I just noticed your link to the League of the South “a neo-Confederate hate group.”

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/news/item.jsp?aid=79

“Thus Lincoln “saved the Union,” when in reality he destroyed the Union and replaced it with something else, but the reality is too terrible and cannot be defended without endorsing a radicalism his admirers usually do not want to endorse.”

Is this the Thomas Delorenzo, Ron Paul, James Kennedy, and Pat Buchanan gospel, or something new?

Arguably until FDR, and even through the FDR and Truman years, the Republicans were the predominantly progressive party.

Correct. A nineteenth-century conservative would have preferred the party of Grover Cleveland to the party of Lincoln.

I am not speaking of the entire sweep of the latter half of the twentieth century. I am talking about the last decade.

Fair enough.

Cite an example of how, particularly by your standards as a self-described economic nationalist, the GOP is actually the more conservative party today.

Rats. Politically, today’s GOP is wired perfectly backward when it comes to tariffs, as you say. On no other issue is the GOP more accurately labeled “the stupid party” than on the issue of trade.

Cite an example? Answer: the U.S. Senate’s June 2007 cloture vote on s.1639, the amnesty bill. Even in the Senate, whose Republicans are less conservative than the House’s, the Republicans provided only 12 of the 46 votes for cloture (one of the 12 was John McCain).

What have Republicans *done* in the last decade that earns them this designation?

Congressional Republicans have not done nearly enough.

Do you really want to argue that there are significant, meaningful differences between the nominees on most issues?

No, I do not want to. Even the incoherent John McCain apparently does not want to. He would rather run against his own party.

What are the meaningful differences on major policy questions between Sen. Mortgage Bailout and Sen. Bank Bailout? Whatever differences there are, I’d say they might be worth a quarter rather than a dime.

The nominees are not their parties.

Of course, one does have to adjust for inflation over the last few decades.

Good point!

Thanks for the platform and the reply.

HJH

Do you really want to argue that there are significant, meaningful differences between the nominees on most issues? What are the meaningful differences on major policy questions between Sen. Mortgage Bailout and Sen. Bank Bailout? Whatever differences there are, I’d say they might be worth a quarter rather than a dime. Of course, one does have to adjust for inflation over the last few decades.

Helen Rittelmeyer holds fast to the myth that the GOP is the more conservative party in the United States, for which there is vanishingly small evidence these days,

Joe McCarthy and Jesse Helms were Republicans. Henry Wallace and LBJ were Democrats. These are not accidental party identifications, nor can one find much political commonality between the former pair and the latter. I do not doubt that one could search out some distortive counterexamples if one were determined to do so, but if you seek a real, current myth, try the undead canard that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.”

The party of Calvin Coolidge is no doppelgaenger for the party of FDR.

As for Ronald Reagan, all things considered, this fine and courageous man ought to be regarded as the greatest American president since George Washington. We shall not see his like again.

So, yes, you are right. I subscribe to the myth.

Howard

All demagoguery depends on a certain talent or instinct for this, and the hapless Dems have failed because they don’t understand very well how this works. The best among them try to be rational and sane, if diffident, while the worst care only about playing the insiders’ game.

In the political arena, mythos always trumps logos, so think the challenge that lies before us is to develop a ‘true’ mythic narrative, a narrative that connects the dots in the real world but which nevertheless has imaginative resonance and that calls upon what is most noble, or at least decent, in the American character. For whoever develops the most compelling narrative that explains who we are and where we’re going wins, and there is as much potential for a truly ugly narrative to arise as a decent one.

The smart money, given what we’ve seen recently of what has become of the American character, would be on an ugly narrative emerging before a decent one. In the short run a lot will depend on whether Obama is the man for the moment or whether he is just another Dem cipher, but he has the rhetorical capability to be something special should he be capable of rising to the occasion.

The one thing that can be said of the man is that his political opposition has a tendency to self destruct to clear a path for his advancement. Whether his continued advancement will be for good or ill is an open question, but he presents the most interesting possibilities. I am very curious to see how this movie plays out.

The point about mythology shutting down self-criticism (or, really, any criticism) is by far the most important implication of David Brooks’s recent column, not that he really made it directly.

The current Republican Party platform isn’t so much a carefully reasoned political agenda, as a mythological pantheon of titanomachies and gorgons designed to elicit maximum emotional response without stopping to think at any point. The Earmarks are ravaging our nation! Iran must be bombed! The Surge has worked! Civil liberties are being used against us! (Intriguingly, global warming became a myth inside this mythos–the first instance of a meta-myth that I’m aware of.)

In fact, we can probably use the Campbellian mono-myth on Sarah Palin. Born into obscurity. Summoned to adventure by a wise old man. Trained by a bunch of warriors and philosophers. Fighting the monstrous Bill Ayers. An apotheosis – and, likely, a defeat. Followed by returning to the mundane world to share her divine wisdom among her persecuted followers, gearing up for the final battle. It’s been a while since I read any of that stuff, but it looks like all the elements are there.

Studying the creation of Bill Ayers from forgotten revolutionary to Public Enemy #1 in the space of a week would probably be interesting, too. There’s a hero myth; I’m not sure if there’s a villain myth.

In any event, I think what’s happened over the last 10 years is that we’ve increasingly been led by tribal shamans who recite the mythology rather than persuading people or addressing problems. When your witch doctor can no longer perform miracles, it’s time to kill the old one and get a replacement.