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Haynes Johnson STILL Doesn't Get It
Page 18 DC Examiner Book Review of “The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism” by Haynes Johnson

If journalists are the children of the news cycle, then liberal journalists are its orphans. The mainstream media has reminded us for more than a generation that conservatives are meanspirited, narrow- minded, brutish and selfish. Yet conservatives are on the advance almost everywhere. How can this be?

Now Haynes Johnson, a longtime correspondent for the Washington Post and a PBS commentator, offers his answer. The result is what must count as one of the worst books of the decade, a monument to ignorance and moral evasion and a prime exhibit of the continuing liberal crackup of our age. Ouch! The first part of “The Age of Anxiety” is a scrappily written and predictable account of the rise and fall of Republican senator Joe McCarthy, 1950s Cold War warrior and ancient liberal bogeyman. Johnson claims that because McCarthy was both conservative and evil, then all conservatives are evil — a mirror image of the old anti-Semitic argument that because Leon Trotsky was both a Jew and a Communist, then all Jews must be Communists.

Liberals have deployed this illogic against conservatives for decades. Where has it gotten them? Intellectually, it has gotten them nowhere, unless the creation of a false mythology counts for something. Politically, liberals haven’t done much better, as Republicans control two branches of the federal government (the White House and Congress) and conservatives appear poised to solidify their position on the third (the Supreme Court). This puzzles and enrages Johnson and many pf the LLL and MSM and serves as the springboard for the second part of his woeful book: a rambling rant on the war on terror that miraculously makes Johnson’s musings on McCarthy seem almost scholarly and objective.

Johnson ties the two parts together by insisting that McCarthy’s dark soul has found a new host in the body of President Bush — a case of political demonic possession worthy of “The Exorcist” or “Alien.” But why do Bush and the Republicans keep winning all those elections? Haynes says it’s because they have frightened us into line by conjuring up fake enemies like communists, the Soviet Union and now al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, in order to establish their regime of “torture, of imprisoning innocents, of lying about the reasons for launching a preemptive war, of trampling on civil rights, of helping the powerful at the expense of the powerless ... ” I wonder if he wants the Dems to adopt Pub tactics, or is just crying in his beer? And so it goes, for nearly 600 pages of printed matter. In the end, Johnson concludes, the real villain of 9/11 is not Osama bin Laden (he barely mentions the name) but George W. Bush, who has manipulated the post-9/11 spirit of American unity to secure his own power and Republican “ideological political dominance.”

Johnson doesn’t say Bush masterminded the attack on the Twin Towers to win re-election in 2004, but he hardly allows the man a single good intention. And God knows we all have leftist friends who believe that Bush practically flew one of the planes. Waitaminute. I thought Karl Rove flew two! And that’s the point. Fear and paranoia reign today not on the right, but on the left. Johnson’s hallmarks of McCarthyism — “the Big Lie, fear, smear, and character assassination” — permeate his own book. So does McCarthyism’s basic premise: the notion that America’s greatest danger comes from its own elected leaders and the hidden powerful interests behind them, who are systematically manipulating our minds in order to disguise the truth. How ironic that the “paranoid style” of McCarthy, Norman Lincoln Rockwell and the John Birch Society, which the left used to consider the lunatic fringe of American politics, has come back to roost in its own institutions, from Moveon.org and the Harvard arts faculty to the Democratic National Committee and now the recesses of Johnson’s fevered imagination.

It’s not hard to figure out why. Like the Birchers and the proverbial little old ladies in tennis shoes who once campaigned against fluoridated water, liberals find themselves adrift in a world they no longer understand. The old landmarks have disappeared; their ideological compass is rusty and no longer steers them straight. Cindy to the rescue! So they have withdrawn into the deep dark holds of their imaginations. That little old lady in tennis shoes now wears a “BUSH: WAR CRIMINAL” T-shirt. What liberals like Johnson cannot admit is that they have brought this distress on themselves. Indeed, the real story of American politics since the Second World War has been the public’s loss of confidence in liberalism and the simultaneous rise of the conservative movement. There was New Deal liberalism’s failure to take seriously the totalitarian threat of communism until American boys were dying in Korea, spurring McCarthy’s rise and putting Dwight Eisenhower in the White House as the first Republican president in two decades. There was New Frontier liberalism’s failure in the Kennedy-Johnson era, in starting a war in Vietnam it couldn’t finish and losing control of the nation’s cities in a blaze of riots, which catapulted Richard Nixon to the presidency in 1968. Then came the failure of traumatized post-Vietnam liberalism, which blamed America for the world’s problems and refused to stand up to an expanding Soviet empire. That set off the Reagan Revolution and laid the foundations for Newt Gingrich and Republicans to win control of Congress in 1994. Finally, there was a Democratic president’s pusillanimity in the face of radical Islam, despite attacks on the World Trade Center and American embassies around the world, which set the stage for Sept. 11 and a national resolve not to repeat the mistakes of the past, even if that meant risking new ones in the future.

One of Johnson’s previous books is called “Sleepwalking Through History.” It purports to be a chronicle of the 1980s, and its villain is of course Ronald Reagan. But with “The Age of Anxiety,” Johnson demonstrates that he’s the real sleepwalker. Will someone please wake him up now?

Arthur Herman is the author of, among other works, “Joseph McCarthy: The Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator.”
Posted by: Bobby 2005-10-03
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=131249