Sunday, May 11, 2003

Imagine Being Ruled by 20-year-old right wing zealots Some of the best reporting in America is being done by the writers at the New Yorker, much to the shame of much of the rest of the mainstream press.  Besides the regular reports from Seymour Hirsh, which have thoroughly exposed the fact that Bush’s case for war in  Iraq was built on an intelligence lie, this weeks magazine has an article based around three interviews with Karl Rove by Nicholas Lemann.   The Rove article is fascinating, because it places him squarely in the hothouse world of the college republicans in the early 1970’s.   Why is this so ominous?  Because I also was active in SDS at that time, or a few years earlier, and understand exactly the mood on college campuses.  The young republicans at that time were the factional equal of SDS.   First, the problems with SDS.  I am very proud of my time in SDS, which along with the black student organizations, like SNCC, ultimately brought about the mass anti-war movement that ended the U.S. role in Vietnam.   But in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s,  we were living in a hothouse environment.  In the news were riots, assassinations, the on-going lies about the war, and what we thought was an ascendant communist revolution sweeping the third world.   Many of us believed some kind of anti-capitalist revolution was imminent, and reading through a journal I wrote at the time, I found myself saying that there was little point in planning for a career, because the political needs of the day were too important.   Given the pressure of our need to act, plus the frustration of relative powerlessness, SDS fell into a vicious factionalism that produced the Weathermen, various wannabe communist parties, such as the Revolutionary Union, and a host of disaffected radicals who left both organizations and continued to work for what they believed in the “movement.”   The hallmark of the factionalism was a drive for power within the organization, based on the fact that winning was everything, and that your position was not open to modification.   When organizations or individuals did not accept your ideas, either you left, took over the organization, or purged those who disagreed with you.    Now back to Karl Rove.  The left spawned a counter movement among college republicans.  While the majority of their fellow students were solidly against the war, these college republicans looked out at America and saw a vast torpid wasteland of liberal ideas, where support for capitalism was weak and only “totalitarian libertarians” like  Ayn Rand made sense.  Within the young republicans, the college students were as viciously factional as within any organization on the left.  The basis of their factionalism was the “win at any cost” attitude, where the true goal was power, not the correctness or applicability of their ideas.   Nicholas Lemann’s article grounds Rove in this hotbed of young right wing zealotry and factional power.  It describes how his start in Republican circles came from the lying, deceiving, backstabbing factional fights that consumed the Young republicans.   In the best factional tradition, the year Rove was elected president, the organization split in two, with two separate groups vying for the right to be called the young republicans.   Rove is about power and nothing else.  In George Bush, he has found a vehicle to gain power.  Ideologically, Rove would like to return the U.S. to the time of the 19th century robber barons, where corruption and corporate power ruled, and the role of the federal government was largely limited to doling out contracts to wealthy patrons.   The similarity between Rove and other fascist leaders is their willingness to use  scapegoats, to lie repeatedly, and to seek power outside the rules of democracy.    Rove has constructed a juggernaut of lies, based around projecting a formerly AWOL coke head as the military commander of America in an imaginary war on terror.   Conveniently the enemies never reveal themselves, so like Joe McCarthy’s communists, the terrorists are in the eye of the beholder.   While Rove is stirring up fear of terrorism as his ticket to another Republican sweep, the State Department (probably soon to be “re-educated”  to get with the factional program), reported that terrorist incidents in 2002 were the lowest in many years, and most of the reported incidents took place in war zones, such as Columbia, Chechnya, or Israel / Palestine.   Other lies:  about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, about the judicial obstruction of the democrats (actually the lowest number of federal judicial vacancies in many years, with far more Bush judges confirmed than were ever confirmed under Clinton), the lies about the tax cut, the lies about the staged Bush landing on the aircraft carrier within sight of the San Diego shoreline, etc.    Rove has a factionalist mindset to break the rules to win power.  Just as democracy is vulnerable when religious fundamentalists gain power on a platform of abolishing voting, so liberal democracies are vulnerable when fascists gain power though their willingness to lie and deceive the mass of the population by using scapegoats.   I don’t think anyone’s idea of a democratic America is a rightwing factional orgy of  manipulation and propeganda lies.  But that is the legacy we have before us today.  Rove believes, like Joseph Goebbels the Nazi propaganda master, that with the right lies, he can assemble a winning electoral majority.  America is now a country in fear, a country divided, where those who believe the lies think those who question them are their enemies, or soon will be.  When the post-fascist history of the U.S. is finally written, one of the major questions will be how the press accepted and repeated the many lies that brought the fascists to power.   The New Yorker, at least, is standing against the tide. 10:40:06 PM   comment []

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