Flirting with Lunacy

Maybe it’s just a part of the wider human condition, but the American electorate seems to have a particularly alarming taste for the bizarre and outlandish from time to time. With the rising influence of the Tea Party in the Republican Party, I fear we are entering one of these phases again.

In the 60’s, Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author Richard Hofstadter wrote a book I recall reading at the time and recently re-read parts of again, THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS. Among other works, he also wrote ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE, which I also picked up again. I suggest that the theses of both books are most pertinent today.

In THE PARANOID STYLE, Hofstadter chronicles radical movements in this country dating back to our beginnings: the anti-Masonic movement, anti-Catholicism, and the always convenient anti-Semitism as spewed by Father Coughlin and others, for example. At the time of the book’s publication, the U.S. was just emerging from the McCarthy era but the John Birch Society was still going strong and Barry Goldwater was about to capture the Republican presidential nomination. Goldwater lost in a landslide in the 1964 election but he paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.

As many will remember, Goldwater attacked America’s liberal Democrats with the standard charges from the conservative Right, characterizing them as Socialists/Communist sympathizers and the source of American’s moral decay. Goldwater went so far as to suggest that the liberal backed Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not really a law that citizens needed to follow. In foreign policy, he attacked the bipartisan approach to containing the Soviet Union, initiated during the Truman administration, and called for nothing less than all-out war against the Soviet Union.

Although his image was softened by later developments, Goldwater was scary -- the master of the simple answer to the country’s challenges, famously proclaiming that “just as extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

In supporting Goldwater, Governor Ronald Reagan declared: “They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer – not an easy answer but simple: if you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts as morally right.”

Reagan won the Presidency in 1980 on a platform of building up the military, cutting taxes, and balancing the budget, a patently absurd formula on its face, but it worked politically because he sang a tune Americans wanted to hear. Besides, the country was tired of Jimmy Carter and Reagan promised “a new morning in America” in contrast to Carter’s gloomy assessment of a national malaise.

George W. Bush, who adopted Reagan’s simple approach in contrast to his own father’s nuanced approach, was again the master of the simple answer, as was his Vice President Dick Cheney, and this country paid a severe price. We’re still trying to dig out of a hole that they created and are looking around for a simple answer, forgetting who got us into that mess in the first place.

And now we have President Obama, a highly intelligent, educated, balanced personality, who inherited this mess. He sees the world whole, rejects the simple answer, is willing to reach across the aisle, and as a result he is in deep trouble politically. Standing in the wings and heading up the slate of GOP presidential hopefuls are Governor Rick Perry and Rep. Michelle Bachman, two masters of the simple answer. Just cut spending and reduce the tax burden on the job creators, they say, and all will be well. (By the way, they fail to mention that these “so called” job creators -- millionaires and billionaires -- are already creating millions of jobs, but they are jobs overseas where they have to pay workers a fraction of what they would have to pay U.S. workers here.) And, if this simple solution means cutting liberal, socialist New Deal programs like Social Security, Medicare, and certainly Obamacare, so be it.

Of course, as we have seen, the GOP leadership has caved in to this simplistic approach, with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor even opposing disaster relief for states and counties devastated by Hurricane Irene unless commensurate cuts are made in other discretionary programs. Earlier, to cite another example, the tentative agreement on the debt ceiling reached by President Obama and Speaker Boehner would have been a no-brainer in ordinary times and considered a victory for good government. But, not now when the country has gone mad and reason and common sense have taken a hike. The simple-answer, anti-intellectual crowd doesn't want to hear about compromise and balance, especially when they are offered by liberal intellectuals from Ivy Leagues schools who think they’re smarter than anyone else. This country needs to be put back in the hands of freedom-loving, God-fearing patriots, they say, good Christian folks who are real Americans and don’t need all that book learning to know what’s right for America. They know in their hearts what’s morally right.

An unfair caricature? Maybe, but Hofstadter’s books reminded me once again that paranoia and anti-intellectualism have strong, deep roots in American culture and from what I see they are in full bloom once again.

Gerald E. Lavey