A leading conservative trope these days seems to be a genuine (although I wonder how genuine) puzzlement over liberal anger. For reasons we'll get to shortly, the Fourth of July strikes me as a very appropriate occasion on which to explain that anger's sources. Permit me, then, as a certain famous American document once put it, to submit these facts to a candid world.
Here, distilled into four paragraphs, is the liberal interpretation of the last 10 years. After a long and in some ways well-earned stroll in the wilderness, Democrats finally elect one of their own to the presidency. He is a prodigiously talented man. He has flaws, to be sure, and some of them are important. But far more important is the way the rules of the game change upon his ascension. On election night, the nation's leading Republican goes on television and snorts that the victory is illegitimate; from that point on, a campaign is waged to destroy -- not tarnish or discredit or soften up, but destroy -- the new president and his wife. This campaign has no precedent in American political history. (Please spare us the Alexander-Hamilton-and-his-mistress parallel; the 1790s are not parallel to today's world, and Hamilton was attacked by one yellow journalist, not a network of operatives with tens of millions of dollars to spend.) Finally, he is caught in flagrante. Even then, the public asserts directly and repeatedly that it does not consider the offense a high crime or misdemeanor.
But no matter. Against the clear will of the people, impeachment proceeds. It fails, but the hounding, again mostly over pseudo-scandals (like a West Wing ransacking) that never happened but are endlessly hyped by a frivolous media, continues. And in its way, this technique succeeds: What was objectively a bountiful and comparatively humane period in American history -- prosperity, peace, low crime, reduced poverty, international goodwill; an era that should have demonstrated that Democrats knew how to run the country and left the GOP badly marginalized -- is successfully tarnished.
So the vice president seeks the presidency. He runs a soggy campaign, true. But again, it's beyond dispute that the majority of Americans who go to the polls intend for him to be the president. Yet he loses -- according to the rules, at least. But somehow the experience of the previous eight years has left us with the distinct feeling that, had the situation been reversed, other rules would have been found to ensure the same result. We are admonished to "get over it" by people we know would not have gotten over it if things had gone the other way.
The Republican takes over. For eight months, he convinces precious few who didn't vote for him that he's the man for the job. But then unprecedented tragedy occurs. Americans, the vast majority of liberals included, rally around their country; by and large we support War No. 1. We have serious reservations about War No. 2. But by now something more disturbing than a mere policy dispute has occurred. By now, simply asking questions, or refusing to accept the government's assertions at face value, is denounced as something tantamount to treason. We find this, um, troubling: Open debate and vigorous dissent, we were raised to believe, were once considered the quintessential American values. Now, they are taken as prima facie evidence of anti-Americanism. (We note also how ardently the other side seemed to believe in vigorous dissent when its members were the dissenters.) In Georgia, a man (and sitting senator) who sacrificed his body for his country is labeled unpatriotic. The president has it well within his power, by simply uttering a few morally forceful sentences, to put an end to this madness. But the demonization of the other side is what keeps him afloat politically, and he refuses to do so -- and, in the Georgia instance, goes so far as to implicitly play along.
Sorry, folks. We have a hard time interpreting all this with equanimity. Liberal anger is not based on the fact that George W. Bush is "stupid," or that Florida was stolen, or that Rush Limbaugh is a big (if no longer fat) idiot who feeds a daily diet of lies to his listeners. At bottom -- and this is why Independence Day is relevant -- the anger is about the fate of the country. Conservatism is one thing; it is a legitimate way of seeing the world, though one I obviously disagree with. But the contemporary radical right is another thing altogether. Its project, top to bottom, is to remake the country in ways that, well, let's just say they want to turn America into a place we won't recognize.
For example, here comes Ann Coulter with a new "book" rehabilitating Joe McCarthy. OK, it's only Ann Coulter, and she's a nut. But actually it's not only Ann Coulter; liberal anti-Americanism is the theme of several recent right-wing books (by Mona Charen, Sean Hannity and that 13-year-old boy pundit). Furthermore, wait two or three years for a "scholarly" book or documentary (written or made with right-wing funding) to come out "proving" that McCarthy was a wronged man. And finally, watch The New York Times, in the interest of being either "fair" or mischievously counterintuitive or both, give it a thumbs-up.
So yeah. We're pissed. And being counseled to cool it by conservatives doesn't make us any less pissed. It rings with all the sincerity of a husband smacking his wife for a few years and then lecturing her that anger won't solve anything.
Even so, one part of the right-wing critique is, alas, true: Anger doesn't win elections. Moderate voters don't share our anger, and they're more interested in hearing about what kind of country we want to make. This doesn't mean the anger isn't legitimate. It is legitimate. Given the radical right's plans for the country, well, somebody needs to be angry, and for a lot of people, it's a dandy motivator. But it does mean that we don't need to wear it on our sleeves when we're talking to people who don't feel it themselves.
Michael Tomasky will become executive editor of the Prospect in September. His columns appear on Wednesdays at TAP Online.
