Two Cheers for George McGovern?
Posted on January 7th, 2009
by Daniel McCarthy |
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Paul Gottfried and Dylan Hales offer contrasting takes on my recent essay on George McGovern and the Right.
Perhaps I should say a word or two about how I came to write the piece. I was as shocked as anyone when I first read Bill Kauffman’s conservative defense of McGovern. But amid the Obamacon boom last summer, the notion of conservatives for McGovern started to seem a little more plausible — especially considering that even though McGovern was not consistently anti-interventionist or pro-civil-liberties, he was certainly better than Obama be. Surprisingly there actually had been some conservative and libertarian support for McGovern back in ‘72 — both Lew Rockwell and TAC’s Scott McConnell were pulling for him, while the Future Neocons of America, still Scoop Jackson Democrats at the time, hated him like nothing else.
This prompted me to think about how the modern pro-Bush Right was the same hoary anti-McGovern coalition: Scoop Jackson plus George Wallace. In my article, I should have made explicit the connection between the ’70s/’80s New Right and the Wallace movement: Richard Viguerie, for example, had raised $7 million for Wallace between ‘72 and ‘76, and Wallace was sometimes mooted as a standard-bearer for the populist third party that New Right strategists like Bill Rusher and Kevin Phillips dreamed of. Most importantly, though, the politics of alienation and resentment that fueled Wallace also fueled the New Right, though the emphasis shifted from race to religion. That alienation and resentment was not entirely misplaced, by the way.
The irony of the New Right was that its leaders — including Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, and Howard Phillips — inclined to something like paleoconservatism. (Indeed the 1982 anthology-cum-manifesto The New Right Papers includes essays from Samuel Francis, Clyde Wilson, and Thomas Fleming as well as Rusher, Viguerie, and Weyrich.) But the “culture war” rhetoric they pioneered was quickly appropriated by the Scoop Jackson brigade, who can deploy it far more effectively than the paleos ever could, because the Jacksonites embrace the love of all things military that has long since displaced traditional patriotism in the hearts of many Americans. (As Christian Zionism is now displacing old-fangled Christianity.)
However much New Right populists and metropolitan neocons hated one another, both reviled George McGovern even more. The result was a Right that was an inverted image of the McGovern Left: pro-war, anti-civil-liberties, but equally preoccupied questions of identity. The older anti-Communism, which was problematic enough, gave way to a crude nationalism (specifically, an amalgam of flag-waving and democracy-exporting), while fanciful notions of a conservative welfare state — “compassionate conservatism” or a pro-family welfarism — displaced the Right’s traditional anti-New Deal economics. Perversely enough, the Right as we know it today is not a creation of Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan, but of George McGovern, or at least the anti-McGovernites.
The older conservatism, it should be noted, would have been quite capable of resisting McGovern, albeit on constitutional, limited-government grounds rather rather than anti-counterculture grounds. That might have been less appealing to the electorate than class or culture war, which seemed to work well for Republicans in ‘72 and ‘04. Then again, the electorate soured on the wars and civil-liberties violations of Nixon and Bush pretty quickly after those contests, didn’t it? The anti-McGovern Right actually gave the Left its big wins of ‘74, ‘76, ‘06, and ‘08. Not only is anti-McGovernism bad in principle, it’s a lousy political strategy, too.
In all this, both in my original article and here, what I counsel is not that the Right should become pro-McGovern — I think that’s an obvious non-starter — but that we ought to be anti-anti-McGovern. I do give the senator from Avon, South Dakota credit for several of his positions, however: his stand against the Vietnam War, both in its earliest stages and at its height, was courageous and correct. He’s right, too, that “Freedom Means Responsibility” — which in turn means that if someone goes bankrupt because of a subprime mortgage, neither he nor his lender should be bailed out. His stand against card check is also commendable. Bill Kauffman has enumerated many of his other virtues. He was no Robert Lafollete, let alone Robert Taft, but he was no Richard Nixon or George Bush either. Nor was he a Kennedy-Johnson-Humphrey-Jackson Democrat. For that, I’d give him two cheers.
Filed under: Conservatism, Politics
‘even though McGovern was not consistently anti-interventionist or pro-civil-liberties, he was certainly better than Obama be.’
Dropping some ebonics on us? LOL
Ah … I changed my phrasing there but botched the edit. Thanks for spotting that.
Oh, man - I meant to post in the rawshark way earlier, and got sidetracked and scooped.
Of course, what Dan meant to say was “…he was certainly better than Obama bes.”
I recall here the black comedian from a few years ago who did a hilarious routine spoofing, perhaps, his uncle, known for pronouncing “teeth” as “teefus“…
There is a cultural/generational element to this reappraisal of McGovern and other old liberals. As odious as his political opinions might be, he came from a generation that accepted personal responsibility. I heard him on the radio a few years ago talking about a book he wrote on the death of his daughter. He didn’t use modern psychotherapeutic language or avoid the need for people to own their decisions. So even liberals used to have some measure of backbone.
I think it was Paul Gottfried who mentioned that McGovern dropped bombs on essentaily defenseless German cities during the war. Perhaps bombing population centers was a war crime. But the missions McGovern flew on were far from milk runs. Consulting the casualty statistics for bomber crews in the European theater of WWII proves that McGovern is a brave man, if not a politically good one.
I believe “dispensational premillenialism” should be used in conjunction with “Christian Zionism” along with the “heretical” “modernist” qualifiers to convey the correct impression for the curious that the doctrine bears little resemblance to traditional Protestant Christianity
established from the Reformation to the late 19th century.
The fact that McGovern lost, and so sealed in amber for all time his relative glow as a dissident lesser-of-evils when set against a president whose every dark and sweaty pore is now visible in our national wax museum, gives him a marginal might-have-been aspect for those tired of the military Keynesianism that is our lot as a nation, to which his occasional recent op-eds skeptical, in a William Proxmire-meets-the-Reader’s Digest sort of way, of the reflexive statism of the political class, serve as a sweetener.
However, had the hands dealt Nixon in the economy and foreign affairs been a notch worse, and the McGovern campaign a notch more skilled in winning the swing vote, such that the senator won not his 37% of the vote but the White House, I can see all too easily an Obamatisation avant la lettre O being enacted as candidate transitioned to president, with a roster of “safe” advisers and cabinet picks, pre-emptive thoughts of holding the center unto re-election via hawkish upsurge and “triangulated” wonkery to tickle the soccer moms and NASCAR dads of the shag-rug and Naugahyde era, and a cooling of the non-interventionist fires, much as we see the latest president-elect settled into a kind of TNR/em> McGeorge Govern > McGeorge Bundy
I must have botched the tags on my previous comment, so, from the fresh cream of memory, I attempt to join it in progress:
…much as we see the latest president-elect settled into a kind of TNR “muscular liberalism” that disdains not the Iraqs to come, provided the usual consensus-builders at the CFR swarm with the expected humanitarian/Metternich bona fides. Recall the millenarian euphoria among the anointed and elated of the supposedly liberty-heralding Reagan “Revolution” sworn to slice the federal bureaucracy to bones - and the de facto/default Cold War liberalism of actual Reaganite governance, 1981-1989: Incredible Unshrinking Government, indeed.
The structural dynamics of a modern industrial democracy, and the allergy, on the part of all those able to capture its highest offices, to curbing the drive to exercise with vigor the immense executive prerogatives of the imperial presidency in the interests of “doing good”, effectively rule out anything resembling a presidency friendly to liberty in anything more than campaign and Independence Day rhetoric. Well before the presidential palm quits the inaugural bible, Grover Cleveland has long since left the being.
Shorter Alternate 1972-1976:
George McGovern > McGeorge Govern > McGeorge Bundy
The problem is not George McGovern the man or what he did during his career, which does follow along LaFollette-Lindbergh Sr.-George Norris-Non-Partisan League-prairie populist lines.
The problem is what he’s perceived to have represented and the forces that helped him win the Democratic nomination. Heck, my parents are tree hugging liberals and even they were put off by some of his more radical supporters in ‘72. And those very supporters, often caused him the most grief.
Gorttfried’s right about that. There’s no doubt the multicultural left’s first victory was the McGovern camapaign of ‘72. However, there’s much to admire about a patriotic, religious decent man, a man of the priaire soil and the sincerity of those views. His camapaign against Nixon might have gone better if they had emphasized these qualities instead of, as Dr. Hunter S. Thompson put it “running a 60’s campaign in the 1970s.”
That’s why Gottfried’s wrong about the communist angle and insultingly so. It’s true McGovern originally supported Henry Wallace and attended the Progressive Party convention of 1948. But what he doesn’t tell you is that McGovern switched his support to Truman when he realized the Stalinists were in control of the Progressive Party. If CREEP hacks didn’t think it was a big deal I don’t see why Gottfried does. Besides, if you use Gottfried’s logic then Murray Rothbard was a commie, everyone at LRC is a commie, and one could say Ron Paul is a commie too. In fact such crap has been said by the necons all last year.
And so long as we’re talking Commies here, why are we letting the neocons off the hook? Does Gottfried not remember than many of their number belonged to socialist political parties and groups? Did they get off easy because they were Trotskyests instead of Stalinists? Trotsky was a murderer too and had none of Stalin’s Russian patriotism. Why shouldn’t all of the gang at Alcove 6 at CCNY have gone in front of Sen. McCarthy’s committee and answered if THEY were members of the Communist Party? Hmmm? I sure we would have gotten some interesting answers from messrs. Kristol and Podheretz.
My basic problem with McGovernism is not who supports it or what their backgrounds were, but where does it lead ultimately? McGovern himself personally may have been a left-libertarian but his supporters didn’t mind using the heavy hand of government for affirmative action or to get something they wanted for themselves. They may very well have been anti-interventionist when it came to Vietnam or Iraq but they sure didn’t mind blowing up Serbia and killing innocents there. One cannot be a interventionist only when your side controls the military. There are fundemental contradictions between the policy and the practice of McGovernism that leave it an incoherent mess as we saw in the Clinton administration and will to a certain extent with Obama, especially on foreign policy.
I think we all can agree McGovern the man is more attractive from a paleo standpoint than McGovern the idea
The neocons got off easy and snuck into the conservative movement because they shared the perspective of folks like Prof. Gottfried.
While it is true that there were large gaps between the New Right and the Neocons, both groups tended to view things through the prism of anti-communism and cultural liberalism. Much is made by paleoconservatives today about the “liberalism” of the neocons, but at the time of their ascension they were seen as allies because they were intellectuals, with interests in the hard sciences (interests that by their own account paleos did not have), who were openly opposed to the Great Society, Affirmative Action, et. To be more specific, the neoconservatives were opposed to the statist trends of the “Civil Rights Movement,” which was to a large extent the primary enemy of the New Right.
The error made by the paleos/New Right was in assuming that eggheads of any variety were the friends of liberty or decentralized government.
Anyone with a passing interest in the work of Irving Kristol would know that he was an advocate of Universal Health Care, Social Security, expanded public education, and some sort of guaranteed annual income/family wage package. Kristol’s gripe was not with the size or scope of government, but rather with government action that favored one group over the other for reasons of ethnic or gender identity alone. To Kristol social democracy was for everyone and “national greatness” was to be all inclusive.
On the other end of the neocon spectrum, the Commentary crowd was primarily opposed to this “second wave civil rights movement” for reasons that dare not be discussed without the charge of anti-semitism flowing freely (and needlessly). I will merely say that American blacks were not the preferred “victim” group with the Podhoretz clan, and leave it at that.
By focusing on decentralism rather than anti-communism, and community autonomy instead of cultural liberalism, the Ron Paul kids and their fellow travelers are promoting a much more “inclusive” form of anti-progressive politics. Though the paleoconservatives of old were right on most of the particulars, they were starting from a reference point that was a dead end and allowed for easy neocon takeover.
I don’t blame the paleos for trying to make allies and build a coalition. That is the nature of politics. I do blame them for being hopelessly naive, and at times so dangerously preoccupied with certain ethnic dynamics, as to allow the worst of the worst within the “conservative umbrella.”
Traditionalist conservatives and libertarians need not make enemies with a left that is increasingly allied with them on the most crucial issues of the day. An “alternative right” that has room for welfare statist “libertarians” like Charles Murray, or Israel-first White Nationalists like Larry Auster, ought not be shutting its doors to George McGovern, Ralph Nader, Gore Vidal or Robert Williams…it should be embracing them.
Thanks, Dylan. The only thing I would disagree with is the idea that there is *an* alternative Right. Whatever Right Auster belongs to is not one I would want to associate with.
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