The Triumph of Meanness: America’s War Against Its Better Self – Nicolaus Mills, 1997, Houghton Mifflin – is a dissection of the social politics of the nineties and was reviewed in these pages back in 2003 here – and you can order a copy here, even if the evidence he cites is a bit outdated. But then, the book isn’t really outdated – we just have new players.
The book is a little dry, but has its moments. You could call it social-scientific commentary on social conditions in the United States. Mills discusses what he sees as the underlying sources of our social problems, what was at that time the present state of those, and the reasons for our “societal failure” to treat the problems. Basically Mills says meanness has become our “first response to a series of social problems” and that has become a bit more than problematic. Meanness is a part of our culture; in fact, Mills refers to the United States of the nineties as a culture of meanness.
Things haven’t changed that much. Now we’re in the post-meanness phase – total polarization and rants. See Andrew Sullivan on Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani –
They need each other. So do the polarized, professionalized political and media classes. That’s why this race is already over, according to Washington, MSNBC, CNN and Fox. And they all make oodles of money off the classic left-right, McGovern-Nixon, Lib-Con circus. It’s win-win. For them.
Then one of Sullivan’s readers offers this –
You show a billboard of the repulsive Hannity urging “Stop Hillary Now,” and you see that as a force against the former first lady. Why can you not see how energizing such items are for Hillary? I like Obama, think he’s said all the right things and avoided all potential pitfalls to date — I could certainly make a case to myself that he is quite presidential and could be the healing force this country needs. But I will vote for Hillary no matter what. I’m as bothered as anybody about the concept of 3 decades of the Bush/Clinton dynasties. It is very possible that Edwards’ plans for Iraq and healthcare could be more effective than Hillary’s.
But I will vote for Hillary in the primary if Edwards and/or Obama walk on water. Why? Because the Hannitys and the Limbaughs and the Malkins et. al. have made it their mission to stop her. I have voted in every election since 1981 and no vote I have ever cast would make me more proud than one I could use to foil the mission of that revolting scum. Andrew, I am not alone in this. The right wing ranters’ audience already hates Clinton and she has already written them off. But the people that loathe the right wing ranters almost have to vote for Hillary specifically because of this scum’s terror of her.
The italics are in the original. And Sullivan has a calm response –
This is the logic of polarization as its own reward. It is faction and dynasty placed at the core of American politics - something the founders rightly feared would destroy a rational democratic polity. It is the toxin that won’t go away. And when this country is attacked again and Clinton needs the trust and support of those who didn’t vote for her? What will America do then?
But then polarization is its own reward. She will be impeached. Hell, that process is probably underway now – best to be prepared and all that. And everyone says Clinton is a polarizing figure, like no one has ever been before. But Kevin Drum will have none of that nonsense –
Andrew likes Barack Obama and Ron Paul, so he’s trying to play up the problems with other candidates. That’s fine. We all do it.
But there’s a huge difference here. A guy like Giuliani is polarizing because he actively chooses to be. It’s part of his persona. He wants people to hate him.
Hillary, by contrast, is polarizing not because she wants to be, but because the right-wing attack machine made her that way. She’s “polarizing” only because a certain deranged slice of conservative nutjobs detest her.
And guess what? By this standard, Jimmy Carter is polarizing. Bill Clinton is polarizing. Al Gore is polarizing. John Kerry is polarizing. Do you see the trend here?
There are plenty of good reasons to oppose Hillary Clinton. But anyone who opposes her because she’s polarizing is allowing the bottom feeders of modern movement conservatism to dictate who gets to run for president and who doesn’t. If we want less polarizing politics, the answer isn’t to oppose Hillary Clinton, who, outside the cartoon universe invented by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, holds almost relentlessly orthodox center-left opinions and expresses them in relentlessly garden-variety politician-speak. The answer is to send the right-wing rage machine back under the rock it crawled out from. Anything else is just caving in to bullies.
“Giuliani is polarizing because he actively chooses to be. It’s part of his persona. He wants people to hate him.” That’s on odd thing to say, but it feels right. That’s how things are now.
That’s how it might seem to Drum, down in Orange County, in Irvine, among all the hard right folks. Digby, in ultra-liberal Santa Monica, does, however, concur –
I would just add that allowing the Village stenographers to pick our presidents lets them off the hook too. They happily join with the Neanderthals in carrying these little prophesies into the mainstream. We should not let gossipy junior high backstabbers dictate who our candidates should be either. I don’t give a damn if they think Al Gore is a stiff or think that Hillary is bitch or whatever. Nobody elected them to anything. They don’t represent anyone but themselves…
And she cites this new poll –
Many Republicans have said that they are eager to run a general-election campaign against Hillary Clinton, describing her as a highly polarizing candidate who would unite and energize the opposition. But, as of now, Clinton appears to be no more polarizing than other leading Democratic contenders. Nor is there a potential Republican nominee who appears significantly less polarizing.
Forty-one percent of those surveyed said they definitely would not vote for Clinton in the general election if she were the Democratic nominee, one of the lowest “reject rates” among the leading candidates in either of the two major parties.
Drum – “Hillary isn’t actually any more polarizing than anyone else. She just has more unhinged enemies.”
Digby runs with that –
Giuliani could theoretically be a transcendent politician in 2008. He’s a rare northeastern blue state Republican with all kinds of signifiers that should appeal to independents and Democrats. He was mayor of New York City, for crying out loud. But the Republican base forces every candidate to become polarizing because that’s what they like in a candidate. Indeed, that’s why Giuliani is doing so well - he’s a nasty piece of work and they can sense it. Their movement is based upon rabid partisan hatred of liberals/Democrats/blacks/”immigrants” and whatever other “other” they’ve targeted today. It’s their fundamental organizing principle.
In fact, this is meanness institutionalized –
I have no doubt that Hillary will be polarizing, but it will come from the abject hatred any Democrat inspires on the right (although the fact that she’s a woman probably add a little frisson to their loathing.) Look at what they did the John Kerry. Hell, they impeached her husband, a centrist good old boy who advanced a fair portion of their agenda in the name of bipartisan comity. They will loathe and despise Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Dodd or any of the rest with just as much fervor. It’s what they do.
And a proper response takes new thinking –
There a many good reasons to be wary of Clinton’s candidacy and worry about whether she’s the right person for the job in 2008. This isn’t one of them and it shows a tremendous weakness of will on our side to even think about it in those terms. As Kevin said, “The answer is to send the right-wing rage machine back under the rock it crawled out from. Anything else is just caving in to bullies.”
I’m so sick of caving in to bullies.
But with the right-wing rage machine going full tilt that becomes difficult. Fight them and become one, like Sullivan’s reader, or cave in. It’s hard to see an alternative – it’s a sucker’s trap.
And it’s more than the politics of the presidential campaign. Paul Krugman at the New York Times, freed from behind the now abandoned pay-to-read wall, on Friday, October 5, in Conservatives Are Such Jokers, in a short column manages to nicely update Mills’ 1997 book. His opening “compare and contrast” example –
In 1960, John F. Kennedy, who had been shocked by the hunger he saw in West Virginia, made the fight against hunger a theme of his presidential campaign. After his election he created the modern food stamp program, which today helps millions of Americans get enough to eat.
But Ronald Reagan thought the issue of hunger in the world’s richest nation was nothing but a big joke. Here’s what Reagan said in his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” which made him a national political figure: “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”
He sees today’s leading conservatives as Reagan’s heirs.
If you’re poor, if you don’t have health insurance, if you’re sick - well, they don’t think it’s a serious issue. In fact, they think it’s funny.
He spends a bit of time on Wednesday’ veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (discussed in detail in these pages here). Providing health insurance to an estimated 3.8 million children who would otherwise lack coverage is the joke there. Krugman doesn’t think much of what William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, had to say the weekend before the veto – “First of all, whenever I hear anything described as a heartless assault on our children, I tend to think it’s a good idea. I’m happy that the president’s willing to do something bad for the kids.”
What? Krugman notes that most conservatives are more careful than Kristol, and they really do “try to preserve the appearance that they really do care about those less fortunate than themselves.” But he feels that the truth is that they aren’t bothered by the fact that almost nine million children in America lack health insurance. They just don’t think it’s a problem – and he, and everyone else on the web and in print, quotes what the president said in July – “I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.” So what’s the problem? (Ask a hospital administrator if you want to know one of the answers to that.)
And on the day of the veto, Mr. Bush dismissed the whole issue of uninsured children as a “media myth.” He cited Medicaid spending – and that never reaches most of the kids, But it would do – “When they say, well, poor children aren’t being covered in America, if that’s what you’re hearing on your TV screens, I’m telling you there’s $35.5 billion worth of reasons not to believe that.” It may be different money, for other people, but no one will look it up after all. It’s considered rude to fact-check the president, or un-American or something.
And shift from issues of the poor to issues of the sick, and things are even meaner –
Before the last election, the actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s and has become an advocate for stem cell research that might lead to a cure, made an ad in support of Claire McCaskill, the Democratic candidate for Senator in Missouri. It was an effective ad, in part because Mr. Fox’s affliction was obvious.
And Rush Limbaugh - displaying the same style he exhibited in his recent claim that members of the military who oppose the Iraq war are “phony soldiers” and his later comparison of a wounded vet who criticized him for that remark to a suicide bomber - immediately accused Mr. Fox of faking it. “In this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking. And it’s purely an act.”
It was supposed to be funny, but there’s a pattern here –
Of course, minimizing and mocking the suffering of others is a natural strategy for political figures who advocate lower taxes on the rich and less help for the poor and unlucky. But I believe that the lack of empathy shown by Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Kristol, and, yes, Mr. Bush is genuine, not feigned.
And Krugman backs that up citing Mark Crispin Miller, the author of The Bush Dyslexicon observing that all of the famous Bush malapropisms – “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” and the others – only occur when the president was trying to sound caring and compassionate –
By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that’s when he’s speaking from the heart. The only animation Mr. Bush showed during the flooding of New Orleans was when he declared “zero tolerance of people breaking the law,” even those breaking into abandoned stores in search of the food and water they weren’t getting from his administration.
It is then obvious that “the modern movement conservatism attracts a certain personality type” –
If you identify with the downtrodden, even a little, you don’t belong. If you think ridicule is an appropriate response to other peoples’ woes, you fit right in.
But even if the Republicans walk away from Bush as they finally realize what he’s done, and has not done, does sit well with voters, this will remain –
… [T]he leading candidates for the Republican nomination have gone out of their way to condemn “socialism,” which is GOP-speak for any attempt to help the less fortunate. So once again, if you’re poor or you’re sick or you don’t have health insurance, remember this: these people think your problems are funny.
Reaction? See Conservatives aren’t joking, Paul (they really do care), or The Legacy of Lee Atwater: Making America Safe for Mean-Spiritedness and Kicking the Losers (”I think this is a bit harsh. When people with problems are clearly people like ‘us’ then they deserve all of our support. I think the problem is that the ‘us’ category has shrunk so much that there aren’t many people left in it.”)
Mills got there first. The topic persists.
As an analog, see Dahlia Lithwick here on Clarence Thomas’ new autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, which she says “paints a stark picture of an America in which nothing but race matters” –
In his telling, virtually everyone who has ever wronged him has done so because of his race. Not surprisingly, in the eyes of many of Thomas’ defenders, anyone who objects to this book must also do so because of his race. But the prism of Black vs. White in America is the wrong one through which to view this book. The real black/white problem Justice Thomas reveals is his own binary worldview. Everything is good or bad; everyone is either angel or devil. You might say the justice has produced the world’s longest Santa Claus list: everything in America classified as either naughty or nice.
This memoir is a painstaking accounting of the people who have supported Thomas (painted in heroic terms) and those who have tried to destroy him (bigots, idiots, or both). It’s a directory of journalists he likes and dislikes, judges he admires and mistrusts. It’s a detailed ledger of Thomas’ many shamings (by lighter-skinned schoolchildren, or law school interviewers) and of his equal number of academic and professional triumphs. Perhaps to symbolize all this, Thomas tots up the trophies he carries with him (a warm letter from a Missouri judge he’s carried “from job to job, like an heirloom”) against the symbols of his persecution (his diploma from Yale Law School, onto which he stuck a “fifteen-cent price sticker” because it bore the “taint of racial preference”). There is not an inch of gray area in the justice’s personal landscape.
It’s the same thing.
And see Naomi Wolf on Blackwater, the newly-created thug cast –
It is remarkable that the hearings focus on what Blackwater is doing in Iraq - but not on what Blackwater plans to and is legally able to do here in the US when the President determines there is a “public emergency” that requires the restoration of “public order” - a power that he arrogated more completely with the 2007 Defense Authorization Act. The second phase of the blueprint of what I have called in The End of America a “fascist shift” is what we are beginning to see now: increasing physical intimidation of civilians and increasing staging or provocation of situations in the a federalized national guard or a Blackwater paramilitary force is sent in at the behest of a leader - over the heads of the people’s representatives - to “restore public order.” I note that Congress is outraged that there were plans to stage a fake scenario of a dirty bomb detonation in three US cities next week - plans that were not fully revealed to Congress. The second stage of a fascist shift on the blueprint I identified in The End of America calls for disorienting public spectacles, sudden scenes of shocking violence against civilians (see the tasering of a student in Gainesville, Florida, and the death of a woman who looks like you or me in a holding cell in the Phoenix airport) and the declaration that a situation is unstable so call for a paramilitary force in order to keep the people safe.
It might remind you of something –
Italy was a parliamentary democracy - with newspapers, cinema, a wide span of political parties, dissent and a vital modern culture - when the Blackshirts began to beat selected individuals in newspaper offices, in the countryside, around voting booths. Italy was still a democracy when the Blackshirts murdered a major opposition figure, shocking a society that was still technically free into silence. Same tactic was used by the National Socialists - who studied Mussolini - before they came formally to power. In what was still a working democracy a targeted paramilitary responded to Hitler’s directives - intimidating protesters, beating up critics, essentially taking ownership of the streets - even while Germany still had a working Parliament and Constitution. Remember when TSA officials were making passengers at the airport drink their baby’s milk - including human breast milk? Both the Blackshirts and the Brownshirts forced citizens to drink liquids such as emetics as an intimidation tactic.
Yeah, yeah – one party, the authoritarians, knows we want to be safe, and -
… the Republican base forces every candidate to become polarizing because that’s what they like in a candidate. Indeed, that’s why Giuliani is doing so well - he’s a nasty piece of work and they can sense it. Their movement is based upon rabid partisan hatred of liberals/Democrats/blacks/”immigrants” and whatever other “other” they’ve targeted today. It’s their fundamental organizing principle.
You know where this is going.
