HomeNixon FoundationNixon Center

Salon: McCain Win Would Threaten Democracy

September 14, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Election 2008, News media 

“Salon”’s Gary Kamiya:

Palin represents the reappearance of the one part of Bush that never died — the culture warrior. Democrats may have forgotten about the notorious red state-blue state divide, or hoped that the failures of the last eight years had made it go away. But it hasn’t. It’s been there all along. If Palin catapults McCain to victory, it will be revealed to be the most powerful and enduring force in American politics. And that fact will raise serious questions about the viability of American democracy itself….

It’s terrifying that so many Americans are so driven by resentment that they will vote against more qualified candidates simply because they seem “different” from them. For what this means is that anyone with expertise, unusual intelligence, mastery, special knowledge, is likely to be rejected by voters who are resentful of “elites.” This constitutes a rejection of the very idea that it matters if someone is better at something than someone else.

To conservatives, the left’s shrill, sometimes dishonest attacks on Gov. Palin’s background, family, faith, and political principles feel like culture war tactics. But the left thinks Sen. McCain picked a culture war just by naming her. When someone argues, as Kamiya does, that a GOP victory will threaten democracy itself, to conservatives that sounds like the worst kind of scare tactics. But the left says (unceasingly) that it’s Republicans who traffic in the politics of fear. Andrew Sullivan, Alan Colmes, and other post-boomer commentators said Republicans would lose by playing red-blue politics. And yet their efficacy has just been rediscovered by Sen. Obama’s friends and Palin’s opponents, their primary-season rhetoric about a new kind of politics notwithstanding.

Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, argued that Richard Nixon institutionalized the politics of resentment and anger. If RN were here, he’d send Perlstein clippings showing what his enraged critics said after the Hiss case. One person’s politics of resentment is another’s truth, which is why politicians never get anywhere accusing the other side of going negative first. The mutual finger-pointing would go all the way back to Cain and Abel. In public affairs, as in many human endeavors, people have often tended to be at their worst when convinced they’re doing the right thing. Liberals are as prone to this effect as conservatives — more so when they decide their advanced insights are vital to the survival of democracy.

Hence Kamiya’s standing up for elites’ unusual intelligence, mastery, and “special knowledge” — one translation of the Greek work gnosis. The Gnostics were a Christian sect whose members believed that true knowledge of God and the means of achieving salvation in a broken world were only given to a select few. Political and media Gnostics think the same way, hence their resume fixation. That’s why they’ve spent nearly a week dancing on the head of a pin engraved with the words “Bush Doctrine” as though they believe the bulk of the American people are paying attention to what Sarah Palin knows instead of who she is.



Comments

17 Responses to “Salon: McCain Win Would Threaten Democracy”

  1. Rick Perlstein on September 14th, 2008 9:59 pm

    Rev. Taylor, RN can’t show me the clippings, but you can–provide the evidence. I found the coverage of RN’s role in the Hiss case predominately fair–and find that he only began complaining otherwise with any intensity after his first presidential defeat (and he certainly never showed anyone any clippings; the rage was always vague and unfocused).

  2. John H. Taylor on September 14th, 2008 10:19 pm

    Rick: Here’s a recent one, from Ron Rosenbaum: “[T]he Alger Hiss spy case—that seething and bitter Cold War battle, that interminable intellectual blood feud…” A bitter, seething blood feud requires two sides. Are you saying that millions really didn’t despise Richard Nixon because of the Hiss case?

  3. paul a'barge on September 15th, 2008 7:22 am

    Let’s not engage in historical revisionism Mr Perlstein.

    Hiss was guilty as charged.

  4. Horatio on September 15th, 2008 8:08 am

    I love this line…”It’s terrifying that so many Americans are so driven by resentment that they will vote against more qualified candidates simply because they seem “different” from them.”

    So…other than Kamiya’s assertion, what makes Obama/Biden “more qualified” that McCain/Palin? Their education? Accomplishments? “Experience”? Good looks?

    What makes anyone “qualified” to be President/VP? One can suggest that anyone who seeks that much power is clinically insane.

    “Pity the poor, diseased politician. Imagine: to spend your days and expend your efforts making rules for others to live by, thinking up ways to run other lives. Actually to strive for the opportunity to do so! What a hideous affliction!” – From The Second Book Of KYFHO (F. Paul Wilson)

  5. Andrew Koenig on September 15th, 2008 8:15 am

    Gary Kamiya is right, but not in the way he probably intended.

    Let me rewrite the first sentence of his second paragraph slightly: It’s terrifying that so many Americans are so driven by resentment that they will vote against John McCain, despite his being obviously more qualified than Barack Obama, merely because he seems “different” from them in not being a hard-core liberal.

  6. LibertyGuy on September 15th, 2008 8:17 am

    I must be one of those Americans who terrify you. If my vote is driven by resentment, it’s not resentment against “more qualified candidates” but rather against this simple sentiment I’ve read from several left-of-center commentators (one from your own Magazine): If I don’t vote Obama this fall, I’m a racist. Talk about your politics of fear.

    And, by the way, this formula your article relies on
    Republicans are dumb, uncultured and mean
    Democrats are smart, refined and compassionate
    Vote Democrat
    is getting old. I doubt it can win any more elections. People today have too many ways of accessing information without the “old media filters” to be tricked into this kind of thinking.

  7. Bob on September 15th, 2008 9:39 am

    Gary Kamiya inadvertently demonstrates the very reason average Americans distrust and despise the left-wing Marxists represented by Barack Obama and the Democrat party. They are full of themselves and think that they are so much better than we and thus are “qualified” to rule over us because we are too stupid to know what is in our own best interests. Average Americans may sometimes be ignorant about some things, but they know that ignorance is only a temporary condition that can be cured with information. So, they seek out that information from a variety of sources, bypassing the Marxist filters of the MSM. However, Mr. Kamiya and his crowd are afflicted with the terminal disease of stupidity, and there simply is no cure for that.

  8. phowes on September 15th, 2008 11:05 am

    Yes, democracies are full of people who disdain the “elites.” They were once called royalty.

    What we are starved for in our polititian leaders is character and authencity, not the sock puppets of special interests that inhabit that Chamber of Fools, the U.S. Senate.

    Joe Biden, owned by the credit card companies, having now publicially stated that Hillary is better qualified to be vice president that he is, look for his departure soon.

  9. JD Bryant on September 15th, 2008 12:50 pm

    resentful of “elites!?!?!?!? The funniest thing is that Kamiya is so clueless that he cannot comprehend that we aren’t resentful of the so called “elites”. We are laughing at them. They lose presidential elections because the “elites” mistake caricatures for candidates so they keep nominating the former. Boy talk about dumb.

  10. Shakes The Clown on September 15th, 2008 1:13 pm

    Democracy is now a threat to democracy. The only way that democracy can be proven viable and effective is if we vote for the Democrats.

    The only problem the left has with Democracy is the part about everyone getting a vote. And they raise hell about every election that they do not win.

    To say that they act like children is an insult to children.

  11. Mike T on September 15th, 2008 9:16 pm

    special knowledge? unusual intelligence? Kamiya cannot be talking about Obama or Biden. Neither has shown any evidence of either. Mastery? of what? Neither has mastered anything, neither has been responsible for a budget or even a small company. Palin has actually accomplished something, and it scares the heck out of the libs. This has been a brilliant rope a dope scheme – they flail away at her for inexperience and then have to sheepishly admit that their presidential candidate has even less experience – it doesn’t take “special knowledge” or “unusual intelligence” to figure out uhBama is an empty suit.

  12. John H. Taylor on September 16th, 2008 7:38 am

    If Rick Perlstein is still monitoring this thread, a scholar at the UVA law school had this to say about the Hiss case’s “Nixonland” effect:

    “Individuals linked forever with the Hiss and Rosenberg cases — Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Whittaker Chambers and Roy Cohn — became villains of the left and heroes of the right, with the most notorious figure, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, as the lightning rod. Mr. McCarthy, however, played no role in either case, only using them for political ends.

    “Alger Hiss ‘played upon the identification of many liberals with his sympathy for the Soviets,” Mr. White said. “He emphasized that his chief persecutors were Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and Whittaker Chambers [Hiss' accuser], and suggested that his conviction was another example of McCarthy-era blacklisting. Many people had friends and acquaintances that were blacklisted in the late 1940s and 1950s, so believing in Hiss’ innocence was a way of coming to terms with one’s own former political sympathies.’”

    H/T to Br. Robert Nedelkoff

  13. leishman on September 16th, 2008 1:32 pm

    Wow–Gary Kamiya makes Sully look phlegmatic! When he says, “It’s terrifying that so many Americans are so driven by resentment,” I think (a) what a limp-wrist to consider political disagreement as “terrifying,” and (b) what typical lefty projection regarding “resentment”. All this fear and bluster is reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz, with Governor Palin as Dorothy.

  14. Rick Perlstein on September 16th, 2008 8:01 pm

    I’d be interested to see a clip specifically attacking Nixon on the Hiss case. Proquest Historical Newspapers counts.

  15. Rick Perlstein on September 16th, 2008 8:02 pm

    (During the case, I mean.)

  16. John H. Taylor on September 16th, 2008 9:19 pm

    Gotcha. I’ll stipulate your findings that newspaper coverage of the Hiss case was not unfair to RN. Clippings could be from opinion journals, too. My argument was that the Hiss case made him a target — his era’s equivalent of red-blue, culture-war politics.

  1. “Average Citizens” And Foreign Policy : The New Nixon: News and Commentary about the President, his Times, and his Legacy

Got something to say?