Jonah chides me for lending legitimacy to the comparison, which he suggests is implied by the term "stabbed in the back," between American conservatives today (or after Vietnam) and post-World War I German right-wingers. This was certainly not my intention: I didn't mean to "gamely go along" with any such comparison, but merely to acknowledge what I think is the self-evident reality that many conservatives blamed our defeat in Vietnam on liberals who undermined the war effort at home, and that a similar narrative seems to be developing on the Right where Iraq is concerned. If there's a better, less historically-loaded shorthand for this narrative than "stabbed in the back," I'm happy to propagate it. But while obviously there are lefties who would love to draw the Republicans-to-Nazis analogy, I think the term has a general application that's independent of the connotations Jonah imputes to it. (For instance, when Max Boot - no Iraq-War dove or liberal lapdog he! - wrote a column criticizing this narrative earlier this year, he used precisely the same language, writing that "Just as it did during the Vietnam War, a myth is likely to develop in which America's valiant fighting men and women were stabbed in the back by unpatriotic, even treasonous, reporters.")
Jonah also writes:
I think Ross is basically wrong when he says that the Vietnam syndrome didn't help conservatives. Vietnam saturated American politics in myriad ways that helped the Reaganite Right, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, become the party of American confidence. "Morning in America" makes little sense without Vietnam.
I didn't mean to imply that the need to kick the Vietnam syndrome, get back on our feet and start kicking ass again wasn't part of the narrative that Republicans rode to power in the 1980s; obviously it was. But I think that when this narrative was deployed most successfully, by Reagan and others, it didn't involve blaming liberals for losing Vietnam so much as it involved blaming them for being overly traumatized by our defeat and acquiescing to American decline as a result of that trauma. It's a subtle distinction, maybe, but I think an important one.
Correct, it is a very important distinction. "Morning in America" was more in reference to Carter, economic malaise, and the Iran hostages. Any acknowledgement of "Vietnam syndrome" by Reagan (I don't recall any, and I assume Jonah was all of 5 when Reagan was elected) would have immediately reminded people of with Nixon. Vietnam was the great unspoken, and it only "helped" Reagan in the sense that he found suitable rhetoric for getting beyond it. I find Jonah's analysis, particularly the claim that "Vietnam saturated American politics in myriad ways that helped the Reaganite Right," to be typically shallow.
Posted by Bill | June 27, 2007 3:20 PM