Comments on: He was using abusive and obscene language, calling people Conservatives and all that.

By: Anthony Greco

Anthony Greco — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 15:51:55 +0000

You are right in pointing to a linguistic watershed in popular views of the labels “liberal” and “conservative.” The right’s linguistic triumph is all the more striking in that those who claim the “conservative” label are, for the most part, not conservative at all, but reactionary, and quite radical. Bush is the closest thing to a radical ever to occupy the White House*: his massive, deficit-inducing assault on progressive taxation; his evisceration of much of the federal regulatory appratus; his unprecedented attempt at social security privatization; his brazen asertion of immunity to law whether international or domestic do not amount to a conservative, but a radical reactionary program. Yet he and his followers successfully claim the eminently respectable label “conservative.”

FDR was arguably more “radical,” but he did, after all, have a Great Depreession to deal with, and he didn’t start with an ideologically driven agenda, as Bush clearly did.

By: k

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 18:49:43 +0000

Viereck had a pretty impressive Oedipal situation to deal with. His father was a Nazi sympathizer, his grandfather, a Marxist, and his great-grandfather was possibly Kaiser Wilhelm I. That is more than a situation, it is an Oedipal tradition. Wikipedia article

By: Seth Edenbaum

Seth Edenbaum — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 14:45:37 +0000

Right and left both have modernist and anti-modern contingents: where’s the news in that? Liberals and neo-cons share ‘progressive’ values (optimism and moral clarity) that disgust those of us with longer memories (and better reading lists).

By: Russell Arben Fox

Russell Arben Fox — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 13:20:58 +0000

Gene—yes, y81 is almost certainly confusing the Wilders. Laura Ingalls Wilder, as one would expect of a 19th-century pioneer woman who said she wasn’t interested in ever having the vote, was basically apolitical, though in some of her local newspaper columns in the early 20th-century made it clear she was a prairie populist. Her daughter Rose Wilder, by contrast, became a journalist, went through a spectacular divorce, lived for years in Europe, wrote some bestselling novels, denounced FDR on the front page of the NY Times, described herself as a libertarian, and invested her money abroad so it couldn’t be taxed. Her books have been out of print for more than 50 years, of course. History shows which one was a more grounded person.

By: abb1

abb1 — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 09:39:09 +0000

This essay is dated 1964. He quotes San Francisco Chronicle that year:

The John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series about the United Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor,…The Xerox Corporation. The corporation, however, intends to go ahead with the programs.…

The July issue of the John Birch Society Bulletin…said an “avalanche of mail ought to convince them of the unwisdom of their proposed action—just as United Air Lines was persuaded to back down and take the U.N. insignia off their planes.” (A United Air Lines spokesman confirmed that the U.N. emblem was removed from its planes, following “considerable public reaction against it.”)

Birch official John Rousselot said, ”We hate to see a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy.”

I think by the 1960s all was lost already; the crazies had created their ‘great silent majority’.

By: Gene O'Grady

Gene O'Grady — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 05:48:55 +0000

y81—
There were two Laura Ingalls Wilders. Aren’t you confusing the mother with the (much less impressive) daughter? I have, of course, been wrong before.

By: Scott Eric Kaufman

Scott Eric Kaufman — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 01:43:49 +0000

When I saw the title of this one, I so thought I was gonna get a link.

By: y81

y81 — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 23:22:09 +0000

From these excerpts—all I know of this guy Viereck—he seems like one of those people who can’t stand to be on the winning side and therefore veers right when the left is ascendant and left when the right is ascendant. Some other examples that come to mind are Lewis Lapham (in the late 70s, Harper’s used to publish Thomas Sowell and denounce Teddy Kennedy) and Laura Ingalls Wilder (who supported Bryan but rejected FDR).

I suppose contrarians like those named are morally preferable to trimmers and sycophants like me, but only as individuals, not as policy guides, since they are not in fact thinking independently.

By: abb1

abb1 — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 19:04:46 +0000

Why is 1950’s prescient? Red-scares and witch-hunts started even earlier, in late 40s, and that’s when loads of scum started coming to the surface and taking over.

By: Randolph Fritz

Randolph Fritz — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 18:34:01 +0000

He wrote pretty decent poetry, too.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 15:46:32 +0000

Viereck had a pretty impressive Oedipal situation to deal with.