Sunday, November 30, 2008

A McCarthy Gene?

Neal Gabler is getting a lot of attention this morning for a piece in the LA Times arguing that the yahoo populist strain of Republican is nothing new--that it goes back through Richard Nixon to Joe McCarthy (link).

It's a useful exercise, I suppose, but I must say, first, that I'm surprised that he's surprised, and that so many others are surprised. I should have thought that the idea that populism was nothing new was itself nothing new--but maybe you have to remember Nixon. Or McCarthy.

Second, I don't know where he comes off assuming that it starts with McCarthy. Hasn't he heard of the Vendée, the country conservatives who did so much to destroy the French Revolution? Or the masses who brought Napoleon III to power in 1848? Or the humble worker conservatives who bought into Disraeli's dream of empire? Or the former socialist newspaper editor, Benito Mussolini, who did so much for train timetables in Italy? And let's not get started on Hitler. ...

There are, in fact, many strains of conservatism (as there are in any other political movement worthy of our attention). For the moment, I might suggest a topic for Gabler for next Sunday: the strain of conservatism that relly hates the masses; that figures the worst thing we ever did with respect to the masses was to give them the vote. Of course, you don't carry many precincts that way.

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