The Right’s Rebellion
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What happened to the Age of Obama?
Glancing over the New York Times Book Review Sunday, one finds three of the top four non-fiction best-sellers were written by conservatives — columnist Michelle Malkin, talk-show host Mark Levin and Fox News contributor Dick Morris.
At No. 10, in its 40th week on the list, is Bill O’Reilly’s memoir.
No. 1 best-seller in paperback: Glenn Beck’s “Common Sense.”
Moreover, the altarpiece of the transformational presidency, universal health insurance, is on life support, as huge crowds pour into town hall meetings to denounce it. Responding to the protests, the Obamaites have dumped the end-of-life counselors (aka “Death Panels”) and declared the government option expendable.
But what are we to make of these “evil-mongers” of Harry Reid’s depiction, these “mobs” of “thugs” organized by K Street lobbyists and “right-wing extremists” who engage in “un-American” activity at town hall meetings? Surely, all Americans must detest them.
To the contrary. According to a Pew poll, by 61 percent to 34 percent, Americans think the protesters are behaving properly. Gallup found that by 34 percent to 21 percent Americans identify with them. For these folks at the town hall meetings are not overprivileged Ivy League brats seizing campus buildings and holding the dean hostage. They look and talk just like them.
What President Obama is losing is not the far right but the center of the country. Nor is this the first time liberals have misread America.
During the 1968 Democratic convention, liberals sided with the antiwar demonstrators in Grant Park. And the country sided with the Chicago cops who went into the park and gave them a good thrashing.
In 1969, the national press was writing that President Nixon must yield to the hundreds of thousands ringing the White House. Nixon went on national TV to call on the Silent Majority to stand by him.
They did, for four years.
One recalls Sen. Ed Muskie blurting out, after being crushed in the Florida primary by George Wallace, that he didn’t know there were that many racists in Florida. That was the end of Ed. And in the fall, the Floridians flooded to Nixon, who did not insult them.
After Nixon rolled up his 49-state triumph, Pauline Kael, movie critic at the New Yorker, is said to have expressed disbelief: “I don’t know how Nixon won. No one I know voted for him.”
George H.W. Bush never saw the rebellion of 1992 coming and watched Ross Perot waltz off with a third of his 1988 voters.
The anger in Middle America today looks much like what erupted in the NAFTA debate of 1993 and the amnesty debate of 2007.
The difference: Republican leaders stood with Washington then, for NAFTA and amnesty. This time, the party leaders are with the people, and should do the people’s will.
Seven months into the Age of Obama, the GOP has been given an opportunity to regain the allegiance of the voters John McCain lost with his embrace of NAFTA and amnesty, and his dash to Washington to convince Republicans to give Hank Paulson $700 billion to bail out Wall Street.
For these protesters are not so much being drawn to the GOP as being driven to it. The manic assaults by Democrats and liberal commentators and columnists on the protesters as “un-American,” “birthers,” “racists,” “mobs” and “evil-mongers” has enraged and united them and cost Obama much of his support in Middle America
Does the left not realize that, while four in five Republicans say the protesters are behaving appropriately, 64 percent of moderates and 40 percent of Democrats agree with those Republicans?
We are also learning that Republicans have not been hurt by their opposition to the stimulus bill or cap-and-trade. The country has come to agree with the GOP.
Nor was the party hurt when, by four to one, its senators voted against Ms. Affirmative Action, Sonia Sotomayor. Nor was it hurt by standing with Sgt. Crowley when Obama rushed to denounce the Cambridge cop for acting “stupidly” in arresting the Harvard professor who got in his face. Obama’s support among Africans-Americans remains solid. His support among the white working and middle class is sinking.
Increasingly, Obama is being perceived as a man of the left and Republicans as the bulwark against a lurch to the left. Democrats may denounce Republicans as the Party of “No” — but the nation seems to be saying “Yes” to the Party of “No.”
In his new memoir, Encounters, conservative scholar Dr. Paul Gottfried writes of a 1993 gathering, hosted by this writer, where libertarian legend Murray Rothbard, columnist Sam Francis and that founding father of postwar conservatism, Dr. Russell Kirk, went at it over the role of the populist right in the conservative movement.
Though they vehemently disagreed, each man represented an essential element of a center-right coalition. As for the protesters, surely Thomas Jefferson was more right than Harry Reid, when he wrote to James Madison, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
Filed under: Uncategorized
So the GOP, the party of Bush, Cheney, the neo-cons and the Wall Street banksters (and less we forget its tyrannical origins, the party of Lincoln) is poised for a comeback thanks to the stupidity of both its democratic opponents and its populist rank and file? Dare we hope – NOT?!!!
Still crazy after all these years, eh?
Back in the real world, it’s pretty much guaranteed that, by the time a Health Reform Bill actually gets voted on by Congress and lands on Obama’s desk, it’ll have a public-option and voluntary ‘end of life’ counselling in it. He’ll sign it, and move onto Immigration Reform. That is, after all, what he was recently elected by a large majority of Americans to do.
And, the Republican Party, already up to it’s neck and sinking fast in race-baiting crazyville, will complete the task of making itself unelectable outside of the Deep South for a generation, by following its Base off a cliff and into the swamp named Culturally Toxic.
The only question remaining, is will the GOP split before or after the 2012 Election? But that’s not really Obama’s problem, is it?
Left-liberalism’s condemnation of middle America’s concerns, fears and democratic expression of angst over the viability and scope of the Dem plan as “thuggish” and mob-like is so typical of the elitist-authoritarian Left. It reminds me of how the Bolsheviks categorized any opposition to their totalitarianism as sabotage being orchestrated by “counter revolutionaries” hell-bent on preventing human progress.
The open disdain and hostility being expressed by left-liberal MSM commentators, bloggers and even average “progressives” in comments on the internet, and some of the spin being emitted from the White House, make it clear that left-liberal elites and much of their base have utter contempt for average Americans who possess populist and libertarian instincts.
Apparently the left-liberal collective regards itself as their intellectual betters, and the flyover country bumpkins too primitive to understand the finer points of central planning, and thus undeserving of an opinion or perspective on the matter. Not very “democratic,” that.
But as typical of the childish fantasyland in which liberals live, the Left believes it can suspend the laws of economics and the incontrovertible history of central government inefficiency, and “create its own reality” with enough will and largesse.
Why, the whole mindset is reminiscent of Bush’s adolescent intellect and the Necon blind faith that Washington could transform and socially engineer the Middle East.
Doesn’t supporting either of these two sets of corrupt and incompetent clowns election after election reach the definition of insanity?
Chris Moore wrote:
“Doesn’t supporting either of these two sets of corrupt and incompetent clowns election after election reach the definition of insanity?”
Yeah, and it is interesting (and distressing) to see a kind of duality in Buchanan’s writings. On the one hand when it comes to matters of substantive policy he’s right there, often the first to be pointing out where the Republican Party is being corrupt or incompetent. (Or both.)
On the other, with the very next breath it seems, he’s talking as he does here as just another apparent Republican partisan, cheering the falling poll numbers of Obama with the barest of mentions that he feels same is justified.
I’m no fan of Sotomayor and think cap and trade is nuts, but clearly the great mass of opposition Obama is engendering right now arises out of opposition to his health-care ideas. So okay, I have no doubt they can be argued with on any number of grounds and indeed maybe they are just way way wrong. But with the populist movement against it I at least haven’t seen any of those grounds at all, just some unfocused anger at politicians not reading the entirety of bills or at alleged but non-existing provisions curtailing end-of-life care. (Accompanied by an utter lack of suggested alternatives, as if the current mess with health-care costs continuing to rise at multiples of the rate of inflation can continue forever with sheaves of good people going bankrupt due to same being just hunky-dory.)
In Buchanan’s defense I suppose one could see this column of his as just being analytical and not cheer-leading for the Republicans, but to me at least it just reinforces the idea that we should cheer allegedly good politics regardless of whether good policy is behind it.
And meanwhile in obvious and opportunistic reaction to Obama’s attempts to merely get Israel to stop expanding its settlements in the occupied territories, some 25 or so Republicans just got done visiting Israel with Mike Huckabee openly coming out supporting such expansions and essentially saying that if the Palestinians should get a state it should be elsewhere, such as on Pluto presumably.
Not yet time to be cheering the Republican Party I don’t think when it’s clear that when it isn’t just practicing its same-old brain-dead reactionism in eternal defense of the status quo it’s just condemning the very same things that its sainted George Bush did with his bailouts and stimulus attempts.
(And at least Obama hasn’t invaded any new countries yet.)
Cheers,
I greatly respect Pat Buchanan’s integrity and principles. I take issue with his promoting the GOP, a party that has not demonstrated any principle beyond that of political expedience.
@TomB and Avi,
I’m thinking out loud here, so take it for what its worth…
Deep down, Buchanan probably believes the GOP can be redeemed, and possibly salvaged from the grip of the Israel lobby, the war-profiteering complex, the corporatists, all of whom have a grip on the Dems, too. (With the latter, you can also throw in lawyers and Big Government unions.)
But the GOP has so much blood on its hands, and so many power-mad cynics, opportunists and charlatans at its helm.
On the other hand, all of the above can be said of the Democrats. And the GOP does have Ron Paul…
It could be the libertarian populist groundswell that will lead the GOP out of the wilderness, if the entrenched and corrupt powers at the helm could be forced to follow. And they CAN be forced to follow, because the only remaining alternative increasing looks like American economic and social collapse.
Since we’re apparently stuck with the two-party system, perhaps Americans of conscience can muscle the GOP back towards the Founders’ ideals. And because only conservatives are really interested in those ideals, I think Buchanan has concluded it will have to be the GOP or no one.
The other possibility, though, is a third party Ross Perot figure (but libertarian populist) that could totally bypass the two corrupt entrenched parties and pull off a victory by tapping into the groundswell of populism we’re starting to see today.
Won’t get fooled again.
Many here seem to confuse political parties with religious denominations. Parties dear people, are not congregations brought together by shared values and beliefs. They are machines for winning elections. In this they are cold monsters. The Republican party is dedicated to one thing only, getting incumbent Republicans reelected. In order to do this they will take money from anyone and they will support any cause for the same reason.
So stop castigating Pat Buchanan for having a Republican background or for hoping that the GOP will take on some conservative positions. There are only two parties. And the Democrats have already been bought by a different set of interests.
Why don’t the Republicans actually follow their Conservative campaign promises? Because Conservatives are unfocused, complaining, navel gazers, who do not understand that only two things count to any political party, money and votes. The Business Round Table, the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street and the AARP provide one or the other. Conservatives provide both, but never get around to holding the GOP accountable because they do not organize and get in the game. They just keep complaining that the GOP doesn’t love them for themselves.
While not willing to defend the big government Democratic Party, or it commentary of the “thuggish” nature of the recent town whole loud mouths, I will say that assuming that those people recently disrupting otherwise sober discussion are “middle American populists” is pretty naive.
I have seen these folks in action, and I doubt that any of them are anything more than small minded fanatics, who have created their own reality and then wish to pretend it is real.
Let’s take the recent “Obama as Hitler” posters. If you look closely you see the web site printed at the bottom points to the LaRouche crowd. This group is anything but centrist, middle America, and I think it is certainly disingenuos to suggest such on this blog.
Basically, there appears to be three main bodies of dissenters that show up to these meetings – the thugs namely the left-wing crazy LaRouchites, the right-wing crazies who think a failed Alaskan governor is their saviour, and those who simply have sober and serious concerns about public policy, but are not given the opportunity to inform themselves or question the town hall panels.
This goes to the fact that the crazies are not interested in honest debate. Like all members of radical political and/or terrorist movements, facts and pragmatic discussion is anethma to them, as when people can properly inform themselves and develop informed opinion and make educated choices, they lose, and lose big. So they spread lies and half-truths and shout down anyone who tries to do anyting different.
Let’s not pretend that these nut jobs are anything other than the radicals that they are. The only way to put an end to it, is to take away their bully pulpit and stop giving their arguments even the remotest consideration. The only thing they are interested in is scaring enough people to actually matter.
The Republican party is redeemable, and I hope will come to resemble much more closely the Founding Fathers by the time the next elections come around, running principled conservatives/libertarians a la Reagan. If Sarah Palin gets the Republican nomination, I think we will have the most promising candidate we know of so far. If Ron Paul recognized that the Islamic depredations of September 11, 2001 had far more to do with Islamic ideology than American foreign policy, he would be a super candidate. I sincerely believe that his lack of recognition of that fact cost him most of the voters who love this country. Yet there he was on TV echoing Marxist enemy propaganda, claiming we brought the atrocities on ourselves, as if we deserved them. Meanwhile, the Democratic party has been taken over by the socialists, communists, fascists, and other Leftist enemies of liberty, and is irredeemable. If the Republican nominee ends up being a conservative/libertarian, (s)he ought to win in 2012 not just in a landslide, but in an avalanche. But if the Republican nominee for 2012 is another Leftist-lite like McCain, I believe the door would be wide-open for Ron Paul in an independent campaign.
The uprising against Obamacare is, if I may say, a healthy sign. Like the uprising against amnesty a couple of years ago, it shows that at least a portion of the American population still has some fight left in it. The criticism leveled against the protesters for being rude by some paleoconservative commentators is unfair. Despicable politicians like Specter, McCaskill and Frank are due no deference. They don’t much like being told that they are wrong, do they? Tough!! The only problem with this situation is that the usual suspects in the Republican party and among the neoconservatives will seek to take advantage of this anger and misdirect it toward support of their agendas of Wall Street welfare and Middle Eastern Wars. And then we’ll back to where we started, only worse off.
Lots of really good comments here, many if not most of which reinforce my perception at least that George Bush did something really tectonic with his tenure along the lines of simply making the popular understanding of modern “conservatism” something that to a great degree is simply intellectually embarrassing.
That is, whether under Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan or even Bush I there was still a separation that people saw between their ideas and the instincts of the mob, even if they saw themselves as populists of a sort and were against elitism. Indeed, in hindsight, the sense that there *were* ideas behind them and not just instincts may have been the over-arching characteristic that defines them for us now.
To a great degree of course Thom Meehan and Chris Moore are right about how the Repub. Party has been bought, but that doesn’t quite explain things to me at least. For instance I didn’t see any great monied constituency in favor of going to war in Iraq and occupying Afghanistan, instead what I at least perceived was more of an instinctual “bad guys over there, we make big war on them” kind of impulse. And look how that impulse even over-rode the monied interests behind the Republican Party’s traditional anti-tax positions; it was clear from the start that at a minimum such adventures were going to cost billions upon billions if not trillions.
And as to many other issues—especially today—it just seems to me that the instinct is merely (if almost totally) a reactionary one: If the Dems are in favor of it, the “conservatives” are against it.
I guess this is pretty gloomy since if the Repub. Party and its current crop were just merely corrupt in Thom and Chris’ monied way its redemption would seem more possible given that at some point it and they would realize that losing wasn’t helping their coffers. But how do you change instincts and what amounts to a culture? Reasoned dialog? Well, maybe. But here what can seem the very *hallmark* of the instinct and culture Bush II bequeathed on conservatism is anti-intellectualism.
So how do you persuade it that it’s going wrong when, in short, ideas are the first and foremost thing that it is disdainful of?
Mr Moore,
Thanks to this and a few other good publications, I’ve learned the following:
The rank-and-file Lefties haven’t recently had an opportunity to watch their good intentions achieve the outcomes that ideological goals ultimately and inevitably produce.
Rank-and-file Righties had 8 years of Bush and 6 years with a rubber stamp GOP Congress, so ideological and imprudent use of state power by Republicans had a chance to reach its logical conclusion. Unfortunately, the conclusion drawn by most Lefties was simply that Republicans are stupid and don’t know how to use government— instead of the real lesson, which is that effective use of government power has natural limits.
So, now we all get to suffer through the education of the Left. They rightly point out that many Republicans are now only interested in limited government because they no longer control it. This allows them to ignore conservative warnings and plow ahead into the beautiful future that they know is possible with the right smart people in charge. If that future turns out to be a nightmare? For some, that will probably be the fault of those stupid Republicans. Hopefully, for more it will be a lesson in what is achievable by the collective and what is best left up to the individual.
All you lefties need not worry. The leadership of the republican party is still the same old corrupt clowns with their Reagan buttons and copy of the Constitution, which they use alternately as toilet paper or campaign literature as the situation demands. Republicans still think they can get the New York Times to stop calling them Nazis. Meanwhile the Democrats will pass Obamacide and begin killing their own constituents so they do not have to admit Medicare and Social Security are ponzi schemes and there is no money in the Trust Fund.