"THE KOOKS" ARE WINNING

Seventy years ago, Richard Hofstadter attempted to describe what he saw as a new development in American Conservatism. Writing in “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” first described what a

“pseudo-conservative” is:

“Today the dynamic force in our political life no longer comes from the liberals who made the New Deal possible. By 1952 the liberals... could look back to a brief, exciting period in the mid-thirties when they had held power itself and had been able to transform the economic and administrative life of the nation... Moreover, a large part of the New Deal public, the jobless, distracted and bewildered men of 1933, have in the course of the years found substantial places in society for themselves, have become home-owners, suburbanites and solid citizens. Many of them still keep the emotional commitments to the liberal dissent with which they grew up politically, but their social position is one of solid comfort. Among them the dominant tone has become one of satisfaction, even of a kind of conservatism.

“There is, however, a dynamic of dissent in America today...Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for non-conformism, but is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality published five years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence.

“From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative. The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. . . . The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

“Who is the pseudo-conservative, and what does he want? It is impossible to identify him by class, for the pseudo-conservative impulse can be found in practically all classes in society, although its power probably rests largely upon its appeal to the less educated members of the middle classes. The ideology of pseudo-conservatism can be characterized but not defined, because the pseudo-conservative tends to be more than ordinarily incoherent about politics... Many of the most zealous followers of Senator McCarthy are also pseudo-conservatives, although there are presumably a great many others who are not.

“The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world... cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.”

Forty years ago, I could have lunch with a Republican staffer colleague in the California Legislature and talk could turn to the latest craziness coming from the Birchers in Orange County and we both might laugh about “the kooks,” but the fact was that it was only a few years earlier that the two California senate seats in Washington were occupied by Max Rafferty - the personification of an Orange county “kook” who had been the Superintendent of Education in Ronald Reagan’s first cabinet, where he went after the “liberal threat” to education (sound familiar today?), while the other seat had been held from 1965-71 by Hollywood song-and-dance man George Murphy, one of the enforcers of the Hollywood Blacklist. And of course the California Republican Party had been changed fundamentally by the takeover of the party machinery by Barry Goldwater’s supporters.

What Hofstadter was describing 20 years before our lunchtime laughter was already the power to be reckoned with in the California Republican Party and was responsible for the national ideological sorting of the two parties that began with Goldwater’s presidential campaign and sixty years later has resulted in each party being fairly ideologically homogeneous.

And already back then, seventy years ago, what Hofstadter accurately termed “pseudo-conservatism” was largely concerned with “facts” that were not facts. The “International Communist Conspiracy” didn’t exist; the minority of Americans who were communists were so far removed from any access to power that it was laughable to consider them a threat. But still, “The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

This is why I have said that Donald Trump didn’t create anything new in the Republican Party; he simply took advantage of what was already there.

Today’s issue of The Bulwark has two articles that demonstrate this.

Did you know that President Joe Biden has been tried and convicted on multiple felony charges, along with his son Hunter and brother James? Sentencing was initially slated for August 29, but that has now been pushed back to September 7.

These three members of the “Biden Crime Family” were convicted on August 17 after a bench trial in a Citizens’ Court in Boise, Idaho, presided over by Citizens’ Judge Michael Pendleton, of charges returned by a Citizens’ Grand Jury nearly two years earlier. The prosecutor in the case was Larry Klayman, founder of the groups Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch. The defendants put on no defense, which Klayman took as an admission that their actions—crimes, really—were indefensible.

Insane, yes? Yes indeed, definitely. But “People’s Prosecutor” (an interesting choice of terms) Larry Klayman, who is currently eleven months in to an eighteen-month court-ordered suspension of his law license by the District of Columbia Court of Appeal, over his alleged mishandling of a decade-old sexual harassment lawsuit.

According to his bio on the Freedom Watch website - the organization Klayman founded after being kicked out of Judicial Watch, which he also founded - Klayman is “known for his strong public interest advocacy in furtherance of ethics in government and individual freedoms and liberties.” The Southern Poverty Law Center currently describes him as “a pathologically litigious attorney and professional gadfly notorious for suing everyone from Iran’s Supreme Leader to his own mother... convening meaningless ‘citizens grand juries,’ and railing against an endless list of enemies. ”

Klayman is currently using the “conviction” of the “Biden Crime Family” in fundraising emails for Freedom Watch. The readers of World Net Daily, where he was a regular contributor from 1999-2021, are the likely targets of his latest grift. Or perhaps the audience for OAN, where he regularly appears.

Then there is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., currently a candidate for president in the Democratic primary, who is running with Republican support having been laughed out of the party for his world-class “kook-ness.”

Have you seen the legal ads on TV telling you that if you used the weed-killer Round Up, you should contact whichever ambulance-chaser is running the ad, since you have been exposed to what a court determined is a “carcinogenic”? That’s the work of RFK Jr. In 2018, he won a settlement of $290 million, representing a client who claimed he suffered from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a result of using Round Up, which uses the active ingredient glyphosate. Despite the case result, independent scientists have not found a causal effect between glyphosate and cancer. Unfortunately, scientific facts like that didn’t stop RFK Jr. from winning an enormous settlement for his client, when Bayer subsidiary Monsanto - desperate to make a damaging lawsuit go away - settled without going to trial. And now, “everybody knows” that using Round Up will give you cancer. The large sums have given rise to an industry of trial lawyers who make their living by skimming money from large class-action lawsuits that can be joined by just about anyone. As witness that TV ad you saw the other day.

Both Klayman’s “people’s court” decision and RFK Jr’s “legal decision by a court of law” - and the fact that both make money from these events - one by shilling the rubes and one by conning the court - demonstrate the state of affairs where acting “in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers,” is now so widespread that there is enough evidence of it to result in a scholarly article: “Partisan Schadenfreude and Candidate Cruelty,” in the latest issue of Political Psychology, as Jonathan V. Last pointed out in his newsletter this morning.

The article points out,” We’ve developed a political culture in which one party has affirmative policy goals and the second party is committed mostly to making the first party angry. And this incentive system has created a market in which the first party campaigns on healthcare reform and infrastructure spending while the second party campaigns on performative cruelty.”

Performative cruelty: Klayman claiming he has “convicted the Biden Crime Family” and they will be sentenced for that on September 7. RFK Jr claiming that Round Up gives you cancer. Both stir up today’s version of Hofstadters “pseudo conservatives.”

And nobody points at either of them and calls them what they are: A Kook. Being a Kook has somehow become “normal.”

Is there any difference between the claims of Klayman and RFK Jr and the claims Hofstadter cites that animated far right politics 70 years ago? “He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world.”

Hofstadter cites an article by Richard Rovere published in the summer of 1953 in which he pointed out that, “Constitution-amending had become almost a major diversion in the Eighty-third Congress. About a hundred amendments were introduced and referred to committee. Several of these called for the repeal of the income tax. Several embodied formulas of various kinds to limit non-military expenditures to some fixed portion of the national income. One proposed to bar all federal expenditures on ‘the general welfare’; another, to prohibit American troops from serving in any foreign country except on the soil of the potential enemy; another, to redefine treason to embrace not only persons trying to overthrow the government but also those trying to ‘weaken’ it, even by peaceful means.”

The article in Political Psychology has this: “We also document the existence of the acceptance of candidate cruelty, finding that more than one-third of Americans are willing to vote for a candidate of unknown ideological leanings who has ‘regularly stated’ a preference for enacting policies that ‘disproportionately harm’ supporters of the opposing party. . . . In doing so, we demonstrate that partisan schadenfreude offers more predictive power of this electoral preference than being ideologically extreme or identifying as a ‘strong partisan.’”

Donald Trump didn’t create any of this; his trial and conviction and incarceration won’t end it.

While we were busy laughing at them for the past sixy years, “The Kooks” have largely taken over the public debate.

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