“The relatively recent successes of New Left ideas in law and legislation have only been made possible because their proponents were able to capture the cultural institutions — e.g., the media, academia, publishing houses, advertising agencies, Hollywood — some years earlier…We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them.” Eric Heubeck, The Integration of Theory and Practice
Substituting contempt for reason is not a new phenomenon in this country, nor is it a vice confined to the far right. A thorough search of the Internet will uncover leftist sites containing gross, sometimes threatening statements about conservatives. This kind of mindless garbage has always to some degree been present in political commentary in every time, belief, and nation. It only becomes truly dangerous when it mirrors the aims and tactics of powerful interests.
In the years immediately preceding the Third Reich, political violence by right-wingers and left-wingers was a fact of life on the streets of Berlin. Unlike their leftist counterparts, however, the Nazis came to enjoy widespread, if often tacit support of wealthy industrialists and influential members of the military, many of whom, as educated people, saw Hitler’s more outrageous statements as a form of political theater. “In fact to a certain extent, Hitler succeeded because he was dismissed as being more ridiculous than dangerous,” write James and Suzanne Pool in their 1978 book, Who Financed Hitler. “The man who shouted crude anti-Semitic slogans in public could, to the amazement of those who met him in private, discuss complex political and economic issues with logic and penetrating insight. He was able to convince his financiers that he was not a rabble-rouser at heart but had to act that way to attract the masses away from the Communists.”
The resulting infusions of financial support to the Nazi Party helped make Streicher more than an individual crackpot ranting from a soapbox on a street-corner. He was a hatemonger promoting a political party that had generous financial backing and friends in very high places. Whether or not it was taken seriously by most Nazis, Streicher’s language of dehumanization, by sheer repetition, ceased to shock Germans and helped prepare the ground for the policy of annihilation Hitler enacted not only against Jews, but against all who opposed him.
By the same token, Coulter, Savage, and other such commentators are not merely obscure bloggers or occasional posters to Internet bulletin boards. They are commentators who have been given greater access to the media than most leftist pundits, and thus greater leeway when it comes to outrageous statements. It would be hard to find a writer for a prominent liberal publication who had, for instance, suggested that the Bush twins should be executed, as John Derbyshire did about Chelsea Clinton in the February 15, 2001 issue of National Review Online.
There are, of course, differences. Streicher embraced the notion of Jews as genetically evil, so inherently corrupt that their moral “taint’ could be spread through rape. So far no prominent modern American right-winger has claimed that a conservative woman who has sex with a liberal man is “irredeemably lost” to conservatism, as Streicher claimed about Gentile women who had even nonconsensual sex with Jewish men. The National Review has stopped short of claiming that liberals drink the blood of conservative children in unholy rites.
But the similarity in language remains. If they don’t present liberalism as an inherent genetic taint, they do present liberalism — or even membership in the Democratic Party — as an irrefutable sign of an inherent moral or mental malaise. “”Liberals are in my estimation, just not bright people. They don’t think deeply, they don’t comprehend, they don’t understand…” said Republican Senator Dick Armey in 2002. “They don’t seem to have a fundamental understanding of good versus evil in the world, and the need to destroy those that would otherwise destroy innocent life,” said Sean Hannity on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. In short, to be a liberal is to be “evil,” “not bright,” afflicted with a “mental disorder.”
And as with Streicher’s propaganda, whether or not everyone who uses this kind of language actually believes it beside the point. In 2001, an essay appeared online that briefly garnered attention on the Internet. “The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement” was written by someone named Eric Heubeck for the Free Congress Foundation.
It’s important to note that the Free Congress Foundation is not merely an obscure right-wing blog but a well-funded conservative think tank headed by right wing strategist Paul Weyrich. An article about Karl Rove in the April 30th 2001 issue of Time Magazine (“The Busiest Man in The White House” by James Carney and John F. Dickerson) mentions the influence the foundation wields:
“Each Wednesday Rove dispatches a top administration official to attend the regular conservative-coalition lunches held at Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation… When Weyrich heard a few weeks ago the Bush’s budget slashed funding for a favorite project called the Police Corps, which gives scholarships and training to police cadets, he complained to the White House. To Weyrich’s surprise, Rove called back. “We’ve taken care of it,” Rove said. ‘The problem is solved.’ Weyrich, who says his memos to the Reagan and Bush Sr. White Houses were rarely read, was impressed. ‘That,’ he gushes, ‘is what it means to have friends in the White House.’”
Heubeck’s essay outlines a strategy for a grassroots movement of “cultural conservatism,” one that, as Heubeck put it, “must channel undesirable impulses to serve good purposes.” An example of these “undesirable impulses” can be found in the following quote:
“We must always operate based on this cardinal principle: Leftists are never morally responsible for the evil they commit; but we as conservatives are morally responsible for not having done more to prevent them from committing that evil. We must learn to treat leftists as natural disasters or rabid dogs.”
One does not debate natural disasters or rabid dogs, or even treat them as if they were capable of framing an argument. Both are problems to be prevented, if possible and if they occur, contained or destroyed.
This is not to say that Heubeck and others like him relish the idea of liberals being physically destroyed. It is to say that they would like to destroy any rational public discourse on the subject of anything they label as “liberalism.” They want any liberal or anyone labeled as such to be dismissed out of hand no matter how valid their arguments might be, denounced as mad, stupid, or evil.
That an inevitable byproduct of this approach is a significant number of people believing that liberals are the equivalent of natural disasters and mad dogs and relishing the idea of liberals being physically destroyed is apparently unimportant to them.
The tactic of delegitimization promoted in Eric Heubeck’s piece has been echoed in Bush administration statements, most notably those made in the wake September 11th. One of the most well known of these is then Attorney General John Ashcroft’s comment at a press conference, in which he both implied that administration critics were irrational or dishonest, and equated dissent with giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies. “…to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends.” (December 6, 2001)
Even opposition within the context of an opposition party is increasingly depicted as illegitimate. Not content with control of both the Executive and Legislative branches, the Republican Party has attacked some of the most basic tools of dissent within government. The judicial filibuster has been denounced by Senate Majority leader Bill Frist as “radical. It is dangerous and it must be overcome.” This kind of language, the use of terms like “dangerous” and “radical” to describe a tactic that Republicans — including Frist — have used in the past, should be at least startling to Americans. Unfortunately, the quality of modern political rhetoric has been so lowered that it doesn’t seem that unusual. Compared with some of the comments about Democrats and liberals heard regularly on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, it seems downright benign.
If reasoned debate is eliminated as the way to deal with dissenters, even those who dissent as members of the opposition party within the halls of government, how does one respond to those who refuse to be silenced? How does one deal with the “problem” of those liberals and Democrats who are, with increasing frequency, being referred to as dangerous, radical, as traitors, lunatics, rabid dogs, and haters of America?
Pam Troy 