Why the Right Wing is so Brazen and Bellicose While the Left Wing is so Meek and Mild
Why the Right Wing is so Brazen and Bellicose While the Left Wing is so Meek and Mild
BY
David Gottfried
The right wing certainly blazed with bloody bluster on January 6, seizing the Capital, storming the stage of national and international politics and doing the sort of thing that the far left, in the United States, had always dreamed of doing but hasn’t had the balls to do for almost fifty years. (Of course, I despise the Trumpian insurrection on Capitol Hill).
First, this essay will explain that violence is sometimes efficacious. (It should not be necessary to explain this, but my readers are Americans and most Americans have no conception of Real Politik) Then, I will rely on Daniel Bell’s psychosexual political theories to demonstrate why the American left once simmered with violence and is now as peaceful as a neutered puppy.
A) THE EFFICACY OF EXTREMISM
Of course, one might claim that if one is an extremist, one will fail. The conventional view holds that blistering, bull-dozing political tactics will inflame opposition against extremism and defeat the party which fights with vigor and violence. However, a review of contemporary political history, in the United States, shows that the opposite is often true and that ferocity and violence often pay off.
For example, in the immediate aftermath of the Communist Tet Offensive, the United States’ Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to send an additional 206,000 troops to South Vietnam. (This would have brought our troop levels from roughly 500,000 to 700,000) Previously, whenever the generals wanted to send more men to Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson had always said yes. However, Johnson refused to escalate the war any further. Very simply, potent and sometimes violent political opposition in this country made further escalation untenable. In 1968, some people believed that America would convulse in left wing revolution within 6 to 18 months. The center left consensus that had governed America since the Great Depression had unraveled. As Andrew Kopkind wrote in August of 1967:
“The civil War, and the foreign one, have murdered liberalism in its official robes.”
Andrew Kopkind, the New York Review of Books, August 1967.
(I should hasten to add that Kopkind is defining “liberalism” as academics and philosophers define the term. This is very, very different from the definition of the term in contemporary, American electoral politics)
Some observers believe that Johnson softened his Vietnam policies because of the anti-war candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, but Johnson most probably turned down the Generals’ request, to send an additional 206,000 troops to Vietnam, before McCarthy’s electoral upset in the New Hampshire primary and Robert Kennedy’s entry into the race four days later. The bulk of the evidence supports the proposition that the febrile and explosive political climate in this country forced Johnson’s hand and stopped further escalation of the war.
Similarly, the gay rights movement did not get a head of steam until it transcended the confines of legality and pussy-footed peacefulness. Prior to 1969, advocates for gay rights were straight-laced, non-violent and utterly inconsequential. Then, in June 1969, the Stonewall riots erupted and the modern gay rights movement was born. When gay men attacked policemen, gay rights earned the credibility and respect that had eluded it for decades.
Understand something and understand something well: 10 brilliant professors can compose a brilliant, flawless manifesto advocating a particular policy, and they can release this to the media and it will get absolutely no attention whatsoever.
However, a complete and utter dingbat can compose an absurd and meaningless rant, and his rant will blaze across CBS, NBC, and all the other media platforms that infantilize the political discourse, if he bolsters his rant with a Molotov cocktail in Grand Central Station. We live in a society enamored of Hollywood, glamor and violence. People want “lights, camera, action” as in bombs, bullets and barricades. Anything else is a goddamn snooze.
B) DANIEL BELL’S CONSIDERATION OF THE MASCULINE PROTEST PHENOMENON IN LEFTIST ACTIVISM
The left which had once seemed so incendiary, which had once flashed with promises of mayhem and tumult, suddenly became, in the 1970’s, as soft and as pliable as a playboy kitten. Although the soundtrack of the left had once bellowed with John Lennon (“If you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out – IN,” the song “Revolution”), Jagger (“I’ll shout and scream, I’ll Kill the King, I’ll rail at all his servants,” the anthem “Street Fighting man”) and Dylan (“We’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls,” the prophetic song, “The times they are a changing”), by the end of the 1970’s the music that once roared like the stormy Atlantic became as pacific and as putrid as a swamp in Alabama as we were accosted by sound waves of lard from “musicians” such as Donna Summers, the Captain and Tennille and a host of birdbrains that made we want to blow up the broadcasting towers of every AM station in the nation. (This is just hyperbolic comedy; I never planned to blow anything up.)
I think the enervation of the Left, in part, came about because of a phenomenon discussed by Daniel Bell, in “The End of Ideology,” which was published in 1960. I read this book in 1980 so pardon me if my recollection is a bit rusty.
Daniel Bell said that much of the energy and elan of contemporary leftist politics was derived from the “masculine protest phenomenon.”
The masculine protest phenomenon was a process, discussed by Freud, in which a male aspired to fierce and sometimes violent, ultra-masculine behavior to compensate for feelings and/or fears of homosexuality and/or effeminacy. Daniel Bell said that the leaders of the left, in the 20 th Century, were very often men with a macho aura and that this macho, which manifested itself in strident and severe political tactics, gave leftist politics its rocket fuel.
For example, Fidel Castro exuded unparalleled macho. Bearded and shouting, he was a hairy ape of an intellectual ready to dynamite pentagons and princes and the money changers of Park Avenue. He thrilled and stimulated the modern far left in America which found mainstream America, in its complacency and corpulence, exasperatingly sedate, soft and hence somewhat feminine. (Norman Mailer, the macho madman of literature in the 50’s and 60’s who extolled leftist extremism in “The Armies of the Night,” contended that President Eisenhower was effeminate.)
Indeed, the right wing in America unconsciously suggested that the left was fueled by macho. For example, in the 1960 Presidential election, Lyndon Johnson, in his speeches to Southern and “down home” country audiences, said that he would give Fidel Castro a “bath, “shave him” and “spank him.” Lyndon Johnson’s oratory was a form of soft porn of the gay, bondage and discipline, variety.
Also, Daniel Bell contended that the Bolshevik revolution was fueled by disgust with perceived effeteness and effeminacy in the Russian aristocracy.
As I write this, I think that what Daniel Bell said is evident in many, many revolutionary movements and rebellions. I think the American revolutionists and the men of the French Revolution rebelled against the perceived softness and effeminacy of a white-wigged, perfumed aristocracy. Also, both the Chinese Maoists, and the early Zionist Kibbutzniks, were rebelling against a sort of effete scholarship in Chinese and Jewish culture. The Maoists thought that classical Chinese education, which entailed the memorization of thousands of myths and/or accounts of the past, did not change society and was, in its impotence, somewhat effeminate. The early Zionist Kibbutzniks, who were often fiercely socialistic, wanted to create a new Jew. They wanted to replace the dephysicalized. “intellectual” Jew of Europe, whose life was mired in ancient, Talmudic tracts and was under the gun from anti-Semitic violence, with a Jew who would wield the farmer’s hoe and the soldier’s gun.
THE ADVENT OF FEMINISM AND THE WANING OF THE LEFT
The feminist movement achieved top billing in American politics in around 1970. Of course, contemporary feminism had been germinating and growing throughout the 1960’s, but feminist concepts were largely under the radar until 1970, and during the 60’s, most Americans were oblivious to the theories articulated by Betty Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique.”
When Feminism made its big splash in the Seventies, it was associated with liberal democrats and with the left in general.
(The feminist linkage with the Left was by no means a foregone conclusion as A) women were more likely than men to vote for the republican candidate for president than the democratic presidential candidate in every election from 1920 through 1960, B) prior to 1972, Republican national conventions repeatedly endorsed the equal rights amendment for women while Democratic conventions ignored it, C) industrial unions, which were the base of the left, were largely male and D) many women, immune from the draft, enjoyed being war hawks from a safe distance. For example, Robert Kennedy once said that Lyndon Johnson wanted to seat Kate Smith, who belted-out renditions of “G-d Bless America” at pro war rallies, on a commission to review our Vietnam policy)
Feminism entailed the rejection of macho. The feminist movement had no place for a contingent of rowdy men.
As the Democratic Party, the center-left and genuinely leftist politics became wedded to feminism, the left was pruned of any manifestations of macho.
The loudest song in the soundtrack of the Democratic Party became Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman hear me roar” and the Weathergirls’ “It’s raining men,” (The women in the latter song have an oober vulgarity and grossness guaranteed to make 2 out of 5 men instantly gay.)
The Democratic Party learned to whine, purr and curtsey whenever Nancy Reagan entered a room.
The Democratic Party played dead while Republicans implemented an anti Robinhood economic policy of taking from the middle class and poor and giving to the rich, eviscerated the voting rights act, curtailed environmental regulations, and put immigrant children in cages.
Yes, the right wing putsch on the Capitol was horrifying and incontestably criminal. But I just wish a little bit of that bravado and boldness could find its way into the desiccated, dainty and dreary American left.