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June 24, 2008
The Politics of Predicting
The left has authored more atrocities than the right.
by
Private Papers
A version of this essay was published in The Fresno Bee, May 31, 2008.
Phillip Jenkins, respected historian at Penn State University, writes in The Los Angeles Times that there “is a sound basis in American political history” for predicting that the election of a Democratic president will cause “assassinations and bombings” by right wingers.
Such ghoulish predictions might best be ignored. But Professor Jenkins is not a lone voice; others have also predicted a coup d’état if the Democrats return to power.
Of course, these predictions are mostly election year hype, meant to suggest that the election of either Senator Obama or Clinton would be like the honest sheriff; imagine Gary Cooper, returning to town and having all the crooks gang up on him. And following from that is the implication that Republicans appeal to a constituency of right wing, angry-white-males, Rambos still seething over the betrayal in Vietnam and equally upset over a potential pullout from Iraq by either Obama or Clinton.
Could be.
But then the left certainly appeals to a constituency of resentful people. Take the followers of liberation theologian, Reverend Wright. And also consider those attracted to the less histrionic, but equally dangerous John Edwards, the opulent apostle of class hatred, who resides in a 28,000-square-foot home deep within his 102 acre estate which is situated on an island, connected to the mainland by a guarded causeway. Perhaps Senator Edwards, who preaches that a deep divide separates the rich from the poor, knows whereof he speaks.
But beyond election year hype, what does “American political history” show about the possibility of a right wing take over?
For the last 108 years, of the two assassinations and the 12 assassination attempts on American presidents, most all of them have been by carried out by individuals with troubled backgrounds, acting alone with vague, apolitical motives.
Two exceptions were when foreigners with political motives tried to kill American presidents. One was the attempt to shot President Truman by two Puerto Ricans and the other was the plot by a group of Iraqis to kill the elder President Bush.
But other assassination attempts were made by confused individuals like ‘Squeaky’ Fromme who approached President Ford with a gun in 1975, saying that she only wanted to talk to him. Or the loner anarchist who took an errant shot at FDR in 1933, but who wanted to assassinate either Herbert Hoover or the president.
Then there is Arthur Bremer, who wanted to shoot President Nixon in 1972 but settled for right wing Independent Party presidential candidate, George Wallace, whom he shot and paralyzed.
These are the deeds of confused people as was the man who sprayed the White House with an automatic weapon when Bill Clinton was president. The same applies to John Hinckley who had stalked President Carter and ended up wounding President Reagan in 1981.
Unfortunately, two presidents were assassinated in the 20th century: President McKinley was assassinated in 1901 by another loner anarchist. President Kennedy was assassinated by a Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine who had immigrated to Moscow, but became disillusioned with Soviet communism. And then, as James Piereson points out in Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, Oswald evolved into a forerunner of a new breed of leftists called “the New Left”, who revered third world dictators like Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. In common with other contemporary leftists, Oswald blamed the United States for much of the world’s problems.
Though the fact that a communist killed Kennedy is rarely mentioned, what is consistently pointed out is that Dallas was full of militant right wingers at the time of the assassination. Despite this, Oswald also came close to assassinating the strident conservative, General Edwin Walker.
So too, a case can be made that “a climate of violence” existed in the United States in the late 1960’s when Robert Kennedy, a most likely ascendant to the presidency, was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan.
America at that time did witness an increase in crime, urban riots, campus confrontations, the assassination of Dr. King. Thus after RFK’s assassination, playwright Arthur Miller condemned the United States for its violence, saying it was deserved because the country had tolerated injustice and poverty. Progressive historian Richard Hofstadter began to see violence as a key theme in American history.
But there was nothing particularly American about Sirhan. He was born in Jerusalem and immigrated to the United States with his Christian Palestinian parents when he was 12. He was a believer in Palestinian nationalism, and, thereby, hated Kennedy for supporting Israel which was the reason Sirhan committed his atrocity on June 5, the anniversary of the Six Day War. Sirhan’s hero was Egyptian President Nasser, “the Castro of the Middle East”, another “third way dictator” enshrined by much of the left.
So this dastardly act was committed in response to an ancient conflict in another part of the world about which Americans knew little. Thus it might well be seen as less a reflection of a ‘climate of violence’ in America, than as the first act of Middle East terrorism on American soil.
Sirhan’s writings were full of pro-communist, anti-capitalist and anti-American invective; like Oswald, he hated America. But neither of them were representative of nativist, right-wing militias intent on cannibalizing their own country.
So far one does not see any evidence of right wing coups. Quite the opposite, in fact, using the Kennedy assassinations as examples, one can see that left wing nuts were responsible for those despicable deeds.
Of course, it does not mean that right wing coups can’t happen, except that they should have happened by now, since such predictions have a history.
In the early part of the 20th century, respected writers like Jack London, John Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis wrote about right wing take-overs occurring in America. For example, Lewis’s 1935 ironic novel, It Can’t Happen Here dramatizes the rise of a silly fascist dictator in America.
Others within the left literati have exhibited a similar apprehension. Norman Mailer, in his otherwise brilliant 1948 novel, The Naked & the Dead, has a General Cummings manipulate the embittered, working class Sergeant Croft into destroying Lieutenant Hearn who is the conscience of the book. Thus Mailer sees America as a place where the powerful manipulate the resentful Archie Bunkers into destroying the progressives.
Another recent example in this genre is Phillip Roth’s tendentious The Plot Against America which is a counterfactual tale in which Charles Lindberg is elected president in 1940. In getting elected, he rides a wave of ‘conservative’ Republican resentment chock full of anti-Semitism and xenophobia.
The most explicit reflection on this theme was made by Walter Van Tilburg Clark in his classic western, The Ox Bow Incident. In the novel, a patrician Confederate officer, Major Tetley, leads a testosterone driven mob of cowboys into conducting a lynching. The major leads the charge because he is full of resentment for the defeat of the South in the Civil War.
As Clark wrote the book in the late 30’s, he saw parallels between the moral confusion in the old West and the rise of Nazism in Europe. The clinical title of his book is meant to show that, at least, in the area of frontier vigilantism a pedigreed bully used resentment and fear to lead a mob to commit a barbarous act. Thus, unscrupulous leaders, albeit in a limited arena, have manipulated mobs into committing atrocities even in America.
So Professor Jenkins and his like thinking colleagues are in a tradition that assigns blame to the easily duped working classes, those with “false consciousness” who don’t follow the enlightened routes offered by the elites.
Thus, if progressives, as represented by Senator Obama, should win in November, then gun toting and Bible toting right wingers will rebel. Of course, if the left loses in November, then the “false consciousness” of these rubes will be the reason for that also.
The source of this blame game is Marxism, or more specifically the neo-Marxism that became the default explanation because of the failures that besieged the “Soviet experiment” from its beginnings.
For example, Marxism has never made much headway among the working classes, the very proletariat that it was designed to elevate. So instead of junking the philosophy when it did not fit the facts, Marxists and their liberal apologists have shifted the blame elsewhere for collectivism’s failures. One of the obvious ways that this has been done is pointed out by Jonah Goldberg in his recent Liberal Fascism. As Goldberg writes: “. . . whenever the left has met with political defeat, it has cried, ‘Fascism!’ and declared that the fat cats were pulling the strings.”
Professor Jenkins may not realize it, but he is promoting a political agenda with an undistinguished, not to mention destructive history which included the killing of millions of people, among them millions of working people. We can forgive fiction writers who care little about facts when dramatizing Marxist mythology. But historians should know better.
Terry Scambray lives and writes in Fresno, California.