fpb | (no subject)

The worst feature of the American right is its astonishing, almost unbelievable ability to rewrite its memory - both individually and collectively.

Take for instance the last presidential election. You can hardly read a conservative blog without finding, at least every third day, some vituperative attack on John McCain, in terms that would suggest that he had given away a certain victory. You would think that the 2008 campaign was some sort of conservative triumph, thrown away by an incompetent candidate; rather than an election in which the Republicans were so unpopular that the Democrats could have run the yellow dog of the old joke and won by a comfortable majority. You would think that McCain was not running against the whole establishment, national and foreign, and against the unspoken but greedy desire to have a black President. You would never think that, against all the odds, he had not run the most successful Republican campaign of the year, infinitely more successful than the congressional and state campaigns, capped with the star-making discovery of Sarah Palin (of whom the same blogs speak as though she were the sworn enemy of John McCain - and never mind who had called her to national and international prominence); as if the numbers did not prove that, until the collapse of Lehmann Brothers holed his campaign below the waterline, he had managed, against all the odds, to come even against Barack Obama and with a real chance of victory!

Even worse is the delusion that is feeding the fires of conservative revolt - that the reform of healthcare is some sort of nefarious plot sprung in secret by plotting Democrats. Anyone who had followed the campaign of 2008 should remember that if there was a mandate for anything, it was health reform. The pressure for it was so obvious that the Republicans had to present a set of alternative proposals of their own. But the yelling Republican mobs all act as though there was nothing wrong with American health care, as though the Democratic President and two-house majority had not been returned with a clear mandate for reform, and as though the whole thing were a violation of the popular will! People who actually voted for candidates who clearly had offered varieties of health care reform turn out in their hundreds of thousands to shout their rage at this undesired surprise.

Of course people who can so easily revise their past do not always show a grip of reality in other ways. Who do the same blogs think would have made a better candidate than McCain? My impression is - and please, hold on tight, because I know that this is an enormity - Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee! The very mention of two such names in one bracket shows a considerable degree of confusion. Huckabee, while unelectable because of his Creationism and bizarre ideas of taxation, certainly does represent a strong section of the Republican grass roots; but Romney is not just a RINO, but a man with no principles of any kind. Governing Massachusetts, he showed nothing but hostility to pro-life forces and conservatives of every kind; having barely stepped out of that very liberal post and posture, straightaway he proceeded to discover in himself a number of pro-life and pro-family feelings that were not, to say the least, evident as governor barely six months earlier! Does such a man not deserve the description I bestowed on him two years ago: "sleazy dealmaker"? And yet - what is really breathtaking - his name occurs again and again in the list of favoured and approved "conservative" candidates promoted by big-name conservative columnists such as Ann Coulter; whereas the only people who should be glad of a Romney candidacy - and who did everything in their power to promote one - would be the Karl Rove, deal-making party leadership that hates real conservatism like the plague.

Many things may be said against liberals and allied forces; and I have said one or two. But faced with this amazing ability to forget and rewrite one's own most recent past - an ability that escapes the charge of mendacity only because most of the people who share it so obviously believe what they say - can anyone really blame them for the famous insult that conservatives are "ignorant and easily led"?