Post-Nixonland Open Thread
A warm-up for next week's Book Club.
In the New Yorker, George Packer argues that Rick Perlstein, author of next week's discussion book Nixonland is too pessimistic when argues that the divisions that Nixon exploited and helped sow in the 1960s will exist for another generation. Packer, in essence, argues that the recent failures on the right (three special elections, and the 2006 midterms before that) and the increasingly silly and unsuccessful attempts at Nixonian red-baiting and general name-calling ("elitist," "appeaser," etc. etc.) prove that Nixonland is coming to an end.
My sense is it's too soon to tell. Those tactics may yet work. But for the sake of conversation let's say he's right. If Nixonland is coming to an end, what's replacing it? (And if you say "Obamaland where everyone loves each other," I'm going to assume you're either joking or stoned.)
Comments (6)
Well let's guess how long. Nixon worked hard at and successfully sowed hatred. (I lived through it.) The hate-filled electorate then chose sides. Those since have taken on the characteristics of traditional feuding entities where reason is replaced by unreasoned hatred.
Hatfield and McCoys? Maybe 5 generations, 100 years. Sunni and Shia? At least since 650 AD, about 1,350 years.
May 20, 2008 12:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Look to Sunstein and Thaler's new book "Nudge" to get a start on envisioning Obamaland. Obama seems to be very process-oriented, and so the values and protocols of mediation and conflict resolution may become a lot more familiar to the general public (and will also demand that we learn to stretch our attention spans). I'm betting a lot of people who may be expecting Obama to hand them a world of Bizarro-Bush will be disappointed at first, but here's hoping his unusually patient approach catches on.
May 20, 2008 12:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
My guess, short of Obamaland, is something with characteristics both of a bipartisan utopia and of multi-lateral war.
The conservative coalition that Nixonland helped create probably isn't going to crumble, but it's going to shed a lot around the edges. Western-state conservative individualists might veer in larger numbers to the Democrats, while religious social conservatives find common cause on some issues with environmentalists, civil rights advocates and others on the progressive end. We are possibly witnessing another flare up of Reagan Democrats who may yet not desert the party as such, but will remain divided in their loyalties. Libertarians might increasingly give up on the two-party system.
What I see, in short, is shifting alliances, temporary defections, ideological confusion (on the right) and message breakdown as keeping a post-Nixon-era conservative coalition becomes impossible. This will impact the left end of the spectrum, too, as some choose to exploit the divisions by making alliances across the spectrum, and others choose to repudiate those who do. It seems kind of Hobbesian, in a fun way.
May 20, 2008 10:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
A few years ago I was at breakfast with a friend, a Republican, and I said I thought the Bush gang, with the help of a Republican Senate and House, is destroying the Republican party for a generation.
After years of hearing all the promises of the Republican/Conservative party, the public lived and suffered through six full years of their rule.
Many of the public now see what Republican/Conservative means in reality, in foreign and domestic policy, and I think that except for a number of hard line districts around the country the "Conservative" movement will now wither on the vine.
May 21, 2008 6:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
I went to bed on election night 2004 thinking that Kerry had one, and part of me felt rueful for the missed opportunity. I felt that, given four more years, GWB could wreck the prospects for the conservative movement for a generation, but that at the end of only one term, the result would be more timid governance by 51%, with no real attempt to win more Americans over to an ambitious, progressive vision for the country. I figured we'd get a Democratic administration that did not sanction torture but was willing to keep running Gitmo as a site for habeas-free preemptive detention.
Who's to say if I was right about what turned out to be the counterfactual. But I think in the actual world, I was onto something.
May 21, 2008 11:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Much to ponder here, after reading Packer's long article.
Nixon and Buchanan spread their hate, quite effectively. Have you read the comments on all the various TPM threads the last three months, the habit of hatred comes now quite easily to many on the grassroots of both the Obama and Clinton camps. I'll not pretend I've been immune, but I will claim to have gotten better at avoiding hatred over the last 20 years, and I'd like to continue that trend.
But on the ground, things are shifting. People need hope. I've worked in retail a long time, and am constantly amazed at the young women of apparently limited education and limited sophistication and their willingness to enter into single motherhood, or coupled motherhood with a half-jerky guy who doesn't always show them a lot of respect. But they do it partly because they need something to hope for, and that tangible baby, bratty and expensive as it may be, provides a fulfilling outlet for that hope -- even if they squander it, or misplace it, making the same mistakes over and over and getting stuck on the modern American "ladder" that offers them no real way up, winding up as 40-yr old grumps fussing with their 20-yr old daughters making the same mistakes they made in their time.
Obama offers hope, that's why he's survived to the brink of success. The Obama-haters are fond of saying "he's never _done_ anything, all he does is give fancy speeches." But he has done one HUGE thing which validates his success: HE OUT-ORGANIZED THE DEM PARTY/CLINTON MACHINE, he beat them on the bank accounts and he beat them in delegates. As a radical who's struggled to organize dozens and hundreds of people in a number of contexts over the decades, I am deeply impressed by this accomplishment of Obama's. You can give the fanciest speech in the world, but if your audience isn't 3/4ths of the way to hearing it already anyway, you're going to fall on uncomprehending ears.
So Obama has one huge accomplishment in changing politics as we know it to his credit. Can he take the second step, that will render my radical efforts of the last two decades useless? Can he, will he, be able to mobilize people to ACTUALLY TAKE PART IN THEIR DEMOCRACY outside of the election season, will he be able to mobilize people to push forward on their CongressCritters and their Corporate News Outlets, when those CC's and CNO's provide the inevitable pushback to President Obama's idealism in April 2009 and August 2009 and February 2010?
I've been telling my radical friends that Obama's campaign presents a win/win situation for us. Either he will succeed, and we will actually get an era of deep reforms, and a reasonable chance to participate in them, like we haven't seen in our (approaching 60-yr) lifetimes; or he will fail, and leave us a huge open door for future radical organizing. (But so far my radical friends aren't listening.)
The last month of gutter politics and blind Corporate Media should give us an inkling of just how much of a struggle it will be. To put it into a Civil War analogy, the various Billy Glads and Oamatrons on the Blogs are looking for an ideal first Battle of Bull Run, where their guys will over-ride the enemy in one swift cavalry charge that leads to ultimate victory. But it's far more likely that we'll have to have a multi-year struggle with our own versions of the Peninsular campaign, and our own bloody and indeterminate clashes like Shiloh and Fredricksburg, on the way to any clear outcome.
I'm a radical. I don't have much hope in Obama, I'm prepared for a speech that _I_ will very much hate before AIPAC coming up. I remember hoping in Eugene McCarthy and George MCGovern, Jimmy Carter and Gary Hart and Walter Mondale, even that rat Dukakis ... is there something in the air of the Month of May in a year divisible by 4? But that hope is contagious, and it's psychologically necessary to our continued well-being ... will Obama be able to organize his people for a real struggle against the corporate merchants of hate and repression and ignorance? He has the potential to succeed hugely, or to fail crushingly, depending on his ability to organize his masses for a long tough struggle of national civic liberation.
May 22, 2008 4:41 AM | Reply | Permalink