The Old Right and the New Left and the Establishment Center
“When the histories are written, I’ll bet that the Old Right and the New Left are put down as having a lot in common and that the people in the middle will be the enemy.” == Karl Hess.
I saw this quotation in the American Conservative article on George McGovern. The next paragraph shows McGovern saying:
“[M]ost Americans see the establishment center as an empty, decaying void that commands neither their confidence nor their love. It is the establishment center that has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster—a terrible cancer eating away the soul of the nation. … It was not the American worker who designed the Vietnam war or our military machine. It was the establishment wise men, the academicians of the center. As Walter Lippmann once observed, ‘There is nothing worse than a belligerent professor.’”
I’ve gone on record on many matters. I’ve never known what the “Center” is supposed to be, and tend to view it as whatever the elitists who control the flow of political debate have decided it to be — thus I favour “moderation” over “Centrism”, and thus the DLC is a shaky and useless organization for moving the nation anywhere. I’ve also smirkily, and mostly jokingly, said that there will be a new framework of American politics where the left-wing paranoids and right-wing paranoids and paranoids in general will join to become the electoral block that does away with the current paranoia-inducing government complex.
But seriously. New Left and Old Right? While both see the political apparatus as something like this, and both are impratically driven, you have to believe that much… um… stands in the way with them being drawn in as part of the same force, or part of the same twentieth century crusade.
He [McGovern] asked Wallace for his endorsement, though as he recalls with a smile, “He said, ‘Sena-tah, if I endorsed you I’d lose about half of my following and you’d lose half of yours.’”
The American Conservative article takes a faintly fond view of George Wallace, much I guess as Trent Lott takes a fond view of Strom Thurmond’s 1948 run for the presidency. And therein the roots of the isolationist Old Right (I guess once epitimized within the Republican Party by Senator Robert Taft, power within the party garnered as a whiplash against Woodrow Wilson and World War I and the League of Nations… the distrust of the League of Nations being what survives of this outlook through the Cold War, ie: Barry Goldwater would inherit Bob Taft’s following and he was a hyper-Cold Warrior– and as suggested in this McGovern article Taft would’ve been the only other presidential candidate challenging the framework of the Cold War — not Barry Goldwater — but the shred that unites Taft and Goldwater in the happy cause to some semblance of “America First”itis: Boy did Barry Goldwatar hate the United Nations) and the anti-Imperialism New Left (which I’ll trace within the Democratic Party to the second or third presidential run of William Jennings Bryan — power within the party garnered as a whiplash against Theodore Roosevelt and his “Rough Riders” persona and the Spanish-American War — and note that these sentiments transcend past the narrow confines of party) do not converge happily.
So Lyndon Johnson said goodbye to Democratic victories in the South by signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And that was that. The Old Right is on the wrong side of history. The New Left, for all its excesses, (and please note that when the Black Panthers sold Mao’s Little Red Book, it was a cynical fund-raising tool outwitting white radical-wannabes), your 60s protest culture came out of the forefront of the most noble movement in the twentieth century.
Nonetheless, the American Conservative magazine is a happily quirky magazine — prone to a celebration of George McGovern and a celebration of the Vermont Secessionist Project. And… prone to anti-gay and anti-immigrants diatribes. I note that I receive weekly an email plea to subscribe to the New Republic Magazine, this week I read this:
You may want clear opinions from The New Republic or from any magazine of political commentary. But you certainly don’t want predictable opinions or simple opinions, which, alas, is what you get from The Nation and the National Review, The Weekly Standard or The American Prospect. Why, I bet that you could write their articles in advance. No challenge, no mystery, no surprise, no puzzling through of argument. Not like The New Republic.
The problems with particularly The Nation I’ll leave alone for the moment… Actually The New Republic’s Stuffy Centrism I find suffocating, and I think I see the basic problem inherent in an ad featured in the magazine these days. “Most Read and Trusted by Congress”. And the problem is: Politics as Washington-Insider Game. See the Money-head cartoon again. Read the McGovern “Centrist” quote again. Read the opening Karl Hess quote.
And thus I conclude another entangled and largely theoretical blog post. I hope you enjoyed it.