Ten Years Later: The Right Since 9/11
Ten Years Later: The Right Since 9/11
Michael Kazin: The Right Since 9/11
Many important things have not changed in the United States over the past ten years. The gap between the rich and everyone else is as wide as ever, global warming continues apace, organized labor still struggles to survive, the leader of the Democratic Party is still afraid to sound like a liberal, the best TV shows are all on cable, and the Chicago Cubs have absolutely no chance of playing in the World Series.
But the Republican Party has changed quite a bit—and not for the better. Before the attacks of September 11, the GOP was certainly a conservative party, rhetorically committed to slashing income taxes and government programs, heeding the advice of evangelical Christians about abortion and homosexuality, and keeping the military strong enough to intervene anywhere the president deemed it necessary. But, once in office, conservatives from Reagan to Bush both father and son often acted domestically in more sensible ways. They understood that most Americans may curse “big government” yet still expect, or at least hope, that public officials will keep the economy prosperous and deliver good education to their children, a decent income and cheap medical care when they retire, and swift and efficient aid whenever disaster strikes. And their talk about banning abortion and shoving gay people back in the closet mostly remained just talk.
Over the past decade, however, the “war on terror” and the multiple debacles of the last Bush administration convinced most conservatives that such a balancing act was the rankest of heresies. If America were locked in a deadly, epochal conflict with Islamic extremists—and if those extremists were lurking everywhere from the outskirts of Kandahar to the mosques of East London to Middle East studies departments at elite universities—then talk of understanding or engagement was nothing but appeasement. The same mentality that, during the first decades of the Cold War, gave rise to the National Review and Barry Goldwater’s campaign for president was revived in potent form, despite the fact that Al Qaeda and its disciples had neither the resources nor the international appeal of the Soviet Union in the 1950s and early 60s.
George W. Bush’s failure to defeat the enemy in either Iraq or Afghanistan only increased the anger of right-wing zealots and their determination to press on. What’s more, Bush’s embrace of national education standards, a Medicare drug plan, and, finally, the bailout of the financial industry, proved he was expanding “the nanny state” instead of dismantling it. Republican leaders, and the nation, had let down their guard. No wonder Americans were seduced into electing a closet socialist who may not even be constitutionally eligible to hold the job!
Since the 2008 election, prominent conservatives, both in and out of office, have made their alternative to “the political establishment” alarmingly explicit. They now take views on nearly every domestic issue that, by definition, are profoundly reactionary. Glenn Beck declares he “hates” Woodrow Wilson for initiating the Federal Reserve system, while Rick Perry calls Social Security a failure and a “Ponzi scheme” and would like to abolish the income tax. Both Perry and Michele Bachmann proudly declare their wish that all Americans convert to their sort of triumphal Christianity. Before 2001, most conservatives hoped to roll back certain parts of the Great Society–although not Medicare or the Civil Rights Act. Now, an increasing number would like to repeal nearly everything government has accomplished, with popular support, during the entire twentieth century. The GOP majority in the House of Representatives seems eager to begin that mighty task.
The hypocritical Right has thus been succeeded by a hysterical Right. There is no room in this vitriolic camp for such thoughtful Bushian conservatives as David Frum and Michael Gerson, much less Sam Tanenhaus, an admiring biographer of Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley. David Brooks, who once said his task as a columnist for the New York Times was “to explain Red America to Blue America,” seems entirely disgusted by national politics and has taken refuge in neuropsychology.
Unfortunately, amid recession and fears of national decline, the Manichean delusions of the Right, masquerading as a return to first principles, have wide appeal, if so far mostly among Republicans. Obama, instead of viewing the economic crisis as an opportunity to challenge the premises of the Tea Party Right and offer progressive ones of his own, is trapped by his own desire to rise above the fray. If he manages to win re-election, it will only be because his failure disappoints voters less than the mania of the Right alarms them.
It has, pace Auden, been a low, dishonest decade. Many of the people who greeted the 2008 election results with joy now fret and moan, echoing sentiments reminiscent of a 1971 lyric by a band with the appropriate name Ten Years After:
But I don’t know what to do
So I’ll leave it up to you
Unless the “you” gets translated back into “a lot of us,” the next ten years could be an ugly time indeed.
Michael Kazin is the co-editor of Dissent.
