The liberal brain trust of America had carried out an Indochinese holocaust—but for most libs, crazy as it sounds, Vietnam wasn’t some horrible, pointless, bloody deviation. The sections of LBJ’s speeches about alleviating poverty and creating a more just, egalitarian society at home weren’t contradicted by the sections about “honoring our commitments” abroad (i.e., murdering people in Asia). They were part of the same mission. To this day, liberals view things like no-fly zones in Syria or microloans in Africa as extensions of their oh-so-enlightened social project at home. You see this kind of thought process when people react to the latest US mass shooting by saying something to the effect of, “These guns don’t belong in American streets, they belong in their proper place: in the faces of Afghans and Iraqis.”
* * *
Public disgust over Vietnam shot up year after year, but even that might not have been such a problem for Johnson if it weren’t for the disintegration of America’s supposed “consensus” on race. Riots in Watts, Newark, and Harlem exploded in the mid-sixties as black people struck back at round-the-clock police brutality, discrimination, and impoverishment. This was not a good turn of events for the touchy-feely Johnson administration’s plan to “unite” and improve the country.
You don’t need to study history to see how America reacts to uprisings of nonwhites on TV; you remember it from Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015. The same things happened in the Johnson era: respectable liberals tut-tutted, responsible conservatives blamed the victims, and CHUDs bayed for race war. And, as with Ferguson and Baltimore, the Democrats in charge during the riots of the 1960s responded with vague bromides and tepid reforms rather than radical plans to end the deep-rooted racist systems that produced the unrest. (They also had the FBI mail every radical black leader a letter saying they were gay and should kill themselves—one of the last examples of liberals knowing how to troll people.) Meanwhile, the right wing, from John Birchers to Nixon’s mafia—branded weirdos and squares only a couple of years before—tapped into the well of hopelessness, chaos, and white rage and prepared a tough-on-crime pitch to win back the country.
* * *
Liberalism was on the ropes. But instead of handling the challenges to his Great Society, LBJ stomped his feet, yelled, “I say, I say, I do believe I have the vapors,” and shipped thousands more Americans off to Vietnam.
Here’s the potted history that usually follows: as the Right consolidated power, Vietnam cracked the Democratic Party, pitting pro-war union grunts against Black Panthers and college-educated hippies, which allowed the Republicans to co-opt the working class, a mass of lizard-brained lumpenproles. For the Right, this narrative proves conservatism was always the real answer for the American worker. For some socialists, it proves that well-intentioned 1960s radicals fucked up by alienating union power, the last bit of muscle on the left. And for liberals, it’s completely obscured by their vivid memories of going to see psychedelic bands like Captain Freakout and the Stillwater Jamboree. In every case, this story is another Cold War myth.
It’s true that cigar-chomping union kingmakers like George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, were a bunch of pro-war mummies. And it’s true that Team Nixon exploited working-class resentment of rich-kid protesters amid “hard hat” rallies supporting the massacres in Vietnam. But the whole idea that the working class was uniformly pro-war and middle-class hippies were all against it is bullshit: polls and surveys at the time showed that proles were more antiwar than smug, college-educated elites.II This was the birth of a fake debate still raging today, with upper- and middle-class liberals slamming the dumb slugs of the working class as stupid, racist rubes—which is true to a point, but also covers up the enormous complicity of America’s bourgeoisie in supporting awful wars, draconian conservative economics, and reactionary presidents like Nixon and Trump.
You can’t just blame the baying hordes of plumbers and construction workers for Vietnam or the end of liberalism or the rise of Nixon. You certainly can’t blame the counterculture or people of color. You can’t even solely blame individual politicians like Johnson. So who can we blame, and why?
Truth is, the downfall of the liberal era was contained in its original triumph, the New Deal. That was a massive reshaping of government in response to outcry from the masses, a groundswell of popular rage over the failures of capitalism. But it was still a compromise, one meant to alleviate the pain of the Depression while retaining the basic structure of capitalism—its racial caste system included. Lyndon Johnson inherited that arrangement. The problem was, the compromise wasn’t tenable. It demanded we use “growth” and redistribution to alleviate the contradictions of capital instead of radically changing (that is, equalizing) race and class relations altogether.
The liberal plan was to manage capitalism in a way that would reduce material injustice or want just enough to drain everyone’s energy to build an alternative. And those alternatives were growing. On the race front, you had not only general unrest among black people and other minorities but also bona fide Marxist organizations like the Black Panthers. However well-meaning, Head Start and civil rights legislation weren’t enough; African Americans were trapped in economically deprived areas, and there was no real plan to change that, since it would mean uprooting the hardwired racial caste system that FDR made and LBJ—for all his desire to legally improve the social order—was not interested in changing.
So, liberalism from FDR to Johnson was about accommodating white racism in its most quotidian form while eventually trying to tamp down its more old-fashioned form—i.e., de jure segregation and Jim Crow. But they did nothing to treat the disease, nothing radical that would have been necessary to actually solve the problem, which would have looked something like reparations and the wholesale rebuilding of urban neighborhoods. When that untenable situation devolved into riots, white flight—and therefore money flight—exacerbated the problem.
But it didn’t stop there: since liberal capitalism was an imperial project, you had to enact this futile balance everywhere else as well. You had to be anti-Communist, with a whole anti-Communist foreign policy. So in the sixties, the generals and the wonks faced not only the Soviet menace but also third-world Marxists that needed to be put down. This necessitated destroying socialism as an alternative while also maintaining the military Keynesianism we utilized to get out of the Depression. After World War II, even though the size of the Army was reduced, its function as a subsidized industrial economy continued throughout the Cold War. And the thing is, when you spend years building all those weapons, eventually you gotta use ’em. And that South Asian people’s movement is starting to look pretty dang uppity . . .
Carter: “Feeling Cute and Sad RN”
* * *
And so ended Big Dick Lyndon’s reign, giving way to the equally maniacal, paranoid politics of Richard Nixon. Nixon’s downfall came when enterprising journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein sexted with FBI agent Mark Felt to uncover the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors. Incidentally, the authentic journalism of Woodward and Bernstein unleashed a brain bug into the skulls of American liberals, convincing them that all journalists were brave heroes and that one merely had to ask those in power, “Sir, how dare you, sir?” until they stepped down.
It worked on Nixon, after all. He did step down, and we ended up with Jimmy Carter, a man who did sweaters and offbeat farming long before horny Instagram poetry guys.
For some reason, Carter is remembered as wildly left-wing, immortalized by conservatives as Satan incarnate and by liberals as proof that governing to your left is a losing ticket. They’re right, too: Carter’s pie-in-the-sky Marxist policies of deregulating trucking, airlines, and the credit industry while sending arms and cash to the proto-Taliban alongside Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s ISI—this stuff was just too idealistic. And so President Peanut-Lookin’-Ass-Boy lost to Ronald “I Smell Toast” Reagan in a triumph against ableism, causing liberals to hurl themselves back into the darkness until another
weird centrist governor emerged from the South a decade later.
It’s worth noting in the annals of Democratic/liberal fecklessness that, in the 1980s, they did keep bona fide lunatic Robert Bork off the Supreme Court, which was a win. Still, despite controlling both houses of Congress during the second Reagan administration, they let a brain-dead right-wing president get away with carrying out an HBO miniseries’s worth of Iran-Contra crimes, which was pathetic.
And here’s a dose of irony to sweeten the pill: Reagan selling arms to Iran in order to fund rape squads in Central America really did make Watergate look like a “third-rate burglary.” So if libs want to keep holding up Watergate as a historic triumph for the forces of good, they’ll have to admit that letting Reagan off the hook represents a far greater historic triumph for the forces of evil. At least Nixon approved the EPA while he was blowing up the world; Reagan’s run was an unabashed looting of the public sector. But at the time, in lib minds, the country simply couldn’t go through another Watergate that would further erode Americans’ respect for the institution of the presidency.
After all, it would still be a few more years until a leader would come along and jizz all over the Oval Office.
Premature Triangulation
* * *
If fake friend Jimmy Carter cleared the path for Reagan’s assault on workers, poor people, and minorities, Bill Clinton picked up Ronnie’s gun and put the dying New Deal out of its misery.
Clinton ran for president as a cerebral, charismatic figure who harnessed Boomer coolness to play the sax while sticking to the playbook of the right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council. This was a new club of losers who pushed an ideology frozen in time from the moment Reagan beat Walter Mondale, blaming every subsequent Democrat’s loss on the party being too left-wing, too beholden to the Big Labor tax-and-spend policies that voters had supposedly rejected. Conceding most issues to the Right, Clinton perfected the “Third Way” politics that splits the difference between what the people you represent want and what the people who despise you want. (His counterpart in the UK, Tony Blair, carried out a similar revolution inside the Labour Party and, unsurprisingly, went on to chip away at the NHS and team up with George W. Bush on the Iraq War.)
This right turn would be one thing as a campaign strategy, but Clinton, the new and improved liberal, took this shit to heart. Once in office, he declared the era of big government over, “reformed” welfare by kicking a bunch of poor mothers off the dole, ballooned the prison population, vastly expanded the war on drugs, smashed a handful of small countries with bombs lest anyone call him a pussy, and made sure any gay people at the tip of the imperial spear could get killed but not married. The telecom act he signed into law is also the reason why you fucking hate your Internet service provider. Oh, and he demolished the firewall between commercial and investment banking, which set the stage for the greatest financial crash since that big Depression liberals are supposedly so proud of FDR for fixing.
For all his noble triangulating and compromising, Clinton was rewarded with a once-in-a-generation loss of Congress and his own impeachment and prosecution by a half dozen men actively receiving under-the-desk blow jobs from their mistresses during the Senate trial itself.
All the while, Clinton pushed liberals’ dedication to compromise to the breaking point, testing their basic values by forcing them to back a man of obvious moral turpitude. Believe women? Not Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, or Paula “Drag a hundred dollars through a trailer park and there’s no telling what you’ll find” III Jones. Respect the Process? Not before you shunt your wife to a state she’s never lived in to become senator because there just wasn’t anyone else in the fourth-most-populous state who was better qualified for the job. Opposing, uh, eugenics? Clinton’s welfare reform bill paid a $20 million prize to states willing to cut down on out-of-wedlock births. Opposing, uhhhhhh, slavery? In the Arkansas governor’s mansion, Bill and Hillary enjoyed the services of unpaid black prisoners, a situation detailed in a passage of a book by Hilldawg that Bernie Sanders’s oppo team should be liquidated for not having circulated:
When we moved in, I was told that using prison labor at the governor’s mansion was a long-standing tradition, which kept down costs, and I was assured the inmates were carefully screened. . . . I saw and learned a lot as I got to know them better. We enforced rules strictly and sent back to prison any inmate who broke a rule.IV
Why did liberals stand by their man? After they’d spent twelve years out of the White House, was their despair so profound that they clung to a guy who kinda, sorta won two presidential elections? Were they simply so afraid of the resurgent Right that they felt they needed to triangulate just to stay relevant? Did he just remind them of John F. Kennedy because he was young and fucked around on his wife? Did they agree with what he did?
Beats us. Probably some combination of all of the above. But for as smart and as Process-respecting as liberals think Clintonism was, in practice it was a cascading series of desperate improvisations that diluted any ideological potency the Democratic Party had left. Executing a mentally disabled black man doesn’t placate the Right?V Let’s sign their flatly racist, eugenic welfare bill into law. That doesn’t work? Let’s legitimize their dehumanizing rhetoric and flatter their tribal instincts by calling young black men “superpredators” and signing an anti–gay marriage bill into law. No dice? How about deregulating Wall Street banks—that ought to make suburban moderates like us, right? Oh fuck, why are we losing so many working-class voters???
Into the Wilderness: The Shrub Years
* * *
Despite harassment from the vaguely left-wing Bradley Buds, Clinton’s VP, Al Gore, won the Democratic nomination in 2000. Gore attempted to chart a course between Clintonian triangulation and Naderite progressivism, inveighing against “Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs” while promising to pragmatically maintain the economic prosperity of the 1990s. He chose as his running mate hawkish center-right senator Joe Lieberman (who would later become an independent and endorse John McCain in 2008). And as a sop to social conservatives, Gore dry-humped his wife onstage at the DNC to prove he was horny only for Tipper (who would later separate from Al in 2010).
Gore, of course, went on to shit the bed against an indigo child from Texas. His populist notes sounded insincere, coming as they did from the second banana of the DC establishment who famously went on Larry King Live to defend NAFTA. He hemorrhaged a few million lefty votes to Ralph Nader and, tied to his boss’s policies while lacking his boss’s charisma, lost eleven of the states Bill won in 1996.
But throughout it all, Gore respected the Process. While Bush traveled the country dissembling without a care, Gore prostrated himself before the judgment of Maureen Dowd and the New York Times op-ed page. When one of his advisors received a package containing Bush’s debate prep materials, the advisor recused himself in the interest of fairness and reported the event to the FBI. (Superfun fact: In 1980, Reagan was leaked papers from Carter’s debate prep. He, of course, did the right thing and used them, because he wasn’t nearly as much of a fucking sucker as institutional liberals.) In overtime, the GOP organized street mobs of Young Republican sociopaths—who would all later be rewarded with cushy jobs—to shut down the Florida recount while Lieberman went on TV to say late-postmarked absentee ballots (which favored Bush) should definitely be counted. The Bush campaign succeeded in sowing enough chaos and confusion that the Supreme Court stepped in to shut down the statewide recount, citing the legal doctrine of “Whatever.”
Gore lost Florida—and thus the presidency—by 537 votes.
Bush’s first term, quite frankly, broke liberals’ brains. Deeply fearful of being smeared as unpatriotic, prominent liberal commentators, politicians, and publications fell over themselves to back the White House’s Iraq War and wholesale evisceration of civil liberties. Funnily enough, this compromise didn’t work. Senator Max Cleland, a triple-amputee V
ietnam vet, was rewarded for his pro–Iraq War vote by getting called an Al Qaeda lover and losing his next election. Spooked by unexpected midterm losses in 2002, every establishment Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2004 also endorsed toppling Saddam. Howard Dean, a centrist triangulator from Vermont who likened himself to a moderate Republican in his own campaign book, emerged as the radical leftist candidate, because that’s how awful things were.
It took a “quagmire” in Iraq, the failure of Bush’s second-term agenda, the Old Testament–caliber destruction of a major American city, and a congressman sending horny instant messages to underage pages for the Dems to just barely retake Congress in 2006. But ask around and you won’t hear the Democrats’ midterm victory credited to the public’s natural desire for change from a ruling party that had fucked up so immensely and been so thoroughly discredited.
You might hear it was because of foulmouthed (read: asshole) campaign chair Rahm Emanuel’s strategy of pushing out weaker (read: leftier) candidates in favor of moderate (read: not gay) veterans and sheriffs to fight the perception that Democrats were weak on national security (read: not warmongers). Or you might hear it was because of the Democrats’ “New Direction for America,” a six-point platform featuring such revolutionary proposals as a tax deduction for college tuition.VI You might even hear it was because of the goddamned Netroots.
In any event, liberals were ascendant. A card-carrying latte-swiller from San Francisco held the speaker’s gavel, and if President Shrub wanted money for his war in Iraq or his trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout, by gum, he would have to ask nicely before receiving absolutely everything he requested. In the next cycle, Dems won historic supermajorities in both houses of Congress and, oh yeah, elected a black guy president.
The Chapo Guide to Revolution Page 6