The record outside of foreign and economic policy is hardly any better. Healthcare in America is a disaster, made worse by another eight years of standing by watching conditions deteriorate, and letting a sexually-obsessed American Taliban dictate policy on stem-cell research and anything else even remotely related to genitalia and other evil things. That whole idea of using government to reward cronies and political stormtroopers turns out to have worked just about as well as it did back in the nineteenth century – before we abandoned it the first time – as Heckuvajob Brownie so well demonstrated during Katrina. And won’t history be kind to the regressive right for denying that global warming was a massive threat to humanity, and then blocking solutions once it became undeniable that it was? Or attempting to destroy the International Criminal Court (hmm, wonder why?). And so on, and so on...
These are the reasons, altogether, that Bush is the most widely reviled president ever seen in polling data, and that many notable historians have abandoned their traditional reluctance to weigh in on any subject that isn’t half a century old and have gone ahead and declared the Bush presidency the worst in over 200 years of American history. But we need to remember that Bush, of course, is only the most visible manifestation of an entire regressive movement, which is as completely predatory as it is patently a failure.
So the real question is, how come ‘conservative’ isn’t a dirty word today, a label that any politician outside of Mississippi would run from as if it were the Ebola virus? The answer, I think, has principally to do with marketing, and also with the will and motives of the so-called opposition party. I remember George Bush the Elder, carrier of the demon seed, mercilessly hammering the hapless Mike Dukakis across the 1988 campaign as "a liberal", spitting the word out as if it was the worst epithet imaginable. Week after week, Dukakis said nothing, as his poll number slid into the basement, missing the obvious retort of "If you mean someone who favors Social Security, Medicare, school loans, the GI Bill, civil rights, equality for women, protection of free speech and the Constitution – then, yeah, hell yes I’m a liberal!" Week after week he was silent, that is, until finally I saw him do it live, with my very own eyes. He copped to being a liberal. On the very last day of the campaign. In San Francisco, no less. Brilliant.
What’s happened is that the regressive right has been wildly successful at one of the only two things they’re good at (the other being theft), which is marketing lies. The Atwater/Rove/Schmidt machine is fairly brilliant at using fear, smear and queer to turn night into day, black into white, Palin into Truman. Nowhere does this show up so clearly as in the contrast between policy preferences and the ideological self-definition of voters. On issue after issue – yes, even including guns, gays and taxes – Americans definitively line up in favor of liberal positions, often by huge gaps. They want national healthcare, they want regulation of guns, they support equality for women and gays, they oppose ‘free trade’, they favor government steps to ameliorate the polarization of wealth in America, they want to protect the environment, they approve ‘big government’ providing more services, they want the minimum wage raised, they support stem-cell research and massively oppose Terri Schiavo-type government interventions into personal morality, they strongly support abortion rights and oppose repealing Roe by a two-to-one ratio. Nowadays, they’re even giving up on the death penalty.
But then these same people have, over the last thirty years or so, self-identified as conservatives to the tune of about 30 percent of the population, versus liberal on the order of about 20 percent. And while there are decent arguments to be made that the public doesn’t understand ideological labels as well as they might, or that the other 25 percent or so calling themselves moderates are really liberals, the more important point has to do with marketing success. Who in America wants to be labeled a ‘liberal’ today? It’s still a dirty word, even though all its policy prescriptions are widely held, and even though conservatism has been monstrously and emphatically disastrous. This is the product of a marketing coup of first proportions, a stunning Madison Avenue success at, well, putting lipstick on a pig. You could see it, most recently, at the Republican Convention last month, where neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney nor even the word Republican were anywhere to be found, and yet people bought into loads of the claptrap about Sarah Palin. Democrats would have been hopeless and morose with a hand like the one Republicans have dealt themselves in 2008. The GOP, on the other hand – them boys know how to peddle soap, man.
Meanwhile, the Dukakis tradition, well preserved by the likes of Gore in 2000 and John Kerry and still somewhat by Barack Obama today, continues to illustrate one of the few things a conservative ever got right – namely, Edmund Burke’s oft-quoted observation that all that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing. But there’s good and then there’s good. As another famous old quip notes, many progressives during the New Deal era came to Washington to do good and stayed to do well. One reason that regressivism has been so miraculously successful as a set of politics while being simultaneously so disastrous as policy is surely because of Democratic cowardice. But, just as surely, another is because far too many donkeys are nearly as bought into the corporate predatory nexus as are the elephants (and I don’t mean Babar).
Why does this all matter? Well, for the same reason that eight years of Bush/Cheney matters, and that the very real prospect of a McCain presidency followed by a Palin presidency matters. Political battles are half-won or lost, in advance, by the framing and labeling which precede the actual contests. The right understands this so well, which is why, among other of their successes, liberal is a dirty word, and the press has been successfully labeled with a liberal bias. Progressives – or at least Democrats – are clueless about this stuff. They’ve never worked on Madison Avenue. They’ve never been driven by a rapacious ambition toward infantile self-aggrandizement. They’ve never had to sell gold-plated cappuccino machines or Hummers to idiot consumers just itching to depart with their own money in order to salve their raging insecurities. No wonder they can’t win elections.
It’s astonishing, if you think about it – how much can be sold on the basis of so little substance. Put it this way: I’d be willing to bet there isn’t a day that doesn’t go by in which Karl Rove doesn’t salivate all over his Dockers, dreaming of the kind of empire he could build if he had the material progressives have to work with. An angry public, policy agreement on virtually every issue in the public sphere, a hated government powerfully representing the opposing ideology. What more could you want? It’s true, conservative voters are incredibly susceptible to fear-based political appeals, and tend to have the critical analytical faculties of a pile of rocks. Still, it’s been a very long time since the cards were stacked so heavily in favor of a progressive tsunami in America, and the right knows it. And they alternate between sheer astonishment and giddy joy as they contemplate the utter inability of progressives to pick up that ball and run with it.
Those, like Rove, in the regressive controlling class cannot believe their good fortune in not being completely chased from the field of play, as if they were transsexual Nazi pedophiles advocating for the national agenda a confiscation of all private property and America being annexed as a province of Bolivia. "Goddam, I’m good" Rove tells the guy in the mirror each morning as he shaves, I can assure you. And he’s (very) right, I can also assure you, provided you take the talented meaning of the word ‘good’, not the moral one.
But imagine if progressives were half as good, especially with all the material they now have to work with.
They could be the chemotherapy for the country’s conservative cancer we’ve so badly needed for so long now. Instead of an America on life support, we could once again be a healthy polity, growing and thriving.
And the regressive disease could be banished from the body politic forever.
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