antoine-roquentin:

I think psychologically there’s a lot of, shall we say, neurosis. Again, going back to this trauma of the Reagan victory, the Gingrich victory, the Bush victories—it’s people who built their political identities around a neurotic response to trauma. It’s, We gotta build a protective shell around ourselves because, if we show our egos, our egos will be destroyed, to put it in psychoanalytic terms.

To have this young person who hasn’t experienced this trauma . . and one of the things that’s fascinating about this—I’ll call it an often-used word—authenticity that she has is that you see her, in very interesting ways, going back to modes of rhetoric and modes of political communication that you associate with lots of pre-Reagan figures. Although I’ll also say figures like Reagan. It’s like Harry Truman.

Interviewer: What are examples of that?

I don’t know if she sits around and reads political history or looks at old political videos. But I see, on the “60 Minutes” interview, Anderson Cooper throws a question to her that for just about any traditional, old-generation Democrat is a stumper—Oh, the other side says you’re radical. And she had this ready-made answer in the hopper, which was to deploy these very powerful symbols from the American civic religion, and I’m going to quote: “Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like social security… . If that’s what radical means, call me a radical.”

Now, immediately, when I heard her say that, I heard a very famous quote from J.F.K., who was asked if he was a liberal in the same kind of accusatory tone, and he said, “If by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties—someone who believes that we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a liberal, then I’m proud to say that I’m a liberal.”

I see her Reagan-like brilliance when she comes up with a phrase, like I heard her do in an interview on the shutdown, which she immediately took to a much higher level. She said the people at the border trying to get in “are acting more American than any person who seeks to keep them out will ever be.” I mean, she mentions that the kids who died in custody—she mentioned that it was Christmastime, which was just so Reagan, to use this resonant emotional symbol. She mentions people coming to the country just with the shirt on their back. She says that the people trying to keep them out are “anti-American.” This is the American civil religion. This is playing the game in a way that a pre-traumatized generation of Democrats was able to play the game.

Interviewer: I think people see her as in touch with this new generation but, in a way, it seems like you’re saying that she recalls a New Deal or New Frontier Democrat.

Well, there’s a real back-to-the-future thing going on here, right? In a lot of ways, the Democratic Party is a complicated, complex coalition, and always has been, with lots of elements, both reactionary and progressive, in it. But, in a lot of ways, she’s returning the Democratic Party to the roots—this idea that the Democratic Party is always going to be fighting for you.…

Interviewer: I was going to ask you about the rise of the right post-Goldwater and the rise of the left now, and whether you see similarities, but you excitedly e-mailed me before this conversation that I had to ask you about a comparison between A.O.C. and Newt Gingrich in 1979.

Ultimately, Newt Gingrich was about wrecking and destroying and not building, so obviously there’s profound foundational differences. In 1978, when Gingrich won his congressional seat after his third time trying, Congressman Thomas Mann had this off-the-record briefing session in which they explained to new members how the House worked. Mann tells this story that this young congressman was basically talking back to them and lecturing them about how Congress should work. And he explained to them this plan he had, all the way back in January of 1979, of how the Republicans could become the majority party and take back the House. And no one was saying that in 1979. People were talking about this statistic that only twenty-one per cent of people identified themselves as Republicans. And, all the way through 1979, you see Newt Gingrich showing up in stories as a spokesman for the Republican Party, as the voice that people in the media are seeking out.

And, to go back to another Republican example, in 1966, when Richard Nixon was starting his comeback that obviously culminated in him winning the Presidency, in 1968, his entire strategy, Pat Buchanan explains, was built around getting mentioned in the same sentence as Lyndon Johnson. Getting Lyndon Johnson to notice him, to mention him, to criticize him. So, in the same sense, Newt Gingrich is suddenly finding himself being quoted more in the newspaper than Bob Michel, the House Republican leader, because he has sort of the audacity to talk about his party as agenda-setting.

Interviewer: The giant difference—and this goes back to what we were talking about before—is that A.O.C. is coming in with a Democratic wave.

Right, and that gets back to the trauma, right? The Democratic Party doesn’t even know how to take yes for an answer. They can’t even accept the idea that they are a majority party. There’s this great line, “He who seems most kingly is the king.” Unless you act like a leader people aren’t going to treat you like a leader.

Take Tlaib using a swear word. Truman got in trouble for saying “If you vote for Nixon, you ought to go to hell.” And that was a brassy sort of rhetoric people had come to expect from Democrats. Not this pearl-clutching response that, every time someone uses strong language, they have to apologize for it.

paxamericana:

hmm, good thing we didn’t have a 15-state e. coli outbreak less than 60 days ago