The 1970 Game: Dispersal of the Tribes

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

Ever ask yourself why the Left broke up under Nixon? (If this motivates you buy the poster at Allposters.com)

Some of it had to do with the loss of their majority — Nixon's "southern strategy" brought the Wallace people into his coalition creating a long-term majority.

But some of it also had to do with the Left's natural dispersal after it broke up into various cause tribes. Feminists. Black power advocates. Hispanics. Environmentalists. Gay rights activists. Anti-war activists.

Each group sought to place its own agenda first. Each drained adherents from the organized left into their specific cause. In 1970 the media was following each of these movements avidly, thinking that they could coalesce into a cohesive reversal of the Nixon Thesis. Instead, of course, the Nixon people picked them each off one-by-one.

The main thesis of my history stories on this blog is that the media is stupid. Always.

(Picture from Gawker's Defamer blog. The story is worth reading.)

The same sort of thing is happening now on the right, although as usual the media is missing the story. They see this great energy and agitation, they see all these big causes, and people making big talk about overthrowing the system, and they figure it's got to happen. Especially since the Administration doesn't appear to be near as exciting.

This is how the media gets blind. Reporters follow what is visible and easily heard. They see the shiny object, not the quiet standing in opposition to it. Yet it's quiet resolution that always triumphs in the end, throughout American history. The quiet resolution of the Union. The quiet resolution of various progressive movements. The quiet resolution of those who benefited from the New Deal. The Silent Majority. 

The trend only becomes visible to the media when the opposition  groups radicalize in overt ways. Their rabid talk early in the movement's evolution is seen as political, somehow unrelated to the crazy actions that follow. They attribute the later collapse to the crazy actions, not the crazy talk.

The radicals eventually alienate, not those in the mythical media "center," but those in the heart of their political movement. The mass movements of the 1970s alienated Democratic elders of the Senate, and veterans of the Johnson Administration. The mass movements of our time are now starting to alienate Republican Senators, and veterans of the Bush Administration.

A brief look at news of the crazy from the last several weeks:

• The anti-immigrant crazy has been revealed to be led by white supremacists. People like Karl Rove are shocked (shocked) by this development.
• The 10th Amendment crowd turns out to be a bunch of gun nuts, armed and dangerous, mostly in hilarious ways. You can't make a democratic majority out of an armed mob.
• The religious movements of the right are starting to look more-and-more like their Muslim counterparts. This includes mainstream groups like the Catholic Church. But it also includes people like Franklin Graham, who has proven to be nothing like his father.
• Wall Street turns out to be populated by sexist, misogynistic, a-holes like this one, whose pro-street rant was picked up by lots of people after the Goldman Sachs testimony.

These are like points of dark. In each case you see extremist positions being taken, and mainstream politicians discomfited. The media assumes the right can hold all this together, that this creates enthusiasm and momentum for November.

That's what Allard Lowenstein thought. Lowenstein was my Congressman back in 1970, out on Long Island. He was elected as an anti-war activist in a district that included my more conservative home town of Massapequa. He assumed that the great movements of his day would keep him in Congress, especially given his opponent, a quiet Republican stalwart named Norman Lent. He was wrong. Lent (right) eventually served 12 terms. Lowenstein died in 1980.

What appears to be crazy or radical tends to scare people. In time each political action brings an equal and equivalent reaction. Violent action brings a political reaction that quickly overwhelms it. As the North overwhelmed the South. Americans are not a radical people.

This President will benefit from that.

But let me conclude by putting this into words any conservative can understand, paraphrasing the most famous statement of the late Barry Goldwater:

Extremism in the defense of liberty is a vice, for in extremism there is no liberty. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is a virtue, for without moderation there is no justice.