The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Revisited (Part 1 - 1964)

Reading an editorial the other day in the Wall Street Journal that suggested that the man the Republicans need in 2012 is - and I'm not making this up - Dick Cheney - I got to thinking about how the Republicans managed to get to this particular place at this exact moment in history. 

In a party whose rhetoric is currently dominated by the likes of Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, the candidacy of Dick Cheney makes perfect sense. Never mind the fact that he’ll be 71 years old then, or that the “health problems” section in his Wikipedia entry takes up 9 paragraphs, or that his disapproval rating from Gallup sticks right at around 60%. The fact that Cheney is perhaps the least electable candidate in America doesn't seem to matter the WSJ brain trust. Cheney is a true believer and if the WSJ loves anybody, it’s true believers.

In November 1964, just before the election that pitted LBJ against Republican challenger Barry Goldwater, Harper's Magazine published a brilliant essay by Richard Hofstadter entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind."

No one better epitomized that anger than Barry Goldwater. With former Vice-President and 1960 presidential candidate Dick Nixon off pouting in California, the Republican Party of 1964 was divided into several angry feuding factions, with no clear leader. Goldwater was the darling of the conservative wing of the party which despised the east-coast moderates, represented by Nelson Rockefeller, whom they perceived as elitists and compromisers. Goldwater had famously said “"sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea", exactly capturing the anti-intellectualism and ideological extremism of this particular branch of the Republican Party.

Hofstadter’s essay is 45 years old yet just as relevant today. Hofstadter again:

"As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated - if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention."

Rockefeller was well ahead in the polls and the primaries until three days before the Republican Convention when, his new wife, Happy, gave birth to a baby. Goldwater launched a vitriolic television campaign portraying Rockefeller as a homewrecker (Happy had divorced her husband to marry him) and portraying Rockefeller as morally unfit to be president. Goldwater carried the state, narrowly.

So what had caused this intra-party hatred and feuding? What was behind all the crazy talk? That question is very easy to answer - The Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing segregation.

The Civil Rights Bill had been introduced by JFK in June of 1963, following the Birmingham riots, which were widely seen on national television and the brutality of which had shocked the nation. A few weeks later Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi. Later that summer, 200,000 people marched to Washington with Martin Luther King where he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. A few weeks after that, a bomb exploded in a Birmingham Church, killing four young black girls, again shocking the nation. These events spurred both President Kennedy and his brother Robert, the Attorney General, to take Civil Rights more seriously and to use federal authority to protect the rights of black citizens in the South.

Two months after the Birmingham church bombing, JFK would be dead. LBJ would take his place with a vehement determination to push through the Civil Rights legislation, no matter what the costs. LBJ did manage to get the legislation passed, despite desperate filibustering by racist Southern senators. When he signed the bill into law on July 2, 1964, he allegedly said “We’ve lost the South for a generation.”

Of course, the problem wasn't confined only to the South, as the above photo from a CORE protest in Seattle in the "Freedom Summer" of 1964 shows.

It was in this atmosphere that the Republican National Convention took place six weeks later in July 1964. Goldwater was the champion of what came to be known as “States Rights,” which became the code for being against racial integration.

The ensuing Republican national convention in San Francisco was arguably the ugliest and most divisive in the history of the Republican party.

Goldwater won the nomination and when Nelson Rockefeller took the podium, here is what he said, as he was booed and hooted at by the crowd:

"During this year I have crisscrossed this nation, fighting … to keep the Republican party the party of all the people ... and warning of the extremist threat, its danger to the party, and danger to the nation. These extremists feed on fear, hate and terror, they have no program for America and the Republican Party... they operate from dark shadows of secrecy. It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now any doctrinaire, militant minority whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan or Birchers."

It was all for naught. The extremists had taken over the party and Goldwater was the man in 1964. His acceptance speech contained the following passage, quoted in almost every article written about him since then: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Less often quoted is this passage from Goldwater’s speech:

“Now, we Republicans see all this as more, much more, than the rest: of mere political differences or mere political mistakes. We see this as the result of a fundamentally and absolutely wrong view of man, his nature and his destiny. Those who seek to live your lives for you, to take your liberties in return for relieving you of yours, those who elevate the state and downgrade the citizen must see ultimately a world in which earthly power can be substituted for divine will, and this Nation was founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance of God as the author of freedom.”

Richard Hofstadter again:

“The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to posess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press, he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic Confessional).”

The election of 1964 was one of the most lopsided in history, with Goldwater carrying only five southern states plus Arizona, his home state. Yet conservatives look back on it fondly as the beginnings of the modern conservative movement and in many respects it was, but not for the reasons that they publicly ascribe.

Above, counties carried by Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential election:

It would take Dick Nixon to turn it around in 1968. He was the only one who could unite the east and west coast factions of the Republican Party with his “Southern Strategy,” which I’ll cover tomorrow.