Posted by Amanda Marcotte May 27, 2008 in Asides, Books
I can’t recommend Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America enough, and I’m honored to be asked to be a part of the TPMCafe Book Club discussion of it. Happily, mine is the first post up after Rick’s: Overcoming The Spite Vote.
31 Responses to “Overcoming the spite vote”
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OK, I’m just reeling from “Tricky Dick’s Manhattan”. Sour apple liqueur in lieu of vermouth? Ew. All you old people are right, Nixon definitely sucked.
Bourbon, sloe gin and bitters sounds worse … yet is more evocatively Nixonian. In fact, any properly Nixonian libation would involve bitters.
Yeah, I didn’t get the apple liqueur, but the bitters I get. Actually, though, that drink doesn’t sound too bad. I’d try it.
Seriously, though, part of the problem is that we Democrats have failed to fully understand three things: the resentment of anti-war protestors by those who did not have the luxury of protest and the degree to which the image many people have of liberals is based on people that we Dems. would hardly consider liberal — machine politicos in medium/large midwestern cities, newscasters, NPR. That we moonbats are to the left of them doesn’t cause people to think “well, maybe the liberal media ain’t so liberal after all and real liberals actually are not effete elitist snobs” but rather “if the liberal media are not liberal compared to the Dem. base, how horribly elitist are the Dem base”.
The third thing is the degree to which too many liberals, for all our empathy (which is our strength) somehow don’t empathize with certain groups. It is true — we shouldn’t waste our time getting the Archie Bunker vote (nor should we compromise our principles … if anything that’d just prove to the Archie Bunker crowd that we are craven). OTOH, if we can empathize with everyone but an Archie Bunker (or a Likudnik) … well, why are we so selective?
People don’t have so much spite they vote to cut off their nose to spite their face for nothin’. There are reasons why we liberals are perceived the way we are, and we ought to at least act like we care about it — without coming accross as whiny. How is it we are perceived as effete elitist snobs? Maybe because work-a-day folk don’t have the luxury of protest?
“Tricky Dickie Screwdriver
One part Jack Daniel’s
Two parts purple Kool-Aid
And a jigger of formaldehyde from the jar with Hitler’s brain in the back storeroom”
- Dead Kennedys, “We’ve got a bigger problem now”
DAS…I guess missed the part where my Librul card doubles as “get out of work free.” ‘Cause i’d wager most of us here are just as “workaday” as anyone else…I don’t have the luxury of protest, and yeah, that sucks. But that doesn’t mean I write off protest, and protesters, and social equality, as “elitist.”
I think THAT is a big part of the problem. Why suddenly is anyone who gives a shit about other human beings perceived to be a jobless trust fund gadabout? It’s not TRUE, so how is it the media manages to make it so? And how do we change that?
of course in a larger sense i’m upset that “elitist” is now understood to mean “competent” or “correct” half the damn time…
Maybe because work-a-day folk don’t have the luxury of protest?
I wasn’t aware that protest was a “luxury” in our country. Now, maybe this is naive of me, but I kind of seem to remember learning in school that it’s a right.
Of course you’re right that it’s often difficult for people of the working class to participate in activist forms of political protest. Hell, it’s difficult if not impossible for me to so much as show up for a rally, and at least I have weekends off and am able to get by on only one job. This doesn’t cause me to be bitter about activism, though — I do what I can and know that even if I can’t be at every rally my voice can be heard in other ways. And it certainly doesn’t cause me to change my political affiliation, even when I am able to see the class bias within activist organizing as it’s practiced today.
if we can empathize with everyone but an Archie Bunker (or a Likudnik) … well, why are we so selective?
Is this some kind of bastard inbred cousin of the “If you’re so open minded, why are you biased against bigots?” argument?
To think that a group of right-wingers actually called themselves the Orthogonians.
Not to be confused with Oregonians or Ordovicians.
I think you guys are seriously misconstruing what DAS is saying. It’s not that now, today, in 2008 that protest is a luxury. It’s that in 1968, it was mostly the white kids with college deferments who were protesting the war. The white kids who didn’t have that luxury were the ones getting sent over and getting their asses shot off.
Those working-class white kids who weren’t able to use their social class to escape Vietnam came home and became Reagan Democrats. The biggest success that the Republican Party had in the 1970s and 1980s was in convincing working-class whites that their interests lay not with other working-class people, but with other white people. Sure, it meant that elites like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly and Dick Cheney and George W Bush had to fake being salt-of-the-earth workingmen, but it was a small price to pay for the millions they reaped from cheating the working-class white folks they were pretending to be.
Mnem…I get that that is the historical perspective DAS is invoking, but here:
And maybe I’m reading too much into it, but the present-tense suggested “that frame is still real” to me.
Don’t get me wrong: The dynamic of “rich kids go to college, poor kids go to war” is still very much active, but the point is that most liberals are struggling, too, because most people are struggling right now. So how do we stop the perception that they are not? How can the left make it clear that yes, Our People have kids and jobs and mortgages and skyrocketing health care bills. Like the chart says…most of the Dems can neither afford lattes nor Cadillacs. So let’s kill the idle trust fund leftist image.
“The white kids who didn’t have that luxury were the ones getting sent over and getting their asses shot off.”
…and the Black kids, and the brown kids, etc.
WWII was probably a more “egalitarian” experience for American soldiers, but Vietnam fit right in with the long American history of “Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight”.
And the size of the force, the size of the draft, and the devastation left behind were tremendous. 57,000 Americans were killed and many times that would never be the same.
The numbers are much, much bigger than Iraq, and were much harder to ignore/avoid back in the day…
er, sorry, I now realize the chart is in the other post. My bad.
The biggest success that the Republican Party had in the 1970s and 1980s was in convincing working-class whites that their interests lay not with other working-class people, but with other white people.
What does this have to do with Vietnam and the “luxury” of protest, again?
And, granted, I wasn’t alive in ‘68, but I’m not sure that who was for or against the war had much at all to do with the “luxury” of protest. A great many people who protested the war were drafted, or were veterans. It’s not like you got a “get out of draft” token for showing up at an anti-war protest (any more than liberals nowadays get a trust fund with our ACLU memberships).
Not to mention, of course, that there were a great, great many wealthy people who managed to evade Vietnam who probably never set foot at a protest.
What does this have to do with Vietnam and the “luxury” of protest, again?
Because part of what they used to convince them was pointing to unrest on college campuses over the war and telling them that all of those “hippies” hated them and spit on returning veterans. Of course, there’s not a single documented case of that happening, but don’t discount the power of an urban legend. There’s a reason why half the country is still pissed off at child of Hollywood privilege Jane Fonda, and why urban legends about what she did on her trip to Vietnam persist to this day. She represents the archetypal war protester to a lot of people, the trust-fund hippie who has too much time on her hands.
And, granted, I wasn’t alive in ‘68, but I’m not sure that who was for or against the war had much at all to do with the “luxury” of protest.
It had a hell of a lot to do with it. The protests began because white, middle-class kids were being drafted. As MikeEss pointed out, the draft was fine for the little people (aka black and brown people) but once nice middle-class white boys were being drafted in large numbers, the protests began. Why do you think the center for a lot of the protests was college campuses like Berkeley? Students were in danger of losing their draft deferments and being sent to Vietnam, and they didn’t like it one bit.
And maybe I’m reading too much into it, but the present-tense suggested “that frame is still real” to me. - The One True Vegan
The frame is indeed still real even if the reality is not what the frame says it is. That’s why they call it a “meme”: the frame has gotten handed down to another generation.
However, even still, many working class folk do respond to social liberalism with “geez … its all good that some people can go and be activists for causes … but me: I have to work two jobs to pay the rent”. Being socially engaged does have some costs to it. And to the extent that liberalism requires social engagement of liberals, it is viewed as something for the upper middle classes.
That’s actually the worst part of the whole “Al Gore is a hypocrite for having a big house” talking point — it frames liberalism as a matter of personal virtue. Most people view liberals as those sorts of folks that feel morally superior ‘cause they eat organic food. Well, most people can’t afford that sort of thing. So they figure — “if liberals, who claim to support the poor, view me as less virtuous because I can’t afford to be liberal … well, then I sure as heck won’t vote for the liberal, i.e. the Democratic, party”.
I’m not sure that who was for or against the war had much at all to do with the “luxury” of protest - the opoponax
I wasn’t alive in 1968 either, but I can speak second hand to my family’s experience: those in the poorer branches of my family had to go to ‘Nam. That protesting the war was not a “get out of draft [free]” token is precisely my point. If you were Joe Richkid, you could have your daddy arrange for you to have a sweet spot in TANG. If you were Joe Uppermiddleclasskid and you protested the war and dodged the draft, you probably had enough resources to escape to Canada. But if you were Joe Workingclasskid … you didn’t have those resources, so you might as well just “support the war” as you’d rather believe that the war you were risking your life for was a good cause.
In general, I’d say that if y’all don’t realize the degree to which protest and those things seen as the trappings of liberalism (even if they do not in fact define liberalism, they are perceived to define it … and politics is about perceptions, ain’t it?) are “expensive”, then it is your class bias that’s showing … which class bias being shown by some liberals (who, unlike conservatives for whom such bias is expected) does alienate people who would otherwise support us.
Is this some kind of bastard inbred cousin of the “If you’re so open minded, why are you biased against bigots?” argument? - the opoponax
No … it’s more along the lines of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Perhaps I’m an out of touch moonbat who’s watched one too many musicals, but “you’ve got to be carefully taught to hate”. Bigotry doesn’t arise from out of nothing. If we want to obviate the horrible impact of bigotry on our body politic, we need to understand where exactly it comes from and why people are bigoted. And at some point, to do that we need to empathize with the bigot — even if we do and should find bigotry distasteful (if we were talking about any other horrible blight on society besides bigotry, all y’all liberals would be 100% with me). Liberal principles certainly do not require us to be unbiased against bigots. To adapt a Jewish saying: she who is unbiased toward bigots is bigoted toward the unbiased. Nonetheless, liberal principles require that we understand where bigotry comes from and do our best to counteract that … and understanding does ultimately come from empathy.
As MikeEss pointed out, the draft was fine for the little people (aka black and brown people) but once nice middle-class white boys were being drafted in large numbers, the protests began. - Mnemosyne
Which leads us to the question “why didn’t the working class people protest?”. The answer a putative liberal might give to this question will say a lot about how that person actually views the working classes. Certainly the “liberals” with whom most of the country are most familiar (i.e. the so-called liberal media that hardly is liberal but is viewed by much of the country as such) would answer the question in a very insulting and patronizing way — which is why maybe we don’t get the traction we should get amongst the working classes? And nu? people figure if supposedly, moderate-left NPR is wankerific, we must be all the more so …
Shorter me: what Digby said.
“…the draft was fine for the little people (aka black and brown people) but once nice middle-class white boys were being drafted in large numbers, the protests began.”
Yep. Which is EXACTLY the reason the draft has never been suggested during Iraq - The powers that be know their fun little war will get shut down if middle-class kids might get sent over whether they want to go or not.
As it is, the comments about the military being “volunteer” and therefore “they knew what they signed up for” covers a hell of a lot of sins in many people’s minds.
Of course most of us Pandagonians look at it and realize most of those people entered the military because it’s one of the few job-training programs around (and marketed specifically as such). To waste their lives is at least as much of a sin as wasting anyone’s lives. But in Republican economics, those people were born to be disposable.
One of the only reasons why I thought bringing back the draft (for a very short while only) was exactly because it would force the warmongers to reconsider. Of course it would have been shitty for anybody caught up in it, and who knows how long it would take before the political pain got high enough to work…
“If you were Joe Richkid, you could have your daddy arrange for you to have a sweet spot in TANG. If you were Joe Uppermiddleclasskid and you protested the war and dodged the draft, you probably had enough resources to escape to Canada. But if you were Joe Workingclasskid … you didn’t have those resources, so you might as well just “support the war” as you’d rather believe that the war you were risking your life for was a good cause.”
Exactly.
I missed the draft by about 4-5 years. Even if I had been snagged, the war had been seriously wound-down after ‘73. But if I had gotten a draft notice, there was no way my family would have been able to get me out of it. I probably would have gone into the medical corp if possible (and had serious discussions with my parents, etc., about exactly that course of action). But, if you catch a bullet, you’re just as dead whether you had a rifle in your hands or a stethoscope…
Because part of what they used to convince them was pointing to unrest on college campuses over the war and telling them that all of those “hippies” hated them and spit on returning veterans. Of course, there’s not a single documented case of that happening, but don’t discount the power of an urban legend.
Yes, I’m aware of that. But what does it have to do with working class racism and alignment with a political party that works against their own interests? Because that, to me, is the beauty part of this whole Republican mind-fuck.
The logical thought process post-Vietnam should have been “those asshole rich politicians and financiers sent me to Vietnam and killed half my friends. clearly my interests lie with other working class people of all races, rather than those fuckers.” Instead what happened was the opposite, and as we’ve pretty well demonstrated in these threads, it really has a lot more to do with racism than hatred of the liberal “elite”.
many working class folk do respond to social liberalism with “geez … its all good that some people can go and be activists for causes … but me: I have to work two jobs to pay the rent”. Being socially engaged does have some costs to it. And to the extent that liberalism requires social engagement of liberals, it is viewed as something for the upper middle classes.
Except that, of course, this thought process doesn’t seem to apply to working people who are liberal. And, yes, we do exist. As I said above, even though I’m lucky to only have to work one job, and that said job gives me weekends free, I still just don’t have time to be involved in activism aside from maybe going to one of those huge marches on Washington every couple or 3 years if I play my cards right and save my pennies (and there I’m lucky again, because I live a $20 bus trip from DC and have friends’ couches to sleep on).
Liberalism doesn’t “require” activism. I went to one of the most liberal universities in the country. There was a small core contingent of activist types who would turn out at every protest for every cause. Then there were several thousand other students who were definitely at least liberal, but who didn’t have the time, energy, desire, whatever to take to the streets every other second. The activists didn’t fault the non-activists, and the non-activists didn’t become Republican just because they didn’t have the resources to devote to activism.
The dichotomy of Trustafarian Protester Liberal vs. Person With A Job Conservative does not exist. This is the Berri Bloo flavor of the Right-Wing Kool Aid — it resembles nothing that actually exists in nature.
I am going to have to get me an internet stamp that says, simply, “Yeah! What Mnemosyne said at Post ___!” and then just fill in the damned number.
The logical thought process post-Vietnam should have been “those asshole rich politicians and financiers sent me to Vietnam and killed half my friends. clearly my interests lie with other working class people of all races, rather than those fuckers.” Instead what happened was the opposite, and as we’ve pretty well demonstrated in these threads, it really has a lot more to do with racism than hatred of the liberal “elite”.
Only if you forget that the asshole rich politicians who sent all those kids overseas to die were Democrats. So not only were the Democrats sending you and your friends overseas to die in a stupid war, they were giving all kinds of rights to black and brown people that you assumed meant it would be harder for you to find a job when you came back from that war.
Why are you so shocked that they would turn to the party that was the not-Democrats, the party that promised “Peace with Honor” in Vietnam instead of continuing a futile war?
Highly ironic that the Republicans, in assuming the problem with Vietnam was the way the war was run rather than the war, managed to shoot themselves in the foot exactly the same way the Democrats did in the 1960s.
I am going to have to get me an internet stamp that says, simply, “Yeah! What Mnemosyne said at Post ___!” and then just fill in the damned number.
Aw, shucks (ducking head and blushing). Thanks, seeker. I fall on my face (a lot) but I do my best.
Why are you so shocked that they would turn to the party that was the not-Democrats, the party that promised “Peace with Honor” in Vietnam instead of continuing a futile war?
Mainly because A) I was ignorant of the fact that the whole idea for Vietnam came from the Democrats [the only people I’ve ever heard speak proudly of it were Republicans], and B) as has been discussed in this thread, the political landscape has changed so much that specific party affiliations of 40 years ago don’t really mean a lot now. People who were old enough to be aware of which political party was the most wrong about Vietnam at the time it was being fought are over 60 today. Which implies that the problem is really that senior citizens make up an outrageously disproportionate chunk of the electorate, or that none of this has to do with direct experience at all, but with younger generations being made to drink Kool Aid marketed to their grandparents.
The Opoponax, the Vietnam War was fully bipartisan. Our original involvment came with Truman (post WWII) assisting the French to “reclaim” “their” territory. The Vietnamese were not happy to go back into the tender clutches of imperial France and resisted.
…and resisted…
…and resisted until they kicked France’s ass at Dien Bien Phu.
All the while we were lending France assistance of one kind or another, primarily military equipment and aircraft. Most of this came during the Eisenhower Administration. We also sent “military advisers”.
JFK inherited a clusterfuck that had already been going on for 15-years or so. Whether he would have stopped it or not was lost when he was assassinated.
LBJ inherited the mess and new the Republicans would eat him alive if he just pulled out. (Even though they were not the party in power, for the most part Republicans were eager supporters of the war, primarily because it was seen as stopping the Communist onslaught.)
When Barry Goldwater ran against LBJ in ‘64, he didn’t want to pull troops out and end the war, he wanted to send more troops and use nukes to “win” the war faster.
Nixon won in ‘68 in part by claiming he had “secret plan” for ending the war, which, as had been true with Johnson, really involved more escalation.
Vietnam might be primarily associated with Lyndon Johnson, and the biggest escalations took place under his leadership, but the truth is it was going on before he came to office, went on after he left, and if Nixon had been elected in ‘60 instead of Kennedy, it would most likely have proceeded on more or less the same trajectory…
including this Liberal. And all the Liberals in her family.
And most of the Liberals she knows.
So how do we get it out there that no, Liberals are NOT those sorts of folks? I mean, it’s basic logic, and I know the country as a whole has a problem with it. But is there seriously no way to say, “look! I’m poor as hell, and I’m a liberal”? How do we change the perception that “owning the pricey trappings of NPR dickheads” = “being a liberal” because i can’t afford any of that shit either, but it hasn’t made me into a MiniCheney.
I must’ve asked this three times. Is it just that there’s no fighting the idiot box? TV will always win and our image is graven in stone?
I think you’re giving LBJ way too much credit here. He did escalate it, and he did pretend that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was much more significant than it actually was to drum up congressional support for the war.
Traditionally, Republicans were the party of isolationism — Republicans fought the entry of the US into WWII until the bitter end — and a lot of that was still lingering even into the 1950s and 1960s. Sure, they were freaked out about communist “third columnists” infiltrating America, but that didn’t mean they were eager to run overseas and start pushing people around.
Korea was Truman’s war; Vietnam was Kennedy and Johnson’s war.
Why are these constructions still lingering? Because the Baby Boomers whose formative years revolved around Vietnam only came into power in the past decade with Bill Clinton’s election. They’re still fighting Vietnam while the rest of us are trying to look to the future instead of the past.
Opo, the oldest official Baby Boomers were born in 1945, so they’re not even eligible for Social Security yet. We’ve got a long way to go before they drop out of the political landscape, and there are a lot more of them than there are of us. Their obsessions are going to continue to rule us for a long time to come, unfortunately.
“I think you’re giving LBJ way too much credit here. He did escalate it, and he did pretend that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was much more significant than it actually was to drum up congressional support for the war.”
True, but he didn’t start the war. He did however definitely make it worse.
“Traditionally, Republicans were the party of isolationism — Republicans fought the entry of the US into WWII until the bitter end — and a lot of that was still lingering even into the 1950s and 1960s.”
Yes, except that the Red Menace had so frightened them that we were more interventionist than ever. Under Eisenhower a whole host of black-ops took place, the Bay of Pigs was planned, and there was support for helping the French in Indochina.
The Korean War started with full support, and it was only later that it was used against Truman and the Democrats for political advantage.
There were principled Republicans who were against escalation in Vietnam, but not a whole lot of them.
“Sure, they were freaked out about communist “third columnists” infiltrating America, but that didn’t mean they were eager to run overseas and start pushing people around.”
Examples: Iran, Central America, Korea (with a majority Republican Congress), Cuba, all sorts of Soviet intrigue (Francis Gary Powers, etc.), and so forth (I’m forgetting many of them - apologies)
Sure, Many Republican’s hearts were isolationist, but they (and the Dems) feared Global Communism - people tend to forget that we saw one unified Communist effort to overthrow us, and we did not learn to differentiate between the Soviets and China for a very long time - so much that we did a lot of abhorrent things between WWII and now…
A lot of that stuff was not known to the general public (and the general public is still ignorant of a lot of it to this day — ask 5 random people in the street who Kermit Roosevelt was). To the people watching TV news every night, they were watching American soldiers being wounded and killed because of Johnson’s policies. They were watching rioting in the inner city because Johnson’s Great Society let them get uppity.
I’m not saying they were right — I’m saying that that’s how they interpreted it. Tristero over at Digby’s place says it much better than I can.
Yes, those of us with a little more historical knowledge know better, but we’re not going by what we know now. We’re going by what people saw at the time. And what they saw at the time was a Democratic president who escalated us into a futile war in Vietnam that he couldn’t even win. Why wouldn’t people vote for Nixon’s secret plan to end the war if the only thing the Democrats would promise was more war?
the oldest official Baby Boomers were born in 1945, so they’re not even eligible for Social Security yet.
Yes, but anyone who was old enough to vote in ‘68 is 60+. Sure, that’s hardly the oldest fogeys EVAR, but seriously, considering that Vietnam has been over for something like 35 years now, I don’t think it’s a very good excuse for where the country is at politically right now (in terms of party affiliations, spite, and the like, not necessarily in terms of the march of history).
Enough people have come of age in the intervening 35 years that this should stuff should not be the main reason for how most people vote. For example, I was in grade school when the Cold War ended. Thus, my political outlook generally does not factor in Teh Redz. If I have deep-seated and irrational political stances, they probably can’t be traced to something that was pretty much finished by the time I took the training wheels off my bike.
If young voters turned out in the same numbers as older voters, that might be true. But people don’t really start voting reliably until at least 30.
If we can actually get young people to turn out, that would make a difference, but I remember that the youth vote was supposed to save us all from four more years of Bush in 2004, and that didn’t exactly pan out.
And if you’re surprised that old resentments are carried through the generations so that the son or grandson of someone who railed against Teh Hippiez in the 1960s votes Republican today, you might want to look up, say, the Hatfields and the McCoys. Or the War of Northern Aggression.