Civil Commotion

Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, loathed Dwight Eisenhower with a passion. He was, in Welch’s view, a “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy.” Even William F. Buckley, who hated Eisenhower’s socially liberal and fiscally conservative mindset with an equal intensity, thought Welch went too far and led the campaign to push the John Birch Society out of Republican politics.

So: Would the Republicans today nominate as its candidate for the presidency the man who pushed development of the Interstate Highway System, funded America’s lead in computer science, and insisted that NASA be under civilian control? Not if these quotes tell us anything about Eisenhower’s thinking.

• This world of ours… must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

• Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

• Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

• In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

• You don’t lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.

• When you put on a uniform, there are certain inhibitions that you accept.

• Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.

• Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.

• We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.

• Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

• When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

• In most communities it is illegal to cry ‘fire’ in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

• The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.

• How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

The Republicans have ceased to be the conservative political party in any meaningful sense of the word; they are the radical party, intent upon dismantling all the things that actually made America exceptional, and replacing it with a plutocracy guarded by pious morons.

One way of illustrating how insane the Republican Party has become over the past decade is to compare it to the right-wing ‘extremists’ of a generation ago — to Barry Goldwater, say, whose 1964 defeat is regarded, still, as a sort of benchmark for an electoral thrashing. Lyndon Johnson carried 44-states, and the vote in the electoral college was 486/52.

Can anybody, anywhere, even imagine the contemporary Republican Party nominating a man who says things like this?

• Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies.

• My faith in the future rests squarely on the belief that man, if he doesn’t first destroy himself, will find new answers in the universe, new technologies, new disciplines, which will contribute to a vastly different and better world in the twenty-first century.

• I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.

• On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both.

  I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in “A,” “B,” “C” and “D.” Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?

  And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of “conservatism.”

• Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.

• When you say “radical right” today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.

• The big thing is to make this country, along with every other country in the world with a few exceptions, quit discriminating against people just because they’re gay. You don’t have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that’s what brings me into it.

• Having spent 37 years of my life in the military as a reservist, and never having met a gay in all of that time, and never having even talked about it in all those years, I just thought, why the hell shouldn’t they serve? They’re American citizens. As long as they’re not doing things that are harmful to anyone else… So I came out for it.

I think it’s likely Goldwater met lots of gays but it just wasn’t discussed then, but you get the idea.

Most importantly, contrast his forward-looking views with the bizarre pastiche of anti-intellectual, often racist and usually xenophobic Protestant fundamentalism that is today’s GOP — and you realize that the man easily caricatured in the ’60s as a hawkish Strangelove would be dismissed today by the modern Republican Party as a blinking-neon liberal.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: Concerning the Slander of the so-called Evil Qualities

§367   My kind of “pity” — This is a feeling for which I can find no adequate term: I feel it when I am in the presence of any squandering of precious capabilities, as for instance when I think of Luther: what power and what insipid problems fit for backwoodsmen! (At a time when the brave and light-hearted scepticism of a Montaigne was already possible in France!) Or when I see someone standing below where he might have stood, thanks to the development of a set of perfectly senseless accidents. Or even when, with the thought of man’s destiny in my mind, I contemplate with horror and contempt the whole system of modern European politics, which is creating the circumstances and weaving the fabric of the whole future of mankind. Yes, to what could not become of “man” if! This is a kind of “compassion” although there is really no passion that I share.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: Concerning the Slander of the so-called Evil Qualities

§366   To think that the history of all moral phenomena may be simplified, as Schopenhauer thought — that is to say that pity is to be found at the root of every moral impulse that has ever existed hitherto, is to be guilty of a degree of nonsense and naiveté worthy only of a thinker who is devoid of all historical instincts and who has miraculously succeeded in evading the strong schooling in history which the Germans, from Herder to Hegel, have undergone.

Religion and racism go together, like PB&J. All religions are just cults that made it to the mainstream, and all cults need the other. It’s just exactly as Eric Hoffer once said: “Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”