“Let’s go back to the days when men were men
And start the First World War all over again…”

Another fine article, good light hand on the politics (and no, unlike the sainted Pete Seeger, PP&M were way too commercial to be Marxists), and a fine evocation of the weight of music in our family’s collective memory.

I personally always put on a gas mask before visiting your site, and your timely notice also prompted me to wear rain boots and a slicker, lest I slip on slaughtered liberals’ blood.

Been plowing through Sam Tannenhaus’s interesting but flawed book “Death of Conservatism” and perhaps the most insightful theme he advances is that “movement” conservatism - “revanchists” he calls them - have thrown the rational right off the rails by acting most unconservatively. In this, I am agreement generally but have several major disagreements with his specifics.

The point is, I think to some degree, it is a generational thing. What I might term “Reagan conservatives” like Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, Bruce Bartlett, Martin Anderson, and most of what the revanchists see as the “elites,” are fighting a losing battle to keep conservatism’s feet on the ground with reasonable, yet powerful critiques of the liberalism of Barack Obama.

They are far overshadowed by the hysterical, out of control, exaggerated screaming coming from the base. It is being driven by the pop conservatives in Talk Radio who pander, encourage, and ultimately, deliberately create an atmosphere of paranoia and fear, milking these emotions for ratings and money. They have so skewed the perception of what conservatism is all about that the disfavor both the politics and philosophy into which the right has fallen will take decades to overcome - if ever.

I joke about lefty folkies, of course - more playing to stereotype than reality. But we are of a generation that perhaps learned valuable lessons about civic disagreements and how they can truly lead to bloodshed unless we all remember that we are Americans who love our country and wish only the best for it. If only we could all start from that premise, I think a lot of the ugliness in our politics would be muted and we could get down to the business of truly addressing some of the problems facing the country today.

ed.

no sympathy for my enemy