Kennedy, The Radical Right, Mein Kampf

As you know, Senator Ted Kennedy passed on last week. I’ve spent much of the last few days watching his funeral on TV or following it on the Web.

I was particularly struck by the celebration of his life that was held at the John F. Kennedy Library. As an aside, I know the building. I’ve done rather a lot of research in the archives there. And it is a magnificent site to recall the last surviving member of that particular generation of Kennedys.

It was interesting, and moving, to hear leading Republicans appear and express their admiration for the man. Orrin Hatch and John McCain made it clear that they had respected Kennedy, liked him, and, in a way, even loved him. Hatch put it best, I think, when he said (here paraphrasing) that he would miss most fighting with Kennedy in public and joking with him in private.

Those men were good and true.

But, Hatch and McCain are conservatives. They seek to “conserve” something they feel to be of value in America. Such men do not control the Republican Party any more, even as they are its most famous sons. The GOP today is the property of men like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, as well as the Radio Radicals—Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Michael Savage, and so many others. These men are not conservatives. They find nothing to preserve in America as it has been these last two hundred years. They seek, instead, to sweep that America away and replace it with one of their own creation…an intolerant and regimented America—an America “managed” by a small cadre of executives and the population manipulated by cynically political Churches (Protestant and Catholic alike) and talk-show demagogues.

And already, these men and women have begun their Swift Boating of Ted Kennedy’s memory. The columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson has noted that within days of his death a Google search for radical right criticisms of Kennedy turned up two million hits. (“Hatin’ on Ted Kennedy,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/hatin-on-ted-kennedy_b_270830.html)

Why this sudden and determined attack on a man who worked with Republicans and was admired by them? On, indeed, someone who is already dead?

Because the extremists cannot do otherwise. They cannot possibly be gracious or chivalrous. They must speak ill of the dead or their followers might begin to wonder if all liberals are really so terrible … if, perhaps, it was possible for two sides to argue and debate, and not regard the other as treasonous.

To illustrate, consider this sage advice from a famed work on political action: “Inasmuch as ones own propaganda recognized a shadow of right upon the opponents side, the ground is prepared for questioning ones own right. The masses are not in a position to distinguish where the opponent’s right ends and ones own begins. In such a case they become uncertain and mistrustful…”

The book? Mein Kampf. The author you know. The consequences, you will recall.


Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker