Did populism collapse the house that WFB built?Some thoughts as to the wheres, hows, whens & wherefores.

I. The "Palin farce" & Republican populism.

An article that should be required reading for the George Wills of the world appears in today's Wall Street Journal (which I spotted by way of Media Nation). Penned by a certain Mark Lilla, it's one of the bitter pills that I'd advise self-respecting Republicans to swallow:

The Palin farce is already the stuff of legend. For a generation at least it is sure to keep presidential historians and late-night comedians in gainful employment, which is no small thing. But it would be a pity if laughter drowned out serious reflection about this bizarre episode. As Jane Mayer reported recently in the New Yorker ("The Insiders," Oct. 27, 2008), John McCain's choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future.

And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. ...

... So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals." It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with "ordinary Americans" whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that "populist paranoia" was "subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government." But by the mid-'80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the "common sense" of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by "our disoriented elites," which is why "so many people -- and I include myself among them -- who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism."

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

... Back in the '70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about "radical chic," the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their "struggles." But "populist chic" is just the inversion of "radical chic," and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. ...

The article has something to say, namely that any portion of the educated Right should know better than to keep mum when a force like Sarah Palin is unleashed upon us, in the name of conservatism. And secondly, any conservative that should have known better but didn't, and who therefore didn't condemn Palin should now be ashamed of himself. (He -- predictably -- isn't). They should also be embarrassed. If they're not, then it's their loss, not the Left's. The less equipped these Palin-apologists are to spot the myriad internal contradictions in which the GOP identity is mired, the more likely it is that the USA can continue electing actual adults to national office.

II. However.

Not so sure I'm ready to buy into the premise that it wasn't until the 1980's that the Republican Party started playing the 'populist' (in both the euphemistic and straightforward senses) card. Or that it somehow wasn't until that shiny-chrome decade that the movement realized that, if it were to survive, it needed to appeal to racists and bigots. True, that commie-hating, loony-toony apologist for extremism Barry Goldwater failed to create an effective political alliance combining Northern industrialists with Southern segregationists. But it wasn't for lack of trying! His mistake? Perhaps he was a bit too forthright in his trigger-happy xenophobic militarist extremism?

III. How 'bout let's just say "the silent majority," wink wink?

Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon, et al., perfected the much-ballyhooed 'Southern Strategy' in 1968. This maneuver capitalized on the widespread Southern opposition to Lyndon Johnson's having masterminded the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Southern Strategy is an object lesson in Machiavellianism that the GOP milked for all (and I mean all) that the once-venerable, nominal "Party of Lincoln" could. And while I'm not aware that Nixon was specifically hateful toward black people, Tricky Dick earned his very nickname as a consequence of his use of bald-faced lies, smear-campaigns and McCarthyism in order to get elected to the House of Representatives. And, let's face it, everybody knows that Nixon was anti-semitic (a prejudice that then as now appears to walk hand-in-hand with pandering to the militarist far-Right fringe of the Zionist Movement, perpetuating dishonestly and dangerously a reprehensible ideology that equates 'good' Judaism with radical-Right-wing Zionism [See also: Hagee, John, John McCain's onetime anti-Catholic, anti-semitic pastor. See also: Kristol, William]).

Obviously, where Nixon benefited from the strategy electorally (with the exception of getting his ass handed to him by Jack Kennedy), it was with eight years of Ronald Reagan that the Goldwater Republicans could finally take their hatchet (the one that another Arizona politician, John McCain apparently inherited from them) to the public infrastructure, dismantling it limb from limb. Americans who so much as noticed -- it was, after all, the Spielberg 1980's -- greeted this carnage with either approval or indifference.

As impressively cynical a feat as Reaganomics turned out to be, perhaps even more striking was the unlikely election of George Herbert Walker Bush to the White House. People sometimes refer to Bush Senior's administration as the "Third Reagan Term." Uh...fair enough. But anyone who really wants to understand how the elder Bush managed to get elected had better come to grips with the singular, twisted genius of Lee Atwater. About whom: be sure to catch this documentary, which aired recently on PBS and will no doubt show up as a rerun in the near-future. Maybe Atwater was no Joseph Goebbels or Leni Riefenstahl. He was a Karl Rove, only times infinity.

Whereas Karl Rove's talent in the area of fascistic disinformation-peddling is damn impressive -- even if it may now look rather quaint, now that it's failed miserably in 2006 and especially 2008 --, Atwater was a natural where Rove is a tables-and-figures man. Atwater was a blues-guitar-playing (literally) opportunist who made a deal with the Devil -- and paid for it dearly. Rove is an Adolf Eichmann-figure. Savvier and more clever than Eichmann, of course. But possessing precisely the deficient capacities for reflection and critical thinking for which history has fated that Eichmann shall forever stand as a one-man morality play.

IV. Lee Atwater & the election of 1988.

Anyway (what's a blog if it doesn't veer off onto wild tangents?): Atwater cobbled together a presidential campaign -- that is, that of Bush Senior, in case we've forgotten -- whose unlikely success was fueled by the mere exhaust fumes of decades of slow-burning resentments and fears. Pure Southern Strategy, straight out of the Nixon playbook. Except in a way that plumbed new depths of dishonesty, race-baiting, demagoguery, shamelessness, and -- most importantly -- the whole discourse it imposed upon the presidential race was pure theater.

Unlike Nixon, who was promising, in effect, "law and order" to Southern and suburban whites who were scared of the rebellion of black nationalists and civil rights demonstrators, unlike Reagan, who lowered taxes, Bush Senior wasn't offering anything serious in return for handing him your vote. The Atwater strategy of playing upon accumulated conscious- and subconscious racism, xenophobia, neo-McCarthyism, anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism was nothing but manipulation that had previously been the province of beer commercials. It was all just to (1) slime the other guy and (2) scorch, as it were, the earth underneath the election such that many people became so turned off by the tactics and rhetoric that they (a.) failed to look closely enough to see that it was all being generated by one side (the GOP), and (b.) therefore didn't bother to vote. And they didn't. That's it. It was shameful and mendacious and mean-spirited even by the standards of the McCain campaign.

V. Back to Buckley: forgive him not for his McCarthyist high jinks.

Ever seen the video footage, shot during the political conventions of 1968 in which William F. Buckley offers to smack Gore Vidal in the face, calling him a 'fucking queer' (or something like that)? Which...to give Buckley his due, was not an inaccurate statement. It wasn't, nevertheless, all that relevant to the discussion at hand, which was the Vietnam War. (I'm not even sure that it rises to the status of ad hominem. Sorry, if that's harsh, Bill; may you rest in peace.)

Sure, our few remaining thoughtful conservatives here in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Eight have every reason to light a candle in gratitude to Buckley when attending high mass. Not so much for leaving them with The National Review, whose quality has plummeted at an astonishing rate since the exceedingly stupid Rich Lowry took the helm. (Rich Lowry is an idiot. In case I wasn't being clear about that.) No, these remaining thoughtful conservatives should venerate their forefather for his well-calculated move of severing the overt ties of the conservative movement to anti-semitism and the John Birch Society. But let's not forget that this same Bill Buckley was a huge supporter of Joseph McCarthy, that he embraced Jim Crow.

VI. Conclusion

In other words, I'll allow that the 1980's saw the anti-intellectual and anti-'elite' streak beginning to gobble up the Republican Party, such that this strain has now come to define the GOP in its totality. But don't let it off the hook that easily. Buckley and the early neocons, etc., may have been intellectuals, but they were also strategists, and cashing in on resentments -- particularly the Southern varieties -- was always a matter of chief concern.