SELF-PROMOTION: My review of Steve Craig's book Out of the Dark: A History of Radio and Rural America appears in the new issue of the Journal of American Studies.
Also, the October Reason, currently wending its way to subscribers, includes my brief review of Ken MacLeod's novel The Restoration Game. Watch for it on newsstands.
The change was already underway in July, when Talking Points Memo aired the idea that Bush's exit had unleashed the right's hatred of Muslims. ("His being President and the nominal head of the GOP basically kept a lid on many of the fanatical Islamophobes...The Islamophobes no longer have anyone from up high to keep them quiet.") By mid-August, a Politicostory was spreading the idea that "Republican leaders have largely abandoned former President George W. Bush's post-Sept. 11 rhetorical embrace of American Muslims and his insistence -- always controversial inside the party -- that Islam is a religion of peace." Before long, it was possible to find the phrase "George W. Bush understood this" in a Maureen Dowd column, which is a bit like finding an argument for tax cuts in a Tom Frank column, an antiwar elegy in a Bill Kristol column, or a moment of humility in a Thomas Friedman column.
There's some truth to the TPM argument. Bush did make a special effort to reach out to Muslims, and not just in the aftermath of September 11. In an essay for Foreign Policy, Suhail Khan describes Bush's rapport with Islamic voters in 2000, back when 911 was just a phone number:
Muslim Americans are, by and large, both socially and economically conservative. Sixty-one percent of them would ban abortion except to save the life of the mother; 84 percent support school choice. Muslims overwhelmingly support traditional marriage. More than a quarter -- over twice the national average -- are self-employed small-business owners, and most support reducing taxes and the abolition of the estate tax. By all rights they should be Republicans -- and not long ago they were. American Muslims voted two to one for George H.W. Bush in 1992. While they went for Bill Clinton by the same margin in 1996, they were brought back into the Republican fold in 2000 by George W. Bush.
If Clinton was, as the author Toni Morrison once quipped, America's first black president, Bush was, at least momentarily, the country's first Muslim president. As early as 1999, he hosted a series of meetings between Muslim and Republican leaders, and paid a visit himself to an Islamic center in Michigan -- the first and only major presidential candidate to do so. The 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia was the first in either national party's history to include a Muslim prayer. On the campaign trail, Bush celebrated the faith of Americans who regularly attended a "church, synagogue, or mosque." After Muslim community leaders told him of their civil liberties concerns over a piece of 1996 immigration enforcement legislation signed into law by Clinton, Bush criticized it himself in one of his presidential debates against Vice President Al Gore.
The work paid off. By election day, Bush had been endorsed by eight major Muslim American organizations. He won more than 70 percent of the Muslim vote, including 46,200 ballots in Florida alone, prompting longtime conservative activist Grover Norquist -- one of the few prominent movement figures to caution against the current wave of mosque demagoguery -- to proclaim in the American Spectator that "Bush was elected President of the United States of America because of the Muslim vote."
But Khan also reports that the Muslim vote was already shifting back into the Democratic column in 2004, and that Barack Obama captured nearly 90 percent of America's Islamic ballots in 2008. While the elder George Bush attracted Muslim voters in office -- by, for example, being careful not to tilt heavily to one side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- his son started with strong Muslim support and lost it. That's partly a product of the president's policies. But it also surely reflects something else that Khan demonstrates, a fact that undermines the TPM theory: While W. did his best to keep anti-Muslim rhetoric out of his administration, he couldn't really restrain such sentiments in the larger conservative movement. (The TPM argument also fails to explain why these religious tensions didn't explode until Bush had been out of office for over a year. It's not as though the right-wing grassroots were quiet during that time, but before this summer almost all of their energy went into economic issues.)
Khan does not show, incidentally, that the Republicans have lost the Muslim vote for good. It's not as though the Democratic Party has been making Muslims welcome. As Khan points out, Obama didn't exactly reach out to Muslims in 2008. ("If the Republican candidates treated Muslims as the enemy, the Obama campaign treated them like untouchables, keeping the Democratic candidate's Muslim supporters at arm's length throughout the election.") During the 2006 hysteria over Dubai Ports World, the most vocal xenophobes were Democrats such as Chuck Schumer, who thought the prospect of an Arab company managing American ports would be a good opening to attack Bush on national security grounds. More recently, Republicans may have taken the lead in condemning Cordoba House, but relatively few elected Democrats have risen to defend the project. That led the liberal writer Adam Serwer to argue that the Dems have done nothing to earn lasting Muslim support:
The [pre-'60s] Democratic Party's virulent racism did not prevent black Americans from flocking to the Democratic Party when the Republican Party proved unable or unwilling to mount forceful defenses of black rights. There is no reason to believe that a Democratic Party that has been as timid as this one in defending the rights of Muslims and Latinos can expect their loyalties simply because the other party has been hostile to them. History suggests the opposite is true, and as bad as today's GOP is, they are no where near as racist as the Democratic Party once was.
Calvin Coolidge was a vocal defender of civil rights, but most black people don't look back at the Coolidge administration and think, "That's why I'm a Republican." Lyndon Johnson didn't just give a speech; he passed the most wide-reaching and comprehensive civil-rights legislation in American history. What has Obama done for Latinos or Muslims that is even remotely comparable?
In the last two decades, the Muslim vote has gone from the Republicans to the Democrats to the Republicans and then back to the Democrats again. It's still up for grabs today, though we might have to wait til an election where Dearborn plays the role of West Palm Beach before either party decides it's a constituency worth pursuing.
It played a lot of novelty songs -- everything from Utah Phillips' "Moose Turd Pie" to Toots and the Maytalls' reggae rendition of "Take Me Home, Country Roads" to an ancient and obscene-sounding western swing tune called "Here, Pussy, Pussy."
"Moose Turd Pie" is a spoken-word comedy routine, so I should have written "novelty records," not "novelty songs." I think what happened here was that I added Utah Phillips to the list while revising the chapter but neglected to fix the first part of the sentence.
Also, my November 2009 article "Rogue's Gallery" describes Sarah Palin as a supporter of the TARP bank bailout. In fact, while she endorsed the bailout during the 2008 campaign, she reversed herself in an interview with Barbara Walters about a week before my article appeared, describing the law (and, implicitly, her support for it) as a mistake. I don't think this undermines the point I was making -- indeed, I think it reinforces the article's larger theme -- but I would have phrased the passage differently if I'd been aware of her comment.
Finally: This isn't a correction, but it's been nagging at me. From an article I wrote in late 2003:
In the late '90s and early '00s, a wave of films played with the notion that what we experience as reality is a false and perhaps malevolent illusion....You can credit part of this glut to imitation. But too many of the projects were created simultaneously and independently for that to explain everything. For whatever reasons, audiences at the turn of the century were receptive to paranoid thrillers about inauthentic realities. Call it the demiurge cycle, after the Gnostic notion that our world is governed by a mad ersatz God.
With [The Matrix: Revolutions], the cycle stops -- not because hardly anyone seems to like it but because, unlike its two predecessors, it barely bothers to engage the idea that set the Matrix trilogy in motion. No longer trapped in a false world devised by an evil intelligence, our heroes are now trapped in an anthology of war movie clichés; no longer skeptical and alienated, they repeatedly proclaim the tritest sort of faith. When critics comment on the demiurge genre, they usually cite the novelist Philip K. Dick as its patron saint. Well, there is no trace of Dick in The Matrix: Revolutions, unless he secretly ghostwrote an episode of Battlestar Galactica.
When I wrote that, see, the words Battlestar Galactica signified "cheesy, childish sci-fi series of the '70s." After the article appeared, though, the show was rebooted as a much more adult program that dealt directly with one of Dick's favorite themes, the difference between the mechanical and the human. That's not to say the Battlestar revival was executed in a particularly Dickian way -- the episode and a half that I've seen definitely weren't -- just that my attempt at a clever putdown no longer makes sense.
One theme was the rise of perfectionism: the idea that individuals and societies could free themselves from sin. Sometimes, the leftist historian Eric Foner points out, this manifested itself as a "tendency toward social control"; other times it led its exponents "into an intense anti-institutionalism and, occasionally, all the way to anarchy," as the reformer's evangelical passion "came to challenge all existing institutions as illegitimate exercises of authority over the free will of the individual, and as interferences with his direct relationship with God." The first form of perfectionism produced the prison, the asylum, and the almshouse, authoritarian institutions that exploded in the reform era. The second perfectionism spawned the anarchism of Adin Ballou, Henry Clarke Wright, and the young William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist who did the most to popularize what became known as the "no government" position. "Unquestionably," the former Federalist wrote, "every existing government on earth is to be overthrown by the growth of mind and moral regeneration of the masses. Absolutism, limited monarchy, democracy--all are sustained by the sword; all are based upon the doctrine, that 'Might makes right;' all are intrinsically inhuman, selfish, clannish, and opposed to a recognition of the brotherhood of man." The Garrisonites rejected politics entirely, stressing nonviolent action instead.
There was a big gulf between the two brands of reformers. But to the extent that they shared the perfectionist impulse, it was possible to flip from one side of the divide to the other. When the Civil War broke out, for example, Garrison abandoned his pacifist anarchism and became a pro-war nationalist. Another anti-state abolitionist, Gerrit Smith, endorsed not just war but conscription, and at one point complained that Abraham Lincoln was too respectful of constitutional liberties. Smith is an especially interesting case, because he proved it is possible to espouse both sorts of perfectionism at the same time. Before the Civil War, he usually sounded like a radical libertarian. Arguing that "Government owes nothing to its subjects but protection," he opposed slavery, tariffs, subsidies for internal improvements, public debt, public schools, and the idea that government should protect "the morals of its subjects." Yet he also favored a ban on alcohol. This combination of views is hard to fathom today, but it felt natural at a time when the rhetoric of the temperance movement drew heavily on the rhetoric of the abolitionists, with prohibitionists promising to liberate drunkards from the "slavery of drink."
