As a generational crisis comes on, and people en masse switch sides, the quality they most want to see is fearlessness.
Ironically it’s at these times that fearlessness is in shortest supply.
During the last such crisis, in the late 1960s, it was George Wallace who embodied fearlessness for the Right. This was seen as so vital in holding the new coalition together that Nixon institutionalized his role in the form of Spiro Agnew.
When the scales fell from the eyes of former Democrats in the Long Island suburbs, in the latter years of Lyndon Johnson, it was Wallace whom they first turned to. George C. Wallace (I remember how they liked to put the middle initial in), with his red meat rhetoric, with his disdain for the intellectuals, and yes with his racism.
There is, at times like this, a crying need among new recruits to a political cause for revenge, the equivalent of le guillotine. Wallace delivered that. And then Agnew delivered that. It was Agnew’s rhetoric which solidified these former Democrats as lifelong Republicans. They walked the Wallace bridge to Agnew, then to Nixon, then to Reagan, then to Bush.
The same sort of thing is needed today. I know that Digby and John Aravosis and Duncan Black would be angry to be compared with Wallace, because in their politics they are nothing like him, but they are performing that same historic role. Theirs is the red meat rhetoric that former conservatives are using as a bridge to liberalism. They, and other liberal bloggers like Cliff Schechter, are telling it like it is, unafraid, fearlessly. They are, in a rhetorical sense, sticking the opponents’ faces in it and mashing down hard. They are going after the press and they are going after the think tanks just as hard as Wallace went after the academy. They are treating the war bloggers like the dirty fucking hippies they in fact are, at least in the context of 2007. (The polite term for these losers are the worst persons in the world.)
This sort of thing is essential in a process of structural political change. This kind of fearless rhetoric won’t make you President, but it will allow the next President to ride a rising tide, one based on heart as much as head.
You can see why ambitious politicians would not want this role. Right now only Dennis Kucinich seems really hot to take it on. But Democrats don’t want Kucinich. He ran in 2004 to wild laughter — he actually used the campaign to find a wife — and the political career of Dennis the Menace has more baggage than the late Leona Helmsley.
Many Democrats do, however, want John Edwards. (I am one of them.) Edwards doesn’t have the
smell of loser that covers Kucinich like a soggy blanket. Edwards is
viable, and in recent weeks he seems to have sensed that this is his
only hope for overhauling Hillary Clinton’s Nixonian rise to power. In
last night’s debate he was, for the first time, fearless in his attack,
and willing to take on just about anyone.
Except, of course, for moderator Tim Russert. And this was a mistake. Netroot liberals are sick and tired of conservatives abusing people like Russert so they reflexively spin their way, and demand that someone stick a fork in these folks’ eye. They are tired of the Village, and want to burn it down. Edwards had an opportunity to do that when Russert asked him a question about the $400 haircut, but was unwilling to do it.
I opened this piece with a video of Bill Clinton, attacking the Senate vote against Moveon, and it’s one of the great ironies of our time that he is apparently willing to take on the attack dog role on behalf of his wife. Unlike every analyst and every other candidate, Bill Clinton knows his history. And he’s not on the ballot, can’t be on the ballot — he can do this safely.
If Hillary Milhous Clinton is elected next year, Bill will continue to fulfill this role. A year ago, in The 1966 Game, I played the card of George Wallace and identified him as Michael Bloomberg, because Bloomberg was flirting with an independent run that could become a bridge for disaffected Republicans on their way to the new Democratic Majority.
But this will be a straight two-way fight. The Netroots must continue to take on the role played by Wallace, and whatever they may think of the analogy they will.
So who’s Agnew now?
It’s William Jefferson Clinton.
