Nation Topics - Conservatives and the American Right | The Nation

The author argues that U.S. Democrats have a chance at winning the 2004 presidential election, despite the conventional wisdom that the candidate perceived to be the strongest in defense and national security will win. According to polls most see U.S. President George W. Bush as successfully prosecuting the war on terror and view the Republicans as stronger on national security than the Democrats. However important healthcare and the economy are to voters, the Democrats must change this perception in order to win. Some answers were suggested at a two-day conference on alternative national security strategies in Washington in October. The major themes of the conference were that the Bush Administration has made a radical break with the historic principles of American foreign policy, that it is failing to meet the challenges of 9/11 and that it is weakening the United States abroad and undermining democracy at home. James Traub, a journalist who attended the conference, reported that the antiwar rhetoric of Dean, Clark--and then Kerry--had caused considerable dismay among some Democratic strategists. Traub concluded, the winner may lose the general election as George McGovern did in 1972 because, as Bill Clinton once observed, "strong and wrong beats weak and right." Yet what is missing from the cold war history of hawks triumphant is that in 1964 Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in a landslide.

The author presents fictitious letters written by the characters of George Orwell's "Animal Farm," commenting on the U.S. Republican Party's political platform.

The war on terror may be too new to declare victory or defeat. But this nation has been fighting a war on drugs for more than a quarter-century, ever since New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller mandated harsh drug sentencing in 1973 -- and it may be time to announce that this is one war we have lost. Many billions of dollars are spent by the states and the federal government on drug interdiction, drug-law enforcement and drug prosecutions. More than a million people are serving time in our prisons and jails for nonviolent offenses, most drug-related, at a cost to the public of some $9.4 billion a year. The idea of putting more and more Americans in prison, a great number of them for crimes related to drug addiction, grew out of so-called broken windows social theories developed by criminologists such as James Q. Wilson in the 1970s. They argued that even nonviolent offenses, such as breaking windows or possessing small amounts of marijuana, contributed to an anything-goes climate in which more serious crimes would proliferate. The drug war exiled addiction from the realm of public health, placing it almost exclusively in the hands of law enforcement and the courts.

Essays by Jack Newfield, which will appear in the book 'American Rebels,' attempt to locate and define a coherent American tradition reconciling authentic patriotism with original artistic creation, unpopular opinion and moral principles that do not change with the winds. The subjects of the essays include rebels in politics, education, journalism, religion, literature, film, sports, music, law, popular culture and social struggle. Newfield was able to convince himself that persons such as Walt Whitman, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad All, Norman Mailer, Miles Davis, George McGovern, Willie Mays, Herman Melville, Bessie Smith, Sandy Koufax, Cesar Chavez, Janis Joplin, Larry Bird, Lenny Bruce, Sam Cooke, and Fiorello LaGuardia represented an alternative conception of the country, that they were just as legitimate and American as the burglars of the flag, whom he loathed: Nixon, Kissinger, George Wallace, Senator Bilbo, Henry Ford, John D. and Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Frick, General Custer, Richard Helms, Antonin Scalia, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy and Spiro Agnew. Newfield claims America is a democracy that can be changed for the better by books and the free flow of information.

Offers observations on contemporary liberalism in the United States. If you want to date the beginning of conservative domination of the opinion media, you could do worse than to pick Election Day 1964. That's when Richard Mellon Scaife, later joined by many others, figured out that it was pointless for wealthy conservatives to pour money into the coffers of conservative candidates like former Senator Barry Goldwater without first investing in their own form of media through which to communicate their ideas. Just about the only thing liberals have going for them these days is that most Americans agree with them on the issues. This is partly due to the annexation of the Republican Party by its Taliban faction. It is also likely a product of the relative conservatism of today's liberals, present company included. The power of conservatives to control the discourse through biased media is only now beginning to dawn on liberals. Today liberals are finally starting to take the first steps in the enormously expensive task of building their own media institutions. MoveOn.org, the savviest progressive organization in recent memory, is brilliantly exploiting the communications potential of the Internet to bring pressure to bear on politicians, support progressive campaigns and raise money for the right causes. In addition, venture capitalists Sheldon and Anita Drobny have formed AnShell Media LLC to try to put together a national network of liberal talk-radio stations.

'Trumbo' is an off-Broadway trial run of Christopher Trumbo's play based mostly on his father, Dalton Trumbo's, amazing letters about life under the Hollywood blacklist and other assaults on individual liberty in the name of national safety and security. By coincidence, the showing of 'Trumbo' coincided with the release by the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs of five volumes of secret testimony from 160 closed hearings held during Senator Joseph McCarthy's red baiting of Communists rampage through our democracy in the mid-1900s. Press commentary has ranged over McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn's bullying tactics, the fact that while they turned up some Communist small fry, nobody went to prison and gossipy tidbits about the people called, who ranged from the famous, such as Aaron Copland (not a Communist), Paul Robeson's wife (she denied any personal experience with Communism) and James Reston, Dashiell Hammett and Langston Hughes, to bit players like Annie Lee Moss, the State Department file clerk who did not know who Karl Marx was. Also starring among the witnesses and attorneys were Corliss Lamont, Harvey O'Connor, James Weinstein, Leonard Boudin and his partner, and Victor Rabinowitz. 'Trumbo' notwithstanding, there are heroes and villains in these pages, especially Roy Cohn at his witness-badgering worst and Democratic senators like Stuart Symington and Henry Jackson in supporting roles, 0ut-McCarthying McCarthy in their efforts to prove the un-Americanism of Fifth Amendment-invoking witnesses. But what most of the commentators have missed--and the reason Trumbo, the five volumes of declassified testimony and the latest batch of political memoirs are relevant today--is the apparent failure of the American political culture to grasp the difference between dissent and disloyalty.

The U.S. Congress released transcripts of secret testimony of witnesses summoned before Senator Joseph McCarthy's infamous subcommittee in hearings that impugned the patriotism of everyone from artists to decorated generals. It is good timing to look at these transcripts anew at a time when the fear being exploited has shifted from Communist to terrorist; from un-American to anti-American. Eric Alterman has written about the efficiency with which the organized network of think tanks', who make decisions about what represents a danger to corporate interests, opinions are published first in their own in-house organs--for example the Manhattan Institute's City Journal--then on to the Wall Street Journal's opinion-editorial page, 'The Weekly Standard' and 'National Review,' then reiterated in a nationwide network of privately subsidized conservative student newspapers, talk-radio and the Fox television network. With such private but monopolized power dictating the public record, there is no need for official censure. There is a terribly worrisome punitiveness about the way that attacks on very civil and principled opponents of the war in Iraq, from Robert Byrd to Susan Sarandon, have been justified: They have a right not to like the war, but freedom of expression has consequences....' Exactly how dire the consequences must be the subject of immediate, urgent and public address.

The article provides information on the book "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus," by Rick Perlstein. One will be carried away to those exciting days of yore, the 1950s and 1960s, when several large parts of the national psyche in the U.S. became so twisted, so gripped by fear, so almost comically, sometimes viciously, mad that they got behind a senator from Arizona named Barry Goldwater, who himself, by the way, was free of all those characteristics, and if fate hadn't intervened, just might have made that right-winging mediocrity what he apparently had little ambition to be America's thirty-seventh President. But as Perlstein makes clear, fate was greatly aided by some of Goldwater's very unpolitic conduct and by the dummies who got control of his campaign in 1964 and chased off and frustrated all the smarties in his organization. This is a complex story, but the man at its center was simple.

At its 1964 convention in San Francisco, California, the Republican Party emerged from a corrosive faction fight between its left and right wings to do something that was supposed to be impossible. It nominated a conservative. Politician Barry Goldwater earned that nomination by the efforts of a stealthy organizing juggernaut against the party's moderate and liberal establishment unlike any seen before in the annals of American politics. Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry. It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's very architecture; it flows from that calcified image and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress. By refusing to remember how history always embarrasses the present, punditry only really knows how to be wrong.

The article presents information on a daylong conference in February commemorating the career of the U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. The conference began with a keynote address by the venerable vital centrist Arthur Schlesinger and continued throughout the day with nearly every speaker delivering some variant of the standard and wisdom of cold war liberalism. McCarthy had charged American communists for spying for the Soviet Union. He argued that the whole communist movement was a criminal conspiracy