Pete Hamill-Types


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(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)



Every Republican I heard campaigning for office appears to have taken Rudolph Giuliani as his model: tough on crime, moderate on government spending, liberal on cultural issues such as abortion and the homosexual agenda. Some wags now call the new Republican platform “Democrat-lite,” an attempt to demonstrate to voters that Republicans will do the same things as Democrats, but with a greater emphasis on keeping costs down.

But maybe things are not as bad as they appear. You would think that liberal Democrats would be jumping for joy if the country is moving to the left as quickly as these conservative pundits allege. But that is not the case. Take Pete Hamill, for example. Hamill is a dyed-in-the-wool New York liberal. His books and columns consistently push an amalgam of culturally liberal and trade union points of view.

But he is a clear thinker. He knows what he believes and how to make his point. He does not often indulge in flights of rhetoric and overstatement. He does not get hysterical. So we must assume that he thought through what he was saying in his post-election day column of November 9th. Hamill has been on the wagon for years, but he sounds as if he needs a stiff drink:

“The election, after all, ended any possibility of restraining the right-wing agenda of the Bush hard-liners.

“How can there be checks and balances when one party controls all three branches of government?

“The Bushies want a war in Iraq, and they will now almost surely get one. They will win the great prize: Iraqi oil. It doesn’t matter much to them if a few thousand American soldiers die, or several hundred thousand Iraqis.

“They don’t care if they wreck the United Nations in the process, because they despise the UN. Baghdad, here we come.”

And you thought you had it bad! Imagine one party controlling all three branches of our government! Do you think Hamill has forgotten all the decades when the Democrats held that power? Or is it that there is no need for checks and balances when Democrats are in power? Oh, well…

But it is not just war with Iraq that troubles Hamill now that the Republicans have the upper hand in Washington. He worries that Republicans will also “push their right-wing candidates for judgeships, to maintain ideological control of the judicial branch for a generation.”

What causes him even greater dismay is his perception that “the pathetic Democrats helped make all this possible. They mourned the death of Paul Wellstone, but very few of them displayed his guts…they handed Bush what he wanted.” As a result, “Bush now has the option to wage war on Iraq, without argument from the timid Democrats. Even the best of them voted him these powers, including New York’s Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton.”

So Hamill sees no hope. It is not only that the “best” Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, failed to stand tall. The party hacks were worse. “Who expects a fresh idea, or a lucid, unrehearsed use of language from the likes of Tom Daschle or Richard Gephardt? They drone through past speeches. They tiptoe around Washington like men living in minefields.”

He grumbles that this “would all be vastly entertaining if it weren’t for the growing lines of the unemployed, the intensifying isolating of the country from the rest of the world and the possibility of great bloodshed.” “On a gray, sour morning in New York yesterday, something bleak and spooky was in the air.” “Sour morning?” “Something bleak and spooky in the air?” Brother… and I though I was down in the dumps when Bill Clinton was elected.

Oh, I know: We are not supposed to gloat over the agony of our adversaries. Mea culpa. But, come on: Can’t we take even a little satisfaction is seeing the Pete Hamills of the world reacting as they are to the Republican victories? But, seriously, who is right? The despondent Democrats or the disappointed Republicans? Is the country drifting to the left or to the right?



Well, I would say our side is winning, but that it is going to be a long battle. We are in a culture war, not a culture skirmish. We should not expect single electoral victories to turn things around. It doesn’t work that way. We have to keep making our case, patiently, determinedly, like Alan Ladd and Van Heflin hacking away on that gnarly old tree stump in Shane.

We win some and we lose some. Abortion is going to be with us for many years more, porn is widespread on the Internet, the drug culture is still thriving. But our side has had its victories too. The Soviet Union was toppled. Everyone now knows that the posturing American intellectuals who made the case for Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung were dupes, what Lenin called “useful idiots.” It is now generally conceded that the welfare system created a dependent underclass; that socialism does not work. The American military and our police are held in high regard, despite all the calumnies heaped upon them for decades by Hollywood and the smart people. So even if things are not as bad for leftists as Pete Hamill thinks, it seems to me clear that our side has the upper hand in the ideological struggle of our time. It just could be that the Clinton elections were the anomaly, not the Reagan years.

Recently, I have been thinking of some of my old New Left graduate school professors from the 1970s. I have no idea where any of them are these days. But of one thing I am certain. They would be a laughingstock if they appeared somewhere today in the faux working class denim shirts with the Sandinista buttons, smoking their Camels and spouting cliches about Mao’s and Fidel Castro’s governments as models for economic and social development — except, of course, if they appeared in front of an audience of old leftists who still thrill to tales of the exploits of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. You know, Pete Hamill-types.

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