But there is something different about their tone these days, and I can't quite put my finger on exactly what it is. My tentative take is that there's an inchoate quality to their fears that's new. In the past they were fighting against specific things: communism, hippies, Bill Clinton, Islamists, abortion, etc. But communism is dead, the hippies are grown up, Clinton is off doing good works in Africa, al-Qaeda is pretty quiet, and it's pretty obvious that the culture wars have been lost. They're doing their best to slot Obama into the old Clinton/Gore role, but he just doesn't fit and the media isn't playing along the way they did in the 90s. So they're stuck. Who, exactly, is their enemy these days?
I'm not sure they know themselves. But maybe that makes it worse. A nuclear-armed USSR may be scary, but at least it's something you can identify. These days that's a lot harder. Like a horror movie where you're surrounded on all sides by something you can never quite make out, I guess it seems to them like there's something horrible going on, but it's something so insidious that they're only allowed to catch occasional foggy glimpses of it. Budget deficits? Healthcare reform? Top marginal tax rates going back to 39.6%? Negotiations with Iran? Those aren't things that normally stir the blood. But what if they're really just stalking horses for something far more malign?
This explanation boils down to paranoia, and God knows they have that in spades. But I'm inclined to think that this problem can be explaned through one of the ugly effects of history. I know that history is presented as an invariably good thing, and that knowing it is an absolute good because it is supposed to keep you from making the same mistakes over and over again. There's definitely something to this, and had Lyndon Johnson known more about the history of Southeast Asia before committing us to a disastrous war that killed 60,000 U.S. troops, many more Vietnamese civilians, Johnson's legacy and American liberalism, America would have been better off. Had George W. Bush known a bit about Middle East history before taking us to war in Iraq, perhaps he would have thought twice before plunging us into a morass of ancient religious, ethnic, and tribal tensions. History would have served us on those occasions.
But history can have negative effects as well, such as the inability to get over long forgotten injustices or a lazy reliance on history as a way of going forward. The latter is best symbolized by the Great War, World War I, which saw European generals lazily using Napoleonic tactics a century after Waterloo without adjusting for technological changes. The latter could probably be best summed up by the troubles in Ireland, which seem thankfully to be at an end. But it is this sort of memory that is so hard to get over, and the concept is an elusive one. Many conservatives think that blacks should just "get over" Jim Crow and slavery and move forward. I don't completely agree--when it's easier for a white man with a record to get a job in New York City than a black man without one there's obviously still some racism in today's society--but I don't completely disagree, either, especially when there's so little to be gained by such a focus. I suspect that "getting over it" is a less possible option for people who actually lived through Jim Crow and segregated bathrooms and the rest of it, but it will be easier for younger people who didn't experience that level of hate and injustice, and the trick going forward will be to to find a balance between remembering that tragic heritage and moving forward.
After reading Nixonland I felt like I understood the conservative movement a whole lot better, and I definitely think that a lot of people who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s can't escape the mindset of those times. Back then, it just seemed like the left was violent and crazy and extreme, talking about revolution and glorifying thugs like Huey Newton. If that's the basis of your understanding of politics, and if it was reinforced by images of university bombings and the 1968 Democratic Convention, it makes sense that the old habits would die hard. I have no idea if this is what is really happening, but the fact that talk radio's audience is predominantly older and that Obama's most striking performance in the last election was among the youth and Latinos--two groups who likely don't remember America in the 60s--also speaks to my point.
Now, if my theory holds correct, then within a decade most of these folks will be dying off and perhaps the culture wars will finally end, and the right will be free of the grip of these people. But for now there's only one side that really still cares about this stuff, as the Democrats have finally moved on and are now talking about serious issues, while the GOP's biggest rising star is the most abrasive culture warrior in the country. The short term prognosis is not good for the GOP.
