OUT
WITH THE LONG KNIVES
Pretty
mild stuff, compared
to what Buchanan has to say on the same subject –
but the response to Nader's comments was almost identical
to the hysteria that greeted Buchanan's critique of the same
crowd. Of course, I don't mean a response from Gore himself
– who, as Ralph correctly opines, is too much of a coward
to directly engage Nader on the issues. The Vice President
can only robotically reiterate what is by now a tired and
supremely unconvincing lie – that a vote for Nader is
a vote for Bush – with vice-presidential candidate Joe
Lieberman tearfully pleading with the voters to please please
don't abandon a sinking ship. No, instead Gore unleashed his
surrogates over at the New
Republic
against the Green Party's standard-bearer, and out came
some very long knives –
THE
NEW McCARTHYITES
Yes,
of course you're right: the charge against Ralph is –
what else? – anti-Semitism! But how in heck
can they possibly back that one up? I mean, Ralph Nader
an anti-Semite? You have got to be kidding! Unfortunately
for all of us, they are most definitely not kidding, and here
is the "evidence": It seems that Nader published an article
entitled "Business is Deserting America" in which "he warned
ominously of 'our ingrained gullibility to internationalism.'"
Are you shocked yet? "The remarkable thing," the editors of
TNR gleefully confide, "is that Nader published his
piece in The American Mercury, an obscenely anti-Semitic
magazine. Nader's piece appeared in the same months that the
magazine was publishing a series called 'Termites of the Cross,
which was full of such teachings as:
"'As
soon as anyone demonstrates that he is willing to expose the
enemies of communism or world Zionism, their vast machines
start working to advance his interests. The Disciples of Judas
do not even have to be openly pro-Communist or pro-Zionist
to qualify for the big payoff.... '"
THE
ANATOMY OF A SMEAR
Let
us examine the unappetizing anatomy of a smear, up close and
ugly. To begin with, the American Mercury in 1960 may
not have been H.
L. Mencken's scintillating journal of literary and political
commentary, as it was when he founded it in January of 1924,
but it still retained at least some of the aura of that era,
and the prestige of having been a literary home not only for
Mencken's writings, but also the works of F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore
Dreiser, Sherwood
Anderson, Sinclair
Lewis, and William
Faulkner, among others. The subsequent complex
history of the magazine is relevant, in this context.
Mencken resigned as editor in 1934: the journalist
and economist Henry Hazlitt
took over for four issues, when the publisher, Alfred
A. Knopf sold the magazine to Paul Palmer, a conservative
and outspoken opponent of the New Deal. The Mercury became
the last refuge of Old Right anti-imperialism and libertarian
sentiment in a collectivist age, but its circulation and influence
were considerably reduced. In 1937, the magazine was acquired
by Lawrence Spivak, who would go
on to found "Meet the Press."
A
CONSERVATIVE READERS' DIGEST
By
this time, the American Mercury had become a conservative
version of the Reader's Digest, in form if not entirely
in content. It went through a series of owners, and, in August
1952, was sold to one Russell Maguire, millionaire oilman
and munitions
manufacturer, who presided over the magazine, along with
his daughter, Natasha, for eight years. For most of that time,
the Mercury reflected the general conservative orientation
of its very conservative audience and its owner. Defending
Joe McCarthy
and states' rights, calling for the abolition of the income
tax, the UN, and NATO, Maguire's Mercury typified
the conservative movement of that time. Billy Graham, a
recipient of Maguire's largesse to the tune of some $75,000
(for a film on the virtues of free enterprise) was featured
on the cover of the January 1957 issue, touting his featured
article. (Somehow, Graham was never taken to task for this
hate crime.) J.
Edgar Hoover contributed several pieces on the evils of
Communism. Ralph
de Toledano wrote on "Gravediggers of America": a typical
article was one by a long-forgotten right-wing polemicist
who noted that Fidel
Castro, the alleged "agrarian reformer," was more like
East Germany's Walter
Ulbricht. Robert
A. Heinlein weighed in, in the October 1960 issue, with
"Pravda Means Truth." The following month Bishop
Fulton J. Sheen warned readers that the "World Battles
Demonic Forces."
THE
MERCURY IN TRANSITION
But
by this time, toward the end of his tenure, Maguire had begun
to go a little batty. Really starting in 1960, Maguire began
to sprinkle the usual Mercury fare with openly anti-Semitic
nonsense – over the strenuous objections of his wife
and daughter. But the magazine still had the tattered remnants
of its old reputation, and was still in transition
to what it was to become: yet, at this point, the American
Mercury was definitely not considered "obscenely
anti-Semitic." If Nader's article was published in March of
1960, who knows when it was submitted – it could
have been as long as six months or even a year prior to publication,
before the publication of the justly infamous "Termites
of the Cross" serial that got Maguire in trouble. (So much
trouble that he sold the magazine in January of the next year.)
The magazine eventually wound up in the hands of Willis
Carto, now publisher of the Spotlight, the William
Randolph Hearst of the racialist press – but that is
not the Mercury Nader's piece was published in, although
TNR wants to leaves you with that impression.
IS
RALPH NADER A CLOSET LIBERTARIAN?
Of
course, the mere act of having an article published in a magazine
can hardly be considered a blanket endorsement of its editorial
policies, but by these standards we would have to believe
that, by October of 1962, when
he published an article in the Freeman
that Nader had become a libertarian. The piece, "How the Winstedites
Kept Their Integrity," told the story of how a proposal to
build a public housing project with some "free" money from
the feds met with opposition in Winsted,
Connecticut, Nader's home town – in which the author
clearly sides with the protesters. No doubt we'll soon be
hearing about how "racist" he is. Few will deny, however,
that Nader is on the mark when he attacks the aesthetic aspect
of government housing projects as symbolic of "the drab, uniform,
barrack-type existence" that awaits its tenants. "Living under
the government as landlord neither teaches children the value
of property (which is one reason why public housing deteriorates
so quickly)," he writes,
"nor
produces the environment for the exercise of independence,
self-reliance, and, above all, citizenship. Any government
intrusion into the economy deters the alleged beneficiaries
from voicing their views or participating in civic life. The
reason for this goes beyond the stigma of living in subsidized
housing. When public housing becomes, as it has over the nation,
a source of additional patronage for local distribution to
contractors, repairmen, and tenants, the free expression of
human beings is thus discouraged."
MILKING
THE PUBLIC TEAT
What
really riles Ralph about the Winsted housing project is that
locals were routinely denied access to information by bureaucrats,
and had to resort to three successive referenda before they
could scotch the plans of political insiders and their cronies
to milk private profit from the public teat. It's the same
old Ralph, albeit a bit more libertarian than we're used to.
Another familiar note is struck by his article in the Mercury
– the content of which, incidentally, is nowhere discussed
by TNR – in which he denounces policies that make
it possible for the federal government to subsidize American
corporations for shipping jobs overseas.
THE
CHARACTER ASSASSINS
Desperate
to smear Nader, and avenge their impending defeat, Gore's
character assassins smelled blood and struck before getting
their facts straight. They were in such a frenzy to get at
their intended victim that they simply grabbed the first mudball
at hand and sent it on its sloppy way. But this is the kind
of smear that really ought to boomerang. While I do not support
Ralph Nader's candidacy – and hold to my view that his
most prominent supporters view his candidacy as a left-liberal
"get out the vote" drive to elect a Democratic congress –
I have no doubt that he is personally a man of the utmost
integrity. That, after all, is why he has Gore and his claque
in such a frenzied lather to begin with. The whole tone of
TNR's editorial, with its snide references to Nader
as a self-conscious "saint," is a sneer directed at the very
idea of integrity, as if Nader represented some kind of personal
reproach. The editors of that esteemed journal seem especially
outraged by the suggestion that there is no fundamental difference
between the two corporate parties: this idea is clearly, in
their view, symptomatic of
"a
paranoid view of the world, a conspiratorial economicism,
for which nothing is what it seems, and only a handful of
epistemologically privileged comrades and movie stars know
the truth "
EVEN
PARANOIDS HAVE ENEMIES
The
problem with this psycho-smear is that you don't have to be
"epistemologically privileged" to see that cash changes hands,
and things happen: if the seer who coined the phrase "follow
the money" is "paranoid," then everybody's grandmother deserves
a similar diagnosis, and "conspiratorial economicism" is a
synonym for ordinary common sense.
PURE
MALEVOLENCE
Foam-flecked
and ranting, dripping with venom, and real hatred, TNR
brings up Nader's Lebanese heritage – as if that
had any relevance to the question of his alleged anti-Semitism.
Of course they don't exactly say outright that Nader is an
anti-Semite: only that he may be a reformed one, ending
their little editorial with a flourish of extravagant malevolence.
"The
youthful mistake of the saint? Perhaps; but neither Gore nor
Bush ever made quite such a mistake. In this respect, there
is truly no difference between them."
"SAY,
ISN'T HE AN ANTI-SEMITE?"
Around
this time of year a decade ago, the journalist Abe
Rosenthal and a
neoconservative goon squad raised the same kind of phony
charges against Pat Buchanan for daring to correctly identify
Israel's "amen corner" in the US – notably TNR,
among others – as the main driving force behind the last
Middle East crisis, the war in the Gulf. In spite of a similar
comment by Richard Cohen in a news article in the New
York Times – "The problem," he wrote, "with
those who argue for a quick military strike is that they seem
to be arguing from an Israeli perspective" – a veritable
lynch mob of journalists and other enforcers of political
correctness went after Buchanan with a vengeance. Buchanan's
long record as a good friend to Israel was ignored. Pat
described it as an attempt "to frighten, intimidate, censor,
and silence, to cut off debate; to so smear men's reputations
that no one will listen to them again; to scar men so indelibly,
that on one will ever look at them again without saying 'Say,
isn't he an anti-Semite?'"
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