Bill Moyers: Conservative Radicals and the Politics of Vengeance

[Joanne98]

BILL MOYERS: Watching those protestors you would have to say there's a lot of fight left on the Right, and you wouldn't be wrong. This rising tide of populist resistance to Obama, the anger over the massive government bailout of Wall Street and big failed corporations, have raised Republican hopes for a comeback. And it has Democrats scratching their head wondering how to respond.

So what do we make of this new book titled THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM? Has the author Sam Tanenhaus spent his time and considerable talent on a premature obituary?

Sam Tanenhaus edits two of the most influential sections of the Sunday NEW YORK TIMES - the Book Review and the Week in Review. He's has had a long fascination with conservatives and conservative ideas. He wrote this acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, the journalist who spied for the Russians before he became fiercely anti-communist and a hero to conservatives. Now Tanenhaus is working on a biography of the conservative icon William F. Buckley JR.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL, Sam Tanenhaus.

SAM TANENHAUS: Oh my pleasure to be here, Bill.

BILL MOYERS: So, if you're right about the decline and death of conservatism, who are all those people we see on television?

SAM TANENHAUS: I'm afraid they're radicals. Conservatism has been divided for a long time -- this is what my book describes narratively -- between two strains. What I call realism and revanchism. We're seeing the revanchist side.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean revanchism?

SAM TANENHAUS: I mean a politics that's based on the idea that America has been taken away from its true owners, and they have to restore and reclaim it. They have to conquer the territory that's been taken from them. Revanchism really comes from the French word for 'revenge.' It's a politics of vengeance.

And this is a strong strain in modern conservatism. Like the 19th Century nationalists who wanted to recover parts of their country that foreign nations had invaded and occupied, these radical people on the right, and they include intellectuals and the kinds of personalities we're seeing on television and radio, and also to some extent people marching in the streets, think America has gotten away from them. Theirs is a politics of reclamation and restoration. Give it back to us. What we sometimes forget is that the last five presidential elections Democrats won pluralities in four of them. The only time the Republicans have won, in recent memory, was when George Bush was re-elected by the narrowest margin in modern history, for a sitting president. So, what this means is that, yes, conservatism, what I think of, as a radical form of conservatism, is highly organized. We're seeing it now-- they are ideologically in lockstep. They agree about almost everything, and they have an orthodoxy that governs their worldview and their view of politics. So, they are able to make incursions. And at times when liberals, Democrats, and moderate Republicans are uncertain where to go, yes, this group will be out in front, very organized, and dominate our conversation.



Continued>>>

http://www.alternet.org/media/142754/bill_moyers%3A_conservative_radicals_and_the_politics_of_vengeance

[Demeter]

1. No, the Left Is NOT Going to Go Hand in Hand With the Right

into another Bushite presidency. That's absurd reductionism.

The Left is going to hammer their representatives into doing what they promised to do, or replace them.

[struggle4progress]

2. Tanenhaus summarizes decades very sloppily and without any cogent analysis. Consider,

for example, this:

... one of the real contributions conservatism made in its peak years, the 1950s and '60s, ... is that it repudiated the politics of public demonstration. It was the left that was marching in the streets, and carrying guns, and threatening to take the society down

But of course the 50s began as the McCarthy era, and by mid-decade the segregationists were violently attacking civil rights activists who as a matter of principle adopted gandhian tactics in response to the widespread violence. This nonviolent paradigm completely dominated left-reform movement thinking until nearly a decade later, and the later groups and events usually -- and often erroneously -- associated with threats to "public order" were essentially a phenomenon of the second half of the 1960s: the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense wasn't founded until 1966; the violence in the 1967 Pentagon March was the unprovoked attacks of state actors against marchers after dark, when most media personnel had gone home; the infamous unpleasantness in 1968 Chicago was likewise mostly by police; the Stonewall riots were in 1969

Nor is it clear that "repudiating the politics of public demonstration" was in any sense a "real contribution," since much of the "take-to-the-streets" attitude aimed at changing institutions and policies (like Jim Crow or the Vietnam War) that had proven resistant to change by ordinary "ask politely, then don't rock the boat." The public discussions, produced by acting out ideas like "Instead going to Vietnam to stop elections there, I'd rather smoke pot and splash around naked in this fountain with some other folk," produced majority public opinions against the War before the 1968 election