Print
Three years ago on this day, venerable Washington columnist David Broder penned a Thanksgiving piece that dared to use a term we had not heard for over a century:
“Be thankful this Thanksgiving that no civil war looms, for the divisions are everywhere to be seen… It is clear in retrospect that even the worst terrorist attacks ever on American soil were not enough to unite the nation.”
When I began writing The Strange Death of Liberal America about that time, the country seemed ready to implode on itself. I coined the term The Era of Bad Feelings to describe the atmosphere of that time as voices on the left and right egged on one another in the media and on the Internet. Nothing was out of bounds, no insult too harsh, no curse too crude. People such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter symbolized those times and often found themselves accused of fomenting the nastiness. Certainly there is no doubt they loved the attention like two professional wrestlers growling at the crowd and their opponent across the ring then pummeling their hated rival with anything at hand, all the while locked up in a cage like the animals they pretended to imitate. It resembled the Roman Circus only in this media age words could be as deadly as the tridents, swords and other weapons employed by the gladiators.
Curiously the victims of many of those ancient Roman bloodfests–Christian zealots–were one of the main forces fueling the Era of Bad Feelings making outrageous statements about 9/11 as retribution for America’s permissiveness and stirring up hatred for gay people and Muslims on a level that approached the sick anti-Jewish rhetoric of Joseph Goebbels. Anyone not “born again” was a sinner and some ministers were more than happy to paint vivid pictures of what awaited most of us when the final judgment came.
What seemed to characterize the extremes of both left and right was a little-disguised contempt for the American people. Those on the right liked to talk about “the people” and how “the majority” was on their side in their holy war against the “liberal agenda.” In Strange Death I noted one member of the Raucous Right let his guard down long enough for an Atlantic reporter to catch his true feelings:
The vast majority of people are much, much dumber than you have ever been led to believe. Never forget this. And just like people are far dumber than you have been led to believe, they are also far more dishonest than anyone is seemingly willing to admit to you. Do not trust anyone unless you have some sort of significant leverage over him or her and they know that you have that leverage over them.
Those on the far left were not much different. I am sorry to say people whom I considered close friends not only hated George W. Bush with an almost irrational passion, but they blamed the American people for allowing such an imbecile in the White House. The name calling I heard from some of these people was every bit as bad as anything coming from Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh.
It seemed what the media were calling the culture wars was about to break out the live ammunition. Certainly there were minor skirmishes, the most serious of which was the infamous Brooks Brothers Riot that was organized by still unprosecuted GOP operatives to disrupt the counting of votes during the 2000 election. The fact that some of these heirs to Hitler’s brown shirts received promotions for their violent attempt to disrupt an election–even as I write this some of them are even proudly serving in the Bush White House–only added to the anger, hypocrisy, and contempt not only for manners but the rule of law that lurked behind so much of the Era of Bad Feelings.
Yet for all the contempt zealots on both sides showed for the American people, the American people came through again in the recent elections giving the Republicans–and along with them the tactics of the Era of Bad Feelings–what the president called a “thumping.” So this Thanksgiving we should perhaps remember the wisdom of this nation’s founders and celebrate the fact that our system worked.
The People had finally had enough: enough of a war with little purpose and less top level tactical leadership than since George McClellen commanded the Army of the Potomac, enough of the national embarrassment of one of the world’s great cities being leveled to the ground by a storm everyone knew was coming and no one has done anything to clean up after, enough of scandal after scandal by GOP politicians whose incompetence at corruption would have left the Sopranos shaking their heads, enough of negative ads so ridiculous that the politicians they were supposed to help found themselves disowning them, enough of a government that had tilted the playing field so far that the average American felt as though they were trying to keep from sliding down an icy mountain, enough of a media that had openly abandoned the commitment to fairness that had been the hallmark of Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, and Peter Jennings, enough of an education system whose No Child Left Behind had turned learning upside down by leaving behind schools, students, teachers and parents who were having the toughest time learning, enough of electoral shenanigans that had the Republican Party actually trying to repeal one of the most important pieces of 20th Century legislation–the Voting Rights Act.
The system had been abused for six years by hypocritical Supreme Court justices that turned strict constructionism into a synonym for personal predilections, distorted and untruthful media reports that turned Swift Boat from a badge of honor into a synonym for political propaganda, and an administration that will go down as one of the worst in American history not merely because of its incompetence but because its organized efforts to undermine the system turned patriotism and defense of country into a synonym for abusing the Constitution. The American system had shown itself more stronger and robust than even those founders who had suffered through that steamy Philadelphia summer could imagine.
So thank you, people of America. You deserve this day and may all that you are now thankful for not be taken away from you and all that you wish for somehow come true.
Crossposts: The Strange Death of Liberal America, All Things Democrat, My Left Wing, LeftWord
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
