Column: Why Liberals Are Angry
Akin to politically motivated charges of rising liberal incivility is the seductive, if not surprising, topic of very real liberal anger: seductive, because pondering its origins is fun; surprising, because anger seems so out of character with liberals' rather spineless image they themselves allowed to prevail. When liberals got fingered by militant detractors for unraveling America's moral fiber (a neat trick the liberals pulled off with satanic glee, of course), they abruptly laid low and even cowered to the point of denying their identity.
But no longer. Liberals are pumped – and p-oed.
Some say liberals are ticked because the rest of the country hasn't yet conceded that George W. is a duplicitous bumbler with emperor envy. Some say it's only because liberalism has suffered a long decline. Others say a stolen election, a seedy impeachment, an illegal war and the pack-mentality media account for liberal wrath.
All these are true. But there's a more seminal cause of liberal anger. In view of it, the only surprise is that the anger took so long to erupt.
The post-Watergate movement of the “New Right” – a well-orchestrated confederation of political action committees, think tanks, neoconservatives, religious rightists, social-conservatives and libertarians – introduced into American politics a fresh supply of advanced disingenuousness. In a 1980 Washington Post interview, one of its founding strategists, John Terry Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, described its tactical approach as “the cutting edge of politics.”
New Right activists fueled by massive infusions of cash, Dolan injudiciously bragged in a self-satisfied and rare moment of truthfulness, “are potentially very dangerous to the political process.” We “could be a menace,” he boasted. We “could amass this great amount of money and defeat the point of accountability in politics. We could say whatever we want…. A group like ours could lie through its teeth.”
And that's just what Dolan's group, “Nickpack” – along with dozens of likeminded groups – did. To discredit what it liked to call the failed Liberal Establishment, the New Right bullied opponents with outrageously false attack ads, painted differing opinions as disloyalty and contaminated America's political consciousness with an unprecedented barrage of innuendo, half-truths and whole untruths about liberal motives, the “liberal media” and the liberal agenda in general.
Paul Weyrich, a right-wing PAC-man contemporary of John Terry Dolan, effused in 1980 that the fight against liberalism was “the most significant battle of the age-old conflict between good and evil … that we have seen in our country.” That zealous excess inspired the right to bar no holds. Any expediency drafted in the cause against godless liberalism was legitimate. The end, quite simply, justified the means.
Success soon followed. The new conservatism flourished like no political movement ever flourished before – leading to the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions and the revolution now in progress – because the New Right “could,” and did, “lie through its teeth.”
There are, of course, softer and more diplomatic terms than “lies” to describe the right's rhetorical record, but none so plainly accurate. Intimidated liberals used to call them “fabrications” or “distortions.” All that's over: hence best-selling titles like Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush and Joe Conason's Big Lies .
Today it's no more Mr. Nice Guys, but their angry lingo was long in the making.
In their rush to political supremacy, conservative strategists such as Weyrich and Dolan forgot a basic law of human behavior: Even the intimidated, the vanquished, will take bullying just so long. In time they'll get mad and push back. In time they'll explode.
Paul Weyrich forgot, that is, until the recent avalanche of published liberal anger triggered a wake-up call. “Republicans had better worry,” he acknowledged a just few days ago. “Angry people are motivated to get out to vote.”
He oughta' know.
Sure, liberals still seethe from a doubtful election, an illegal war and political prosecutions. But there's a genuine anger out there engendered by something rooted far deeper in the past: a quarter-century of callous right-wing tactics. Its purveyors now carping about liberal anger have no one to blame but themselves.
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