I can’t tell you how many times friends have declared, apparently believing what they’re saying, that the times are worse than ever: the kids more insolent, the wars more horrific, the price of goods never higher, the future never more uncertain.
My response has always been to ask if they’d like to trade lives with, say, any typical American citizen during the Civil War, or take their chances during the deadly flu pandemic of 1918, or maybe try supporting a family during the Great Depression.
One might think that right-wing crazies have never been crazier, screaming at Obama about birth certificates, death panels, and FEMA concentration camps . . . but right-wing crazies have always been crazy, and I think we have a long way to go in the current debate before we see genuine crazy.
The Washington Post’s Rick Perlstein talked about this in an editorial today, reminding us that irrationality and fear have never been far away from politics:
In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as “20 years of treason” and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House “found in the files a blueprint for socializing America.”
When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America’s nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles — instead of long-range bombers — and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today’s tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: “Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I’m for hanging him!”
Before the “black helicopters” of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a “civil rights movement” had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would “enslave” whites. [. . .]
[. . .] The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.
I remember Republicans in Congress describing federal agents as “jack-booted thugs” during the Clinton administration. The same Republicans couldn’t praise, protect, arm, or legally empower federal law enforcement officials enough during the ensuing Republican administration; pretty soon, now that we have a Democratic administration again, they’ll turn back against them, and they won’t merely call them jack-booted thugs this time around . . . look at the comparisons they’re already making between Obama and Hitler.
In spite of constant conservative mouth-foaming and carpet-chewing over the past several decades, we managed to implement social security, end school segregation, pass civil rights legislation, and set up Medicare and Medicaid. We’ll get there on health care reform too; it’s just going to take a while.
Don’t lose heart over the crazies. They’ve always been with us and always will be. And really, things have been worse . . . far worse.