It’s been obvious for a while that a panicked Republican Party would get down and dirty in an effort to win a few close House and (especially) Senate races, and the GOP is definitely living down to that expectation. Aside from the tawdry crap they’ve been throwing at Harold Ford in Tennessee, we now have the ripe example of George Allen’s efforts to lift a few shocking sex scenes from Jim Webb’s war novels to paint him as some sort of mysoginistic pervert.I haven’t read the books in question, not being a big fan of war novels (The Caine Mutiny being the one exception). But my colleague The Moose has not only read a number of Webb’s novels, but is familiar with Webb’s rationale in writing them, and with the original conservative reaction to them.I know some of my regular readers are Moose-o-phobic, but I encourage you to read his latest post on this subject. He reminds us that (a) Webb wrote his novels in no small part to provide a grunts-eye-view of the Vietnam War to a generation of peers who were in the habit of disparaging those who served; (b) conservative commentators generally gave these novels, “shocking” content and all, rave reviews when they actually appeared; and (c) Webb is an authentic war hero whose own service, and his searing accounts of what it entailed, should command great respect, particularly from an ostensibly pro-military GOP.Beyond that, there’s something particularly disgusting about this sort of attack on Webb emanating from the campaign of George Allen.For one thing, Allen (like me) could have served in the Vietnam War, but didn’t, getting past it on a student deferment. As an enthusiast for the war in Iraq, and contributor to the argument that Democrats generally and Webb in particular are “weak on national security,” he has a special responsibility to steer clear of attacks on Webb for anything related to his rival’s war service.More fundamentally, Allen’s own background ought to make the implicit anti-intellectualism of his campaign’s attacks on Webb’s fiction truly objectionable.I know the conventional wisdom is that the revelations about Allen that have emerged during the current campaign turn on his alleged racism, dating from his peculiar obsession with the Confederacy during his high school years in Southern California. That’s all true.But I personally think the most damning thing about the Allen Story is that he has been exposed as the ultimate Golden State Child of Privilege who has spent much of his life trying to impersonate a dirt-farm, dirt-track Yahoo, mainly by aggressively embracing the underside of Yahoo culture, without the mitigating circumstances of actually growing up that way, or any indication that he shares the positive features of that culture (e.g., a healthy disrespect for economic elites). To put it another way, most true southern white crackers may well have contempt for those well-heeled cultural elitists who look down on them, but they’d also kill to give their kids the kind of advantages that George Allen had, and, if confronted directly with the full Allen Story, would probably consider his efforts to remake himself as a ‘bacca-chewing, thuggish redneck the ultimate insult.It’s also illustrative that when Allen decided to relocate himself to his vicarious southern homeland, he chose to attend the University of Virginia. Having lived near Charlottesville off and on for a good while, I can personally verify what anyone familiar with The University would say: this is a place where anyone affecting a Yahoo world view–much less the Yankee son of a national celebrity with a French mother–would stand out like a sore thumb. UVa is arguably one of the two or three best public universities in America, but it’s also arguably one of the two or three snootiest public universities in America. Whether or not George Allen routinely used the “n-word” while at UVa, or pulled Klan-style “pranks” on black residents of Louisa County, there’s no question his whole pick-up-truck, Dixified persona in Charlottesville was weird on every level. And in many respects, Allen has remained, ever since college, the Wahoo Yahoo–the guy who perpetually combines inherited privilege with a willful determination to refute it by aping what he understands to be the culture of “real people.”By now, I assume many of you are thinking that the Allen Story closely resembles the Story of the President of the United States, on a smaller scale of privilege and pretense. And you’re right: George Allen is sort of a George Bush Mini-Me. No wonder he was the early favorite for ’08 among many Bush loyalists who can’t abide John McCain.And the parallels and ironies extend to the current campaign. Remember that moment in 2004 when the Bushies went after John Kerry for his goose-hunting photo op, supposedly exposing him as a uppercrust quiche-eater pretending to be a Real Guy? Well, George Allen has spent much of his adult life as an uppercrust quiche-eater longing to appear to be a Real Guy–and not a particularly admirable Real Guy at that–without Kerry’s history as a war hero and genuine outdoorsman. He even shares Kerry’s odd experience in learning on the campaign trail that he had a hitherto unknown Jewish ancestry. I don’t recall that Kerry responded to this thunderbolt like Allen, who immediately started talking about his abiding affection for pork products.Have any of the Republicans encouraging Allen’s smear campaign on Webb mocked the Wahoo Yahoo like they mocked Kerry? Of course not.Allen’s bigger twin, George W. Bush, is probably capable of the sort of anti-intellectual assault that his Mini-Me has launched on Jim Webb. But at least W. has hired a few smart people over the years, most notably the brilliant wordsmith Mike Gerson, who have helped him pay lip service to the idea that national leaders ought to take ideas seriously. If George Allen has ever exhibited interest in a political discourse more advanced than the endless repetition of football metaphors, I’ve somehow missed it.That’s why Allen’s latest gambit, in the end, is so nauseating. I don’t like to throw around Nazi analogies; they tend to devalue the unique nature of the Third Reich, and also ignore the abiding civilized values that unite both parties and most Americans, no matter how much and how vociferouly we disagree on this or that topic. But everything about George Allen’s effort to beat Jim Webb by quoting stupidly from his novels is reminiscent of the quote often attributed to Herman Goering: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun.”Allen’s ad attack on Webb’s novels represents the Wahoo Yahoo’s willingness to look the cultural products of a war hero and genuine cultural conservative right in the face, and reach for his gun.I hope and pray Virginians vote for the real representative of their values, and not the cynical pretender whose abasement of those values is best illustrated by how he has chosen to save his political hide.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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October 23: Four Fear Factors for Democrats
I figured this was as good a time as any to come clean about reasons Democrats are fretting the 2024 election results despite some quite positive signs for Kamala Harris, so I wrote them up at New York:
One of the most enduring of recent political trends is a sharp partisan divergence in confidence about each party’s electoral future. Democrats are forever “fretting” or even “bed-wetting;” they are in “disarray” and pointing fingers at each other over disasters yet to come. Republicans, reflecting the incessant bravado of their three-time presidential nominee, tend to project total, overwhelming victory in every election, future and sometimes even past. When you say, as Donald Trump often does, that “the only way we lose is if they cheat,” you are expressing the belief that you never ever actually lose.
The contrast between the fretting donkey and the trumpeting elephant is sometimes interpreted as a matter of character. Dating back to the early days of the progressive blogosphere, many activists have claimed that Democrats (particularly centrists) simply lack “spine,” or the remorseless willingness put aside doubts or any other compunctions in order to fight for victory in contests large and small. In this Nietzschean view of politics, as determined by sheer will-to-power (rather than the quality of ideas or the impact of real-world conditions), Democrats are forever bringing a knife to a gun fight or a gun to a nuclear war.
Those of us who are offended by this anti-intellectual view of political competition, much less its implicit suggestion that Democrats become as vicious and demagogic as the opposition often is, have an obligation to offer an alternative explanation for this asymmetric warfare of partisan self-confidence. I won’t offer a general theory dating back to past elections, but in 2024, the most important reasons for inordinate Democratic fear are past painful experience and a disproportionate understanding of the stakes of this election.
Democrats remember 2016 and 2020
It’s very safe to say very few Democrats expected Hillary Clinton to lose to Donald Trump in 2016, or that Joe Biden would come so close to losing to Donald Trump in 2020. No lead in the polls looks safe because in previous elections involving Trump, they weren’t.
To be clear, the national polls weren’t far off in 2016; the problem was that sparse public polling of key states didn’t alert Democrats to the possibility Trump might pull an Electoral College inside straight by winning three states that hadn’t gone Republican in many years (since 1984 in Wisconsin, and since 1988 in Michigan and Pennsylvania). 2020 was just a bad year for pollsters. In both cases, it was Trump who benefitted from polling errors. So of course Democrats don’t view any polling lead as safe. Yes, the pollsters claim they’ve compensated for the problems that affect their accuracy in 2016 and 2020, and it’s even possible they over-compensated, meaning that Harris could do better than expected. But the painful memories remain fresh.
Democrats fear Trump 2.0 more than Republicans fear Harris
If you believe the maximum Trump ‘24 message about Kamala Harris’s intentions as president, it’s a scary prospect: she’s a Marxist (or Communist) who wants to replace white American citizens with the scum of the earth, which her administration is eagerly inviting across open borders with government benefits to illegally vote Democratic. It’s true that polls show a hard kernel — perhaps close to half — of self-identified Republicans believe some version of the Great Replacement Theory that has migrated from the right-wing fringes to the heart of the Trump campaign’s messaging, and that’s terrifying since there’s no evidence whatsoever for it. But best we can tell, the Trump voting base is a more-or-less equally divided coalition of people who actually believe some if not all of what their candidate says about the consequences of defeat, and people who just think Trump offers better economic and tougher immigration policies. While the election may be an existential crisis for Trump himself, since his own personal liberty could depend on the outcome, there’s not much evidence that all-or-nothing attitude is shared beyond the MAGA core of his coalition.
By contrast, Democrats don’t have to exercise a lurid sense of imagination to feel fear about Trump 2.0. They have Trump 1.0 as a precedent, with the added consideration that the disorganization and poor planning that curbed many of the 45th president’s authoritarian tendencies will almost certainly be reduced in 2025. Then there’s the escalation in his extremist rhetoric. In 2016 he promised a Muslim travel ban and a southern border wall. Now he’s talking about mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants and overt ideological vetting of legal immigrants. In 2016 he inveighed against the “deep state” and accused Democrats of actively working against the interests of the country. Now he’s pledging to carry out a virtual suspension of civil service protections and promising to unleash the machinery of law enforcement on his political enemies, including the press. As the furor over Project 2025 suggests, there’s a general sense that the scarier elements in Trump’s circle of advisors are planning to hit the ground running with radical changes in policies and personnel that can’t be reversed.
Only one party is threatening to challenge the election results
An important psychological factor feeding Democratic fears of a close election is the unavoidable fact that Trump has virtually promised to repeat or even surpass his 2020 effort to overturn the results if he loses. So anything other than a landslide victory for Harris will be fragile and potentially reversible. This is a deeply demoralizing prospect. It’s one thing to keep people focused on maximum engagement with politics through November 5. It’s another thing altogether to plan for a long frantic slog that won’t be completed until January 20.
Trump has been working hard to perfect the flaws in his 2020 post-election campaign that led to the failed January 6 insurrection, devoting a lot of resources to pre-election litigation and the compilation of post-election fraud allegations.
Though if you look hard you can find scattered examples of Democrats talking about denying a victorious Trump re-inauguration on January 20, none of that chatter is coming from the Democratic Party, the Harris-Walz campaign, or a critical mass of the many, many players who would be necessary to challenge an election defeat. Election denial in 2024 is strictly a Republican show.
If Harris wins, she’ll oversee a divided government; if Trump wins, he’ll have a shot at total power
As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently explained, the odds of Republicans winning control of the Senate in November are extremely high. That means that barring a political miracle, a President Harris would be constrained both legislatively and administratively, in terms of the vast number of executive-branch and judicial appointments the Senate has the power to confirm, reject, or simply ignore.
If Trump wins, however, he will have a better-than-even chance at a governing trifecta. This would not only open up the floodgates for extremist appointments aimed at remaking the federal government and adding to the Trumpification of the judiciary, but would unlock the budget reconciliation process whereby the trifecta party can make massive policy changes on up-or-down party-line votes without having to worry about a Senate filibuster.
Overall, Democrats have more reason to fear this election, and putting on some fake bravado and braying like MAGA folk won’t change the underlying reasons for that fear. The only thing that can is a second Trump defeat which sticks.