[lbo-talk] Majority Of Republicans Think Obama Didn't

SA s11131978 at gmail.com
Thu Nov 26 07:46:33 PST 2009


Michael Pollak wrote:


>
>> Picking up my copy of Fred Logevall's _Choosing War_, I see that
>> Richard Russell, the conservative Georgia House Speaker, told the
>> president in Dec. 1963: "[We should] spend whatever it takes to bring
>> to power a government that would ask us to go home."
>
> You realize of course that if you use this as evidence, you'd have to
> say that everyone in the elite today is for getting out of Afghanistan
> :-)

Yes, that's exactly my point! I think the arguments we're trying to make here aren't mutually exclusive. When I say that in 1964 much of the liberal elite privately thought a war in Vietnam was bad idea of highly doubtful necessity, I'm obviously not saying "therefore, there was no Vietnam war." Instead, I'm saying that we have to look for an explanation for the war other than "the elite consensus couldn't tolerate a third-world country leaving the capitalist system."

It's exactly like Afghanistan - which is why the Obamites are apparently canvassing historians now about how things went down in Vietnam: So Obama decides to send 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, yet my distinct impression (not that I'm following Afghanistan closely) is that most sane elites would have a very hard time, under a dose of truth serum, saying that a Taliban takeover would really be that much of a threat to the world. (I mean, didn't Jim Jones himself say that not long ago?) Yet no one wants to be the one to get up and say out loud, "the Taliban aren't a much of a threat." Would you want to go on O'Reilly and say that if you were Chuck Schumer?


> This seems to pretty much concede my point that they were the
> exceptions who proved the rule. They were smarter the rest, they were
> righter than the rest, and everyone allowed them to speak because they
> were so respected. But their position was recognized by everyone,
> including them, as being the opposite of the elite common sense.

For the reasons laid out above, I think it's not so straightforward determining what was "elite common sense" in 1964 America. Is it what politicians said in stump speeches? What they said on Meet the Press? What they said behind closed doors at the CFR? What their foreign policy aides said behind closed doors at the CFR?

For example: If you read Dean Rusk's speeches you'll get the sense he was the most mindless Cold Warrior imaginable. (And he was.) Yet in the famous 1966 televised Senate hearings, Fulbright accused him of believing that a Communist victory anywhere was a threat to America - and he replied something to the effect of "That's ridiculous, of course I don't believe that!" Because when you got right down to it, even back then it was hard for a "thinking man's" anticommunist to agree with a statement so blatantly out of line with geopolitical axioms.


> Here I'm intrigued. I can see how the split ultimately leads to the
> idea of playing off one against the other 10 years later. But I don't
> see how at this period it changes the basic fear that every country
> "we" lose "they" gain, and that when one country leaves it encourages
> five others. At first sight it would just seem that we've got 2
> opponents rather than one: no real gain.

Why does anything change 10 years later? The same logic applies. When the Sino-Soviet split first began appearing in the early 1960's, the notion that the two Communist powers could be enemies seemed so obviously in contradiction with the eternal verities of the Cold War that for a while the standard conservative line was that it was all a ruse put on to fool purehearted Christians. It took a little while before sane right-wingers decided to fall back on the argument you outline above - "they may be divided against each other, but they're united against us." But among CFR types nobody would try to claim it was no real gain. The impact on Cold War thinking was really electric, even at relatively popular levels - it's just not really remembered that way because (a) it happened gradually and (b) not many people paid attention to all this pointy-headed forner stuff. Phrases like "Communist monolith," "Sino-Soviet bloc," "One-fourth of the world" had been so deeply embedded in American politican culture in the 1950's. Now all that was over.

SA



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