Who is Phyllis Schlafly now?

Let's play The 1970 Game!

The myths, values and assumptions that make up an American political thesis are peculiar to their time and based in opposition to what appear on the surface to be inevitable trends.

Those who set their stall in opposition are natural idealists. While there is nothing wrong with ideals in the abstract, absolute adherence to them always leads to trouble down the road. Agendas change, the problems change, ideals become ideology, and things that made perfect sense a generation before now seem to make no sense.

To white suburbanites this is what the 60s were all about. They had left the crowded cities to gain more control over their lives and those of their children. Yet the violence and anarchy of those cities was following them, through the TV, into their very homes, into the minds of their children, and taking control in the form of long hair, rock music, and questioning of their authority.

This is the milieu Phyllis Schlafly came from.In 1964 her ideas seemed daring. Her greatest foes were other Republicans, like Nelson Rockefeller, and she was often disappointed that the Nixon Administration mainly gave her only lip service.  (Schlafly's Wikipedia entry offers a recent picture, but I think this portrait, taken from her 1964 book, is more appropriate. She was once, as they say, a babe.)

She organized, she persevered, and when the Nixon Thesis was validated (renamed Reaganism) she was in the forefront, still pushing society to conform more-and-more closely to her authority. She's still at it, well past her sell-by date, a sad and brittle figure, with an openly gay son.

This is not to dismiss her in any way. She is an important figure in America's political history. But she was never satisfied, and can never be satisfied. She is highly polarizing, and has always been so. As a politician she was a failure because she would not bend from her principles.

So who is Phyllis Schlafly now?

Jane Hamsher.

She might resent the implication. She has nothing in common with Schlafly, any more than Schlafly had anything in common with, say, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose book Uncle Tom's Cabin did for Republicans of the 1850s what Schlafly's A Choice Not an Echo would do for conservatives a century later.

Besides, Hamsher isn't even a book author. She's a film producer. What she writes doesn't even go between two covers, but into a blog called Firedoglake. 

But in fact Hamsher represents the uncompromising end of the new Thesis just as Schlafly represented the tip of the conservative spear. Hamsher's disgust with the Obama Administration is just like Schlafly's disappointment with Nixon, and stems from the same thing.

He's not moving fast enough. He's not the transformation we sought. He's only good, so we'll take him down from the left as Schlafly agitated against Nixon from the right.

This is Hamsher's intellectual Achilles' Heel. Fact is it is much, much more difficult to stand against a Thesis, to turn the ship of myths, values and assumptions into another direction, than it is to lead the parade of change that great leader began. Lincoln was more important than Grant, Roosevelt more important than Truman, and when the history is written Nixon will tower over Reagan.

Generational change is a hard trick to pull off. You not only have to be an extraordinary leader, but you must have great timing. You must develop within a failed AntiThesis, seem to represent it, but in fact develop something truly new out of it. More important, you have to stand against both the cries of the old Thesis and those of the rising new Thesis you represent. You can't please your friends.

This is the change this President is trying to pull off. I'll go further, it's what he is in the process of pulling off. And allies who pull him down while he's at his most vulnerable do him, nor us, nor history, any favors. 

No matter how right, or Right, they might be.

My advice to Jane is to do what Schlafly wound up doing. Seek out causes you believe in, where you can make a difference, and pressure society, not the President but society, in your chosen direction. You destroy Obama and you destroy yourself, as well as all hope for an answer to the challenges of our time.