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The easy answer is that things ratcheted up to the uncivil, bitter, near-warfare between 1987 and 1991- the Bork and the Thomas hearings are sort of the bookends of the ramp-up period. And there are periods between then and now that were unbelievably horrifying- mid 1994 through the end of 1995 (the Gingrich Congress) and January 1998 to early 1999 (the Lewinsky affair) come to mind as particularly bad. November/December 2000 (Florida) was horrid. Most or all of 2003 was very nasty.
Naivite...well, in some sense this country has operated in this way for as long as it can remember. Everything gets said, people assert as belief that which they feel need to believe or trust whatever the particular facts, shouting down others and coercions were normal too. Things get chewed out ad nauseum. But the meanness and retaliation and repressiveness and all that has always been there, too. Writers of the Forties and Fifties loved James Jones's "From Here To Eternity" (1953)- they said it really described the condition of life for average people in the country of that era...which was pseudocolonial, and it was harsh enough that it was- after a lot of adoration and awards- quickly forgotten about. People prefer the myth of Mayberry, the way common people saw their lives change for the better during the late Fifties, to remembering the realities.
After that things get complicated in a hurry. For one thing, the 1-2 generations that grew up politically under FDR and the Depression and Second World War decided it had seen enough of conflict and bad government, and the Cold War added to it. That contingent didn't want seemingly useless and avoidable conflicts in domestic politics- and it spent its best years fighting more or less necessary wars overseas. That made for a lot of repression of domestic resentments built up and for a politics that was always quite polite and had as first priority hanging in on the Cold War, but very nasty below the surface because so much was changing and beginning to change. Civil Rights, feminism, the decline of Christianity.
Right wing government is rule by old men, and they understand the present as a simplistic extension of the part of the past they do understand. They have a way of repeating and rearguing issues current in their youth, so right wing and right wing-influenced governments start off with an idea that things 40-50 years in the past have to be revised, reargued, rehashed. Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon spent a lot of their time dealing with and redealing policies first dealt with under William Jennings Bryant/Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge. Carter and Reagan rehashed issues of FDR's Presidency, Bush Sr. did a lot of Truman and Korea over again. But the end of the Cold War came along, too, and that meant a lot of restrained domestic discord broke out. (Actually, restrained wartime discontents also bubbled over during Truman's terms). Additionally, the people who lived through the harshnesses of the FDR era and insisted on civility in American public life began go into die out. At this point there are very few left, and they are too frail and old to set the tone in things anymore.
Under Clinton the country reargued the Eisenhower Fifties- McCarthyism (Gingrichism), Friedan-era feminism (Lewinsky), Hungary (Bosnia/Montenegro), and early Civil Rights (the Bush side racist appeals of the 2000 campaign, then Florida). Under Bush Jr. we start off with replaying the Gary Powers affair of 1960 (via the E-3 emergency landing on Hainan), the anti-Mafia effort of JFK/RFK (Enron etc), the Castro/Cuban missile crisis paranoia and Bay of Pigs (bin Laden/'9/11' and Afghanistan), the Gulf of Tonkin resolution (Iraq War Resolution), and war in South Vietnam (aka Iraq). The details continue to fit pretty well- Dean and McGovern, Kerry and Muskie more or less, the budget deficits and crappy economy...and at present we're up to roughly 1973, with the negotiations with the various Iraqi factions a good fit to the rigid Paris negotiations that filled the late years of the Vietnam fighting. We are revisiting the early Seventies at present, at a clip of 4 years then to 1 year now. And to listen to the Bush people, they are now getting to the Right's problem with Iran's mullahs, generated by Khomeni in 1978-80, and planning fight Castro's friends in Latin America a la Nicaragua/El Salvador again (read: Chavez in Venezuela, and CIA/mercenary forces) in a reprise of the early/mid Eighties before the end of 2008. (That is the significance of the John Negroponte appointment, btw.)
The present argument begins at WW2. A lot of people saw the cooperative endeavor and the civilized ways people treated each other during it as a relief from peacetime brutishness and wondered why this sense couldn't be sustained. It did, to some fairly large degree, throughout the Cold War. A lot of them and their children decided that this was sustainable, that civilized and collective endeavor and humble-within-bounds behavior and benevolent government and gradual correction of social and economic injustices was the proper form of The American Dream.
We now have a running collision, since the end of the Cold War, with people who see the country in a more barbaric fashion about the assumption of this Mayberry/Brady Bunch life being normal social life. The standard operative before WW2 is the one in "From Here to Eternity", that of (British) colonialism, with all its chauvinisms and racisms and bigotries, its castes, and its running destruction of human dignity and degradation. This standard won out against a hard challenge in 1968 and had its triumphal moment in Reagan's victory in 1980/81. The short answer is: the Brady Bunch lifeway with its optimistic quasi-progressive centrism- it was a Sixties ideal show, after all- has been destroyed in recent years; it was transitory in the first place. The pre-WW2 standard is impossible, but making its last stand. We don't mean to but have to flee forward to some degree, recompose social life in a humbler but more inherently dignified form. We have to end the colonial era in our social forms and sometime thereafter the economic forms will follow.
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Okay, that's the long answer I give myself to explain the present. There's real political hope in its logic, though, despite the present being a reprise. For one thing, as actually seen during 2003/2004, the nostalgia and backlashes generated by rehashing the late Sixties and Seventies are both reactionary and liberal/progressive. A lot of Dixiecrats went over to Nixon at the time, but a sizeable number of Rockefeller Republicans also switched sides out of moral outrage during that period. In fact, once the politics of the late Seventies and early Eighties are put back on the table, the resentments that taps are likely to cause far greater liberal than reactionary responses among swing voters. We should see this resentment/nostalgia politicking turn against the Republicans in the next year or two or three.
There are more complicated schemes from which to glean predictions, and they say that Democrats should be closing ranks in the next few months and the few minor defeats (Social Security is the only really cloudy battle) thereafter will be greatly outweighed by the victories- indeed, comprehensive breakdown of overleveraged Republican federal power- during the next two years. Democrats need to win (1) majority approval as a Party and (2) full control of the Senate. Republican control of the House and USSC and Bush Administration power are hopeless once those two things become the case.
Are there really any 'good' guys...well, it's been such a long and bitter war that winning for the better cause is about all the 'goodness' we can really ask for. Personally, I think the people who will emerge from it as the Party leaders and victors are the Clintons, Kerry, and Pelosi. I think we'll see a bunch of people emerge from the back corridors of the Party and its efforts into the public eye as things become inevitable. I think the closest thing to an FDR/Abraham Lincoln figure that the Party has at this point is Jimmy Carter. We have, and will continue to have, a lot of leading lights and "intellectuals" who are good people but difficult to regard highly because they can't quite catch up with the times.
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