Maybe the secret of the whole thing is that the US bribed Gorbachov with a billion dollars to shut it down.

The importance of 9/11 isn’t the people killed, so to speak. The US loses more people each year to traffic accidents than were lost that one day. It’s that the war with the Islamists has the potential to go on and kill a lot more. And to destroy important parts of Western Civilization. The US is very strong.

Still, we must remember the US would win over al-Queda even if the US did nothing for 10 years after 9/11. Not that that would be the best plan…

Regarding prognostications about the fall of the Soviet Union. I recall articles in US News and World Report in the early 80’s suggesting severe calamity in the Soviet Union due to economic collapse, but dismissed them.

When I was at Columbia University near the end of the decade studying national security topics the Soviet specialists like Legvold were all in thrall of the charm of Gorbachev and perestroika. I don’t recall any of the discussions taking place at that time hinting at the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact.

I would say that Reagan was like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz in only one sense. He DID throw the bucket of water. But unlike Dorothy, Reagan knew that his policy of throwing cold water on the cold war was the only way to bring about a more positive outcome.

The quote from the book first published over fifty years ago, “Man without God is a beast, and never more beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastliness.” –Whittaker Chambers

My sympathies, I truly understand your situation. I am not a psychiatrist though I have seen one… :^)

neo-neocon

Sounds like you were less political than I but growing up “inside the beltway” does have it’s own effects. Great posting and glad you are paying attention these days.

By the way Reagan was definately not Dorothy but rather more the like the apparent bumbling Wizard who really was all powerful in that he ended up displaying more wisdom and ability to effect outcomes more then most could have imagined at the time. I’ll repeat it one more time, not supporting Reagan is my greatest political regret.

We must be exact contemporaries, we are in roughly the same field (I am a psychiatrist), and our political paths have followed the same trajectory.

Thank you for doing the work of figuring all of this out for me!

The most painful thing you have touched on is the isolation from former friends. Last Sunday I was invited to a poetry reading of a couple of friends at Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley; one of the friends I hadn’t seeen since the late eighties.

I knew that at the reading there would be some demeaning reference to the “stupid” Bush, to the “evil” Republicans, and some blather about how going into Iraq was based on a lie, and so on…

I decided not to go so I could remember my friends as they were, and still love them.

Jamie Irons

Your series is gripping and fascinating; as a first-year Boomer (’46), I shared most of your timeline. But I never drank all that deeply of either flavor of KoolAid.

So it will be very interesting to see how you deal with some of the issues that also moved me off center.

I even voted for Clinton in ’92 because I thought he could take the Dems out of the lunacy of the hard left and put them more in the center.

But, I see no redeeming values in any on the left today. Their focus is on defeating Bush and the Reps, not on protecting America and Western civilization. They may have won their last presidential election and be on a pretty steep slope to oblivion.

It’s a shame we have enemies, it’s a shame we can’t all think alike and it’s a shame we have to get up and take action every once in a while that will certainly result in human suffering for the survival of certain ideals like freedom and choice and liberty.

Good job, thanks.

I find it particularly interesting and satisfying that the shots fired by The Tank on that clear September day will go down in history as the “beginning of the end” of the Islamo-fascist scourge, and that the reason for that being so is that it permanently shook the West (or enough of it in any case) out of its slumber.

Also, as I read your description of the 70’s attitude I couldn’t help but think that it was well summed up by the line from Jesus Christ Superstar (written in 1969 no less), where Judas chastizes Jesus for “wasting” money on material comforts and Jesus responds: “There will be poor always, pathetically struggling….Look at the GOOD things you’ve got!”

I look forward to your book.

Happy INDEPENDENCE Day to all,
Bruce Wechsler

The event that loomed largest for me was the collapse of the USSR and concommitant liberation of its satellite republics. Having been aware of the repression that existed within the Soviet Union (c.f. Solzhenitsyn et. al.), and having seen firsthand the suffocating real-world effects of Soviet communism during a 1986 visit with relatives in then-Czechoslovakia, I greeted this as generally good news for everyone (though certainly there would be real challenges ahead). The consensus around me seemed to be that this was in fact a good thing that had happened — a condition that left me completely unprepared for the shock I was to receive years later, on learning that Marxism and its derivatives were alive and well in American academia.

I’m looking forward to hearing more about your experiences adjusting in the post-9/11 present, and the challenges you’ve faced as you’ve found yourself diverging from the dominant ways of thinking that surround you. (Assuming you feel inclined to write about that next!) I know from my experience (which I hope to get around to blogging about in the near future) that having such political differences has the potential to be very isolating, particularly when those around you feel free to express their convictions in social settings based on the seeming assumption that everyone else must naturally think as they do. It takes a determined effort sometimes, for me at least, to overcome the frequently-reinforced fear of discomfort and go out and meet people and socialize anyway!

Thanks, Neo, for sharing another fine and thoughtful piece of work. As “snedwords” said so fittingly, this is good therapy for us, and I hope it is for you too! Best wishes.

If Neo was getting her external political input from TV, the NY Times, and the New Yorker, just what kind of perceptions could she have had of Reagan?

Amiable, homophobic, trigger happy, washed up actor managed by dark cabals of corporate masters and Jesus freaks might come pretty close to the mark - but I may be presuming too much here.

On “tribalism” -

I think there is another explanation for passionate involvement in politics by citizens - especially of the conservative stripe, like me.

It’s THE way that problems are solved. Merely winning elections in no way confers legitimacy on my personal political goals; winning is necessary to see the solutions I support implemented.

If the problems I seek to address are adequately dealt with (economy, environment, education, security, entitlements, etc, etc,) by the candidates I supported, partisan affiliations are reduced to organizational constructs.

It so happens that of the two major national parties I have to pick from, only one retains a vestige of commitment to the higher duty to the nation than to itself.

Note I said “vestige”. Appartchiks like the McCains, Harkins, Snows, and Voinavichs are as fully involved with their own self-aggrandaizment and nest-feathering exclusive of external obligations as are any of the Pelosis, Clintons, Rangels, and Conyers of the Left. The issue is that nakedly seeking personal power among Republicans is celebrated as ‘moderation’ and is NEVER even raised where Democrats are concerned.

The operative media template for covering politics denies duty, honor, or commitment to constitutional principles as primary motivations for any government service. Those old-fashioned, hackneyed terms are for Boy Scouts, not for the bad boys of the Beltway.

Thus are conservatives with any vestigal religious/spiritual credentials, or publicly avowed intentions to govern within literal constitutional limits dismissed out of hand, while ridiculous labels like “reality based” are accepted without a blink, even when applied to a party that has consistently failed to remedy any “cause” it has purported to embrace, from racial tension to economic disparity to national security.

Politics in a democracy should be a tool to achieve practical solutions within a community. It is not a process by which truth or right is measured; not nearly. The rise of the professional political class is always an unavoidable result of people gravitating to what they are good at doing. The key is to remember that at least in this country idealogues and agendas face constitutional limits within the halls of government, and citizens can act via elections to curb excesses, too.

Claiming the high ground based on good intentions , demanding respect for ideas that consistently fail to work, and reflexively falling back on ad hominem attacks when questioned are the hallmarks of our remaining liberal tribe. People who point that out become the targets of the full force of media outrage and establishment disdain…

which is exactly why Rush Limbaugh is labeled a kook on Monday and granted the mantle of Controller of the VRWC on Tuesday, over and over and over again.

The liberals presume to speak for the majority of Americans. Funny thing, that; they can’t seem to win national elections or even run a profitable radio show with that kind of support.

People are trying to kill my family. The enemy has published his grievances (barbarism leavened with theocratic fanaticism), his intentions (the end of Western secular civilization), and acted forcefully to enact his agenda.

Which of our parties is more concerned with confronting and defeating the threat? Which is transparently trying to use the risks and costs of confrontation for their own political ends?

I won’t even go into which party is demonstrating faith in individual liberty and rule of law as valid strategies against tyranny.

The decline of Democrat/liberal/progressive fortunes has not been the result of chessboard manuevering between patricians. It is the objective result of individuals weighing in on the effectiveness of the parties involved to address the issues important to them.

I predict that the 2006 elections will go even worse for the Democrats than did the 2002 midterms. And the media and pop elite will be just as surprised as they were in 1989.

Anonymous 11:05 AM,

Thank you for a matching post.

I agree with your perception of the political intellectuals, but I would couch the story in different language. Most people are searching for meaning in their lives, it’s a fundamental human need. Many intellectuals, particularly of the Sixties generation, came to find meaning through the particular lens of political action. They were going to “reform the system” or “change the world”. Somehow that seemed to make sense during the Sixties. The Sixties seemed so wonderful and everything seemed to be going so well. We solved the civil rights problem. We made big money. We even put men on the moon. Rockets were blazing, skirts were rising, and it seemed that nothing could stop the steady rise of American progress and liberalism.

Our ignominious retreat from Vietnam and the deadly consequences for the people of SE Asia changed that perception.

It’s ultimately an unfixable world, and those who sought meaning through political action alone have come to learn that the political soup is pretty thin spiritual gruel. The gradual but unavoidable sellouts necessary eat away the soul till there is nothing left and only the raw quest for power remains. Those who retain any integrity will leave before they sink to that level.

The crisis of our times is a religious crisis. The 9/11 attacks have starkly highlighted the emptiness of the religion of the New Left. It has left many of its believers in such an awkward position that they are now opposed to the very things they originally set out to create. How very pathetic. It must be humiliating for many of them to have to look in the mirror these days.

I’m a great fan of Nietzsche, but he was wrong about God. God was never dead; we just have to look elsewhere to find Him.
Personally I find bits of God all over the place. On this blog for example.

Ruth H.,

I am proud to remain a liberal. Being from Kansas, I have no trouble being a liberal while voting for a Republican and being pro-American. I continue to believe the United States is the last best hope for mankind and for liberalism.

But I refuse to join either political party.

One thing that fascinates me in the post-Vietnam demise of this country is the way in which “liberalism” gradually slid into the new religion of anti-Americanism. Been there done that, but now I’ve moved beyond it. What’s more liberal I ask, Zimbabwe under Mugabe? Corrupt Canada? I’m eagerly awaiting some posts on this transition from Neo.

As we age, life provides numerous wake-up calls– and some have the wisdom to stop, reflect, and reassess what they “know” to be true. Is it wisdom or mere exhaustion to arrive at the place where you know nothing?

I reread Esmay’s post, and I’m missing the perceived outrageous slight to anonymous, but I probably need to be spoon fed too.

I’m the “Anonymous” you responded to so rudely and with so little understanding of me or of what my previous post was arguing for. Your attitude is a case in point of the kind of thoughtlessness I was talking about.

For your information, I am far from a sociopath, being as I am a member of many social spheres, though none that takes partisan politics as holy writ.

I regard Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and their apologists on the left as exemplars of the precisely the sort of radicalism I most detest.

Your inference that I want anything other than slow, painful death to bin Laden and Saddam shows how little comprehension you have of thoughts that don’t come already cut up for your into little pieces.

There are many things I disagree with George W. Bush on–but I voted for him without hesitation and was enormously relieved when he won.

In a way, rejecting “tribalism” is a way of simply cutting yourself off from the human race. Tribalism is a fundamental human instinct and anyone who says he isn’t part of any tribe is essentially saying he’s a sociopath who holds the human animal in contempt. He’s also pretty much full of it; he’s just joined a cliquish little tribe that holds itself apart from the greater mass of humanity.

She, presumably, didn’t participate in the abuse of those who thought the tank merited some attention, whether Warsaw Pact, or some other specific threat, or the general view that history is not over.

What, neo, do you think differentiated the thought processes of those who stagnated from those who saw?

After thinking long and hard about the issues addressed in this series of posts, the conclusion I’ve come to is that most people — or at least most of those who fancy themselves as intellectual — find it hard to change their minds about politics because they are no criteria other than political ones by which to evaluate the policies put forward by different political factions.

These people are trapped in a kind of ideological tautology. They are Democrats because they are Democrats or they are Republicans because they are Republicans, with those affiliations based not on a set of moral ideals that those political parties embody, but rather on a kind of tribal identification based on class or region or race.

To put it in terms of Kundera’s image from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, people habitually dance the way the others in their circle are dancing, rather than listening to the beat of a personal drum of individual conscience or rationality.

What many lack today — and intellectuals most of all — is some source of moral values besides the tribal idenfications offered by partisan politics.

Friedrich Nietzsche declared God to be dead in the nineteenth century, thereby denying many intellectuals a source of moral orientation in religion. Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in the twentieth century, thereby devaluaing art as a means of moral reflection in the absence of orthodox religion.

Despite the fact that political radicalisms have done more harm to the world in the past hundred years than any prior ideologies in history, most intellectuals are still committed to the notion that politics, not art or religion or anything else, is the fundamental basis of such meaning as existence holds for them.

For someone whose fundamental values are not political, for someone for whom politics is merely a means to pre-political ends, political changes of hear are welcome because they bring about a strengthening of personal integrity. For those for whom politics is their deepest or indeed their only source of existential values, such a change of heart may be frightening, since the loss of a former political belief may mean the loss of belief altogether and the total collapse of a sense of existential integrity. This trauma is intensified by the ugly ostracism that occurs when a member of a given political tribe breaks free from the circle of dancers.

After 9/11, I had thught that those events would bring about a questioning of political orthodoxies as people fell back on more substantial resources in the face of a crisis that called for intelligent reflection. My great disappointment in the last few years has been to see how many people have failed to do that, lacking any resources at all besides a brutal and vulgar political partisanship.

2004 was the first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote when I declined to vote. I made that decision regretfully, but ultimately I felt that it was morally more defensible to make the sort of argument I’ve made against political partisanship than to acquiesce as I had in the past to the pressure to conform to one tribe or another. There was simply no candidate on offer in 2004 whose policies conformed sufficiently enough with my fundamental values that I could justify casting a vote for him. “My side” had already lost even before the election was held.

I would fall in a group even smaller than the neo-neocons: the “neo-nonpartisans.”

I hope this is good therapy for you; I know it is for me.