Bleeding Red — the decline of Conservatism

September 8th, 2007

What to say about conservatism? We’ve certainly seen its ugliest face in the last years. In the spirit of reconciliation, an eventual end to “us” v. “them,” we MUST moderate this issue. I’d expect some of you have conservative friends and relatives … seems we all do. And, of course, we love them, despite a sincere head-scratching that these times have brought out what can only be considered their absolute “worst,” leading us to wonder if we’ve embraced strangers, all these years.

For instance, one relative dear to me, a few years back, made a remark about AIDS that indicated he thought it was “just deserts” for the gays [he's retired scrambled-egg military and lived in San Francisco for some years.] I seldom respond to these kinds of remarks, but this one got my goat … I’ve given years of volunteer time with AIDS patients, losing many I’d grown to love and dealing with the painful mortality issues, the eventual return to Light. I called him on his nonsense, told him it wasn’t just a threat to gays. He came back with a sincere apology, indicating that women and kids certainly didn’t deserve such … which left the bottom line unsaid — that homosexual men did.

Another loved one who should know better is so obsessive about immigration and borders that he’s missed the entirety of the big political picture, displays a xenophobia that smacks of hypocrisy considering he used “wetbacks” himself for years, paying them $20 a day to tidy his orchard and giving them a sandwich and an apple; I know he thought the arrangement “fair” — I’m stunned at the obtuseness of this mind-set, at the tunnel vision … and I find it hard to reconcile that with the respect I offer him.

That’s our dilemma — loving our brother/sister, as they show us the dark spots within their own consciousness. But if we DON’T do that, seek to understand and come to common ground … we are no less in error than they, and we do not add to the solutions we seek — we become just another wrinkle to the problem.

Here’s a collection on conservatism — it’s had its day in the sun and went quickly combust like Icarus, exhilarated by flight and no longer mindful of its own limitations — what we’re hearing now is the last loud bellow of a dying ideology. I was interested in a long conversation with Bill Clinton the other day when he mentioned how appalled the Pub’s were that he’d won the day — they’d already “begun” their 30-year takeover, and Bill wasn’t in their plans. When Hil talks about the “great Republican conspiracy” to devastate them personally, she’s dead on the money — they would have done anything to get their mojo working again. They finally did … his name was Karl Rove.

Conservatism will always be with us, as it should be as a check/balance — but we have seen the results of unrestrained Republicanism and it will brand this party for years to come. The American public turned to progressives too quickly to have had a heart-attachment to conservative principal, which tells me that the spin and fear and patriotic fervor wasn’t enough to carry the decade … or further the ideology.

I just watched Fred Thompson’s well-rehearsed speech and opening shot for president, and I know Republican hearts are a’flutter — he’s got the old boy charm and the practiced manner of the actor he is; he’s also got the ambitious trophy wife, and two kids under 4. He talks the Red rhetoric, the small government, the kick-ass foreign affairs, the fear … a smooth brand of Kool Aid that will please those accustomed to gulping it down. We’ll see if he can walk the walk, or if the Pubs will let him get away with just talking that talk without hard specifics, and kicking shit with the practiced hand of a seasoned performer. He says we don’t need to suffer another Clinton in the White House — I’d say we don’t need any more shit-kickers, either. He talks about uniting America [echo, echo, echo] and I’ll just say that if we fall for that one again, we’re doomed — the Authoritarian model is not going to work, anymore. We’ve seen authority run amok — we’ve wised up.

There are a number of excellent reads on this topic, below — John Dean’s article in FindLaw is particularly revealing, and the Rosen piece on David Addington [Uncle Dick's hit man and the original Plame "leaker," so they say ... NOT a NeoCon, but a conservative who, like Cheney, focuses intently on unitary power] paints a fuller picture for us. The last read, on “how we got here,” is well done, as well.

It’s worth our time to understand the psyche of the conservative — our relationship with the world, the nation … and our loved one’s … depends on it. If you’re in the half of the nation, as am I, that’s got a wet and dreary weekend ahead, these will give you something interesting to do; if not, save them for another day … the topic of “healing” the breach in this nation is one that will become more important as time goes on.

We’ll start with a few bits about the dumb-ass and dismal Pub presidential candidates, [with the exception of Libertarian Ron Paul who has a surprisingly large portion of the public ear, another sign that common sense is increasingly welcomed these days ... but don't make a hero out of him just yet; he's not ALL sweetness and light!] Listening to these guys debate is like watching an old movie … one you know all the dialogue to, but gone frayed and dated so it’s almost embarrassing to watch … and even if you view it for nostalgia, it just doesn’t hold your attention anymore. Something like … a Death Valley Days re-run, perhaps?

Reads, then, important to our future — on some blessed day, when the smoke lifts, we’ll all still be standing here, looking at one another … the great American family.

Jude

Requirements
by digby, Hullabaloo
Saturday, September 08, 2007

Seven years in the White House and he’s still as stupid as the day he was installed:

In a speech this morning, Bush welcomed business leaders to the OPEC meeting, not the APEC meeting.

[...]

As he continued his speech, Bush recalled how Australian Prime Minister John Howard had gone to Iraq last year to visit “Austrian troops.” Actually, there are no Austrian troops in Iraq, but there are 1,500 Australian military personnel in and around Mesopotamia.

With anyone else, it would be seen as a slip of the tongue, jet lag, whatever. But with him, you really don’t know if he knew where he was or the difference between Austria and Australia. He’s that dumb.

And the even more awful news is that the Republicans seem to be trying to nominate someone of equal or greater stupidity and intellectual laziness. From Steve Benen:

“They said, ‘You gotta quit smoking,’” Thompson explained to a questioner asking about progress in Iraq during a town hall-style meeting. […]

Thompson’s tale of a smokers’ revolt baffled some in the audience of about 150 who came to decide whether the former Tennessee senator is ready for prime time.

“I don’t know what that was about,” said Jim Moran, 72, who had driven from nearby McCook Lake, S.D.

Thompson’s been getting a lot of that lately.

Just from the last couple of days:

* He’s having trouble explaining his position on Social Security, despite his assertion that the issue is one of the reasons he’s running for president.

* Thompson dismissed the significance of Osama bin Laden, describing him as “more symbolism than anything else.”

* He believes “we better figure out a way” to combat al Qaeda. Not that he necessarily knows how, of course, only that “we better figure out a way.”

* Thompson proposed a bizarre constitutional amendment on gay marriage yesterday, and argued that “zero” state legislatures “have affirmatively approved gay marriage,” a claim that happens to be wrong.

And then there’s Mr “Dazzle ‘em with bullshit” Giuliani:

MR. GIULIANI: The difference is the descendant of Mohammed. The Sunnis believe that Mohammed’s — the caliphate should be selected, and the Shi’ites believe that it should be by descent. And then, of course, there was a slaughter of Shi’ites in the early part of the history of Islam, and it has infected a lot of the history of Islam, which is really very unfortunate.

And Mr. “All those ragheads are out to get us!” Romney:

MR. ROMNEY: … I don’t want to buy into the Democratic pitch, that this is all about one person, Osama bin Laden. Because after we get him, there’s going to be another and another. This is about Shi’a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate.

And, last but not least, there are these three geniuses:

Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado and Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, all expressed disbelief in evolution. Huckabee later told reporters, according to The New York Times, that “If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I’ll accept that”

Even the bloodthirsty McCain, who has less tendency to spout mind-bogglingly idiotic comments, can sound as stupid as the rest of them at times:

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’” said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.

I think it has to be said that the pervasiveness of this idiocy can’t be a coincidence. Republican voters must want it or the GOP wouldn’t insist that all their candidates be morons..

Let’s hope there are far fewer Republican voters this time out. The world really can’t take much more of this.

WHAT UNITES POLITICIANS: BIG GOVERNMENT
Richard Reeves, Yahoo
Fri Sep 7

NEW YORK — You have to love the hypocrisy of the Republicans running for president, nine characters in search of Ronald Reagan.

That’s why Fred Thompson, who thinks he’s the next best thing, jumped in among the lemmings. After all, he is tall and has worked as an actor. What more can you ask? A lot, actually, but gut instinct and careful analysis both give you the confusing feeling that none of these guys can win.

That is why Thompson wanted to be one of them. Entering stage right, he waited only five paragraphs in his announcement speech before lifting, almost word-for-word, an old Reagan line: “A government that is big enough to do everything for us is powerful enough to do anything to us.”

Reagan, as candidate and president, said that often and a bit better: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is also a government big enough to take everything you’ve got.”

Thompson is used to working from a screenplay, and this one is a remake of “The Reagan Story.” But it is, of course, all made up, all fictional.

This is a quote from me: “All politicians want big government; the only difference between liberals and conservatives is what they want the government to do.”

(In fairness, I might add a footnote: “With the possible exception of Ron Paul.”)

The 40th president was one of the great conservative rhetoricians of modern times, but in practice he expanded the reach of government as far as any liberal could have done in eight years in the White House. Reagan got to the Oval Office by beating up on “tax-and-spend Democrats.” Then he invented “borrow-and-spend Republicans.”

The 43rd president, George W. Bush, is an example. He is a big-government guy, borrowing against the future as fast as he can to build up the military and fund faith-based initiatives across the federal spectrum — cutting taxes all the while. That’s the Republican script, no matter who reads it or what they said in the past.

In fact, Bush, who inherited the $86 billion surplus produced by President Clinton’s last budget, has increased the federal budget deficit by $3.25 trillion. Bush’s last (proposed) budget would scale back 141 domestic programs, including more than 40 education programs. Defense and Homeland Security spending, however, would increase by 23 percent.

And that defense and security spending does not include the financing of our wars and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. That spending is now running at almost $l50 billion a year.

Like Reagan, who never even proposed a balanced budget in his eight years of power, Bush claims he is trying to balance spending and revenues. He now says his goal of balance will be achieved in 2012. If that happened — and it won’t — the heavy lifting would have to be done by the man or woman, Republican or Democrat, elected next year.

As for Thompson, it is hard to understand what the former senator really believes about the big government he wants to run. In his announcement speech he contradicts himself, saying:

“When I went to the Senate, I wanted to balance the budget, cut taxes, reform welfare, require Congress to live under the laws that they had imposed on others, and I wanted to begin the modernizing of our military …

“Now these problems have only grown worse since that time. … On our present course, deficit financing will saddle future generations with enormous taxes, jeopardize our economy and endanger our retirement programs. … This path is economically unsustainable.”

That sounds like he wants to rescue the nation from his party and his party’s leader — because all the terrible things he’s talking about happened while George Bush and other Republicans were running the country. In the end, Thompson is telling us that, like Bush, he is a big-government conservative spending his children’s and grandchildren’s money.

Understanding the Contemporary Republican Party:
Authoritarians Have Taken Control
JOHN W. DEAN, FindLaw
Wednesday, Sep. 05, 2007

This is the first in a three- part series of columns in which FindLaw columnist John Dean discusses his most recent book, Conservatives Without Conscience. - Ed.

Last year, I published Conservatives Without Conscience, but it struck me as a bit too self-promoting to use this space to talk about the book. The core of the book examines a half-century of empirical studies that had never been explained for the general reader. Not being a social scientist, I was thrilled when the book became a bestseller and countless political and social psychologists wrote to thank me for translating their work for the general reader.

At this point, I feel that this material is simply too crucial to understanding current politics and government for me to continue to ignore it in my columns for FindLaw. In addition, I want to refer to these findings throughout my commentary on the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, so it is time to set forth a few basics from this work.

Conservatives Without Conscience (”CWC”) sought to understand the modern conservative movement, and in particular it’s hard turn to the right during the past two-and-a-half decades. Conservatives have taken control of the Republican Party, and, in turn, the GOP has taken control of the government (all three branches, until 2006).

Who are these people? Of course, we know their names: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush - to mention a few of the obvious. More importantly, what drives them? And, why do their compliant followers seem to never question or criticism them? Here, I am thinking of people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter - to mention a few more of the conspicuous.

In this column, and those that follow, I hope to explain the rather remarkably information I have uncovered. It explained what for me what I had previously thought inexplicable. And based on my mail, it seems to have done the same for a lot of CWC readers. So let me see if I can extract a few key points that may help to understand what happened, and why it happened.

In the first two columns of this three-part series, I will offer some basics to provide context, and some of the relevant data. In the last of the three, I will drive home the points I believe are most relevant.

How Conservatives Think (Or Fail To Do So)

Most conservatives today do not believe that conservatism can or should be defined. They claim that it not an ideology, but rather merely an attitude. (I don’t buy that, but that point is not relevant here.)

Conservatives once looked to the past for what it could teach about the present and the future. Early conservatives were traditionalists or libertarians, or a bit of both. Today, however, there are religious conservatives, economic conservatives, social conservatives, cultural conservatives, neoconservatives, traditional conservatives, and a number of other factions.

Within these factions, there is a good amount of inconsistency and variety, but the movement has long been held together through the power of negative thinking. The glue of the movement is in its perceived enemies. Conservatives once found a common concern with respect to their excessive concern about communism (not that liberals and progressive were not concerned as well, but they were neither paranoid nor willing to mount witch hunts). When communism was no longer a threat, the dysfunctional conservative movement rallied around its members’ common opposition to anything they perceived as liberal. (This was, in effect, any point of view that differed from their own, whether it was liberal or not.)

To understanding conservatives thinking, it is important to examine not merely what conservatives believe, but also why they believe it. I found the answers to these two key questions in the remarkable body of empirical research work, almost a half-century in the making, undertaken by political and social psychologists who study authoritarian personalities.

Authoritarian Republicans: Understanding the Personality Type

While not all conservatives are authoritarians, all highly authoritarian personalities are political conservatives. To make the results of my rather lengthy inquiry very short, I found that it was the authoritarians who took control of the conservative movement in the 1980s, and then the Republican Party in the 1990s. Strikingly, these conservative Republicans - though hardly known for their timidity — have not attempted to refute my report, because that is not possible. It is based on hard historical facts, which I set forth in considerable detail.

Authoritarian control continues to this day, so it is important to understand these people. There are two types of authoritarians: leaders (the few) and followers (the many). Study of these personalities began following World War II, when social psychologists asked how so many people could compliantly follow an authoritarian leader like Adolf Hitler and tolerate the Holocaust. Early research was based at the University of California, Berkeley, and it focused primarily on followers, culminating in the publication of a The Authoritarian Personality (1950) - a work that broadly described authoritarian personalities. The book was quite popular for decades, but as the Cold War ended, it had been on the shelf and ignored for a good while.

Given the strikingly conspicuous authoritarian nature of the contemporary conservative movement, and in turn, of the Republican Party, those familiar with the work of the Berkeley group thought it time to take another look at this work. For example, Alan Wolfe, a political science professor at Boston College, observed that the fact that “the radical right has transformed itself from a marginal movement to an influential sector of the contemporary Republican Party” called for a reexamination of this work. That is exactly what I did, although I did not discover Dr. Wolfe’s call for it until well into my project.

The Authoritarian Personality relied heavily on Freudian psychology, which was not without critics, although neither Dr. Freud’s work nor that of the Berkeley scientists has been proven incorrect. The weakness of this early work was the lack of empirical data backing up its conclusions. But in the half-century since its publication, that weakness has been removed, based on others’ empirical work. A number of researchers have examined and reexamined the Berkeley Group’s conclusions, and no one more thoroughly than Bob Altemeyer, a Yale and Carnegie-Mellon-trained social psychologist based at the University of Manitoba.

Professor Altemeyer’s Findings

Altemeyer’s study addressed flaws in the methodology and findings of The Authoritarian Personality, and he then proceeded to set this field of study on new footings by clarifying the study of authoritarian followers, people he calls “right-wing authoritarians.” The provocative titles of his books — Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1981), Enemies of Freedom (1988), and The Authoritarian Specter (1996) — and of a few of his many articles found in scholarly journals — such as “Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities” in the Journal of Social Psychology (2004) and “Why Do Religious Fundamentalists Tend to Be Prejudiced?” in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion (2003)–indicate the tenor of his research and the range of his interests.

Working my way through this material, with the help of a copy of the Idiot’s Guide to Statistics, for Altemeyer writes for professional peers, I realized that, since I do not have a degree in psychology, I should get guidance to be certain I understood the material correctly, because it seemed to me that the information he had developed was exactly what I needed to comprehend the personalities now dominating the conservative movement and Republican Party. Altemeyer, who is the preeminent researcher in the field, graciously agreed to tutor me in his work. I introduced him to FindLaw readers in an earlier column, when I thought it would be interesting to get his take on the writings of the very authoritarian Tom DeLay, as he explained himself in No Retreat, No Surrender.

At the outset of Conservatives Without Conscience, I provided a quick and highly incomplete summary of Altemeyer’s findings, explaining that his empirical testing revealed “that authoritarians are frequently enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, anti-equality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian, and amoral.” To be clear, these are not assessments that Altemeyer makes himself about these people; rather, this is how those he has tested reveal themselves to be, when being anonymously examined.

Altemeyer has tested literally tens of thousands of first-year college students and their parents, along with others, including some fifteen hundred American state legislators, over the course of some three decades. He has tested in the South and North of the United States. There is no database on authoritarians that even comes close in its scope to that which he has created, and, more importantly, these studies are empirical data, not partisan speculation.

About a year after I published my outline of his work, Altemeyer prepared a digest of his research for general readers, The Authoritarians, which he has posted online for one and all to examine at no cost. In his book he walks readers thorough his research in a manner that requires neither an advanced degree nor a copy of the Idiot’s Guide to Statistics.

In the next two columns, I will examine the implications of Altemeyer’s findings, for they explain a great deal about the operations of the Republican Party as presently constituted.

Conscience of a Conservative
JEFFREY ROSEN, Magazine Preview, NYT
September 9, 2007

In the fall of 2003, Jack L. Goldsmith was widely considered one of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament. A 40-year-old law professor at the University of Chicago, Goldsmith had established himself, with his friend and fellow law professor John Yoo, as a leading proponent of the view that international standards of human rights should not apply in cases before U.S. courts. In recognition of their prominence, Goldsmith and Yoo had been anointed the “New Sovereigntists” by the journal Foreign Affairs.

Goldsmith had been hired the year before as a legal adviser to the general counsel of the Defense Department, William J. Haynes II. While at the Pentagon, Goldsmith wrote a memo for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warning that prosecutors from the International Criminal Court might indict American officials for their actions in the war on terror. Goldsmith described this threat as “the judicialization of international politics.” No one was surprised when he was hired in October 2003 to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the division of the Justice Department that advises the president on the limits of executive power. Immediately, the job put him at the center of critical debates within the Bush administration about its continuing response to 9/11 — debates about coercive interrogation, secret surveillance and the detention and trial of enemy combatants.

Nine months later, in June 2004, Goldsmith resigned. Although he refused to discuss his resignation at the time, he had led a small group of administration lawyers in a behind-the-scenes revolt against what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies embraced by his White House superiors in the war on terror. During his first weeks on the job, Goldsmith had discovered that the Office of Legal Counsel had written two legal opinions — both drafted by Goldsmith’s friend Yoo, who served as a deputy in the office — about the authority of the executive branch to conduct coercive interrogations.

Goldsmith considered these opinions, now known as the “torture memos,” to be tendentious, overly broad and legally flawed, and he fought to change them. He also found himself challenging the White House on a variety of other issues, ranging from surveillance to the trial of suspected terrorists. His efforts succeeded in bringing the Bush administration somewhat closer to what Goldsmith considered the rule of law — although at considerable cost to Goldsmith himself. By the end of his tenure, he was worn out. “I was disgusted with the whole process and fed up and exhausted,” he told me recently.

After leaving the Office of Legal Counsel, Goldsmith was uncertain about what, if anything, he should say publicly about his resignation. His silence came to be widely misinterpreted. After leaving the Justice Department, he accepted a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School, where he currently teaches. During his first weeks in Cambridge, in the fall of 2004, some of his colleagues denounced him for what they mistakenly assumed was his role in drafting the torture memos. One colleague, Elizabeth Bartholet, complained to a Boston Globe reporter that the faculty was remiss in not investigating any role Goldsmith might have played in “justifying torture.” “It was a nightmare,” Goldsmith told me. “I didn’t say anything to defend myself, except that I didn’t do the things I was accused of.”

Now Goldsmith is speaking out. In a new book, “The Terror Presidency,” which will be published later this month, and in a series of conversations I had with him this summer, Goldsmith has recounted how, from his first weeks on the job, he fought vigorously against an expansive view of executive power championed by officials in the White House, including Alberto Gonzales, who was then the White House counsel and who recently resigned as attorney general, and David Addington, who was then Vice President Cheney’s legal adviser and is now his chief of staff. Goldsmith says he is not speaking out for the money; though he received a low six-figure advance for the book, he is, after deducting some minor expenses, donating the advance and any profits to charity. Nor is he speaking out because he disagrees with the basic goals of the Bush administration in the war on terror. “I shared, and I still share, a lot of their concerns about what we have to do to meet the terrorist threat,” he told me. When I asked whether he thought Gonzales should have resigned and whether Addington should follow, he demurred. “I was friends with Gonzales and feel very sorry for him,” he said. “We got along really well. I admired and respected Addington, even when I thought his judgment was crazy. They thought they were doing the right thing.”

Goldsmith told me that he has decided to speak publicly about his battles at the Justice Department because he hopes that “future presidents and people inside the executive branch can learn from our mistakes.” In his view, American presidents for the foreseeable future will, like George W. Bush, face enormous pressure to be aggressive and pre-emptive in taking measures to prevent another terrorist attack in the United States. At the same time, Goldsmith notes, everywhere the president looks, critics — as well as his own lawyers — are telling him that pre-emptive actions may violate international law as well as U.S. criminal law. What, exactly, are the legal limits of executive power in the post-9/11 world? How should administration lawyers negotiate the conflict between the fear of attacks and the fear of lawsuits?

In Goldsmith’s view, the Bush administration went about answering these questions in the wrong way. Instead of reaching out to Congress and the courts for support, which would have strengthened its legal hand, the administration asserted what Goldsmith considers an unnecessarily broad, “go-it-alone” view of executive power. As Goldsmith sees it, this strategy has backfired. “They embraced this vision,” he says, “because they wanted to leave the presidency stronger than when they assumed office, but the approach they took achieved exactly the opposite effect. The central irony is that people whose explicit goal was to expand presidential power have diminished it.”

I have known Goldsmith since we were at law school together. In addition to being intellectually curious and having good judgment, he always struck me as a pragmatic rather than an ideological conservative. Born in 1962 in Memphis, Goldsmith is the son of a former Miss Teenage Arkansas whose parents ran a celebrated nightclub. Growing up, he had two stepfathers, one of whom he describes in the book as “a mob-connected Teamsters executive” who was “Jimmy Hoffa’s right-hand man and for decades a leading suspect in Hoffa’s disappearance.” His upbringing seems to have contributed to his down-to-earth sensibility. After earning degrees at Washington and Lee University and Oxford, he thrived at Yale Law School, where he developed what he calls “an allergic reaction to Yale’s left-wing jurisprudence and political correctness.” He later clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court and taught law at the Universities of Virginia and Chicago. He is married, and he and his wife have two sons.

When Goldsmith was asked, four years ago, to head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, he jumped at the opportunity. Working for the office is one of the most prestigious jobs in government: former heads and deputies include the Supreme Court Justices William H. Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. The Office of Legal Counsel interprets all laws that bear on the powers of the executive branch. The opinions of the head of the office are binding, except on the rare occasions when they are reversed by the attorney general or the president.

In the post-9/11 era, the office has played a crucial role in providing legal cover to jittery bureaucrats fearful that officials in the White House, Defense and State Departments or the C.I.A. might be prosecuted for their actions in the war on terror. The Justice Department, after all, is the branch of government responsible for prosecutions, and its own prosecutors — as well as independent counsels — would be hard pressed to prosecute someone who had relied on the department’s own opinions in good faith. For this reason, the office has two important powers: the power to put a brake on aggressive presidential action by saying no and, conversely, the power to dispense what Goldsmith calls “free get-out-of jail cards” by saying yes. Its opinions, he writes in his book, are the equivalent of “an advance pardon” for actions taken at the fuzzy edges of criminal laws.

In the Bush administration, however, the most important legal-policy decisions in the war on terror before Goldsmith’s arrival were made not by the Office of Legal Counsel but by a self-styled “war council.” This group met periodically in Gonzales’s office at the White House or Haynes’s office at the Pentagon. The members included Gonzales, Addington, Haynes and Yoo. These men shared a belief that the biggest obstacle to a vigorous response to the 9/11 attacks was the set of domestic and international laws that arose in the 1970s to constrain the president’s powers in response to the excesses of Watergate and the Vietnam War. (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, for example, requires that executive officials get a warrant before wiretapping suspected enemies in the United States.) The head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the first years of the Bush administration, Jay Bybee, had little experience with national-security issues, and he delegated responsibility for that subject matter to Yoo, giving him the authority to draft opinions that were binding on the entire executive branch.

Yoo was a “godsend” to a White House nervous about war-crimes prosecutions, Goldsmith writes in his book, because his opinions reassured the White House that no official who relied on them could be prosecuted after the fact. But Yoo’s direct access to Gonzales angered his boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, according to Goldsmith. (Neither Ashcroft nor Gonzales responded to requests for interviews for this article.) Ashcroft, Goldsmith says, felt that Gonzales and the war council were usurping legal-policy decisions that were properly entrusted to the attorney general, such as the creation of military commissions, which Gonzales supported and Ashcroft never liked.

The matter came to a head in the fall of 2003, when Bybee left the Office of Legal Counsel and Gonzales suggested Yoo as a candidate to lead it. Ashcroft rejected the suggestion. Yoo then recommended his friend Goldsmith to the White House as a suitable alternative. Goldsmith interviewed with Ashcroft at the Justice Department and with Gonzales and Addington at the White House. In his interview with Addington and Gonzales, Goldsmith recalls talking about the dangers of international law and the importance of military commissions. He got the job.

Several hours after Goldsmith was sworn in, on Oct. 6, 2003, he recalls that he received a phone call from Gonzales: the White House needed to know as soon as possible whether the Fourth Geneva Convention, which describes protections that explicitly cover civilians in war zones like Iraq, also covered insurgents and terrorists. After several days of study, Goldsmith agreed with lawyers in several other federal agencies, who had concluded that the convention applied to all Iraqi civilians, including terrorists and insurgents. In a meeting with Ashcroft, Goldsmith explained his analysis, which Ashcroft accepted. Later, Goldsmith drove from the Justice Department to the White House for a meeting with Gonzales and Addington. Goldsmith remembers his deputy Patrick Philbin turning to him in the car and saying: “They’re going to be really mad. They’re not going to understand our decision. They’ve never been told no.” (Philbin declined to discuss the conversation.)

In his book, Goldsmith describes Addington as the “biggest presence in the room — a large man with large glasses and an imposing salt-and-pepper beard” who was “known throughout the bureaucracy as the best-informed, savviest and most conservative lawyer in the administration, someone who spoke for and acted with the full backing of the powerful vice president, and someone who crushed bureaucratic opponents.” When Goldsmith presented his analysis of the Geneva Conventions at the White House, Addington, according to Goldsmith, became livid. “The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,” Addington replied angrily, according to Goldsmith. “You cannot question his decision.” (Addington declined to comment on this and other details concerning him in this article.)

Goldsmith then explained that he agreed with the president’s determination that detainees from Al Qaeda and the Taliban weren’t protected under the Third Geneva Convention, which concerns the treatment of prisoners of war, but that different protections were at issue with the Fourth Geneva Convention, which concerns civilians. Addington, Goldsmith says, was not persuaded. (Goldsmith told me that he has checked his recollections of this and other meetings with at least one other participant or with someone to whom he described the meetings soon after.)

Months later, when Goldsmith tried to question another presidential decision, Addington expressed his views even more pointedly. “If you rule that way,” Addington exclaimed in disgust, Goldsmith recalls, “the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands.”

The conflict over the Geneva Conventions was just the beginning. About six weeks after he started work, Goldsmith became aware that there might be what he calls “potentially problematic” opinions drafted by the Office of Legal Counsel. These were the “torture memos,” one of which was written in August 2002 and the other in March 2003. The August opinion defined torture as pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.” Goldsmith concluded that this opinion defined torture far too narrowly. He also had concerns about the March 2003 opinion, the contents of which remain classified but which dealt with the military interrogation of aliens held outside the United States.

Goldsmith told me that he objected to what he calls the “extremely broad and unnecessary analysis of the president’s commander in chief power” in the memos. The August opinion, for example, boldly concluded that “any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of battlefield combatants would violate the Constitution’s sole vesting of the Commander in Chief authority in the President.” Goldsmith says he believed at the time, and still does, that “this extreme conclusion” would call into question the constitutionality of federal laws that limit interrogation, like the War Crimes Act of 1996, which prohibits grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which prohibits cruelty and maltreatment. He also found the tone of both opinions “tendentious” rather than cautious and feared that they might be interpreted as an attempt to immunize government officials for genuinely bad acts.

Yoo has acknowledged drafting the August 2002 memo, which he says was the basis for the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda operative. Yoo also wrote and signed the March 2003 opinion. His friendship with Goldsmith made it especially awkward for Goldsmith to criticize the memos. “I was basically taking steps to fix the mistakes of a close friend, who I knew would be mad about it,” Goldsmith told me. “We don’t talk anymore, and that’s one of the many sad things about my time in government.”

In December 2003, Goldsmith decided that he had to withdraw the March opinion — that is, he had to tell administration officials that they could no longer rely on it. “But figuring out how to withdraw it was very tricky,” he told me, “since withdrawal would frighten everyone who relied on the opinions in a very sensitive area.” In the past, the Office of Legal Counsel had occasionally changed its legal positions between presidential administrations to reflect different legal philosophies, but Goldsmith could find no precedent for the office withdrawing an opinion drafted earlier by the same administration — especially on a matter of such importance.

Goldsmith concluded that he could immediately tell the Defense Department to stop relying on the March opinion, since he was confident that it was not needed to justify the 24 interrogation techniques the department was actually using, including two called “Fear Up Harsh” and “Pride and Ego Down,” which were designed to make subjects nervous without crossing the line into coercion. But the withdrawal of the August opinion was a much harder call. The August opinion provided the legal foundation for the C.I.A.’s interrogation program, Goldsmith says, which he considered much closer to the legal line. (He refused to discuss the details of the program.)

Goldsmith, however, says he didn’t have the time or resources to create a replacement opinion immediately. In his initial months on the job, his attention was focused on the more pressing matter of addressing legal issues surrounding the terrorist-surveillance program. In April 2004, however, Goldsmith’s priorities were reversed when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. Then, in June of that year, Yoo’s August 2002 opinion was leaked to the media. “After the leak, there was a lot of pressure on me within the administration to stand by the opinion,” Goldsmith told me, “and the problem was that I had decided six months earlier that I couldn’t stand by the opinion.”

A week after the leak of Yoo’s August 2002 memo, Goldsmith withdrew the opinion. Goldsmith made the decision himself, in consultation with Philbin and Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey, both of whom, Goldsmith says, agreed it was the right thing to do. He then told Ashcroft, who was, Goldsmith writes, “unbelievably magnanimous: it had happened on his watch, and he could have overruled me, and he didn’t.” Goldsmith was concerned, however, that the White House might overrule him. So he made a strategic decision: on the same day that he withdrew the opinion, he submitted his resignation, effectively forcing the administration to choose between accepting his decision and letting him leave quietly, or rejecting it and turning his resignation into a big news story.

“If the story had come out that the U.S. government decided to stick by the controversial opinions that led the head of the Office of Legal Counsel to resign, that would have looked bad,” Goldsmith told me. “The timing was designed to ensure that the decision stuck.”

Again, according to Goldsmith, Addington was furious. During his brief time in office, Goldsmith had withdrawn not only the two torture opinions but also others. (He refused to discuss the other opinions with me.) In the end, he says, he had withdrawn more opinions than any of his predecessors. Shortly before he resigned, Goldsmith says, Addington confronted him in Gonzales’s office, pulling out of his jacket pocket a 3-by-5 card that listed the withdrawn opinions. “Since you’ve withdrawn so many legal opinions that the president and others have been relying on,” Addington said, according to Goldsmith, “we need you to … let us know which [of the remaining] ones you still stand by.” Goldsmith recalls that Gonzales, in his own farewell chat with him, said, “I guess those opinions really were as bad as you said.”

Looking back, Goldsmith says, he criticizes but does not vilify Yoo, whom he believes wrote and defended the opinions in good faith. Praising Yoo’s “knowledge, intelligence and energy,” he writes in his book that “the poor quality of a handful of very important opinions is probably attributable to some combination of the fear that pervaded the executive branch, pressure from the White House and Yoo’s unusually expansive and self-confident conception of presidential power.”

I have known Yoo since we were in law school together as well, and I called him for a response. “I think Jack and I had a good-faith disagreement, but I think at some level this was elevating form over substance,” he said. Yoo said that in writing the torture memo, he experienced no pressure from the White House, which he described as “hands off.”

Instead, he said, “there was an urgency to decide so that valuable intelligence could be acquired from Abu Zubaydah, before further attacks could occur.” Yoo says it is his understanding that no policies or interrogation techniques changed as a result of the withdrawal of the torture memo, noting that all policies that were legal under the withdrawn opinions are also acknowledged as legal under the opinion that eventually replaced the withdrawn ones. (That opinion was issued in December 2004, six months after Goldsmith’s resignation, and was signed by Daniel Levin, his acting successor as head of the Office of Legal Counsel.)

Yoo also rejects the criticism that his reasoning was unnecessarily broad, describing the criticism of his opinion as something that could have been made only with the benefit of hindsight. “You can claim it’s too broad after the policy has been decided on, but I didn’t have that luxury in the spring of 2002,” he told me. “If you’re providing the legal advice before they choose the policy, how could you know?”

Goldsmith puts the bulk of the responsibility for the excesses of the Office of Legal Counsel on the White House. “I probably had a hundred meetings with Gonzales, and there was only one time I was talking about a national-security issue when Addington wasn’t there,” Goldsmith told me. “My conflicts were all with Addington, who was a proxy for the vice president. They were very, very stressful.”

During his tenure at the Office of Legal Counsel, Goldsmith also clashed with Addington over the detention and trial of suspected terrorists. In January 2004, the Supreme Court agreed to review a lower-court decision approving the detention of Yaser Hamdi, an American citizen then being held as an enemy combatant. A group of administration lawyers including Goldsmith met with Gonzales and Addington in Gonzales’s office to discuss the implications of the case. “Why don’t we just go to Congress and get it to sign off on the whole detention program?” Goldsmith recalls asking, reasoning that the Supreme Court would be less likely to strike down a detention program in wartime if Congress had explicitly supported it. According to Goldsmith, Addington shot down the idea.

Not long before Goldsmith left, the Supreme Court approved in June 2004, in the Hamdi case, the detention power itself but put some modest restrictions on the administration’s ability to detain citizens without trial. Afterward, Gonzales, Addington, Goldsmith and others, including the deputy solicitor general, Paul Clement, met again, Goldsmith recalls, and he and Clement again proposed going to Congress to put the administration’s legal strategy on a more sound footing. Once again, Goldsmith told me, the advice was ignored, and the White House continued to operate as if it assumed it could avoid a strong rebuke from the Supreme Court.

That rebuke finally arrived, however, last year in the Hamdan case, when the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s claim that it could try suspected terrorists in military commissions created without Congressional approval. In a further blow to the administration, the court held that the legal protections of “common article 3″ of the Geneva Conventions, which contains minimal protections for detainees in wartime, also applied in the war against Al Qaeda. Goldsmith says he believes this ruling was “legally erroneous” but “hugely consequential.” It provided detainees at Guantánamo with more rights than the administration had ever acknowledged, and it implied that the War Crimes Act might be used to prosecute administration officials for their treatment of detainees.

In debates over the detention of suspected terrorists, Goldsmith says he was struck by how Addington’s efforts to expand presidential power ultimately weakened it. In September 2006, two months before the midterm elections, Bush eventually did ask Congress to approve his military commissions, and Congress promptly passed a law that gave him everything he asked for, authorizing many aspects of the military commissions that the Supreme Court had struck down. Although Bush had won the battle, Goldsmith sees the refusal to go to Congress earlier as the cause of an unnecessary Supreme Court defeat. “I’m not a civil libertarian, and what I did wasn’t driven by concerns about civil liberties per se,” he told me. “It was a disagreement about means, not ends, driven by a desire to make sure that the administration’s counterterrorism policies had a firm legal foundation.”

In Goldsmith’s estimation, the unnecessary unilateralism of the Bush administration reached its apex in the controversy over wiretapping and secret surveillance. Goldsmith says he did not originally intend to mention the surveillance controversy in his book. But he says he was infuriated, soon before finishing his manuscript, to be handed a subpoena in Cambridge by F.B.I. agents ordering him to testify in a criminal investigation into the leaks that resulted in stories by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau in The New York Times about the National Security Agency’s warrentless wiretapping. After having a public conversation with the F.B.I. in the middle of Harvard Square about aspects of the terrorist-surveillance program, Goldsmith concluded he could discuss the same topics in his book.

Goldsmith emphasizes that he was not opposed to investigating the leak, which he agreed with President Bush did “great harm to the nation.” In addition, he shared the White House’s concern that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act might prevent wiretaps on international calls involving terrorists. But Goldsmith deplored the way the White House tried to fix the problem, which was highly contemptuous of Congress and the courts.

“We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004.

In his book, Goldsmith claims that Addington and other top officials treated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the same way they handled other laws they objected to:

“They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations,” he writes. Goldsmith’s first experienced this extraordinary concealment, or “strict compartmentalization,” in late 2003 when, he recalls, Addington angrily denied a request by the N.S.A.’s inspector general to see a copy of the Office of Legal Counsel’s legal analysis supporting the secret surveillance program. “Before I arrived in O.L.C., not even N.S.A. lawyers were allowed to see the Justice Department’s legal analysis of what N.S.A. was doing,” Goldsmith writes.

Goldsmith also witnessed perhaps the most well-known confrontation over the administration’s aggressive tactics: the scene at Ashcroft’s hospital bed on March 10, 2004, when Gonzales and Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, visited the hospital to demand that the ailing Ashcroft approve, over Goldsmith and Comey’s objections, a secret program that was about to expire. (Goldsmith refuses to identify the program, but Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, has publicly indicated it was the terrorist surveillance program.) As he recalled it to me, Goldsmith received a call in the evening from his deputy, Philbin, telling him to go to the George Washington University Hospital immediately, since Gonzales and Card were on the way there. Goldsmith raced to the hospital, double-parked outside and walked into a dark room. Ashcroft lay with a bright light shining on him and tubes and wires coming out of his body.

Suddenly, Gonzales and Card came in the room and announced that they were there in connection with the classified program. “Ashcroft, who looked like he was near death, sort of puffed up his chest,” Goldsmith recalls. “All of a sudden, energy and color came into his face, and he said that he didn’t appreciate them coming to visit him under those circumstances, that he had concerns about the matter they were asking about and that, in any event, he wasn’t the attorney general at the moment; Jim Comey was. He actually gave a two-minute speech, and I was sure at the end of it he was going to die. It was the most amazing scene I’ve ever witnessed.”

After a bit of silence, Goldsmith told me, Gonzales thanked Ashcroft, and he and Card walked out of the room. “At that moment,” Goldsmith recalled, “Mrs. Ashcroft, who obviously couldn’t believe what she saw happening to her sick husband, looked at Gonzales and Card as they walked out of the room and stuck her tongue out at them. She had no idea what we were discussing, but this sweet-looking woman sticking out her tongue was the ultimate expression of disapproval. It captured the feeling in the room perfectly.”

Goldsmith, Comey, Mueller and other Justice Department officials were prepared to resign en masse if the White House implemented the program over their objections. Two days later, Comey had a conversation at the White House with Bush in which the president told him to do whatever was necessary to make the program legal. And in the end, the entire controversy was arguably unnecessary since the program was eventually approved by Congress and brought, at least partially, under the supervision of the FISA Court, as it could have been from the beginning. “I was sure the government was going to melt down,” Goldsmith told me. “No one anticipated they were going to reverse themselves.”

The heroes of Goldsmith’s book — his historical models of presidential leadership in wartime — are Presidents Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both of them, as Arthur Schlesinger noted in his essay “War and the Constitution,” “were lawyers who, while duly respecting their profession, regarded law as secondary to political leadership.” In Goldsmith’s view, an indifference to the political process has ultimately made Bush a less effective wartime leader than his greatest predecessors. Surprisingly, Bush, who is not a lawyer, allowed far more legalistic positions in the war on terror to be adopted in his name, without bothering to try to persuade Congress and the public that his positions were correct. “I don’t know if President Bush understood how extreme some of the arguments were about executive power that some people in his administration were making,”

Goldsmith told me. “It’s hard to know how he would know.”

The Bush administration’s legalistic “go-it-alone approach,” Goldsmith suggests, is the antithesis of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s willingness to collaborate with Congress. Bush, he argues, ignored the truism that presidential power is the power to persuade. “The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action and legalistic defense,” Goldsmith concludes in his book. “This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.”

Goldsmith says he remains convinced of the seriousness of the terrorist threat and the need to take aggressive action to combat it, but he believes, quoting his conservative Harvard Law colleague Charles Fried, that the Bush administration “badly overplayed a winning hand.” In retrospect, Goldsmith told me, Bush “could have achieved all that he wanted to achieve, and put it on a firmer foundation, if he had been willing to reach out to other institutions of government.” Instead, Goldsmith said, he weakened the presidency he was so determined to strengthen. “I don’t think any president in the near future can have the same attitude toward executive power, because the other institutions of government won’t allow it,” he said softly. “The Bush administration has borrowed its power against future presidents.”

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, is a frequent contributor to the magazine. He is the author most recently of ”The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America.”

Death of diversity?
The dangers of an isolationist society
JOSE DE LA ISLA, Hispanic Link
September 6, 2007

Forget presidential politics. The real debate might be taking place outside that arena. And a good thing, too. The dumbed-down, lightning-fast, popular vanity answers by presidential aspirants might be irrelevant.

In August, the Wall Street Journal’s deputy editorial page editor, Daniel Henninger, brought up an important concern about the times we live in. The header boldly read, “The Death of Diversity.”

He reported that Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, author of the best seller “Bowling Alone,” claims after 30,000 interviews in 41 U.S. communities, “People in ethnically diverse settings don’t want to have much of anything to do with each other.”

This doesn’t sound very promising for those who believe we can all not only get along but thrive when real and imagined barriers come down.

That typically happens when our social networks (called “social capital”) do their job and provide economic and cultural security. But that type of solidarity seems to go down when immigration is up.

Henninger, who otherwise appears to be sort of middle-of-the-roadish, has a definite spin on all this. He thinks advocates for campus, corporate and media diversity “gave short shrift to assimilation” and elevated “differences” to another category by challenging the old ways in court.

Because the diversity issue (ethnic, race, gender, sexual orientation) was unnerving, “little wonder the immigration debate is riven with distrust.”

I disagree with Henninger’s perspective.

Diversity issues, at least since the 1970s, have been about fairness standards. Why should all citizens pay for higher education when their own kids don’t stand a chance there, or how fair are glass ceilings for our educated, well-qualified daughters?

Pitting diversity concerns with immigration movements implicitly looks at social change from a xenophobic point of view. It makes the traditional populations seem as if they are under jeopardy of some kind because they might feel they are losing power.

In fact, Putnam says in the first line of his scholarly paper that new ethnic and social heterogeneities pose both challenges and opportunities not just in the United States but in most advanced countries. In this changing of the guard, especially in Western Europe, the traditional networks to find a job, get a mate, raise children, enjoy status and even have prominence within a circle of acquaintances is changing.

Simply put, Putnam says ethnic diversity will increase substantially. In the short to medium term, immigration and ethnic diversity will challenge the established social solidarity. In other words, “different” people will be trying to get into our networks or will be forming networks of their own.

So far, so good. But now comes Pat Buchanan and others with another interpretation. They wrongly claim Putnam says greater diversity causes greater distrust in our country.

Imagine that! The increasing lack of trust researchers have reported since the 1960s happened because of immigrants of the 2000s.

Conveniently misunderstanding what Putnam says misleads the country about an important insight.

Yes, “bonding” within social groups becomes less solid in the face of diversity and immigration. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of “bridging” with non-traditional groups. That’s why Putnam says immigrant societies dampen the negative effects of diversity by constructing new, more encompassing identities.

Negative-oriented people, like Buchanan, will never get it. They can only look at a situation and think about what was “lost.” They can’t see all the new gains.

Or, as Putnam puts it, the main challenge is “to create a new, broader sense of we.”

Now of those running for president, which candidate is enough of an intellectual to understand the big picture and lead us there instead of scaring us?

Dark of Heartness: A Journey Into The (Reputed) Soul of Conservatism
David Michael Green, Cyrano’s Journal
Saturday, September 8, 2007

I spend a lot of hours thinking about what goes on in the hearts and souls of the regressive right.

Probably you’re already thinking, “Boy, what a waste of your time”. Or maybe, “What hearts? What souls?”

Far be it from me to disagree. But I have been haunted this last quarter-century, and especially this last decade, by the darkness that has descended over the American political landscape, a long shadow unlike any I remember from the first half of my life.

That’s a pretty remarkable statement, if you think about it, since among the political lowlights of my first decades were the deepest depths of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, Vietnam, reaction to the civil rights, antiwar, women’s and gay rights movements, three major political assassinations, Watergate, the Nixon/Kissinger/Pinochet coup in Chile, the oil shocks, the Iranian Revolution and the Hostage Crisis. And while much of that I was too young to fully appreciate at the time, you have to admit that’s a helluva of roller-coaster ride for just a few decades.

Just the same - maybe it was my youth, and maybe it was my naivete - but it sure seemed like things were nevertheless different then, even through the worst of times.

People hated Nixon, for example, and for very good reason. You can even make a pretty compelling empirical argument that his depredations were more lethal abroad and more destructive at home than those of his profoundly stunted present-day successor and sociopath sidekick.

Still, somehow there were limits then that don’t seem to exist today. Somehow there was a fundamental decency - though hardly universal - that has disappeared in our time.

It’s hard to put your finger on, exactly, but there’s a base meanness of spirit and a destructive indifference attached to the likes of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Antonin Scalia or Karl Rove for which it is hard to find equivalents among the Gerry Fords or Nelson Rockefellers or Harry Blackmuns or even Barry Goldwaters of old (though high marks go to the likes of Spiro Agnew and Joseph McCarthy for representing their generations well in the Most Debauched Neanderthal competition). Something profound changed in the forty years preceding 2007.

Things are different now. Not only is the moderate wing of the GOP no longer dominant within the party, today it represents a nearly vanished species, and may be fully extinct after 2008. And no longer is there a lack of public support for the worst tendencies of the sickest Republican minds (though things have improved marginally in that regard in the last year or so). Nor are there any longer substantial limits on what the party is capable of doing. Nowadays the inmates are in charge of the asylum, and a very scary segment of the public has been applauding their reprobate policies and their noxious tactics. These are not good signs. This is not the mark of a healthy republic.

How did we get here?

You could begin to see it in the 1980s, though that was still a time of transition. The Reagan administration was in so many ways a warm-up act for the current calamity, though it was still qualitatively different. Perhaps that is why Nancy is always at such great pains to disassociate her Ron from the rabid feralites who inherited his party. Usually I find her plaint unconvincing, but too often even the deceitful and rapacious policies of the Reagan administration look downright patriotic compared to the present crew.

By the 1990s, the ugliest tendencies of the regressive movement were on full display, though, of course, not nearly in the magnitude of what was to come. The arrogance and sheer maliciousness of Gingrich and the hounding of the decidedly not-liberal Bill Clinton made clear that a new and destructive vector had been cut loose in American politics, and that everything - including, if not especially, the institutional and philosophical inheritance from America’s Founders - was expendable if it got in the way of the will to power. When we saw a bunch of Republicans impeach a president - for only the second time in American history - for a less egregious version of exactly the same thing they were all doing (”But his lies about philandering were under oath!”, don’t you see), you knew the country was adrift in some dark waters.

But the real emblem of regressive malignancy circa the 1990s was the savaging that was directed toward Hillary Clinton. Again, it is important to note that Hillary, who had grown up Republican and conservative, was never much of a liberal. Unless you think that giving people access to healthcare or a decent childhood is a stealth project of some Trotskyite anarchist sleeper cell attempting to corrode America’s moral fiber from within. It is highly instructive to remember that there were senators and congressfolk (who, by the way, unlike Hillary had a real title and real governing authority) with politics far to the left of hers, who never took anything like the beating that she did. And also that there have been women in leadership positions in the GOP then and now - Elizabeth Dole, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe - some of whose politics are, like Hillary’s, even rather centrist, and obviously none of whom were subjected to any right-wing venom at all, let alone the oceans’ worth dumped on the former Ms. Rodham.

Something about Hillary struck a primal nerve in the psychology of regressives - and not just public ones like Gingrich and Limbaugh, either, but a whole lot of ordinary folk as well. Why? I think, quite clearly, that she posed some kind of profound and essential threat to a certain kind of person, a threat which entirely transcended all rationale calculus.

By the time we came to the era of Caligula himself, the dark heart of contemporary regressivism was on full display. You could see it in the post-election debacle of 2000, as Scalia actually stopped the counting of votes, as the Brooks Brothers Riot brought GOP congressional aides to Florida for some wee brownshirting to the same effect, and as Bush loyalists waved their ugly “Sore Loserman” signs in an attempt to close down a legitimate legal process seeking to determine the winner of the presidency.

Given a bit more courage, a smart progressive movement could successfully pitch its ideas to an insecure public hungry for protection from a threatening world, especially because the facts are so manifestly in our corner.

Here, along with the prior impeachment, was a bitter anger and destructive vengeance on display rather unlike most of mainstream politics in the prior century. No quarter would be given, and no prisoners taken. Not only ideologically, but also tactically, the radical right of the former fringe had become instead the Republican, and later the national, mainstream. The barbarians had penetrated the gates and were now occupying the very halls of power, while the genteel dinosaurs from a more civilized era stood by watching in stunned silence. Tom Daschle never knew what hit him. This was a different breed altogether.

It would get worse, of course - much worse. Like (the now gone native) John McCain before them, war heroes John Kerry and Max Cleland would be savaged by a smear machine for which conscience was an entirely foreign (and undoubtedly Gallic) concept. It wasn’t that long ago that the wearing of Band-Aids mocking Purple Heart recipients would have been unheard of, even among the Reagan crowd. Next, in an act of what can only be called treason, an undercover CIA agent would be outed in order to destroy her husband, whose crime was to expose one of the myriad lies told to sell a completely fabricated national security crisis. Anyone who disagreed with this most disagreeable of foreign policies had their patriotism publicly questioned, and were accused of abetting the enemy. Historic allies - some dating to the very beginning of America itself, and all only a year earlier fully supporting the Afghan invasion - were ridiculed, mocked and alienated. Longstanding keystone treaties and international laws were shredded. And there is much, much more. What is scary is that this could happen in America, but what is scarier still is that it could receive significant public support.

What happened here? What trauma occurred during these decades, so extensive that it transformed these people and their party into something no longer recognizable even for the likes of former Republican senator Jim Jeffords?

As an upstanding social scientist trained to empirical caution, I’d want to see loads of data before I’d proffer any definitive answers to that question. But as a reckless armchair social theorist, I can’t help but be struck by four highly significant macro trends that have been temporally coterminous with this turn to the mean-spirited right in the United States.

The first of these is economic stagnation. Or, at least, for some of us. The hourly wage of the median American worker has risen only 9 percent from 1979 to 2005. Not too good, eh? Well, more precisely, not too good for the middle class. Certain other folks did just fine, thank you very much. In 1982, CEOs made 42 times more in salary than the average worker at their company. By 2001, that ratio had grown to 525 to 1, meaning that a CEO today makes, over the course of eighteen holes and two beers, what the average worker pulls down in an entire year. Overall, the share of total national income going to the richest ten percent of Americans has returned - after holding steady from the 1930s through the 1960s at about one-third - to pre-New Deal levels of close to one-half, thus bequeathing to our happy country levels of economic inequality only the Third World can match (welcome to Managua, my friends).

The upshot of this stagnation is that people have had to work harder and longer just to tread water. Today’s household typically requires two breadwinners to sustain what a single one could a generation prior. And even that pathetic income is not exactly leaving exhausted workers feeling content. Between globalization, layoffs, outsourcing, and the corporate shedding of healthcare and pension benefits, Americans feel the ground shifting beneath their feet every day. It isn’t inevitable that such conditions would produce a meaner politics, but it certainly provides fertile ground for the purveyors of cheap scapegoats ( e.g., welfare queens, ‘the government’, immigrants) and cheaper-still solutions (reckless tax cuts, beating up punky countries, etc.).

Meanwhile, if falling economic standards are a first causal factor, almost certainly a second one driving such politics is the unprecedented rise of social equality America has experienced since the 1960s. In most circles, it is no longer acceptable to be racist, sexist or, increasingly, homophobic. ‘Worse’ yet, for America’s Archie Bunkers, not only can such outgroups no longer be dominated and disparaged, but they have now become officially privileged, winning jobs and other opportunities on the basis of these classifications, the product of a remedial equality program based on reverse discrimination.

Third among these likely explanatory factors, it must be noted that the driving cohort in American politics (and economics) these last decades has been the Baby Boomers.

Stereotypes are just that, and generalizations should be understood, by definition, to be riddled with exceptions. That said, groups do sometimes have tendencies, and the tendencies of this group have (well-)earned it sobriquets like the Me Generation. Boomers have done a lot of good in their life span, I’d argue, as well as a lot of bad. What seems to unite it all is a certain pronounced self-absorption, selfishness and self-reverence.

What, you disagree? Well, if you’ve got a problem with that, we can gladly toss in a healthy slathering of self-righteousness too, as we disabuse you of your foolish misconceptions.

Finally, all of these factors have arisen against the backdrop of a fourth development, which sets a sometimes subtle, sometimes not, context for the others. That is the crossing of the imperial watershed. Even if Americans, with their short attention spans and their profound ignorance of history, can’t see it, it is nevertheless pretty clear that the ‘American Century’ actually only lasted about twenty-five years, and the empire is today seriously in decline - not only in a relative sense, but now also in an absolute sense. (It is true that this four-to-one projected to actual life span ratio is considerably better than the one percent of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich he actually managed to realize, but then surely there’s no better sign of your empire’s sorry demise than having to take solace in favorable comparisons to Nazi Germany, eh?)

In any case, the signs are all there. The crumbling of Bretton Woods in the early 70s, the vulnerability to oil blackmail that decade, the superpower’s drubbing by an impoverished Third World guerilla army clad in pajamas, and now a latter day repeat of the same disaster, the feel-good beating of collective chests represented by politicians like Ronald Reagan and George H. W. (”By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!”) Bush, and their yellow-ribbon-bedecked wars against such pathetically outgunned ‘enemies’ as Panama, Grenada and Iraq.

The list of such signs of imperial apocalypse is endless. It would certainly include the current insanity of our debt levels, the rapaciousness of our predatory elites that seems to know no bounds, the inability of the richest country in the world to provide basic services for millions of its citizens, and the near-monarchical dynastic tendencies of a polity that has produced the likes of George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton as its leading political figures. And don’t even get me started on American Idol! You don’t have to be Hamlet to know there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.

Put all these factors together and it’s easy to explain (though not excuse) America’s turn to the ugly right. Opportunities are diminishing, foundations are eroding, empire is fading. All this is happening especially to a generation of walking ids, used as they are to wanting what they want when they want it, and then getting it. And it has been happening most, and longest, to middle- and working-class straight white males.

The pinch is not inconsiderable. And gone are the socially-acceptable psychological safety-valve releases of yore which long provided coping mechanisms to these dispossessed. Back then, you might have been poor white trash, but you could at least feel better about yourself every time you asserted your superiority to blacks. No more. You might have been dealt some crummy cards in life, but at least your woman knew who was boss, especially when you brought home the sole paycheck. No more. And even when elites humiliated you with their power, you could always reassert your tenuous manhood by stomping a few queers here or there while the cops looked away (or assisted). Nowadays you’ll draw thirty years for committing a hate crime.

These people - these discarded and existentially exposed denizens of a dying empire - were walking targets for an angry ideology of greed, selfishness and violence. Like so many wandering San Francisco street kids seduced into attending a Moonie retreat, you could see them walking through the door. Mix in a little 9/11 fear and unfocused hatred at this or that brown-skinned foreign race, and these dudes were fully locked and loaded, ready to rumble. If you had to design a set of circumstances in order to sell tax cuts, war, repression and the permanent rule of Wall Street in America, you could hardly engineer a better program. And, to a certain extent, that is exactly how it went down.

The political figureheads, at the behest of their cynically clever marketing gurus, like to mask it as a cool and efficient resolve. But you don’t exactly need magnetic resonance imaging to pick up on the sheer self-loathing fury raging just below the surface of a guy like Newt Gingrich or George W. Bush. And just below that lies (and lies often) what is really the operative emotion, a deep, essential and defining terror. Without question, these politicians resonate with our bedraggled Boomers not only for their jejune policy prescriptions of belligerence abroad and selfishness at home, but most especially because such voters recognize in them a kindred spirit. One which hates Hillary Clinton profoundly and viscerally, without really being able to explain why. One which thinks blacks and Hispanics have gotten to be more than a little uppity and are stealing ‘our’ jobs. One which thinks that kicking some Arab ass might be a pretty good idea just on general principles.

Maybe you’ve also gathered from personal experience, as I have, that for many such ordinary folk this has become a faith-based politics, in more than one sense of the term. Regressives have nowadays become post- (actually, pre-) empirical. It’s as if the Enlightenment and the Founders and all of the last two centuries never happened (though, somehow, they seem to like their SUVs and their atomic bombs just fine). Rationality, as the primary cognitive system for comprehending our world, has been rejected in favor of unyielding dogmatic belief. For example, there exists today plenty of evidence to clearly prove without question that the administration willfully and purposefully lied about Iraq to sell a war the American public didn’t otherwise want. The Downing Street Memos alone are enough to make that case, but there is also plenty more. (Just imagine if there was this much proof against Bill Clinton how the right would have responded.) But try presenting a regressive you know with this evidence, or with the overwhelming evidence for global warming, and watch how they put up the blinders and start quoting from the Limbaugh gospels or the New Fox Testament. They can’t hear of it, and so they don’t.

Given the prevalence of such attitudes, it is no small miracle that we appear to have survived our era’s toxic cocktail of regressive bile. We are, of course, not out of the woods yet, and it is possible that a new, new Pearl Harbor, or yet another Middle East war would rally the persuadable middle of the American electorate back to the flag of the Boy King. (Don’t forget he had 90 percent job approval ratings right after 9/11 - despite the fact that he had gone off hiding in Nebraska.) But I tend to think that is probably no longer possible. I also tend to think that the fact that they haven’t already done this suggests that they’re probably not going to, though you never know what they’re capable of once the impeachment process kicks in.

Americans have hardly become any more secure in their own skins, however. To the contrary, the loss of a second Vietnam and the economic disaster which continually seems looming right around the personal debt / government debt / trade debt / mortgage meltdown / globalization corner is only going to make things worse on that score.

Ironically, what saved us (if we are saved) in the long-term from a predatory regime of regressive kleptocrats was the short-term experience of living under a predatory regime of regressive kleptocrats. After the utter and complete hash these people have made of everything they’ve touched, who now wants anything to do with this absurdly deluded ideology, apart from the frightened old ladies who still allow their pastors to tell them how to think and vote (oh, and how to donate too)?

There is massive opportunity here. The combination of increasingly insecure Americans and the patent failures of a disastrous turn to the right meant to address those insecurities leaves one obvious prescription on the table - a turn to the left. Already there is overwhelming public support for a national healthcare system (wow, and to think - only sixty years after every other industrialized democracy in the world got theirs!). This would have been unthinkable as little as five years ago. Expect similar attitudinal swings as the trap door continues to open underneath Americans on issues like pensions, global warming, jobs and more. It is not exactly in the American tradition to favor governmental solutions to personal and social problems. It just so happens, though, that in so many of these domains they tend to work (however imperfectly - which imperfections usually having most to do with insufficient funding), and that the alternative of the conservative market deity (Praise the one true lord!) does not.

Americans have been slow to learn this, and have paid the price accordingly. But learn they now appear to be doing (it would sure help if somebody out there from the so-called liberal party would frame the question properly, and vocally), and we should perhaps be thankful that the damage done during this particular life lesson wasn’t greater than what has in fact been visited upon us. As awful as its been, it could have been much worse.

There is hope, especially, in the narcissistic selfishness of the Baby Boomers, whose only consistent attribute has been a tendency to take very good care indeed of Me (and, after all, who else really matters?). In their formative years, that meant playing at socialism. When, during their middle years, the bill for such policies would have come due in the form of higher taxes (and therefore fewer wide screen televisions), that meant playing - much more seriously this time - at capitalism. Now that they are getting ready to retire and will be dependent on external revenue sources to maintain a decent lifestyle, they’ll be back to the government teat again. You can bet, as Boomers usually do, somebody else’s bottom dollar on that one.

John Stuart Mill once said that “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people… it is true that most stupid people are conservative.” Mill was certainly on to something there, though I prefer the term ‘ignorant’ (in its non-pejorative sense, that of simply lacking knowledge) to his use of ’stupid’.

Regardless, I suspect that what is more significant to the determination of political dispositions than even the absence of education, knowledge or intellect is the question of personal security. We’d understand our current predicament much better by realizing that not all conservatives are insecure, but that most insecure people are conservative.

Fortunately, conservatism is not the only answer to insecurity, and in the end it’s no answer at all. Writing in “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, Hannah Arendt described how such movements “conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations”.

It’s great magic, but, of course it never lasts. However powerful your imagination, that empty belly of yours is still going to require food. However potent their propaganda, that medical condition you have is still going to require treatment.

Fortunately, this process has already begun. Now it only remains to be seen just how courageous and smart we are, and just how desperate is the reaction of the regressive right to its own implosion.

The moment is ours.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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