Liquidating the Left

A few months ago, I commented on what trial lawyers used to refer to as the "scorched earth" policy-- that is, winning isn't enough, you must totally and completely destroy the other side. I noted that this seemed to underlie the philosophy of the Republican party in power (see, Scorched Earth).

NYTimes guest columnist Thomas Frank takes up this same theme in Defunders of Liberty, noting:

Before he became K Street’s most enterprising racketeer, Jack Abramoff was best known as a sort of young Robespierre of the Reagan Revolution. In 1983, as chairman of the College Republicans, he declared that he and his minions did not “seek peaceful coexistence with the left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently.”

* * * *

Abramoff’s remark about liquidating the left was not just the intemperate raving of a hot-blooded youth. It also expressed the essence of the emerging conservative project: You don’t just argue with liberals, you damage them. You use the power of the state to afflict their social movements, to wreck their proudest government agencies, and to divert their funding streams. “Defund the left” was a rallying cry all across the New Right in those heady days; Richard Viguerie even devoted a special issue of Conservative Digest to the subject in 1983.

Abramoff and his clean-cut campus radicals pushed their own “defund the left” campaign with characteristic élan, declaring war on Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups, or PIRG, environmental and consumer activist outfits that were funded by student activity fees on some campuses. The young conservatives were always careful to cast the issue as a matter of “student rights” versus political coercion, but Abramoff clearly saw it as an avenue to ideological victory. “When we win this one,” he boasted in 1983, “we’ll have done more to neutralize Ralph Nader than anyone else, ever.”

A winsome combination -- scorched earth/starve the beast -- to obliterate the opposition forevermore. And the Republican Party has been extremely successful at that. Even as the Republicans are losing favor, the Democratic Party has been so demonized and demoralized that even with the problems within the Republican party, the Democrats are still not ahead.

(Via Rendezvous with Oblivion -- who has full article available)

Tags: Commentary, Politics, Thomas Frank