Age of Folly by Lewis H. Lapham

Author:Lewis H. Lapham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

2004

22.Propaganda Mill

When in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?

—Richard Hofstadter

Trundled into Madison Square Garden in August 2004 for the Republican nominating convention, President George W. Bush affirmed the great truths preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal—government the problem, not the solution, the free market the answer to every maiden’s prayer—and in the press gallery listening to the rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin I found myself asking the same question that Richard Hofstadter had asked of the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco that nominated as its candidate Barry Goldwater, Senator from Arizona, declaring the American government the enemy of the American people.

The “basic American consensus” in 1964 was firmly liberal in character and feeling, assured of a clear majority in both chambers of Congress as well as a sympathetic hearing in the print and broadcast press. Even the National Association of Manufacturers was still aligned with the generous impulse of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, accepting of the proposition, as were the churches and the universities, “that government must do for people what people cannot do for themselves.”1

And yet, seemingly out of nowhere and suddenly at the rostrum of the Cow Palace, here was Goldwater, cowboy-hatted herald of enlightened selfishness portraying government not as a guarantor of the country’s freedoms but as syndicate of quasi-Communist bureaucrats poisoning the wells of commercial enterprise with “centralized planning, red tape, rules without responsibility, and regimentation without recourse.” A band played America the Beautiful, and in a high-noon glare of klieg light the convention delegates beheld a militant captain of capitalist jihad (“extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”), known to favor the doctrines of forward deterrence and preemptive strike (“let’s lob a nuclear bomb into the men’s room at the Kremlin”), believing that poverty was proof of bad character (“lazy, dole-happy people who want to feed on the fruits of somebody else’s labor”), convinced that Mammon was another name for God.

The star-spangled oratory didn’t draw much of a crowd on the autumn campaign trail. The electorate in 1964 wasn’t interested in the threat of an apocalyptic future or the comforts of an imaginary past, and Goldwater’s reactionary vision in the desert faded into the sunset of the November election won by Lyndon Johnson with 61 percent of the popular vote. The suburban sheriffs on their palomino ponies withdrew to Scottsdale and Pasadena in the orderly and inoffensive manner of the Mongol hordes retiring from the gates of thirteenth-century Vienna.

Departed but not disbanded. As the basic American consensus has shifted over the last forty years from a liberal to a conservative bias, so also the Senator from Arizona has come to be seen as a prophet in the western wilderness, apostle of the rich man’s dream of Heaven that placed Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and provides the G. W. Bush Administration with the sound and fury of both its domestic and foreign policy.

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