By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I don’t think it is nostalgia that leads me to believe that the hostility between Americans on the left and the right has never been as intense as it is today. I can imagine Robert Taft and Adlai Stevenson discussing in a civil manner the issues that divided Republicans and Democrats back in the 1950s. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill were able to do that in the 1970s.
But can you picture Susan Rice and Donald Trump in such a setting? Or Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher? I can’t. Rice would look as if her hair were on fire. These days, conservatives and liberals don’t like each other, don’t respect each other, don’t trust each other.
In an essay in the current issue of Modern Age, the journal’s new editor, Peter Augustine Lawler, captured the breadth of the division:
“What conservatives call tradition, progressives call the legacies of oppression. What conservatives call manners, progressives call patriarchal stereotyping. What conservatives call the personal identity we’ve been given by a relational God and a purposeful nature, progressives call outmoded and illusory barriers to autonomous self-expression.”
Lawler is on the mark. The Round Table is broken. And as C.S. Lewis once said, when that happens, “Middle things are gone. Every man must follow Galahad or Mordred.”
This explains the track record of deception by liberal politicians documented by Victor Davis Hanson in his May 2 column in the online edition of National Review. It is a phenomenon with which we must come to terms. Hanson contends that the modern leftists in positions of power realize that the broad mainstream of American society will be hostile to the ideological premises that have shaped their thinking since their college days, what makes them who they are politically. So they dissemble to sell themselves and their programs to the public. He offers many examples:
The Obama administration understood that the public would not react well if they knew that the attack on our embassy in Benghazi was carried out by Muslim terrorists. That reality clashed with the line Obama had been selling to the country about his success in fostering democratic forces in the Middle East, what he called the “Arab Spring.” So, writes Hanson, “to disguise that unpleasant reality, Americans were treated to Susan Rice’s yarns about a spontaneous, unexpected riot that was prompted by a right-wing video.”
The Obama team also understood that few would think it an intelligent bargain if Bowe Bergdahl, an Army deserter, “whose selfish AWOL behavior,” writes Hanson, “may have contributed over the years to the injury or even deaths of several American soldiers tasked with finding him,” had been exchanged for “five dangerous terrorists.” So once again Susan Rice, whom Davis describes as Obama’s “go-to consigliere in such deals,” was sent before the cameras to describe Bergdahl as “a brave soldier who served with honor and distinction.”
Davis also points to the Iran deal. The Obama team’s view of the Third World is shaped by New Left theories about the victims of American imperialism. This led them to reject, writes Hanson, the nature of Iran as a “truly belligerent, anti-American theocracy bent on a baleful Middle East hegemony through acquiring nuclear weapons.”
So Obama and his team ran a campaign of “lies and deceptions” about Iran’s willingness to stop their nuclear arms program, proceeding as if all that was necessary to make the mullahs eager for peace was a display of good faith from the United States, for us to be “less threatening.”
It is the same frame of mind that led to the Obama administration’s use of terms like “workplace violence” to describe attacks by Muslim extremists against Americans within our borders and “man-caused disasters” for terrorist attacks abroad; why they used the term “overseas contingency operations” for our military response against Muslim terrorists.
The manner in which the Clintons and Obama have had to work diligently to hide their youthful radicalism is part of this scenario. They cannot let us know the extent of Bill Clinton’s involvement with the Mobilization against the war in Vietnam, both in the United States and while a student at Oxford, or Hillary’s legal work for the Black Panthers. It is why we know so little about Obama’s time as a student, other than the congratulatory version he gave us in his autobiographical writing. It is as if the Clintons’ and Obama’s early adulthood has been scrubbed from the history books. Members of the press, who likely had similar leftwing flirtations in their youths, assisted in this cover-up of what they see as understandable excesses of youthful idealism.
So the media looked the other way on the Clintons and Obama, while at the same time digging under every rock they could find for some dirt on the young George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump. The same reporters who told us it was out of bounds to explore what Bill Clinton was doing in Eastern Europe during his time protesting our involvement in Vietnam, found nothing objectionable about investigating Mitt Romney’s high school pranks and what motivated Neil Gorsuch’s sarcastic comments about fascism in his high school yearbook.
Is there a comparable hidden agenda on the right? Liberals would say there is. It is why they harbor such animosity toward us. They contend our calls to lower taxes is motivated by greed, not by a conviction that tax cuts will promote economic growth and a better way of life for the poor and middle class. They say our opposition to affirmative action programs is motivated by racism, not a concern for the working-class whites and Asian-Americans denied equal treatment in the college application process; that our hesitancy to accept global warming is rooted in concerns about how environmental regulations will impact corporate profits, that our calls for law and order are based in a hostility toward urban minorities.
I submit that these charges about a hidden agenda on the right are unfounded. Permit me to be more precise: I have been around the block. I have come across racists and Social Darwinists in right-wing circles, but they are always eccentrics not representative of conservatives as a whole. You are more likely to come across them in a saloon than at a lecture or symposium conducted by respectable conservative groups. But there is no way to prove that to liberals.
Hence the broken round table, the atmosphere of suspicion and hostility that shapes political discourse in our time. It is an unfortunate reality for which there is no easy solution. We are left with the reality that large numbers of Americans on the left are not being honest with us about where they want to take the country.
But listen to Maxine Waters. She lets the cat out of the bag when she gets flustered and her handlers are unable to rein her in. She wants socialism and is willing to crack the whip to get it. She is not alone.
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