An outspoken pacifist in WWI, Bertrand Russell had no reservations in supporting the war against the Axis in WWII.

His summary observation was that Mahatma Gandhi would have had no success in Germany. He believed that non-violent resistance rested on the assumption that the opposition retained *some* vestiges of compassion and human empathy, and that in WWII this assumption was without foundation.

Some of us haven’t trusted the Republicans since Richard Nixon was President.

Ronald Reagan put a genial face on the same authoritarian impulses, and that disarmed a lot of people. But the astute could see it coming with the ascendance of Gingrich and his memo on language as a key method of control.

I think that Ezra is right–basically nice people didn’t want to believe that Gingrich was the true face of the GOP, or just how bad it would be when Cheney and the others got total control. Until the Clinton Impeachment they could pretend that it was all fringe and not really the true colors of the GOP. Some of this is age and lack of personal experience with Nixon (to say nothing of McCarthy), but that doesn’t account for Kerry, who by any reckoning should have known better and sooner, and Gore.

And some people just wanted to relax in the Clinton years and can to some extent be forgiven for not wanting to have to spend their entire adult lives fighting these scum.

But now that more and more people are seeing it, is it too late to make a difference?

I raise again the question I raised on Kagro’s thread yesterday. If these guys are really as bad as we are saying, why should we believe they will give up power willingly, despite what the people say in an election?

I remember my father saying he needed a sign, â€Ronald Reagan made a Democrat out of me.†Believe it or not, I felt sorry for Nixon (hey, I was in high school, ill-informed from a Republican family, for cripes’ sake) but have been moving left left left since college. Yes, Reagan, Iran-contra and Gingrich put chills in me. But when the sharks went after Clinton, I got seriously shaken. And after Bush v. Gore, it was clear, all my idealism about bipartisanship and middle-of-the-road was not going to save this country. Never in my life have I been so informed, so motivated, so committed to getting these people out of power and, with any luck, into jail. This is some serious shrill-making shit.

â€The founding Bad Act(s)†were Nixon’s Watergate, Reagan’s Iran-Contragate, Bush’s (senior), â€New World Order†concrete barriers around the Capitol and â€illegal†searches of purses and briefcases at Washington Museums (late 1980’s), Newt Gringrich’s the â€Republican Revolution,†The Clinton Impeachement, Katherine Harris’s unconscionable election decisions, the Supreme Court’s Gift to Bush, the P.a.t.r.i.o.t. Act, John Yoo’s Memo, und so weiter.

I’ve been mad as hell since 1980, when the Iranians made a gift to Reagan of the release of the American Embassy hostages immediately after the Inauguration. But, maybe, it’s because I’m older: I have experienced more history with these jerks.

Just wanted to thank everyone for the enlightening comments, particularly the â€What took you so long†from Mimikatz, margaret, and William.

I would like to point out one disconcerting problem about the moderates and their new found ’shrillness.’ Attacking Iran. Most moderates seriously consider the attacking of Iran because of its alleged development of nuclear weapons technology. These are the same moderates who seriously considered attacking Iraq for the same alleged reasons. Moderates are enablers to radicals, willing to entertain the ravings of madmen as long as those ravings fit well accepted platitudes rationalizing US hegemony.

From my vantage in the People’s Republic, there still are a great deal of progressives outside of the party.

But how many of them are boring leftists, Old or New, who have been around the block many many times, and how many of them are young progressives involved in politics for the first time, choosing the Democratic party as the venue of their progressive activity, whatever else they do? It’s the latter phenomenon that is really interesting and encouraging to me. The idea that you can be a real, grassroots progressive and be a committed and active Democrat per se is, I think, fresh again.

Then there’s also the fact that a lot of people who don’t believe that – let’s just call them Dennis Kucinich supporters – are also participating in Democratic politics.

I can’t resist tossing in one piece of Plameology. I finally got around to reading the Wilsons’ complaint. Did anyone notice that the Wilsons assert (at the bottom of p. 15) their belief that Cheney spoke with reporters about Plame’s employment, either before or after July 14? I wonder whether that is just to keep Cheney relevantly involved in the complaint, or they have some real basis for that belief – did Cheney talk with Mitchell at the Ford party? or Pincus on July 12? or what?

I would put the problem much much earlier — 1948. At that time the domestic matters were quite independent of the Foreign Policy ones, but they do knit together. By all reason, 1948 was time for a Republican President. FDR was dead and Truman just didn’t match up in Charisma terms to FDR. The country was flush with money, saved during the years of war rationing, and it seemed time for less regulation, less experimentation and all. Running as a moderate Progressive Republican, Dewey didn’t win. And that stunned the Republican Hierarchy. Once they found the reasons, they were even more stunned.

1948 was the first election decided by Black Voters. The Big Industrial States the GOP anticipated they would win, went to Truman, precisely because Labor and many other organizations represented the real possibility of economic equity for the millions of black workers who had migrated out of the south into the mass production industries during World War II — and Labor did not hesitate to get them registered and voting. They went solidly for Truman simply because he talked the same talk about economic matters to Blacks as he did to Whites. The Republicans waved the flag of Lincoln, but the question really was, What have you done for me lately? The congressional alliance that had always joined agricultural states interests with the segregationist interests of the deep south, got somewhat wounded in that election. A new power center was in the process of emerging.

That 48 election led to the Republicans adopting the shrill radicalism of what we now term the McCarthy era — though it should be named for a few more of them. The tactic of shouting out â€Who Lost China†(a speciality of Senator William Knowland of California) and later the absurd claim that Five Star General George Marshall was some sort of pinko commie traitor, ginned up the fear factor among US voters, and along with McCarthy’s show, it proved politically workable, the Republicans did take the Senate by a small margin, and while Eisenhower did not use the tactics himself, it certainly contributed to his win in 1952. For Americans, it meant that Truman’s FEPC (and Civil Rights), National Health Care, support for the Labor Movement, and much else went off the table, not to return till the Kennedy Johnson years. For Republicans, the point was made — the tactics adopted in the wake of Dewey’s loss actually worked. What we have now is a new and much improved version. And in many respects these tactics are far more dangerous in the hands of some of the contemporary practioners.

For Republicans, the Cold War always provided a â€cause†around which they could politically organize from the 1940’s right through to 1989. When the Berlin Wall and all the rest suddenly disappeared relatively peacefully, many of the supports under their system disappeared. The Democrats had no choice during all this time except to say â€me too†— I think one of the most critical little documents in history of these years is that little taped conversation between Johnson and Richard Russell just after LBJ became President. Talking about Vietnam both of them say that then little war is pretty pointless — but unless they want to go back to the Knowland Days of â€Who Lost China†they would have to support it. We need to fully understand how much true blackmail was confessed in that little conversation. We need to comprehend how these tactics still play in the Global War on Terrorism.

Democrats do best countering these tactics when non-party mass movements support alternative policy, in a sense greasing the skids for new sorts of political conversations and resulting policy. Civil Rights, and follow on movements such as Womens Rights and Gay Rights — and I would even add aspects of Environmentalism — moved the political center on Citizen’s Rights, and Democrats benefited in the 60’s and much of the 70’s. It even forced Nixon to adopt public stances that vaguely seemed supportive. But it broke down when too many of these movements became DC centered bureaucracies, raising money and doing lobby work, or law suits — and the movements themselves lost touch with their populist base. (The Labor Movement, so central to FDR’s coalition did the same thing in the late 40’s and early 1950’s).

While I doubt that blogging alone is a true political movement, it is by its nature totally decentralized. We pay for, and organize our own soap boxes, and there really is no way it can be easily co-opted, centralized and muted. But it really does not yet have much of a â€Cause†to it other than a fairly generalized â€We Want to be Heard†claim. But it is a good tool — potentially much more powerful than the â€Who Lost China†tactic, and we perhaps need to consider a range of causes to which it can be targeted. That would make movements.

Jeff’s comments are very interesting. I agree that the big, big difference now over, say, 1968 is the willingness to work within the Dem party and even try to influence it in a serious way. The young people (under 40) today seem much more serious in that respect than we were. That is a very welcome development. The bomb-throwing now is all from the other side, despite what the shrill voices on the Right would have people believe.

I’ve had an old song running through my head lately that we heard a lot in the Civil Rights era. It’s â€Which Side Are You On?†There came a point when there was no middle of the road. I see on one side of the road peaceful demonstrators, perhaps singing â€Which Side Are You On?†and on the other side police thugs crossing the road to beat and hose the demonstrators on national television. Or maybe the middle disappeared when racists bombed a Black church killing the children inside. Something similar happened soon after in the Vietnam War when we dropped flaming napalm on peasant villages and someone photographed a burned naked girl running in terror (down the middle of a road). Of course those are just moments among many others. As in our Civil War, families were torn apart by disagreements over politics and morality. There was no sane middle ground. I think we’re reaching that point again, not quite there yet but almost. It’s the point of real and inevitable change. Would that we could get there without such suffering.

I was just thinking back before the phony Clinton impeachment and the harassment that led up to it (the DC press right after his inauguration went after him as if someone had turned on a switch), before Iran-Contra and the cover-ups, and even before Watergate.

You see, figuring out when I first went into shrill overdrive isn’t easy, since I grew up in a civil rights-aware household. But I’d have to say that the first event that stands out as having flooded my consciousness was the shooting of Oswald by Ruby. Not that grade-schooler me had anything like a conspiracy theory going, but (a) I thought there was something horrifying about the exploitation of tv in that shooting, and (b) without regard to any motive for the killing, it just seemed to me that never knowing would become like a tumor in the public mind and make it hard for too many people to trust the government again, just because it looked too much like a clean-up killing from a detective story. To that point I’d been holding up a lot better than other kids at school and church, but when I found out there was to be no trial, I really lost it for a moment, I felt as if the last chance at something were slipping by.

I was a pretty strange kid, I guess. Of course since then, the use of spectacle to keep people frozen in place one way or another and the maintenance of secrecy have become hallmarks of much that is wrong with our country. What a relief then, to get the sense that many are actively trying to shake off that rapt dumbness—to become less enraptured rather than more so.

Many Democrats voted for the credit card/no bankruptcy and energy bills. How can that be explained outside of serving corporate interests, just like Republicans would be expected to do?