Immortal Hate

There's a famous old New Yorker cartoon by Peter Arno from the Thirties. A group of New York swells in fancy dress are calling out to their friends to go down to the Trans-Lux movie theater to hiss Roosevelt (in the newsreels). Although FDR did well electorally, those in the opposition hated him with a passion. Then there were were Nixon-haters, but it seems to me that only with the second President Bush has the FDR-hatred of the right been equaled and surpassed on the left.

I've pondered why, and still I ponder. I recently visited New York City on a family visit. Last night at a restaurant, I asked my sister, a passionate Bush opponent, not just where she disagrees with the Bush Administration, but why the passion of the Bush-haters exceeds even that of the Republicans who despised Roosevelt. I got an earful.

Because the blogosphere is replete with sermons to the choir, I thought it would be interesting to try to reproduce what she said as fairly as I can. My sister is no dummy. Now a small businesswoman, she's an MBA with 20 years' experience in the corporate world, and is intelligent, articulate, and although passionate, by no means dogmatic on every political issue. So I'm going to paraphrase what she told me in a conversation last night, trying to present her views in my own words. I can express my own views any old time, and because this is my blog, I will. In this post, however, I'll just present her viewpoint as filtered through my brain and my iBook's keyboard.

First of all, she thinks the leadership of the Administration is not just wrong, but dishonest about its beliefs and intentions. They will say anything, she said, so long as they think it will work politically. Thus, rather than a reasoned debate, the citizenry are the targets of a constant public relations effort involving systematic political mislabeling. An example she cites is the "Clear Skies" initiative, which involves the creation of a market in the right to pollute. Whether or not the creation of such a market is wise (and she allows it might be), it is at most a device for redistributing pollution, not reducing it. She would, no doubt, have a similar reaction to the branding of the "Patriot Act," with the title's implication that those favoring a different balance between civil liberties and the government's power to investigate have questionable loyalty to the nation.

As a corollary, she believes that there is a hidden agenda behind Administration policies. Thus, for example, the deficit is a manifestation of a desire to "starve the beast," to force a reduction in federal programs (at least social programs) by indirection, to achieve in this fashion what might be hard to achieve if they presented it openly.

This hidden agenda, she believes, is a combination of crony capitalism and religious obscurantism. The Bushies, she believes, want to provide government largesse, or at least latitude, to their wealthy cronies, preferably in ways that are not obvious to the public. She appears to believe this is more than the traditional GOP view that incentives for investment benefit the economy as a whole, but is in essence a series of corrupt schemes to benefit contributors and pals. (She concedes that the Clintonistas were equally devoted to fundraising among the wealthy. Her distaste for Bush does not translate into a love for the opposition.)

One example she gives of a pro-corporate orientation is the Administration's refusal, in the face of what she thinks is overwhelming evidence, to recognize that global warming is a scientific fact and a major problem. And in this regard she thinks that the tendency of the Administration to weaken environmental protections, many of which she believes to be necessary or desirable. Hardly a radical environmentalist, she recognizes the inevitability of tradeoffs, but questions the Administration's sense of balance. For example, she tends to believe that the risks of oil drilling in the Alaskan wildlife preserve probably outweigh the possibility of obtaining a relatively modest supply of oil.

The real emotion behind her opposition, it seems to me, comes not from these economic and environmental issues, or even from opposition to the Iraq war, which she opposes as a misguided reaction to the World Trade Center attacks. It is the presence in the coalition of the "Christian right." Although she concludes that many in the GOP, such as Dick Cheney, make obeisances to this segment more out of tactical convenience than conviction, she honestly believes that there is a segment of the GOP that would like to impose a fundamentalist theocracy in the United States. For her, at the heart of this fear is the issue of birth control and abortion. She is firmly convinced, for example, that it is profoundly wrong to allow licensed pharmacists to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions for unmarried women. This and related issues she sees as matters of both health and women's autonomy. Her fear, however, is not just of a rollback of "reproductive rights" but of the empowering of religious extremism. And this phenomenon she finds not merely distasteful, but frightening.

Incidentally, as much as we on the right perceive what we have come to call the "mainstream media" as favoring the left end of the spectrum, she believes the press has supinely swallowed the Administration line, and has failed in the task of investigative reporting. She sees a Barbara Boxer, for example, who seems to me a shrill, ignorant crackpot, as commendably courageous, and Howard Dean less as over the top and more as revving up the troops.