Okay, I just saved you about 4,000 words, the approximate length of El Kevbo’s recent meganalysis of the American mood, appearing in Mother Jones, The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage, which has been getting some semi-approving nods around the internet. “I’ve been spending considerable time digging into the source of our collective rage,” Kevie boy tells us earnestly, “and the answer to this question is trickier than most people think.”
Yet when we finally wend our way to Kevin’s tortuous conclusion, after thorough examination of every other possibility, it turns out that the “answer” isn’t tricky at all: Fox News, mother fucker! Fox News! Fox News!
Which is, for Kevin’s purposes, a most convenient answer, for several reasons. First of all, it “proves” that we liberals did not nothing wrong! It’s all those damn conservatives’ fault! Secondly, it “proves” that the solution is really quite simple, at least in concept if not in application: just make Fox News disappear! Problem solved!
The thought that the causes of our discontent might be rooted in, you know, the nature of things, or at least in the nature of things as they are currently arranged, by forces not at all amenable to simple management from the top—a mere shift from a “bad elite” controlling things to a “good one”, composed of Kevin and his pals—well, this is a nonthought in Kevin space, at least as evidenced by this article, which might be well titled “Walking in a Liberal Wonderland”, for rarely is heard a disparaging word regarding liberalism’s record since World War II.
For example, in his “study” of right-wing conspiracy-mongering, Drum naturally examines the McCarthyite take on the Yalta “giveaway” to Stalin, and the “kernel” of truth on which it was based:
Like most good conspiracy theories, there was a kernel of truth here. Stalin really did take over Eastern Europe. Alger Hiss, part of the Yalta delegation, really did turn out to be a Soviet mole. Klaus Fuchs and others really did pass along atomic secrets to the Soviets. Never mind that Stalin couldn’t have been stopped; never mind that Hiss was a junior diplomat who played no role in the Yalta agreements; never mind that Fuchs may have passed along secrets the Soviets already knew. It was enough to power a widespread belief in McCarthy’s claim of the biggest conspiracy in all of human history.
Well, yes, Hiss was a “junior diplomat” at Yalta in the sense that he had just turned 40. But, according to Wikipedia, his record at State wasn’t too shabby: “In 1944, Hiss was named Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, a policy-making entity devoted to planning for post-war international organizations. Hiss served as executive secretary of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which drew up plans for the future United Nations.” Furthermore, Harry Dexter White, another Soviet spy, left unmentioned by Drum, was Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau closest advisor and, as the senior American official at the famous Bretton Woods conference that set up the financial underpinnings for the post-war era, reportedly dominated proceedings there.1 As for “never mind that Fuchs may have passed along secrets the Soviets already knew,” if Drum means that the Soviets knew these secrets because they had already done the necessary research on their own, that’s utter nonsense. If he means they had gotten them from other spies, well, so what? And, of course, he doesn’t mention the Rosenbergs at all. And Drum doesn’t even touch on what is the most embarrassing issue of all for liberals—“honest liberals” like me, that is—that FDR simply refused to believe that the Soviets were the proudly soulless totalitarians that they in fact were; that, to the very end, he insisted on believing they pursued liberal goals (peace and prosperity for all) by illiberal means. There were plenty of communists and near-communists in high-level government jobs in the Roosevelt administration, because Roosevelt thought they were essentially harmless and very much disliked being told otherwise.
As Drum tells it, the liberals never do anything wrong, and any opposition to liberal policies is simply the result of the Fox News Machiavellians pulling the wool over the honest folks’ eyes. In fact, he seems to discover almost no reason for anyone to get excited over anything in the past 20 years. He makes little mention of terrorism, though 9/11 has to bulk very large in the list of “defining events of the 21st century” in the minds of most Americans.2 In fact, like a “true liberal”, he ignores foreign affairs almost completely. Iraq? Afghanistan? Libya? Are those places? Never mind the fact that if President Obama hadn’t decided to take out Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi (“smart power at its finest” said the very stupid Hillary Clinton), Hillary Clinton would have been elected president over Donald Trump by a comfortable margin.
Oh, and what about the riots and looting following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis policemen? Yeah, suburban white folks don’t get upset at all when they see young black men throwing Molotov cocktails or running out of Foot Lockers with armfuls of running shoes. Not at all. And “unathorized immigration”, as Drum calls it?
Fearmongering about it was certainly a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign but there’s little concrete evidence that it has been driving the long-term rise in political anger, in part because actual unauthorized immigration has been falling since 2007. Gallup polling confirms that aside from brief periods, the number of people who say that illegal immigration is a major issue has stayed pretty much constant for the past 20 years.
Then why did the Republican party basically split in two over the issue during the second Bush administration? Why did Moderate Mitt Romney promise to make illegal immigrants so miserable they would “self-deport”? If people didn’t care about illegal immigration, why did Trump’s “fearmongering” work?
Drum’s “analysis” presumes that you can trick people into voting on issues they don’t really care about—that, in essence, people are stupid. He seeks out “evidence” like polls, that tell him what he wants to hear, rather than, say, election results, which tell him what he doesn’t. He says nothing at all against the reaction against “globalism”, which has strongly reshaped both parties, explicitly rejecting the Clinton-Bush-Obama neoliberal consensus (which I, not so coincidentally, still very largely, and very strongly, believe in). If political controversies are the result of real world issues, which cannot be “solved” without real world winners and losers, then it’s no wonder that political controversies will be sharp and long-lasting. But if we can restore peace and harmony by getting rid of smarmy, right-wing broadcasters and replacing them with simple, honest, liberal straight-shooters who will explain the issues to the people so that they understand that liberals are always right, well, problems solve themselves. It almost sounds too good to be true!
Afterwords
Drum simply ignores a lot of other issues, like the self-sorting into blue and red states, intensified by the disappearance of both “moderate” Republicans and “moderate” Democrats, with the result that a larger and larger percentage of Americans never encounter “people like me” who hold differing political views. Because the “equal” (actually, unequal) representation of the states in the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College, together with the massive population shift to the coastal states, disadvantages the Democrats in both Senate and presidential elections, liberal views are underrepresented at the national level. Liberals are bitter over their inability to pass legislation, while conservatives are bitter over the long-running shift in cultural issues against their values, for which they have no real answer. Stalemate leads to a lot of posturing, since neither side ever has to suffer the burden of putting their ideas into effect.
The strange thing is, a couple of weeks ago, Kevin ran a rather different take on the nature of our discontents, If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals. And, in fact, Kevin’s conclusions in that piece make him sound an awful lot like Mr. Wimp himself, Alan Vanneman:
This is obviously not a popular proposal among the white activist class [i.e., to talk like Alan Vanneman]. But a dispassionate look at voting patterns hardly allows any other conclusion. Moving to the left may help galvanize the progressive base—which is good!—but if it's not done with empathy and tact it risks outrunning the vast middle part of the country, which progressive activists seem completely uninterested in talking to.
It is well within our power to break our two-decade 50-50 deadlock and become routine winners in national politics. All it takes is a moderation of our positions from “pretty far left” to “pretty liberal.”3 That's all. But who's got the courage to say so?
Well, it seems that sometimes it’s Kevin Drum, and sometimes it isn’t.
More thoughts on the faults of Republicans and Democrats.
1. Wikipedia tells us that many economists now conclude that White’s ideas, which largely prevailed, were inferior to those offered by the legendary John Maynard Keynes. Since Keynes, among other things, did not believe that non-whites were capable of self-government, and passionately rejected the notion of a free India, I think we might well be skeptical of such after the fact skepticism. It is “arguable” that Keynes was an otherwise horrible man who had the strange idea that mass unemployment was a bad thing and that government might be able to do something about it.
2. Since I’m 76, my list goes back to the JFK assassination, and I suspect that the first is almost always the worst. My mom always chose Pearl Harbor as the worst; thankfully, she didn’t live to see Trump in the White House.
3. Unfortunately, these warm milk, milksop proposals make no sense to politicians running in one-party districts—like the inescapable AOC, for example—who win their primaries by being the most passionate candidate on the slate rather than the least.
