Legal eagle run amok and other bits

John Yoo — fashioned by fate to help destroy the union? Seems so. I read a piece that asked why, given his obvious failings, he is still allowed to teach at Berkeley — the author has obviously never BEEN to Berkeley, or he wouldn’t ask such a dumb question. There’s no Us/Them questions in the Berkeley rank and file — just a motley and grand-glorious gathering including one of everything.

Before we get to the serious talk, though, I thought you’d be interested in this well-deserved honor bestowed upon our little Decider, as reported from the SF Bay Area:

“Looking to honor the forty-third President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, the recently formed Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is looking to change the name of the Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility. It seems the group would like to rename the SF Zoo adjacent facility to the ‘George W Bush Sewage Plant.‘”

Perfect!

Now — the ACLU finally got their hands on the memo’s produced by Yoo and others as they put together their torture rationale; I can’t help but connect dots from the Pub disdain of anything lawyer-ly, like their attack on John Edwards due to his “big bucks” income, crafted out of big settlements “victimizing” well-meaning corporations [that suck children into pool drains, for instance] as compared to their complete dependence on legaleze to give them powers outside of the Constitution. If a lawyer says it’s true, it’s true? Apparently — but only if that lawyer is bought and paid for and does exactly what Uncle Dick wants.

And that was always the plan — always, even when Dubby ran on his compassion and his revulsion to nation building and his disdain of foreign adventure. Consider this passage snipped from Lincoln Chafee’s new book, concerning the early ambitions of the Bush White House:

Daniel Heim writes in Roll Call about former Rhode Island Republican senator Lincoln Chafee’s new book:

“The former Senator describes a December 2000 meeting of Republican moderates with Vice President-elect Cheney. Chafee listened as Cheney swore off the moderate course he and Bush had just finished championing in their campaign.

“Hearing Cheney say ‘the campaign was over and that our actions in office would not be dictated by what had to be said in the campaign,’ Chafee writes, was ‘the most demoralizing moment of my seven-year tenure in the Senate.’”

For those who say that these Boyz were floundering around, looking for their message prior to 9/11, I say Bah Humbug! They immediately launched into deconstruction of protections across the board, preparing for a take-over. The Towers just gave them license to make it international, and the opportunity to get right to their “unitary” project [while legally covering their own ass] — remember, it wasn’t until Dubby stood on the mound with the bullhorn that anybody thought he was impressive in the least.

I still don’t. He’s not even a competent tyrant, like Uncle Dick who doesn’t give a rap about what people think; Dubby is all Cancerian self-protecting cover-up … he can look forward to a lifetime of bluster and defense, tears and depression after his bubble bursts. Unhappily, his legal eagles have pretty much made it impossible to slam him into an orange jump suit.

Here’s a short collection of snips and links to the Yoo memo and discussion; lots of info there, if you wish to explore it. After that, a couple of interesting reads about how dead the Conservative duck is. The first is an interview with Bill Press — he used to be the only voice of calm in early Cross Fire’s on CNN. He’s a cool one.

I especially like the last piece, a discussion of Us v. Them — a last look at old paradigm thinking, slowing drifting away. It hasn’t left the building, of course — we will still have to deal with this mind-set if Obama gets the nod; the “race chasm” that David Sirota speaks of has to do not with the candidate himself being black, but the arousal of old fears that he might skew his influence to empower the black community. Hil is more generic — sexism is more a ‘vanilla’ problem, and no Righty is going to give himself away by claiming he’s scared of a woman [even if he regularly has night terrors!]

Us/Them isn’t dead yet — just old and crusty, like John McCain.

Jude

Snipped from Call It the Abu Ghraib Memo
Dan Froomkin, WaPo
Wednesday, April 2, 2008

[open link for entire article and to read the Yoo memo]

The Justice Department memo released yesterday is a key link in the chain of evidence connecting the monstrous abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere straight to the White House.

President Bush has described the torture and murder of prisoners by U.S. military personnel as the work of an aberrant few. But this 2003 memo opened the door to precisely the kinds of abuse so horrifically chronicled in the Abu Ghraib photographs.

And the memo’s author — John Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — was a longtime ally and notoriously pliant scribe for the radical legal views of Vice President Cheney and his chief enforcer, David S. Addington.

Yoo’s memo is a historic document. It is the ultimate expression of Cheney’s belief that anything the president or his designates do — no matter how illegal, barbaric or un-American — is justifiable in the name of national self-defense.

It is also an example of how enabling zealots to disregard the rule of law and the customary boundaries of human conduct leads to madness… ++

Snipped from John Yoo’s War Crimes
Glenn Greenwald, Salon

[open link for article]

Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin makes a critical point:

Lawyers can make really bad legal arguments that argue for very unjust things in perfectly legal sounding language. I hope nobody is surprised by this fact. It is very commonplace. Today we are talking about lawyers making arguments defending the legality of torture. In the past lawyers have used legal sounding arguments to defend slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, rape (both spousal and non-spousal), Jim Crow, police brutality, denials of habeas corpus, destruction or seizure of property, and compulsory sterilization. . . . .

Orin [Kerr] wants to know whether John [Yoo]’s theories are consistent with my views of the living constitution. If he wants to know as a substantive matter whether John’s theories of Presidential dictatorship are consistent with the Constitution’s text and underlying principles, they are not.

The fact that a lawyer does something in his capacity as a lawyer does not mean it’s proper, legitimate or legal. The fact that an argument is packaged in lawyerly wrapping doesn’t mean it’s reasonable or offered in good faith. All sorts of lawyers — from those representing crime families to those representing terrorists — have been convicted of crimes because they concealed and/or promoted their clients’ illegal acts. Lawyers aren’t any more immune from the rule of law than anyone else.

Harper’s Scott Horton makes the point in much the same way:

These memoranda have been crafted not as an after-the-fact defense to criminal charges, but rather as a roadmap to committing crimes and getting away with it. They are the sort of handiwork we associate with the consigliere, or mob lawyer. But these consiglieri are government attorneys who have sworn an oath, which they are violating, to uphold the law. ++

Bill Press’s New Book ‘Train Wreck’ Says Good-Bye and Good Riddance to Right-Wing Conservativism
BuzzFlash Interview
Tue, 03/18/2008

Some conservatives want to blame it all on George W. Bush, and they say, no, it’s not our fault. He’s the one who betrayed the conservative movement. That is just a cop-out, because George Bush could not have done anything that he did without the support of the conservatives who controlled the House and the Senate and the Supreme Court at the time. In fact, he wouldn’t even have been President without them. …

I think they have ruined the economy. They’ve ruined the country. They’ve ruined our image around the world. And they’ve ruined the conservative brand name. I don’t think they can or should ever be trusted with power again.

~ Bill Press, Author, Progressive Talk Radio Host, Political Commentator and Former Chair of the California Democratic Party

He’s a progressive talk show host, former chair of the California Democratic Party, political news analyst, reporter, and author. That means he’s Bill Press.

Some people fault Bill for not being as emotionally driven as some of the progressive radio hosts (and we listen and like all of them — except Lionel whose voice is just too annoying).

But as we get BuzzFlash ready for the day in the early AM, we have come to really enjoy Bill’s nationally syndicated program. Sometimes we even call in just for the heck of it.

Press is straightforward, fair, the reasonable lunch guest who isn’t going to get all red in the face and lunge for your throat. He lets callers have their say in response to a question of the day and is respectful, but isn’t hesitant at all to weigh in with his own perspective, in a tactful way.

Press has also gotten us to appreciate — God forbid — some mainstream journalists, such as CNN’s John King. In short, as we get BuzzFlash all set up for the morning alerts and order the headlines, we learn a thing or two from the Bill Press program.

In this interview with Bill we discuss his forthcoming book Train Wreck: The End of the Conservative Revolution (And Not a Moment Too Soon). It will be out in April, and we’ll be offering it as a premium in the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace.

BuzzFlash: — Your new book is Train Wreck: The End of the Conservative Revolution (And Not a Moment Too Soon). To begin, maybe we can clarify some terminology. What’s the difference between conservative and, let’s say, the Bush-Cheney right wing?

Bill Press: Well, the Bush-Cheney right wing has repudiated everything the conservatives supposedly stand for. So they’re not, I don’t believe, true conservatives. And they didn’t start the end of the conservative movement, but they certainly brought it to a screeching halt. What I try to do in the book is expose the hypocrisy of the conservatives, starting from Newt Gingrich on, who assumed power and then proceeded to screw everything up, and deliver just the opposite of what conservatives preached. If you’re talking about limited government, if you’re talking about a non-interventionist foreign policy, if you’re talking about fiscal responsibility, if you’re talking about honesty and integrity in politics, conservatives have brought just the opposite.

BuzzFlash: Well, they call themselves conservatives, but they’re really right wing. Your colleague on progressive radio, Stephanie Miller, who is the daughter of Bill Miller, who ran with Barry Goldwater, constantly brings up that Goldwater himself would be horrified at what has happened.

Bill Press: And I make that point in the book — that Russell Kirk, Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater would all be horrified at where today’s right wingers have taken the conservative movement, correctly. By the way, so was Bill Buckley, who, if anybody still represented true conservatism today, it was William F. Buckley, Jr. And he came out over a year ago and denounced the war in Iraq as a failed mission and a very non-conservative foreign intervention.

BuzzFlash: If we look back to before World War II, America didn’t enter the war when Britain entered the war. We didn’t enter the war until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Bill Press: Right.

BuzzFlash: That’s because the conservatives in the country, in the Republican Party in particular, were non-interventionists. They said we shouldn’t get involved in Europe again. We had one war — that was enough. That’s their war, and we are not going to intervene abroad. We’re concerned about defending America, so we didn’t get involved until we were attacked. Now Bush has adopted this nation-building concept, preemptive war, and that we’re the international police power. Clearly that’s a big difference from the old conservative movement.

Bill Press: Yes. I’ll address that directly, but first let me explain that the book makes three points. Number one, the conservatives assumed control of everything — of the entire government — the House, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They controlled everything. Number two, they screwed everything up. Everything they touched, they trashed. And number three — and I think maybe the most important point I make in the book — is that, therefore, they can never be trusted to govern again. They should never be allowed to be in the majority again. Their permanent place, and where they really belong, is in the minority, preventing the majority from going too far.

There’s no worse example of their total repudiation of conservative policy than the Bush doctrine, which repudiates everything, I think, that this country stands for, going back to George Washington warning us about not getting involved in foreign entanglements. Certainly our policy always has been that we will do anything to defend this country, but we don’t go around the world, to use John Quincy Adams’ phrase, seeking monsters to destroy. George Bush’s policy is that we’ll go anywhere in the world, anytime, to destroy anybody we believe to be a monster, even if they’re no threat to the United States.

BuzzFlash: Your book has three parts, and each addresses a conservative principle that the modern right-wing movement has betrayed. Again, I want to emphasize that in the mainstream media, the terms are often intermingled — that those whom they call conservatives are right wingers.

Bill Press: Right.

BuzzFlash: And many conservatives say, well, I’m really a conservative, I’m not like Bush and Cheney. They’ve betrayed my beliefs. Still, the press sometimes lumps these groups all together as conservatives. W need to make that distinction. And you point out that there is a conservative movement with some people still in that lineage, but that’s not who’s controlling the Republican Party now.

Bill Press: Exactly. They’re not controlling the Republican Party at all. And there are some people who really have remained true to what I would call pure conservatism. I think Pat Buchanan is one, for example. He and I have talked about this a lot. He agrees that the conservative movement that he was once a part of doesn’t exist anymore.

But one word of caution here. Some conservatives want to blame it all on George W. Bush, and they say, no, it’s not our fault. He’s the one who betrayed the conservative movement. That is just a cop-out, because George Bush could not have done anything that he did without the support of the conservatives who controlled the House and the Senate and the Supreme Court at the time. In fact, he wouldn’t even have been President without them. So it wasn’t George W. Bush and Dick Cheney alone. It was Bush with the so-called conservative leadership of the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court.

And here’s the problem. When you start out hating government, you can’t make government work.

BuzzFlash: If you think government can’t work, then your goal is to make government not work. That’s the one thing they’ve succeeded at.

Bill Press: Exactly. They failed at everything they said they were going to do, whether it’s trying to limit the size of government, or trying to balance a budget, or trying to run a responsible or a “humble” foreign policy.

BuzzFlash: In Chapter 7 you write about “the party of fiscal responsibility.” Historically we associate conservatism with fiscal restraint, and balanced budgets. So what’s happened here? When Bush came in, he hardly had any debt. And now it’s over $9 trillion.

Bill Press: Right. And 23% of that is owned by foreign governments. The Republican Party is no longer the party of fiscal responsibility. Period, end of story. The only president in modern times to have balanced the budget is Bill Clinton. Ronald Reagan didn’t. Bush ‘41 did not. And Bush ‘43 — his legacy as a Republican president will be the biggest federal government ever, the biggest work force ever, the biggest federal budget ever, the biggest federal deficit ever, and the biggest national debt ever.

They spent money like a drunken sailor. But, as John McCain likes to repeat, he never knew any sailor drunk or sober that spent money the way the federal government has done. And it’s our money.

BuzzFlash: You mentioned ownership of our debt by foreign governments. What are the implications of that?

Bill Press: The implications of so much of our paper being owned by foreign governments is that they’re holding us hostage. At any time, they could wreck the U.S. economy. They could lose confidence in the U.S. and decide to cash in their investment, at any time. That puts the United States in a very perilous financial position vis-à-vis foreign governments.

BuzzFlash: In essence, foreign governments can call in their debt at any time, and our economy would collapse.

Bill Press: As others have said, we are borrowing from the Chinese to buy oil from Saudi Arabia. That’s the essence of the Bush economy.

BuzzFlash: Your last chapter is titled, “Less Power to Washington.” That would be, again, the historically conservative position, not the modern right-wing position.

Bill Press: Right.

BuzzFlash: We know that the symbolic centralization of authority in Washington has become the concept of the unitary authority, or complete Executive Branch control of the three branches of government. The Bush Administration even has attempted to overrule what has been a traditional — the most traditional — conservative policy in many ways vis-à-vis government, which is states’ rights. We have a White House that believes in supreme Executive Branch federal authority. What happened there?

Bill Press: There are two issues here. First of all, states’ rights don’t exist anymore. To the extent that they still did recently, they ceased to exist with the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, where, again, the conservative leadership yanked from the State of Florida the right to hold and conduct its own elections and count its own vote.

I give several other examples where the conservative Supreme Court and the Bush Administration, if they don’t agree with a state policy or a state action, then they have demanded that the federal government come in and overrule the state. So they only believe in states’ rights when the states are doing what they think the states ought to be doing.

On top of that, the Bush-Cheney Administration came into office with the idea that Nixon gave away too much power, and that the presidency has been weak ever since then. They were determined, and they set out, to restore the power of the executive. The so-called “unitary executive” means that the President has all the power he believes he needs to do anything. That’s a very bold kind of goal or statement. But 9/11 gave them the opportunity they were looking for, and they have used 9/11 to assert breathtaking new executive authority across the board. Whether it’s wire-tapping without a court order, or whether it’s torturing prisoners in violation of international law, they don’t believe that they are bound by the law, period.

And this is the final thing. The unitary executive, when the Founding Fathers talked about it, they were debating are we going to have one president, or a little panel of presidents? They said, no, we want one president. We want a unitary president. Bush and Cheney have taken that phrase “unitary” to mean unlimited power. That’s not what the Founding Fathers meant.

BuzzFlash: Finally, the title of your book refers to “The End of the Conservative Revolution.” Is that because, in essence, the right wing has ruined the conservative brand name?

Bill Press: Yes. That’s a good way of putting it. I think they have ruined the economy. They’ve ruined the country. They’ve ruined our image around the world. And they’ve ruined the conservative brand name. I don’t think they can or should ever be trusted with power again.

Of course, this is a timely question. With this election, people are going to be saying, it’s not conservatives that are at fault. It’s just George Bush. So we get him out of there and we put in another conservative, if you can call him that — John McCain — and everything’s going to be okay. And I strongly disagree with that. The book is a refutation of that point. No matter who the conservative is, they have proven that, given the opportunity, they have a generic deficiency and are incapable of governing.

BuzzFlash: Bill, thank you so much. It’s a great book, and everyone should read it.

Bill Press: I’ll be reading BuzzFlash, and I hope you’ll be listening to my show, too. ++

BuzzFlash Interview conducted by Mark Karlin.

Two Kinds of Americans: Us Versus Them
Sara Robinson, OpEdNews
April 3, 2008

The old joke goes that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t.

Funny thing is: it’s not a joke. In fact, it turns out that this one oddly recursive fact can tell us a whole lot about any country’s prospects for social order, political stability, and propensity for violence.

The premise is preposterously obvious and simple — but all the more powerful for being so.

Where people — from families to nations — see themselves as one unified group, where everyone’s in the same boat together rowing toward a more-or-less agreed-upon future shore, and where there’s enough mutual trust and respect to allow people to cooperate in achieving their common goals, the group tends to survive and thrive. The social contract holds. The economy grows. People are willing to invest in the common good. The group prospers.

However: the happy comity that allows us to function as social and political animals inevitably falls apart when one group pulls away from the collective whole and decides that there are in fact two kinds of people in the world — a righteous Us, and a suspect Them — and They aren’t worthy of respect, cannot be trusted, and should rightly be purged from our midst for the good of the whole. Whenever the name of the political game becomes Us Versus Them, the resulting divisions can quickly shred any sense of shared identity or common future. Nobody wants to invest in anything. Infrastructure and economies fall apart. In short order, the escalating internal conflicts can tear apart families, communities, and nations far more effectively than any external enemy ever could.

Unfortunately, Us Versus Them thinking has become the political norm in America — and it’s gone on so long now that it’s shattered our ability to deal effectively with any of the big challenges we’re facing as a nation. If America is going to survive — and especially, if we’re going to bring about any kind of progressive order — it’s crucial that we understand how this split got so wide, the magnitude of the damage done, and what can be done to heal it.

This piece will address the first two questions: how it got started, and what it’s cost us so far. Next week, we’ll look at some of the ways we can begin to bridge the rift and restore America as a functioning whole.

Us Versus Them: A Short Tour

For a chilling example of how an all-out game of Us Versus Them can eventually end up, look no further than Iraq — a nation that has never been a singly unified country at any point in its modern history. The colonial Brits had a nasty habit of throwing national boundary lines around mutually antagonistic groups wherever they could, knowing that this arrangement guaranteed a level of permanent internal instability that would allow them to stay in perpetual control. And that was the logic at work when they drew up the boundaries of modern Iraq in the early 1920s.

Iraq includes fragments of Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish territories — each of which has stronger attachments to other communities outside Iraq’s borders than it does to the idea of a unified Iraq. The Sunnis look to the Saudis as much as they look to Baghdad; the Shia look to Iran; and the Kurds yearn to be reunited with their siblings in Turkey. The country was set up, from the get-go, to be divided and conquered by its own constant potential for internecine warfare: the British simply capitalized on a lively Us Versus Them game that had been going on since ancient times. Given that we’re now trying to join together what earlier colonial powers very intentionally put asunder, why are we so surprised this unhappy trio can’t seem to make it all work out now?

Us Versus Them is a noxious religious impulse, too. One of my professional mentors is fond of saying that fundamentalists don’t need a God, but they absolutely can’t survive without a Devil — a despised Other that they can project their own inner demons onto, and then try to eliminate. You cross the bright line between mainstream belief systems and fundamentalist ones at the precise moment you realize that you have found the One True Right and Only Way — a way that’s not just True and Right for you personally, but is also the God-ordained rule that everyone else in the world should be forced to follow, too. All-or-nothing, black-or-white belief systems encourage believers to sort the world into Us (the Elect) and Them (the Fallen) — and then set the two factions against each other in a cosmic battle for the soul of the world, with stakes so high that any atrocity can be justified to win it.

Fundamentalists don’t come to the point of holy violence overnight. There’s a very predictable cascade of conclusions that tumbles from “pray and preach to the unconverted” down to “God told us to kill them all.” But leave them cooking for a while under enough social and economic pressure, and any fundamentalist group can end up here in time. And, looking back, we will realize that it all started the minute they decided there were two kinds of people in the world — and that their conviction that They were separate from and holier than Us was the essential justification for horrific acts of terrorism and genocide.

But fundamentalists aren’t the only ones who do this. You can find the Us Versus Them impulse at work anywhere you find authoritarian thinking. As Dr. Robert Altemeyer explains in his book, “The Authoritarians,” Us Versus Them is a central theme of the right-wing authoritarian (RWA) worldview — which is why RWA politicians are the ones who seem to lean most heavily on scapegoating, race-baiting, and warmongering (Us-versus-Them arguments all) in order to gain political power. It’s also why RWA voters, whose knee-jerk tribalism helps them deal with their inbred hypervigilance, always fall for it.

Unfortunately, while conservatives know that divide-and-conquer is often a winner at the ballot box, progressives need to start pointing out that Us Versus Them politics are a loser when it comes to the overall health of the nation. This kind of politics is nothing more than a form of right-wing self-indulgence that does massive damage to the health and future of the entire republic — and may even, in the end, cost us the whole world.

How did we get here?

It all depends on how far back you want to go. The conservatives will petulantly point our direction and insist that the Dirty Fucking Hippies started it all, with help from the Negroes and the Mexicans and especially those Uppity Women. We were one unified happy White Protestant Male nation until Those People got a bug up their butts and decided to assert their “rights.” In this telling of the story, 1960s identity politics was the first wedge that drove America apart — and they’ve been gamely trying to hold the center together ever since.

Of course, this is a damned disingenuous recounting of the tale, given that it blithely sidesteps all the ways those White Protestant Males have been working the Us Versus Them wedge since long before the republic was founded. Not just blacks and women, but Native Americans, Jews, Irish, Chinese, Catholics — the country’s ruling elites have never been shy about Othering whoever was handy in order to maintain their privileges and assure the steady stream of cheap labor and resources that capitalism feeds on. It also ignores that the civil rights and women’s movements were, at their best, a request to let people in — to heal the breaches and expand the definition of full American citizenship in ways that would, ultimately, make us a far more unified and sturdy whole.

The cold historical fact is: They started it. And they did it on purpose. Rick Perlstein, our own tireless chronicler of modern conservative history,* points out that Vice President Spiro Agnew fired the first shot in 1969, when he announced the GOP’s intention to put an end to the Era of Good Feeling that had dominated Washington since the war. While party differences were always evident, the previous 25 years had seen strong, even-handed agreement on what the role of government should be, what the common good looked like, and what kind of future the American people expected them to work toward.

That November, Agnew proclaimed the end of that era, in a speech that tore into the country’s liberal leadership with a ferocity that stunned the nation. He called the leaders of the anti-war movement (which, by that late date, represented well over two-thirds of the country) “political hustlers” — “who would tell us that our values are lies.” “America cannot afford to write off a whole generation for the decadent thinking of a few,” he argued — a few who “prey upon the good intentions of gullible men everywhere,” and who were best characterized as “vultures who sit in trees and watch lions battle, knowing that win, lose, or draw, they will be fed.” The real enemy, of course, was liberals — and the Democratic party, which was guilty of something akin to treason for harboring them.

This was new and shocking rhetoric in its day, and it heralded the beginning of an unapologetic conservative attempt to label half the nation — including much of the younger generation — as Bad People with an agenda that all right-thinking Americans were duty-bound to resist. And Agnew reveled in it. “If in challenging, we polarize the American people, I say it is time for a positive polarization….It is time to rip away the rhetoric and divide on authentic lines.”

It sounds mild by current standards, but Hubert Humphrey, the previous VP, put the harshness of Agnew’s rhetoric in the perspective of its time. “I personally doubt that our country has seen in 20 years” (that is, since Joe McCarthy) “such a calculated appeal to our nastier interests.” But, according to Rick’s account, White House aide John Ehrlichman stepped forward to defend the GOP’s new tone: “I don’t think it’s illegitimate for someone in his situation to help bring a balance to communications” — after all, he declared, “politics is the art of polarization.”

That was the moment that the conservatives began to pull away from the rest of America, and define themselves as a separate movement with a separate vision of what it meant to be part of this country. Once they’d cut themselves loose, they were no longer bound to play by the agreed-upon rules — not the customs of comity that had governed GI-era politics, not (as we saw as early as 1972) the laws that ensured fair elections, not even (as we came to realize during the Bush years) the fundamental operating agreement that is our Constitution.

They declared themselves a tribe apart, standing in implacable opposition to the future America was rapidly embracing — a future of environmental responsibility, fair taxation, widening diplomatic influence abroad, and greater domestic investments and social and economic equality here at home. They wanted no part of any of it. And if putting a stop to all that meant declaring themselves a separate nation at war (they openly called it a “culture war”); and if the ravages of that war tore the nation to pieces, well, then, so be it.

Agnew’s declaration was only the beginning. In October 1971, Pat Buchanan wrote a strategy paper that turned Agnew’s “positive polarization” into a long-term Republican goal. “Cut the Democratic Party in half,” he argued, and the GOP would end up with “far the bigger half.” The biggest part of that half would be gained by pandering to the racism of the Dixicrats, in the gambit that Kevin Phillips famously named the Southern Strategy.

The GOP and their brethren movement conservatives have been playing divide-and-conquer with America ever since, constantly seeking out new ways to slice-and-dice the electorate by stimulating old animosities and churning up new ones. The demons have been many and varied, depending on the time and place: feminists, gays, communists, pagans, college professors, scientists, Mexicans, liberals, and most recently, Muslims. Like authoritarian ideologues everywhere, the GOP has found that it can do without a God; but it can no longer survive — let alone justify its long war — without a devil.

What It’s Cost Us

The right wing has kept this rollicking game of Us Versus Them going for nearly 40 years now, and we’ve reached the point where almost every problem we’re facing as a nation can be traced back to the fact that a large political subgroup has effectively seceded from same the union the rest of us still belong to. Here are just a few areas in which the divisions they’ve fostered have cost us dearly, and will continue to cost us for a long time to come:

Faltering economy – Once they cut their ties to the rest of us, conservatives felt no compunction about taking more than their fair share from the rest of us via absurdly lopsided tax laws and draconian employment, wage, and unionization laws. While even the robber barons of earlier generations understood that a thriving middle class was the goose that kept laying industry’s golden eggs, the post-secession right wing felt no responsibility for anybody else in America at all. Their new motto is: I’ve got mine. The hell with the rest of you.

Failing infrastructure — Having psychologically left America behind, the conservative Us feels no further obligation to pay for anything that might benefit Them. (In fact, the very idea that they might owe anyone anything sends many right-wingers into a spittle-flecked, irrational rage.) And that included roads and bridges, schools and universities, public health officials and safety inspectors — every essential service that keeps civil society functioning. To abandon the works of civilization this thoroughly, conservatives not only needed to divorce their own fate from that of the rest of the country; they had to openly declare war on the rest of us.

In then end, they put so much distance between Us and Them that they actually believed that they’d be insulated when the inevitable consequences of all this deferred maintenance started to come down. Everyone else would suffer, but somehow, they’d be spared — safe in their gated communities, protected by their hired police, treated by their elite doctors, and speeding along on their private toll roads. A lot of them still believe that they’re completely exempt from the future they’ve designed for the rest of us — and it’s going to take some real shocks to the system to disabuse them of this naive faith in their own invincibility.

The Global War on Terror — “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists.” They literally couldn’t articulate the problem in any other terms — which has foreclosed any other kind of solution.

Unaccountable government — This started out as a political reflex: whatever goes wrong, make PR hay out of it by blaming it on liberals, taxes, immigrants, or Bill Clinton. It didn’t take long before it simply became a habit, because it fed so nicely into the Us Versus Them narrative that defined their entire worldview. In the black-and-white authoritarian world of conservatives, the bad stuff was never caused by Us; and the good stuff can never be attributed to Them. And so they remain pure, unstained, and blameless for anything that goes awry.

Bad decision-making – Of course, this kind of skewed ideological thinking makes it impossible to come up with good solutions to knotty problems. Conservatives now define “good” as “what’s good for Us” — or, alternatively, “what will really stick it to Them.” The idea that they have any responsibility to any of the rest of us is totally anathema to them. And that led directly to the worst outcome of all….

The death of the common good — Whenever a society devolves to Us Versus Them, the common good is the first and worst casualty of the ensuing war. The conservatives worked overtime through the 1970s and 80s to convince us that the common good was nothing more than a mass delusion that weakened society, and was probably a Communist plot. By 1987, Margaret Thatcher was publicly admitting that “there is no such thing as society;” and conservative intellectuals were insisting in peer-reviewed journals that “communalism” — that is, the notion that we have any obligations to each other at all — was a dangerous and backward superstition that needed to be extinguished.

This is what over-the-top Us Versus Them sounds like in its metastasized stages.

Putting it back together

The illusion that there are two kinds of people in the world — our kind, and that other kind — has been hard to maintain lately in the face of some shattering realities. 9/11 divided us further — but only for a while, until the middle and lower classes began to notice who was paying the price for the ensuing wars, and who was collecting the profits. On the heels of that came Katrina, and the shock of our falling bridges, and the undeniable collapse of our health care system. When most of Us can’t trust the roads we commute on every day, or count on the government to keep our homes above water, or afford a doctor when we need one, all that conservative cant about Rugged Individualism and Taking Care of Ourselves rings damned hollow.

We’re starting to remember, at long last, that there is no Us, and no Them — there’s just We, the People, struggling to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. And the life, liberty, and happiness of every one of us depends on having a government that works. Us Versus Them is a self-serving conservative indulgence that we can no longer afford — and those who continue to promote it in the face of all we’ve been through the past seven years are declaring their implacable hostility toward both their fellow citizens and the nation’s founding ideals.

Next week, I’ll talk about some of the ways that pernicious sense of division — which is, arguably, the root of most political, social, and economic evil — might be constructively engaged and addressed. ++

*This section draws on Rick’s unpublished account in Nixonland, which will be arriving in bookstores in May.

“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

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