On December 7th, 1941, it was patriotic to pay your taxes. In 2010, it is not. This historical shift in your national values comes courtesy of the conservative movement, which lays claim to the inheritance of the Greatest Generation’s values while subverting practically all of them.
But wait, there’s more. This day saw the most successful surprise attack on the United States by an enemy. Combined with Sputnik, McCarthy, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the day of infamy became part of our national paranoid culture. To this day, conspiracy-mongers posit an American president ‘allowed’ the Japanese to surprise American forces in the Pacific. It’s nonsense, of course. Reading Eliot Cohen’s Military Misfortunes: the Anatomy of Failure in War, I am struck by Naploeon’s dictum that we never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained as incompetence:
The subsequent Pearl Harbor investigations revealed that the army depended for its information primarily on navy long-range reconnaissance for warning, radar being regarded as a new and unreliable device. Yet the army had no idea what kind of reconnaissance the navy had or would implement. At the same time, the navy, whose installations were to be protected by army fighter planes and antiaircraft guns, did not control the army’s level of alert or even understand that General Short had chosen the lowest level of alert, which only covered antisabotage precautions.
At the dawn of the age of paranoid conservative politics, Donald Duck was tempted by a zoot-suited spendthrift with the reminder: “after all, it’s your dough.” In the first decade of the 21st Century, America embarked on two wars with tax cuts and calls to go shopping. These tax cuts were framed as an expansion of freedom: after all, it’s your dough.
Prior to Pearl Harbor, American conservatism favored Hitler and saw Stalin as the greater threat. As Soviet confrontation chilled into a Cold War, America’s long tradition against large standing militaries finally came to an end. In many ways, the military-industrial complex was born that day, too, and to a large extent we live in a world made by our national desire to never be surprised like that again.
Pearl Harbor would never happen today. If the entire world put its forces together, they would lack the troop mobility to ever invade America. Moreover, they would have to pass under constellations of satellites and avoid interception by our fifteen aircraft carriers. But the combination of paranoid culture, high defense spending, and a decades-long sustained campaign of resentment politics may prove lethal to the American workforce.
God forbid we should question the patriotism of billionaires who pay lower tax rates than their secretaries, much less see their two consecutive banner years as evidence that trickle-down is a crock. The richest Americans put $1.8 trillion in the bank while waiting for someone else to stimulate the economy; why aren’t they creating jobs with the tax cuts they already have? But we daren’t ask that question, because it’s un-American.
After all, it’s their dough. Speaking of un-American:
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) appeared to lend support in a recent interview to the re-creation of a congressional committee directly descended from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a panel that was originally formed at the height of the Red Scare to be the chamber’s deliberative body to handle the duties of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anti-communism crusade.
In an interview with Right Side News, King was asked if he supported a recent conspiracy-laced speech by conservative media mogul Cliff Kincaid, in which he argued that the next Republican Congress should bring back the House Internal Security Committee in order to combat “the ugly spread of Marxism in America.” King responded, “I would. I think that is a good process and I would support it.”
As I’ve explained before, the bulk of modern conservatism is about a great going-backwards, and a feature of the paranoid political culture is this constant call to reevaluate history a la Glenn Beck. “The modern conservative,” John Kenneth Galbraith says, “is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” A paranoid world justifies selfishness: you owe your fellow American nothing because this is no longer the America you know. That world started to be made on this day 69 years ago.
