Note: The posts for today and Sunday are a two part review of Charles Pierce’s “Idiot America” and David Neiwert’s “The Eliminationists”. The two books are very different, but there’s enough overlap that a two part review made more sense than two completely distinct posts. Today is more “Idiot America” and Sunday is more “The Eliminationists”, but there’s discussion of both books in each post.
One of the most profound and, after the last Administration, indisputably destructive elements of American politics the past few decades has been the gradual devolution of the Republican Party from a conservative one into a hard right one. This did not happen overnight, nor was it inevitable, but it did happen. One of the results of this transformation was an absurdity that Charles Pierce describes near the end of Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. At a Republican primary debate in New Hampshire one third of the nine men on stage said that they did not “believe” in the Theory of Evolution. Pierce describes this patently insane scene with typically wry prose, “However, since admitting that you don’t believe in evolution is tantamount to admitting that you plan to eradicate the national debt by spinning straw into gold, it should have disqualified the lot of them. In fact, it should give people pause about the entire Republican party that a third of its presidential field was willing to admit that their view of the life sciences had stalled in the 1840s.” One of the three was Mike Huckabee, who would eventually finish second to John McCain.
How did we reach this bizarro state of affairs? Dave Neiwert has a pretty simple theory and, helpfully, it’s right in his subtitle, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. Neiwert documents, with painstaking detail, how positions that used to occupy the far right of American political discourse, epitomized in the John Birch Society, came instead to dominate the highest levels of the Republican Party. It was a gradual process, one that could’ve been checked at any time had the elites of the Republican Party been willing to stand up and say “No” to the most radical of their supporters. But they weren’t willing to do that, the votes were needed and the money was too good. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
That both men have the word “How” in their subtitles is not a coincidence. They are both trying to explain how radical, almost revolutionary, right wing positions, which have long been a part of America, came to be so acceptable, so mainstream. Both were born in the 1950s and so they have seen this transformation first hand. Neither is happy about it, and nor should they be. Of the two, Neiwert has dug deeper, and as a result has the confidence to explicitly state the conclusion to which Pierce only alludes.
Which is not to say that Pierce has written a bad book. He has written an excellent book (it’s the book Rick Shenkman could’ve written if he’d been more enamored of his research than his ego). In fact there is one element where Pierce’s far surpasses Neiwert’s and that is in humor. Idiot America is genuinely funny (laugh out loud in a few places), and it treats right wing absurdities with the caustic scorn they deserve. Pierce begins with the eminently mockable Creation Museum in Kentucky, here and perhaps only here, you can see a dinosaur with a saddle. Why does the dinosaur have a saddle? Because the planet is only 6,000 years old and man and dinosaur coexisted, don’t cha know! But wait, isn’t that insane, like, provably so? Well, yeah, it is, but as Pierce moves through the Creation Museum it becomes hilariously apparent that the people behind the place have pre-answered any objection anyone may care to voice, including asking how Noah got those big ass dinosaurs on his teeny little ark.
Pierce takes the long view of American cranks, going back to the 19th century, and holding up a man named Ignatius Donnelly as a paragon of what a good crazy person is supposed to be. Donnelly wrote a bestseller called Atlantis which postulated that all civilizations sprang from that lost city; he became an international sensation. (Before this he was elected to Congress, Michelle Bachman take note.) Of course, Donnelly didn’t know he was crazy and as he kept acting crazy he became a laughingstock. What Pierce wants to know is why that mechanism has broken down. Why hasn’t Ann Coulter been laughed into a corner for claiming that Joseph McCarthy knew what he was talking about? Why hasn’t Rush Limbaugh been ignored off the airwaves for his bizarre and inconsistent antics? And, though Pierce doesn’t mention it, why hasn’t the lunatic anti-vaccination crowd been shamed into silence by the re-emergence of preventable diseases like the mumps?
To explain these things Pierce has formulated Three Great Premises of Idiot America which basically boil down to the idea that anything can be true if it sells, it’s popular and people really believe it. Any notion, no matter how easily disproved, no matter how relentlessly stupid, no matter how galactically insane, can become legitimate if it fulfills those three criteria.
To illustrate his point, Pierce takes some trips and tells well reported stories about what happens when real people start thinking that they live in a magical fantasy land. This includes a trip to Dover, Pennsylvania for the federal court case that demolished “Intelligent Design” and exposed it as merely the latest attempt by religious fundamentalists to undermine science education. He then goes to Florida, to the hospice that became a national embarrassment as right wing lunatics fought a public war over Terri Schiavo. This is maybe the best chapter in the book, as Neiwert interviews the police and hospice workers who had to live through a media nightmare that had no more basis in reality than the Boogie Man. Their stories tell the true cost of rampant stupidity, of death threats and intimidation caused by religious belief twisted toward political goals.
To explain why his three premises are effective now when they weren’t in the past, Pierce says basically that we have become complacent. We live in a society so prosperous and secure that there is no longer any real punishment for being horribly, spectacularly wrong. Too many, especially near the top of society, are so well insulated from the consequences of their actions that they can operate in a world of make believe.
Why listen to real experts on terrorism, who were uniformly certain that Iraq had nothing to do with the 2001 attacks, when the President already knows, with his Gut, who the real Bad Guys are? Isn’t he the President? Isn’t that enough? Well, no, it isn’t, but with so many resources at the government’s disposal the fantasy could be sustained for years. As Pierce writes near the beginning, “There is nothing more worthless to the cultural imagination that a persistently wrong idea that succeeds despite itself.” There is now a great lag between genuine failure and the recognition of failure, and in that gap Idiot America thrives. Success can be generated from thin air (think “Mission Accomplished”), and it can be made to last awhile, but it cannot be made permanent.
This is about where Pierce leaves off, and where to get to the deeper causes and uglier realities of persistently bad ideas we must turn to Neiwert. Because while Pierce is on the same track as Neiwert, he is only willing to hint at the implications of his conclusion. Writing in his penultimate chapter about the overtly creepy and utterly stupid tendency towards Great Man Worship that is engendered by Idiot America, he writes:
That’s how Andrew Card, George W. Bush’s chief of staff, could get up in front of a group of delegates from Maine during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York and tell them that the president looked upon the people of the United States – his nominal employers, after all – the way all of “us” looked at our children, sleeping in the night, and nobody mentioned to Card that there isn’t a single sentence proceeding logically from what he said that doesn’t include the word “Fatherland.”
That’s a very funny way to put it, not least because of the fact that it’s very true. Neiwert explores the implications.
