has been no such agenda. As I’ve noted, Democrats have fallen silent. The money pouring into Washington, coupled with the Radcons’ highly disciplined political machine, and their media “shock troops,” has blocked any such program. At the same time, the muted response of liberals and Democrats has allowed Radcons to exploit these economic anxieties for their own ends, diverting public attention and distorting public outrage.
As I’ll show, the Radcon version of morality seeks to impose private religious norms about sex and the family on the entire nation, transforming matters of private morality into law. Radcons are looking in the wrong direction. America is facing a moral crisis, but it is abuses of authority at the highest levels of America that are stacking the deck against average working people and small investors, and undermining public trust in the entire economic and political system. They raise central questions of public morality.
The Radcon version of prosperity rewards the rich, gives almost nothing to the middle class, and penalizes the poor. Contrary to what Radcons say, this doesn’t lead to economic growth. As I’ll demonstrate, the real way to grow the economy is by widening the circle of prosperity to include Americans who have been falling behind. Shared prosperity isn’t incompatible with growth; it’s essential to it.
Finally, the Radcon version of patriotism is downright dangerous. I call it “negative patriotism” because it stifles dissent at home and insists that America be so much stronger militarily than any other nation that we can bully others into submission. In truth, both of these make America more vulnerable. If we’re unable to hear criticism, we can’t correct dangerous errors in our policies, and all governments make errors. If we appear to act like a bully, we can’t get the cooperation we need from other nations—both in fighting terrorism and reducing the risk that nuclear weapons will fall into terrorist hands. As I’ll discuss, we need a “positive patriotism” that recognizes that our security depends on our moral authority in the world, not simply on our brute strength. And that demands that all Americans—not just the middle class and the poor—accept their fair share of the burden of keeping America strong.
The Radcons’ emphasis on exterminating evil—outside the nation as well as within it, and within each of us—is leading us down a treacherous path. It’s turning us against one another and against much of the rest of the world at precisely the time when we have to stand together.
America needs a very different approach, based on reason and common sense. That’s liberalism, properly understood.
ADDENDUM:
A GUIDE TO THE RADCON GLOSSARY
Many of the words and phrases used by Radcons have been crafted over the years by pollsters, wordsmiths, and media consultants seeking the most persuasive means of packaging Radcon values and demonizing their opponents. The results are widely disseminated by Radcon talk-show hosts, pundits, and politicians. Some have become such standard staples of American political discourse that they are almost taken for granted. A small sample:
Big government. Bill Clinton famously “triangulated” by saying that the era of “big government” was over, but the term continues to be used derisively by Radcons to distract the public’s attention from the fact that Radcons epitomize big government. They have created the largest and most expensive military in the history of the world, given the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation broader powers to spy on Americans, and come up with some of the largest federal deficits in American history. In short, they’ve made government far bigger and more intrusive.
Blame-America-firsters. Anyone who expresses doubts that the United States is perfect in every way is assumed to be a member of this group—unless they’re Radcons blaming America for its moral decadence. The phrase was first popularized by Jeane Kirkpatrick, columnist and U.N. ambassador under Reagan, at the Republican National Convention in 1984, when she attacked the Democrats. “When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations . . . Democrats did not blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States. But then, they always blame America first.”44 The phrase has since been used to criticize those who express even constructive criticism of American policies. During the Iraqi war of 1991, Bill Bennett wrote, “One reads the statements of the blame-America-firsters and listens to their chants, and one wonders if they have ever absorbed a single fact about the despicable character of Saddam Hussein. . . . There is a name for this attitude, and the name . . . is anti-Americanism.”45
Class warfare. Liberals are accused of fomenting this if they even so much as point to the rapidly widening divergence of income and wealth in the United States. Or if they reveal that most of the tax breaks pushed by George W. Bush were meant to further enrich those at the top. The truth is that it’s Radcons who have declared class warfare.
Death tax. This is used to refer to the tax on estates that applies almost exclusively to families in the top 2 percent. Republicans spent five years prodding their troops to use this term. Newt Gingrich made anyone who forgot and uttered “estate tax” put a dollar into a pizza fund.46
Environmental wackos, tree huggers, environazis. These are applied to anyone who expresses concern about the cleanliness of air and water, and a willingness to sacrifice some economic growth in order to improve their quality.
Family values (see also Traditional family). Liberals are accused of being opposed to these when they suggest that gays and lesbians should have the same legal rights as heterosexuals, that women and their doctors should decide whether an abortion is merited, or that government should help finance child care, health care, or family leave.
It’s my money (sometimes phrased as “It’s your money"). This is used by Radcons in anti-tax harangues to fool people into thinking that wage-earners should be allowed to keep all their income, ignoring the fact that their taxes pay for public schools, roads, water, clean air, bridges, national defense, seaports, police, fire departments, public health and safety, and other essential services. Imagine the nation without them.
Liberal establishment (also termed “liberal elite"). This phrase is meant to mask the reality that, by the start of 2004, Radcons were in control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the presidency, a significant percentage of the federal courts, almost all political think tanks, most of the political-opinion media, and a large portion of the money pouring into Washington.
Liberal media. See pages 41–42.
Limousine liberal, liberal stooge, screaming liberal. These and similar sobriquets are self-reinforcing because Radcons have been successful in almost totally distorting what the word “liberal” means. As early as 1976, Representative Morris Udall said that although he continued to think of himself as a liberal, he used the term “progressive” to define himself in public because the word “liberal” was “associated with abortion, drugs, busing, and big-spending wasteful government.”47
Operation Iraqi Freedom (see also War on terrorism). This term was repeated verbatim on all Radcon radio and television outlets to lull the public into believing that the purpose of the Iraqi war was to free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein, when the original purpose, as initially stated by the President, was to prevent “weapons of mass destruction” from getting into the hands of Al Qaeda’s terrorist network, which might use the weapons against the United States.
Partial-birth abortion. This is an extremely rare medical procedure resorted to when the mother’s life is in danger, but the term is used repeatedly by Radcons who want the public to think that abortion is the equivalent of killing a baby.
Political correctness, or PC. This term is still used by Radcons to describe liberal objections to forms of speech that are offensive and insensitive to certain groups. Radcons themselves consider it politically incorrect, however, to criticize America or American foreign policy.
Radical feminists, feminazis. These are applied to anyone who calls for equal opportunity for women.
Traditional family. This term is contrasted with single parents, gay couples, and unmarried couples, who are considered as “deviant” as bigamists or people who commit incest. According to Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court’s finding that homosexuals have a right to consensual sex is “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.”48
War on terrorism. These words are meant to suggest that terrorism can be subdued through military actions staged against easily identifiable adversaries, involving bombs and troops, leading to decisive victories. The term “war” also creates the impression that suspensions of civil liberties, invocation of censorship, or the extraordinary powers vested in the president during such an emergency will be temporary measures until the “war” ends. In fact, fighting international terrorism is not like fighting a war. It’s more like controlling crime, requiring continuous policing and cooperation among law enforcement personnel all over the world.
Words and phrases like these are powerful because they use emotion-laden images (birth, death, freedom, class, blame, family, warfare) to mask their political agenda. In this way, they serve as “conversation stoppers”—easy means of asserting Radcon conclusions without subjecting them to meaningful debate. Who, after all, could possibly be in favor of taxing people who die, killing partially born babies, or blaming America first? Why would we ever not want to uphold traditional family values or declare war on terrorism?
Through this deliberate campaign of distortion, Radcons have tried to stop America from examining the true Radcon agenda. It’s a smart tactic, because on close inspection Radcon arguments fall apart. When the test is reason and common sense, liberals win—as I will now show.