Federal Judiciary

The Way We Weren?t

Back in the first season of Mad Men, while pitching a new ad campaign to the suits from Eastman Kodak, creative whiz Don Draper describes nostalgia as 'a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.' Will Rogers put it less artfully: 'Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was.'

That nugget of wisdom should be kept in mind amid our latest bout of self-indulgent handwringing over America's 'toxic'/'poisonous'/'hateful' political climate. No question, the present environment is drenched in buffoonish conspiracy-mongering and reckless demagoguery, with bilious commentary emanating from both right and left. But in yearning for the good old days of temperate rhetoric and social comity, we are imagining a past that never existed.

#ad#It certainly didn't exist under George W. Bush or Bill Clinton, the two polarizing Baby Boomers who inspired all manner of kooky accusations and nasty vitriol. While the 41st president is now hailed by many as the 'good Bush' -- the mild-mannered patrician who defied the anti-tax crowd, signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, bolstered clean-air regulations, and pressured Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians -- he was once demonized over Willie Horton and Iran-Contra. Likewise, the mythical Ronald Reagan bears little resemblance to the actual Reagan, who during his presidency was smeared as a racially insensitive, moronic Social Darwinist who wanted to shred the safety net, risk nuclear war with the Soviets, and bankroll 'death squads' in Central America. As Reagan biographer Steve Hayward noted last week, 'the ‘tone' of public discourse in the 1980s was just as bad as today.' On the loopier fringes of our politics, the Gipper and Bush 41 were -- are -- charged with using the CIA and the Contras to spread crack cocaine among inner-city blacks.

And what came before them? The 1970s witnessed Kent State, the Hard Hat Riot, Watergate, anti-busing violence, soaring crime, and the disparagement of a Democratic presidential candidate (George McGovern) as the champion of 'acid, amnesty, and abortion.' The 1960s saw horrific racial attacks in the Jim Crow South, shocking assassinations, massive antiwar protests, and deadly urban upheaval -- not to mention arguably the most vicious political advertisement ever shown on American television: the infamous Daisy Ad, which was directed at a Republican presidential nominee (Barry Goldwater) whom mainstream journalists, politicians, and other public figures openly associated with Nazism. The 1950s were the decade of McCarthyism and Little Rock Central -- a decade when nine black students required U.S. Army protection to attend high school in Arkansas.

We like to remember Harry Truman for his Midwestern common sense. We rarely observe that he gave a campaign speech in 1948 linking his Republican presidential opponent (Thomas Dewey) with the forces of fascism, or that he railed against 'bloodsuckers with offices in Wall Street' and 'the economic tapeworm of big business,' or that he harbored racist and anti-Semitic attitudes. We sentimentalize the Great Depression as a period when Americans banded together in the face of extreme hardship. We spend less time recalling Father Coughlin, Huey Long (murdered in 1935), intellectual infatuation with Stalin's Russia and Mussolini's Italy, or pro-Nazi rallies at Madison Square Garden.

#page#U.S. politics has always been a rambunctious affair, and Americans have always been fiercely divided over hot-button social issues. Less than 50 years ago -- within the lifetime of our current president -- a hefty chunk of the United States was still maintaining a racial-apartheid regime worthy of South Africa, and people working to dismantle that regime were being terrorized and killed by white supremacists. The 1964 Civil Rights Act passed with strong bipartisan support -- but that was only because the two parties were ideologically heterogeneous, not because the country was enjoying political or social harmony.

#ad#In partisan terms, we have come a long way from the era when Goldwater conservatives shared a party with Rockefeller liberals, and Dixiecrats gathered under the same tent as anti-segregation progressives. But the polarization of 2011 cannot be analyzed in a vacuum. It is largely a consequence of the long-term ideological sorting of Republicans and Democrats, a process that has been driven by major structural changes in American society, including the demise of Jim Crow, cultural transformations, and ethnic shifts. (Rampant gerrymandering has also played a role, albeit a much smaller one.) America now has one big center-right party and one big center-left party -- which, in modern Western history, is really the natural order of things.

Some political scientists believe ideological polarization is limited mostly to the elites. Alan Abramowitz and Kyle Saunders, by contrast, have found that 'the high level of ideological polarization evident among political elites in the United States reflects real divisions within the American electorate.' Either way, the ferocity of our ongoing national debate over health-care reform pales in comparison with the ferocity of previous debates over civil rights and Vietnam.

The human tendency to romanticize the past and grumble about the present is both understandable and inevitable. Yet it can severely distort our historical perspective. By all means, let's have more civility in public life, and let's all strive to lower our political blood pressure. (For the record, I thought President Obama delivered a boffo performance in Tucson.) But let's also stop propagating the myth of an Edenic past in which Americans hashed out their thorniest differences without venom or rancor. As Billy Joel once sang, 'The good old days weren't always good, and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems.'

--- Duncan Currie is deputy managing editor of National Review Online.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on January 24, 2011 (boomark / email).