Terror on the Right: What happens when the pursuit of power trumps patriotism.
May 19, 2017
I guess you could say I was a child of the sixties, a decade marked by turmoil. It started with the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., which ultimately led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended the infamous Jim Crow laws in the American South, our version of Apartheid. The Civil Rights Act, while a huge step forward, didn’t create equality, justice, and peace overnight, as the decade’s numerous race riots and the assassination of Dr. King vividly show.
The other great movement of the sixties was the anti-war movement, opposed to American involvement the Vietnam War. Because of the draft, thousands of conscripts were pulled from American cities and towns into the military and sent to fight in the jungles of southeast Asia. As casualties mounted, so did opposition to the war. The anti-war movement gained strength and spawned other leftist movements, which opposed just about everything in America. I spent my teenage years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a hotbed of left-wing radicalism and anti-war activism. I remember a march where someone waved the Viet Cong flag. The Students for a Democratic Society – founded in Ann Abor – called for revolution to overthrow “capitalism”.
Most Americans back then, including many who opposed the Vietnam War, were appalled by the excesses of the far left. We could disagree on politics, but for most of us, our allegiance to the country was never in question. And once the war was over, many of the long-haired hippie types cut their hair, put on suits, and joined the “establishment”. Many of them became Republicans.
So, let’s fast-forward half a century. In 2014, rancher Cliven Bundy and his armed supporters, self-proclaimed “militiamen”, threatened to do battle with law enforcement officers attempting to enforce a court order to impound his cattle to pay grazing fees owed to the federal government. Amazingly, the insurrectionists were supported by a number of Republican politicians. As the 2016 election approached, some right-wing “militias” were training for civil war in case Hillary Clinton got elected. But Trump’s election hasn’t brought peace. With opposition to Donald Trump growing throughout the country, some of his supporters are still talking of civil war against “left-wing terrorists”. And at the end of April, a self-described conservative walked into a campus coffee shop in Lexington, KY, and asked customers what their political affiliation was. If they answered Republican, he left them alone. If they said Democrat, he attacked them with a machete.
Mainstream sixties conservatives would have been appalled by this. William F. Buckley Jr., for example, steadfastly opposed the John Birch Society for its conspiracy-mongering and extremism. If he were alive today, he’d certainly have harsh words for the Tea Party, militiamen, and Trump supporters. But today’s Republicans can’t find it in themselves to condemn advocates of sedition and extremism, as long as they vote Republican.
We now have a “conservative” Republican president whose ties to a hostile Russian government are suspect and about whose incompetence there is no doubt. The Justice Department has appointed a special counsel to investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. How have Republican leaders reacted? With a few honorable exceptions (such as Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain), the silence has been deafening.
In the “good old days”, Republicans and Democrats could work together. Both parties supported the space program. Both parties voted for the Civil Rights Act. On foreign policy, the norm for both parties was, “politics stops at the water’s edge”. Shutting down the federal government was unthinkable, as was refusing to raise the debt ceiling. Back in the sixties, America worked, even during the depths of the Vietnam War.
What’s happened to us? The same thing that happened to the Roman Empire after Marcus Aurelius died. Power, not patriotism, reigned supreme, and the Empire descended into a period of civil strife. But today, everything happens much faster, thanks to modern media. The media could be a force for educating the public, but many Americans have no use for education. Rather, they tune in to TV and talk radio commentators who confirm what they already believe. Roger Ailes, who died on May 18, built Fox News into a “conservative” kingmaker. He combined right wing ideology with flashy entertainment, which hooked much of the white middle class. Rush Limbaugh and others were even wilder, hatching conspiracy theories and blaming all the country’s problems on “progressives”. Amazingly, new media outlets, like Breitbart, opened to the right of Fox News, as if there were much space there!
Republican politicians soon learned that compromising and negotiating with Democrats would get them a primary challenger for the next election. The key to a long career as a Republican member of Congress was to fight everything Democrats supported. And when voters elected the first African-American president, the very moderate Barack Obama, Republican politicians tried their best to make him fail, despite the harm that did to the country.
Hindus believe in Karma. Christians prefer to say, “you reap what you sow”. The laughable presidency of Donald Trump could well mean the end of the Republican Party, as Americans turn away with disgust from the lies, corruption, and incompetency of this administration. We can only hope that some principled conservatives start a new party or sweep up the shards of the broken GOP. But if we don’t want to go the way of the Roman Empire, we must never forget what happens when the pursuit of power overwhelms patriotism.
