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Rick Perlstein On The Town Hall Demonstrators

August 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Congress, Double Standard Paranoia Quotient, George W. Bush, Healthcare, New Media, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixonland Nitpicks, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin, TV News Personalities, U.S. History 

A little over a year ago, when Rick Perlstein published his mammoth study of “the American berserk” – the original subtitle of Nixonland – in the years between 1965 and 1972, he concluded his 748-page saga of heated hardhats and howling hippies (or was it the other way around?) by arguing that the culture and political wars of the late Sixties and early Seventies had not only not died, but had never really gone away.

Perlstein maintained that the 37th President’s legacy to the nation was “a notion that there are two kinds of Americans: one kind viewing themselves as “people of faith,” patriots, “nonshouters,” and viewing the other kind – “liberals,” “cosmopolitans,” “intellectuals” – as “un-Americans, anti-Christians, amoralists, aliens [Perlstein's emphasis].”

The book’s final paragraphs read:

Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not.

How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.

When Nixonland appeared, several reviewers criticized that penultimate statement, and said that Perlstein clearly was mistaken to think that the passions of that time still ran as strong.

But that was last year, and now that many of this month’s “town halls” about the proposed health-care legislation across the country have featured very heated rhetoric, not only at the meetings themselves, but among the crowds assembled outside the venues, Perlstein has written an op-ed for the Washington Post that makes it clear that he considers himself vindicated in his argument.

Now, anyone following the town hall meetings closely knows that many speakers at them have been as fervent about single-payer care and the proposed legislation’s failure to incorporate it, though not as visible in TV sound bites as the ones who have been waving pocket copies of the Constitution and arguing against the bill’s big-government tendencies.

But the leftist voices at the meetings count for nothing where Perlstein is concerned. What he sees is nothing less than the return of the right-wing fervor that swept through parts of America during the Kennedy years. And the op-ed’s title, though probably the work of a dependably liberal Post staffer, sums up its attitude toward the liberatarian and conservative voices at these gatherings: “In America, Crazy Is A Pre-Existing Condition.”

Yes, all the objections raised to the mammoth scope of the bill, and to the possibility that it marks the start of a path which will see Americans turn over as large a percentage of their income to the state as was the case in Sweden at the height of its cradle-to-grave system – or perhaps more – yes, all the worries raised by hard-working citizens, in Perlstein’s opinion, are on a par with the fears of almost 50 years ago that fluoride in drinking water would brainwash children into being Communists, or whatever members of the John Birch Society were supposed to have believed in those days.

(I have to admit that sometimes fluoride does worry me a bit. The other night I was gargling with that new Listerine “Whitening Formula,” or whatever it’s called, in which the active ingredient is sodium fluoride. On the back of the bottle I noticed an instruction not to drink or eat anything for 30 minutes after using it. If the idea is to keep fluoride out of my system, then why would it be in my drinking water? But then again, my dentist tells me there’s been an upsurge in cavities because kids don’t drink as much tap water as they once did. End of digression.)

In the op-ed, Perlstein states:

Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror — powerful elites — find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.

Why, of course, “crazy-making panic” is endemic only to conservative Americans, otherwise defined, in the world of the Post, as those people who still insist on regarding Sarah Palin as a political force even after her daughter’s former fiance has started dating Kathy Griffin. Those thousands upon thousands (or maybe millions upon millions) of words, many of them still online, which fretted about Guantanamo in the Bush years presaging internment camps for the young and disaffected in the United States? That was legitimate political discourse, nothing irrational about it.

(As is, presumably, the post at a left-leaning site I read the other day that compared the present political situation in America to that of Germany in about 1930. Anyone for Obama as the new Heinrich Bruening?)

Although, as I write, it will be several more hours before Perlstein’s piece appears in the antiquated ink-on-paper format, it has already stirred up several dozen responses from across the political spectrum. Matt Yglesias has one of the most thoughtful posts about it on the Left. He focuses on these remarks of Perlstein’s:

You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to “debunk” claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president’s program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn’t adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as “extremist” — out of bounds.

As opposed to the “in-bounds” rhetoric of the SDS and Black Panthers, which got substantial on-air attention. But let’s look at today’s situation. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when President Obama held his town hall meeting about health care this week, William Kostric, a self-described “free stater,” was spotted in the crowd by an MSNBC crew with a sign reading “Time To Water The Tree” (it referred to a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, which concludes “with the blood of patriots and tyrants”) – and a gun strapped to his leg, which he had a permit to carry.

It turned out that Kostric had not simply brought the weapon to provide a headache to Secret Service personnel who had to worry about any individuals who might not be carrying weapons simply to “make a statement.” He meant for the gun to attract media attention and stir curiosity about what he wanted – which turned out to be, presumably like all the “crazies” Perlstein describes, to get on TV.

And which program finally extended an invitation to appear? Was it Glenn Beck’s show, or Sean Hannity’s, or The O’Reilly Factor, or any of the other shows which, as every schoolperson in Santa Monica or Marin County knows, are diabolically constructed by “elites” to inflame the heartland? No, it was Hardball with Chris Matthews, a show which is not usually viewed as a hotbed for “crazies.”. I assume that Kostric chose Hardball because MSNBC was the channel that gave him visibility. (He also appeared on Alex Jones’s radio talk show, a venue more along the lines of his personal views, but certainly not the creation of any media “elite.” Indeed, Michael Savage, singled out as a rabble-rouser by Perlstein, has not had Kostric appear on his program.)

Perlstein doesn’t seem to realize that most of those who are concerned about the drawbacks of the health-care bill are voicing heartfelt and rational objections. They know that every citizen of the country already is shouldering a share of the national debt equivalent to nearly a fifth of a million dollars and they hope that there’s some way to keep it from going to a quarter of a million. They were not happy with the idea of a President doing his best Lyndon Johnson imitation and insisting that Congress pass over a thousand pages of slapped-together taxes and regulations before the end of last month, before it became clear that would not happen. (And compared to the versions of the health-care bill now in the works, even the most hastily drafted bills of LBJ’s Great Society look like they were penned by James Madison or George Mason.)

But that doesn’t matter to Perlstein; for him, “the tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America’s flora.” However, he’s not going unchallenged about this. One of the more impressive retorts so far has come from Stephen Bainbridge, a professor at UCLA’s law school. The professor sums up the op-ed as follows: “we lefties are rational, nice, kind people who are puzzled by conservative crazies. We’ve got no crazies on our side, of course. Just nice rational people like me.” Then Bainbridge lists some “rational” responses to perceived threats from the Right by left-wing organizations, starting with the Weathermen.

Bainbridge’s post got this prompt response from Perlstein, who says: “I hate the Weathermen. Read my book. So does everyone I know on the left.”

Well, it may be that everyone Rick knows on the Left deplores what the Weathermen, as a whole, became, or some of its actions. But individual former members of the Weathermen, whether or not they still think they were justified in what they did, certainly are not hated by many of his colleagues – indeed, quite the opposite, as Bill Ayers’s recent well-attended book tour demonstrates.

And, before I forget: does Perlstein mention Richard Nixon in his article? Yes, he does, classing RN as one of the “vultures” who exploited the fears sprouting from the “tree of crazy” – and, somehow, managed, by doing so, to secure a 49-state victory in 1972.

With a little help from 47,168,710 “crazies.” Count ‘em.



Comments

9 Responses to “Rick Perlstein On The Town Hall Demonstrators”

  1. MK on August 16th, 2009 8:36 am

    Since I’ve been reading Perlstein’s Nixonland in recent months, I’m not surprised to see his op ed. One rhetorical point, Robert. You write, “all the worries raised by hard-working citizens.” I know that is a time-honored phrase in political writing, one you use in its traditional sense. Unfortunately, given the way the term was used in the 2008, what used to be an innocuous phrase, sometimes used by politicians to praise or stroke listeners, changed last year when a bi-racial candidate ran for office. Beyond that, no one knows who on which side of the health care debate really is hard working and who is not! Both sides can use that claim. Still, the phrase taken on some charged connotations.

    What is fascinating about the issue of health care reform is what the debate tells us about how various people view government. The framing and what people zero in on is revealing, just as it was in Nixon’s day. On the one hand, a non-partisan group of public policy experts writes that over the last decade, “Washington has neglected to make appropriate policy adjustments in light of demographic changes. The country is not only getting more populous; it is getting older. Aging has significant implications for the country’s economic outlook, its fiscal policy, the balance of domestic politics, military capacities, and intergenerational equity issues.”

    The experts focus on the unstainability of the current path Medicare is on. On the potential for inter-generational conflict. On the importance of preventive care and wellness education, which play a role in reducing health care costs under private plans and under Medicare. If people get care earlier in life or receive advice on lifestyle choices such as healthy eating, exercise, avoiding smoking, reducing alcohol intake, they might reduce the chances of getting diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Early detection too is important. Better to catch something at the outset when it may be curable than too late, when a patient may undergo costly and lengthy procedures which ultimately have little effect, cost a great deal in money and psychic stress, but don’t prevent early death.

    Not all citizens see the issues as policy experts do. No more than they did in Nixon’s day, when policy experts talking about the domino theory, about the need for nations to project military power. Then as now, some people express inchoate fears that reflect their fundamental view of government. Some don’t necessarily recognize that Medicare is a government run program. That they already benefit from a federal program their children and grandchildren may not have available to them at the same level in their old age, if costs are not controlled, revenue shortfalls addressed and levels of preventive do not rise.
    Some argue for low taxes and limited government and point to the Founders. Unlike the hippies who formed communes in the 1970s, it’s hard for them to test how that might work at its most basic. It’s not as if like-minded people can drop out, opting out of Medicare and some other federal programs and subsidies. And forming self-sustaining communities of back to basics conservatives in designated, special low tax, low government provided services states, where they were charged taxes only commensurate with national defense. And relied on their own income and the community to take care of everything else. I thought of hippies and their commune experiments when I saw the conservative town hall protestor who told an interviewer on MSNBC, “I know that there are people out there that can’t afford health insurance, that can’t afford a lot of different things. And, you know, with the founders, they had — they thought and hoped that the goodness of the people would allow the people to take care of those . . . who were doing without. . . . .a lot of people that I know go on missions. They. . . volunteer.”
    There’s so much more in the mix than what Perlstein describes. Still, the example Perlstein cites from the letter writing effort is fascinating, isn’t it? “‘To the Editor . . . Who in the hell elected these people to stand up and read off their insults to the President of the United States?’ read one proposed ‘grass-roots’ letter manufactured by the White House. ‘When will you people realize that he was elected President and he is entitled to the respect of that office no matter what you people think of him?’”

    Then and now, there are people who would apply that equally to anyone who sits in the Oval office, Republican or Democrat. They accept that his party won, he was elected by a majority of the people, and he sets the policy agenda, one for which individual citizens can signal acceptance, rejection or calls for some modification or adjustment. (That’s where I am now and have been for decades.) There are others for whom basic respect goes out the door when the opposing party takes charge of government. Left or right, rarely do they admit that it’s a partisan matter – and for a what I hope only are a few, seemingly a racial one — rather than one based on respect or consistent principles.

    Rick Perlstein’s op ed focuses more on partisans than on Independents, some of whom formed part of Nixon’s “Silent Majority.” In last week’s daily tracking polls, Research 2000 indicated that a lot of Independents are fence sitting as far as the generic ballot question is concerned.

    Percentage of Undecided Voters, 2010 Generic Congressional Ballot Test
    Democrats 19
    Republicans 14
    Independents 58

    Much clearer is how the polled Independents view the two parties right now:
    Favorability Ratings of Democrats and Republicans, 8/13/09 (Independent Voters)
    Approve/Disapprove
    Democrats 42/47
    Republicans 5/85

    That provides the President with some opportunities, just as the existence of a centrist middle did for Nixon. Indeed, on the same day Perlstein’s op ed appeared, the President had his own op ed published in the NYT. Obama used a Nixonian, Silent Majority type appeal. He noted in passing the focus on “the loudest voices,” then wrote, “What we haven’t heard are the voices of the millions upon millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them.” For someone who remembers the ‘60s and ‘70s, what now is happening sure is fascinating to observe, on many levels!

  2. MK on August 16th, 2009 8:42 am

    Apologies for the formatting issue. There’s a long single paragraph in the middle of my comment which was supposed to be three separate ones. Sorry ’bout that. I sometimes compose first in Word then copy and paste. I messed up this time, didn’t mean to be annoying, really!

  3. MK on August 16th, 2009 1:22 pm

    FYI, Rick Perlstein will be online on Tuesday at 11 am eastern to take Q&A. See
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/08/14/DI2009081402554.html?referrer=emailarticle

    For TNN readers generally — the way it works is you submit a question. A Washington Post moderator then screens them and decides which ones will be included. So submitting a question (which you can do early) does not guarantee Mr. Perlstein will see it.

  4. MK on August 16th, 2009 3:05 pm

    Hot day today, lot’s of computer time for me this Sunday.

    I hadn’t read the Bainbridge piece when I posted my observations this morning. Intrigued by your calling it impressive, I just clicked on it and read it. What I saw was something that came across to me as the “so’s your old man” school of argument. It wasn’t until I looked for a bio for the professor that I figured out why he may have done that.

    I find that Professor Bainbridge misuses the phrase speaking “truth to power.” What the phrase means to me is someone potentially conveying unwelcome facts or data to a person who may retaliate, who can do him or her harm. I link it to what is called in management theory the “shoot the messenger” syndrome. What Brainbridge describes is something much simpler — the expresssion of opinion in fora which hold few risks for the speakers. Americans have been doing this for decades, in various ways. It has nothing to do with truth or dispositive conclusions. It’s just opinion, a fascinating glimpse at worldviews, impressions of government, concerns, expressed in a nation which values freedom of speech. But as interesdting and as ingrained as such expression is, it’s not speaking truth to power. That’s something that involves risk.

    I also found interesting Prof. Bainbridge’s characterization of “The classic liberal lie: ‘we lefties are rational, nice, kind people who are puzzled by conservative crazies. We’ve got no crazies on our side, of course. Just nice rational people like me.’” This, too, represents a poor choice of words. It’s not a lie if someone o the left actually perceives it to the case. (I don’t know how many of the left actually do.) He vastly underestimates the extent to which people across the political spectrum find justifications for their own behavior and reach for condemnation of the other.

    Psychologists attribute some of that to the application of situational and dispositional explanations. What your side does inherently is good — it is explained as relating to disposition. What works out well for the other side is situational — circumstances permitted it, not their inherent characteristics. It’s puffing up your side and deflating the other. Much of that may be not be conscious, it’s how people often filter things, in the political world and elsewhere.

    One can call someone who has an inflated sense of self too earnest or self righteous, or clueless as to how others may view him or her, or misguided. But that sense well may be authentic to them. A lie is when someone states something provable as not a fact. What Prof. Bainbridge is describing is perceptions. He totally misses Perlstein’s point — one which warrants consideration in the midst of Perlstein’s other stuff — that there often is incomprehension between liberals and conservatives. Haven’t we all seen very earnest people on both sides who seem genuinely astounded that there are fellow citizens who look at things from another angle? Who wholeheartedly believe not that there are multiple perspectives, but that there’s only one right way, and it is the way they are following?

    I’m not familiar with Prof. Bainbridge and had to look up what is his area of expertise. I gather it is law which means he is trained as an advocate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as they said on Seinfeld. I just happen to be more interested in why some elements on the right and some on the left would rather demonize rather than try to understand each other. It’s the same thing that intrigues me in looking back at Nixon’s day, when people screamed at each other over a war or over civic disorder or desegregation or whatever differing combinations of elements drove their anger.

  5. Rick Perlstein on August 19th, 2009 6:27 am

    Folks here might be interested in this part of the WP forum.

    —–

    Silver Spring, Md.: Isn’t there craziness on both sides? Why do you ignore the left-on-right variety? How do you know right-on-left is the primary type? Surely there is an argument beyond the pileup of anecdotes.

    Rick Perlstein: This is a really, really important question, one I’ve been asked constantly in the last few days.

    Here’s a difference. Some people think “Code Pink” is crazy. Let’s grant that for the sake of argument. Well, Democratic politicians don’t like Code Pink. They don’t encourage Code Pink. In fact, Code Pink feels so alienated from the Democratic Party that one of their leaders is running against Nancy Pelosi.

    It is the opposite in the Republican Party today: now people who fairly can be considered leaders (like Rush Limbaugh, and the congressman yesterday who refused to condemn bringing guns to political meetings) have made themselves the frank allies of extremists. And the mainstream media has abetted this in a way they would never do with left wing extremists. When is the last time you saw a member of the Animal Liberation Front on CNN?

    It was the same way in the late 1960s with the violent New Left and the Democratic Party. There was NO congressman or senator who supported them. None. Ever.

    Some people have been distorting my argument by pointing out that some people who were violent leftists in the 1960s and 1970s were friendly with politicians long, long, long after they re-entered the mainstream. I can’t stand Bill Ayers because I think he lies about his past (he claims all he cared about was ending the Vietnam War when actually the Weathermen were quite explicitly that they were working to foment a violent overthrow of the American government–read their manifestos). But he was a legitimate and law-abiding and non-violent member of the Chicago progressive community by the time Barack Obama met him. It was quite possible–as Obama claims is the case– not to know about his past.

    There’s a trope in right-wing culture going back to the Cold War that if someone once was a revolutionary, they must still be a revolutionary, only they’re hiding it–for the purposes of furthering the revolution. This silly paranoia has to stop. People are allowed to change (though I wish Ayers would be more forthright about his past and apologize, which he smarmily avoids doing).

  6. Timothy Hays on August 24th, 2009 12:30 pm

    I LOVED Richard Nixon. He saved America, when I was just a kid.

    Diabolical, devious, at times duplicitous? Yes. That was MY Nixon.

    Also: the brightest man to hold the office of the presidency, brighter than Herbert Hoover, brighter tha Clinton, brighter even than James Earl Carter III.

    RMN dared to confront the obnoxious, ugly, hippie pukes, who were bent on destroying any social order in our country when I was young. He was forced to play on the fears of Southern bigots in order to win election in 1968. Any man faced with that situation would have an extra scotch late at night.

    A friend of mine just retired from a 35-year service as supervisor at the Legal Aid Society, where he was based in The Bronx. Who founded Legal Aid, in order to fulfill his desire to be a real “Law and Order” Republican? RMN. God Bless him.

    When I was a kid, in LA, I worked as a file clerk in a CA state office bldg. which housed a division of OMBE. Remember “OMBE”? It stood for Office of Minority Business Enterprise.

    Who started it?

    Richard Nixon.

    As a fifth-generation Californian, I am proud of Richard Nixon.

    I love him forever.

    I can recall Jean Sharley Taylor’s son calling AT&T in 1982, when it was sponsoring a “documentary*” on RMN, and Mr. Taylor’s telling AT&T’s execs, “Why don’t you just change your slogan to ‘Reach out and SMEAR someone.’”

    That wonderful comment, and Mr. Taylor’s verve, reaffirmed my youthful Republican values.

    I love Nixon. I have every biography of him ever written here in my home library. Best are Ambrose’s. (By contrast, I have studied and done archival research at Hoover, HST, DDE, JFK, and LBJ Libraries.)

    Timothy S. Hays
    Westchester County, New York
    Note: you may see my review of “Nixonland” on amazon.com; an old friend, Chris Calhoun, was the agent on that book. Every Republican should buy it. It will reaffirm WHY we became Republicans.

    * “documentary”– opinionated and biased against RMN

  7. Timothy Hays on August 24th, 2009 1:25 pm

    A footnote: I expose my two sons, ages 11 and 14, to Democrats. (For five years, I was chairman of the local Town GOP Committee.) My older son wears his Obama tee-shirt everywhere, which I applaud– especially when he’s behaving badly in public, representing his hero. He’ll eventually be head of the college Republicans, once he grows up. But I do not dare say a word.

    Repression breeds rebellion. I am the quintessential conservative libertarian dad. I enjoy seeing my “liberal*” neighbors, from inherited money, swamped under high property taxes, and venting their anger still at the bonehead GWB, instead of at the Democrats they elected here in Westchester County. The Democrats are sheep. There are no Hubert Humphreys or Daniel Patrick Moynihans (great men) to lead them. Only corrupt people.

    This partisanship did not exist before 1972. Really. I know many Republicans who liked LBJ, begrudgingly; and I know Democrats who liked RMN and Reagan.

    You don’t have to be Sam Freedman to understand this dynamic.

    Timothy S. Hays
    Westchester County, NY

    * “liberal”– a term that’s been misused for years. Once, it meant “open”and “progressive.” No longer.

  8. Timothy S. Hays on August 24th, 2009 3:00 pm

    Just got one final rejoinder for any puke lefties out there, and I quote from a hero of mine, one Chad Ochocinquo:

    “Child please!”

  9. Larry Rusty Cherone on April 22nd, 2010 7:35 pm

    Timothy,
    Could not agree more with your definition a a liberal. There were liberals years ago I was honored to know and serve with. Although I am conservative, that term has been misused for the past decade.
    Larry

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