Category: borrowed content

Use the interwebs to throw shoes at the president:

The end of the campaign has meant that I’m blogging a lot less on politics, but this article by Neal Gabler in the L.A. Times is worth passing along, both for its cogent historical analysis of the GOP’s recent history and for its insights into the current civil war within the party between the right-wingers and the righter-wingers:

The creation myth of modern conservatism usually begins with Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was the party’s presidential standard-bearer in 1964 and who, even though he lost in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history, nevertheless wrested the party from its Eastern establishment wing. Then, Richard Nixon co-opted conservatism, talking like a conservative while governing like a moderate, and drawing the opprobrium of true believers. But Ronald Reagan embraced it wholeheartedly, becoming the patron saint of conservatism and making it the dominant ideology in the country. George W. Bush picked up Reagan’s fallen standard and “conservatized” government even more thoroughly than Reagan had, cheering conservatives until his presidency came crashing down around him. That’s how the story goes.

But there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn’t begin with Goldwater and doesn’t celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party’s past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn’t run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn’t likely to be expunged any time soon.

Today marks the 90th anniversary of the Armistice which ended World War I, a cataclysm which, among other outcomes, destroyed many of Europe’s monarchies and two of the world’s largest empires (the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman), bankrupted Britain, allowed the emergence of international communism as a powerful social movement, created a model for technologically-driven total warfare, and made the U.S. into the world’s leading industrial power. The Great War also killed about 20 million people, created several states which still trouble the world today (Yugoslavia, Iraq), and of course led to a flawed “peace” which only led to an even greater war 21 years later.

Amazingly, there are still a few veterans of World War I among us. At least ten men who served in the war are still alive, including the American doughboy Frank Buckles. Several of these servicemen are also their country’s oldest known citizens, and several – including Buckles – also witnessed the violence of World War II. It’s not suprising, given the way the histories of wars are written, that there’s is no parallel list of the women who witnessed the war.