Thursday November 4, 2004 – The Political Pendulums Swings

Thursday November 4, 2004 – The Political Pendulums Swings

Well the die is cast and we are now looking at four more years of conservative Republican politics. If you look at the map of the United States with the bright red and blue colored states it should become abundantly clear that the majority of the states in this great nation preferred the republicans to the democrats.

After being around for several decades, I can say that I’ve seen my share of political swings. Born in the last decade of the Second World War, I was the product of an incredible economic recovery from a worldwide depression at its height ten years before I was born to its ascendancy ten years after my birth in the middle of the 1950s. Dwight Eisenhower was in office and would serve his full two terms.

Back then, the nation was of a staunchly conservative bent. It was the era of Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). It was the conservative right leading a campaign of terror against the liberal left. Hollywood with its left leaning tendencies was singled out for attack, with McCarthy using the HUAC’s subpoena power to command a series of high profile witnesses from the movie industry to come forward and testify. Eventually the White House recognized McCarthy for the rogue he was and set about undermining him and his campaign of terror.

McCarthy was a lightning rod that catalyzed the national's fear around a hidden enemy, Communism. He insinuated that it was a cancer that hid within the healthy tissue of the American system, wrecking havoc on an unsuspecting nation. McCarthy exploited a basic human fear for this own political agenda. In the process he damaged the American vision of tolerance and acceptance of divergent ideological views.

The 1950s passed and I grew older reaching draft age in the early 1960s. I was part of a generation of children born in the aftermath of a great world war, who had never known what it was to want. All of our parents had been affected by the Great Depression and an overwhelming international war and these major traumas marked their collective memories with an understanding of want and hardship. I think it also made them long for a halcyon time when the world was perfect and life was idyllic. The result was the 1950s, the era that gave birth to Disneyland. Father Knows Best, Ozzie & Harriet, and Leave it to Beaver.

When my generation came of age, this age of gentility was passé. Everything our parents wanted, we wanted no part of. The libertine John Kennedy, who after his assassination was followed by Lyndon Johnson—a redneck liberal if ever I saw one—replaced Eisenhower, the symbol of monogamous propriety. The sexual revolution began. Johnson’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 once enacted set about eliminating the inequalities that minorities, especially blacks and women, had endured since the nation began.

Johnson’s undoing was the Viet Nam War to contain the communist menace that McCarthy had so successfully convinced this country we should fear. Just as after eight years of Republican rule, the country grew tired of eight years of democratic rule, in which President Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King were gunned down and major cities the East, Northeast and West saw the worst demonstrations and rioting in its history.

The country wanted an end to the turmoil and they turned to the Republicans and their standard bearer Richard Nixon, who set about putting right the international mess we’d gotten ourselves into. The early 1970s was an era in which my generation suddenly woke up from an extended party of alcohol, drugs, and sexual indulgence to the realization that they needed to turn all that reckless energy into making money. And they did just that.

By the time my generation’s children were entering high school in the early 1980s, the country had nearly impeached Nixon, dumped his well-meaning but ineffective successor Gerald Ford for a Southern Baptist, Jimmy Carter. And despite an earnest desire to do the right thing, Carter was felled by a failed policy in Iran that resulted in a protracted hostage take over by Muslim extremists and a failed military venture to rescue them.

The powerful military and economic giant seemed impotent to move against a third-world Middle Eastern nation, who took delight in taunting the superpower. The country wanted a leader that exuded strength and it found it in Ronald Reagan, the man epitomized the “Marlboro Man” image this country has of itself. Reagan a product of the 1950s, succeeded in bringing the communist boogie man of his era to heel, thus giving the nation back its decades of lost face: first in Viet Nam, then in the Middle East. Curiously, the Middle East continued to bedevil the American presidency. Reagan lost 241 service men to a terrorist bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon on October 23, 1983 with nothing to show for the loss of life.

The republicans held the White House four years after Reagan left office through the one term of George Herbert Walker Bush. He was displaced by another southerner, William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd President of the nation. Clinton was a throw back to the libertine ways of John Kennedy, though lacking in Kennedy’s good looks and his good fortune of having a press that looked the other way at his peccadilloes.

Clinton bitterly divided the nation between the conservative, bible-belt, family values camp, and the liberal, free spirit, and ultra tolerant camp. The liberals thought Clinton’s impeachment proceeding was the work of right-wing extremism. However, I don’t think anyone realized how badly his very public peccadillo had offended the sensibilities of what in the 1960s was termed the “silent majority”. They are the great masses that go to church every Sunday, complain about the immoral programming that network and cable television produces, and patronizes Disneyland, McDonalds, and Walmart.

When offered a choice between Al Gore and George W. Bush, they chose the latter. And when they were once again offered the choice between a man who said he was against Gay Marriage but for Civil Unions and another who wanted to create a Constitutional Amendment banning Gay Marriage, they chose the latter. They were simply tired of having their sensibilities offended. The democrats had been painted with too many of the values (not policies) Middle Americans were unwilling to accept. (San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom may have written his political obituary with his campaign for gay rights.)

The most telling evidence of the pent up energy propelling the "silent majority" was so obvious that no one saw it. It was Mel Gibson's "Passion." If there was one advertisement that catalyzed the conservative right and drew to it large numbers of followers it was Gibson's blockbuster movie. The left had its 90-minute or so retort to Gibson's tome in Fahrenheit 911, but the box office receipts of the respective films foretold the outcome of the election far sooner than did the ballot box.

Hey we're looking at four more years before the center of the country realizes we moved back to the 1950s. By then they'll be fed up with the right and swing back to the left. Politics are an e-ticket ride, no?