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The New York Sun
There is a long history in American politics of election-year polemics designed to paint one candidate or party as the personification of all that is evil in the world. In 1964, for example, a book by John Stormer, "None Dare Call It Treason," sold several million copies by portraying the Democratic Party as a hotbed of Communism. Now former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich has come forward with another such polemic, which makes a similar broad-brush attack on the Republican Party.
Mr. Reich charges that the Republican party has become totally controlled by right-wing nuts and is now but a short step away from fascism. Like the Stormer book, his is long on accusations and straw men but short on facts and analysis. "Reason" is far from reasonable and will not persuade the undecided. It is designed solely to fire up the juices of true believers and will appeal only to those who view books like Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" as models of objectivity. And it reads like it was written over a long weekend.
In the Reich worldview, "Radcons" (radical conservatives) now have total control of the Republican Party. They have imposed upon it an extreme agenda of sexual prudery, religious fundamentalism, racism, oppression of the poor and disadvantaged, imperialist foreign policy, corporatism, and systematic abrogation of every civil liberty. His support for this contention consists entirely of a few scattered statements by a few Internet bloggers, radio talk-show hosts, and newspaper columnists like Ann Coulter, who are known
for their hyperbole and hot tempered rhetoric.
Mr. Reich's methodology is equivalent to collecting the most inane comments posted at extreme left-wing Web sites like Democratic-Underground.com and saying that they represent the views of every Democrat. The Republican Party has its fringe element, as do the Democrats. But to elevate these ideas from the fringe to the mainstream without serious analysis and ample documentation is intellectually dishonest.
Further, there is no evidence in the book that any Republican in elected office or in a party leadership position actually holds the views Mr. Reich ascribes to the entire Republican Party. Mr. Reich ignores the real-world actions of Republican officeholders - that is to say, what the Republican Party actually does in power, rather than what a few would like it to do.
But having set up his straw men, Mr. Reich bravely knocks them down. It's not very hard to do, since virtually everything he accuses the Republican Party of representing would be abhorrent to all reasonable people. And because the Democratic Party opposes everything the Republican Party stands for, it must logically be the embodiment of all that is good and noble in American society.
There is a critical problem here, however. If the Republican Party is the in carnation of all that is evil and the Democratic Party represents all that is good, why have the American people been so mistaken in their electoral choices? How is it that Republicans have gone from virtual extinction in the 1970s to control of the White House, both houses of Congress, and 28 of 50 of the nation's governorships - including those in its largest states, New York and California ?
Naturally, Mr. Reich cannot accept that the American people agree with the Republican agenda (either in reality or as he caricatures it), so they must have been lied to, fooled, tricked, and misled. This results from the "vast right-wing conspiracy" first put forward by the Clinton White House to explain away its troubles with Monica Lewinsky, Whitewater, and other scandals in which it was embroiled.
In this fantasy, the Fox News Channel is more powerful than the united weight of ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN; the tiny Weekly Standard is more influential than Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report; and the Washington Times newspaper has a broader reach than the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. At the same time, poor, powerless liberals are ruthlessly censored by a radical conservative corporate complex run by Rupert Murdoch, Clear Channel radio, and Sinclair television - to name a few - and so have no way whatsoever of communicating their message.
Reading Mr. Reich, one would think that being a liberal in America today is only slightly less dangerous than being a Christian missionary in Saudi Arabia . Attorney General John Ashcroft is portrayed as the reincarnation of his 1918-21 predecessor, W. Mitchell Palmer, who once jailed a man simply because he said Vladimir Lenin was smart. Empowered by the unconstitutional Patriot Act, MrAshcroft appears to lurk around every corner, ready to arrest any well-meaning liberal who dares voice dissent.
In the Reich worldview, the American people have not rejected the Democratic Party because of any disagreement with its programs, policies, or record, but only because Democrats haven't gotten their message out. His advice is to be more vocal and aggressive in combating Republican hate; then, he says, the American people will return them to power. The possibility that they know perfectly well what the Democratic Party stands for - welfare, class warfare, a pacifist foreign policy, denigration of the military, coddling of criminals, affirmative action, radical feminism - is never considered.
This is nonsense, and Mr. Reich knows it. He is no fool. But he wants to sell books and make money, and so he has targeted the same book-buyers who have already made similar screeds by Mr. Franken, Michael Moore, Paul Krugman, and others bestsellers. It may work - the publisher is printing 60,000 initial copies. But this book is not going to change a single vote. The only people who will read this dishonest dreck are those who already believe that George W. Bush is a war criminal who belongs in jail and those, like me, who are forced to.
Copyright 2004 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC
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The New York Sun
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