Growing up Liberal

...It inspired McVeigh to kill 168 people for the crime of being in a federal building...

...Liberalism is an essentially feminine, submissive world view...

...In one routine, Pryor imagines the reception Nixon gets from the brothers when he arrives in prison...

...After an age in which the vast majority benefited from economic growth, the country was entering a new age of class division, not unlike the period of my grandfather's political career—and yet no class politics arose to meet it, no Populism or Progressivism or New Dealism...

...Lighting a joint at lunchtime, going to an impeachment rally, or sneaking into Memorial Auditorium to catch a screening of Linda Lovelace doing her trick were equivalent acts of protest against—not really against the System, because the System had visibly broken down and was being hounded from all corners...

...American military actions are suspect...

...They did not look like the oppressed miners and steelworkers of old Birmingham...

...federal programs that had drastically reduced poverty in old age and broadened access to education...

...A restructured economy is not on the table, and even the notion of the poor becoming productive working members of society isn't given much thought...

...I had uncovered a serious weakness in our position, yet I went on holding the position...

...I might have even set the phrase off in its own tiny paragraph where it would be most conspicuous...

...civil and political rights for blacks and women...

...For two decades the book was passed hand to hand among hardcore neo-Nazis...

...We were having fun...

...Black nationalism is regrettable in some ways but also necessary for group self-esteem...

...My father became an academic administrator just in time for the student revolution...

...In the same way that the burst of utopian novels following Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward gives a strong sense of the late nineteenth-century Populist mindset, its optimism and its paranoia, The Turner Diaries reads like an exaggeration of the hatreds that would contaminate conservatism in the late twentieth...

...Nixon might be president, or Ford, or Carter, who made liberalism look like no fun at all (and wasn't much of a liberal), but we were right, and anyone who didn't see it that way probably didn't know what a reefer or a blow job was either...

...Maybe just against...

...But our idealism was more assumed than available...

...Three years later, when I was twelve, he took his own life...

...So is personal display of the flag...

...Its meticulously recorded vision of a savage revolt by an DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 73 GROWING UP LIBERAL underground Nazi brotherhood against multicultural America was too extreme to catch the imagination of an indulgent, self-absorbed age...

...It was a story (loosely autobiographical) about a boy of roughly my fifteen years who throws up after swallowing too many tequila sunrises at a New Year's Eve party...

...So is the presidency...

...Nonetheless, like many extreme fantasies, its violent cartoon picture of contemporary liberalism contains a glimmer of truth...

...They are the least interesting, least attractive people in America...

...One of the liberal ideas had run up against a personal prejudice, leaving scrapes on both—but the idea survived...

...Nineteen-seventythree began a dreary age of stagnation and scarcity that would make revolt—serious revolt— much less alluring to people my age when we turned eighteen...

...It was too abstract, too untested, to be altered by a collision with reality...

...The most crucial social distinction isn't money but education...

...Reprinted by permission...

...But by the time I was growing up, liberalism seemed to have achieved what it could and stopped being a vital force for reform...

...the point was to laugh and mock until structures of power toppled over from sheer embarrassment...

...Without my father to pro72 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 vide Socratic questioning and scholarly analysis of the issues, the brand of liberalism practiced around the house became moralistic and fiercely partisan...

...Every presidential race offered a new victim in the line of liberal losers, each more hapless than the last on his way to the chopping block: McCarthy, Humphrey, McGovern, Carter (who, after winning one election, couldn't stop losing), Mondale, Dukakis...

...IN THE pink-and-blue, padded nursery of Stanford, the seventies were like a long anti-climax to the high-drama sixties in which parents and older brothers and sisters had played leading roles...

...We gonna see how tricky you are...

...Nothing confirms righteousness like defeat...

...I choked on this explanation, and perhaps secretly she choked on it, too...

...Raised on Vietnam and Watergate and Saturday Night Live, how could we take politics seriously...

...The faith of my ancestors was born two hundred years before me, in the century of Jefferson, in the philosophical creed of human Blood of the Liberals, copyright ©2000, by George Packer, to be published in August by Farrar, Straus & Giroux...

...But every now and then some dissatisfaction would nag at me, a sense that our worldview might be vulnerable, a whiff of hypocrisy or contradiction...

...That is an alien, essentially Oriental approach to life, the world view of slaves rather than of free men of the West...

...Government spending on everything but defense is good...

...At home I kept the vigil on behalf of the poor and the blacks, and at school I took on the principal over a story— my own—published in the literary magazine I helped edit that employed the phrase "Fuck off...

...A few decades after that, when I was a small boy, it ascended to the status of a cultural elite...

...A truly crude piece of writing sometimes gives a clearer sense of the mental atmosphere of its time than more subtle and sophisticated work...

...They will always be poor—they will always deserve help...

...widespread distribution of prosperity as a result of the postwar social contract between government, business, and labor...

...His youngest child, my mother, married a Jewish law professor and left Alabama for the West Coast, where my father taught at Stanford...

...I skipped the liberal columnists and ate up conservatives like William Randolph Hearst, Jr...

...I reached none of my political beliefs on my own and was hard-pressed to justify them if challenged...

...The two poems basically expressed the same point of view, the view from GROWING UP LIBERAL a comfortable underground, where Kurt Vonnegut was saying "So it goes" and back issues of Mad magazine were piling up and the worst thing you could be called was "conventional...

...The sordid language of Watergate entered our vocabulary with knowing snickers: ratfucking, Deep Throat, stonewall, dirty tricks, big enchilada, hush money—above all, impeach...

...They were "middle Americans," "white ethnics," "Democrats for Nixon," and quietly we feared and despised them, and knew that they hated us...

...Yet they went as unchallenged as the virgin birth in a devout Catholic household...

...These years gave me the unconscious feeling that a liberal was a man in a wheelchair...

...In order of importance, second after blacks come the poor...

...Some day, it would recognize its error and embrace our beliefs...

...Even those who do not consciously accept the liberal doctrines have been corrupted by them....Yes, the inability to face reality and make difficult decisions, that is the salient symptom of the liberal disease...

...No system or principle holds the items on this list together, other than a vague imperative to help the weak and otherwise let people be...

...A hundred years later, in my grandfather's youth, it found a plain raspy voice in Populism and fought the princes of wealth in the name of the common man...

...Always trying to avoid a minor unpleasantness now, so that a major unpleasantness becomes unavoidable later, always evading any responsibility to the future—that is the way the liberal mind works...

...No one could have scripted a better story line for early adolescence...

...Nineteen-seventythree, the year of the oil crisis, ended the postwar economic boom, which had granted a generation the luxury of revolt...

...My high school literary magazine ran a poem, after Ginsberg, that went: "Nixon, America/They don't rhyme at all/How can I write a poem/About such a jerk...

...My breakfast reading had progressed from the backs of Cheerios boxes to the sub-mediocre San Francisco newspaper...

...It was becoming a set of fixed positions that went along with a certain way of life peculiar to a narrow social class...

...Busing, welfare, taxes, affirmative action, crime, patriotism—the majority of Americans turned against the liberal position on all the most controversial and divisive issues of the period...

...When my grandfather said "No is always right," knee-jerk rebellion wasn't what he had in mind...

...a moment later he walked in and gave me a look that said, "Don't tell me it was an act of artistic and political struggle...

...But against something...

...DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 75...

...BY THE EARLY seventies, liberalism could claim to have secured a great many of the best things in American life: the eight-hour day, the end of child labor...

...At fourteen I wrote an ode to Hearst in rhyming tetrameter couplets probably inspired by Pope, a sarcastic diatribe on all the major issues of the day—"What shall we do with troublesome blacks?/Hang 'em from trees, suspend 'em from racks...

...The rest of the country just kept getting stupider and meaner...

...Just before our ill-fated 1971 trip to Europe, we canceled plans to visit fascist Spain and Greece (I was taken to see Z as an object lesson), but Leningrad was eliminated from the itinerary only for logistical reasons, on the theory that things had gotten worse in counDISSENT / Summer 2000 n 71 GROWING UP LIBERAL tries under fascism but communism had made socio-economic improvements over what it replaced...

...The grotesque distortions of unchecked fantasy can sound like broadcasts direct from the political unconscious...

...Nineteen-seventy-three was the year in which average wages began their generation-long decline...

...Not even the quadrennial bad news from the outside world could shake me out of my complacency...

...This wasn't organized political activism, it was a mood—premature cynicism against a backdrop of vaguely anti-authoritarian hi-jinks...

...So the point of foreign policy should be to shed as little blood as possible...

...I regarded its publication as an act of artistic and political struggle, a moment of existential self-definition...

...They looked like Archie Bunker...

...We thought of ourselves as the good guys, even idealists, somehow continuing in the footsteps of civil rights and anti-war marchers, as if a straight line ran from Birmingham and Selma through Columbia and Kent State to the subversive R. Crumb-like cartoons that littered the senior-class portraits in the yearbook...

...Since the values—compassion, tolerance, fairness— were so obviously good, the social policies weren't open to question...

...Race is the biggest problem in America...

...Yeahhhh...

...Nothing needed to be built...

...The Stanford Marching Band, having come a long way from the days when Herbert Hoover managed the football team, ridiculed Jerry Falwell during a halftime show, a giant marijuana leaf painted inside the tuba player's horn...

...It was becoming known as the creed of the weak, the soft, the guilt-ridden, the hyper-intellectual, the privileged, the out-of-touch, the hypocritical— all those who don't want to see the world as it really is...

...Probably not, she said—but education meant more to us than to people in South Boston...

...Complaints about high taxes are a sign of racism and mean-spiritedness...

...But integration is the ideal...

...Liberals and conservatives went on fighting the cultural wars of the sixties for decades...

...and James J. Kilpatrick—their every line boiled my blood and proved me right...

...Taxes should be higher for the rich and the "well-off...

...Then, in 1995, it suddenly surfaced to achieve a kind of cult infamy as the bedtime reading of Timothy McVeigh in the months before the Oklahoma City bombing...

...A quick and partial list of some of the beliefs I was raised on: • It's wrong to send rockets to the moon when we have problems on Earth that need money...

...BY 1973 THE kind of Americans my grandfather had once visited in their villages, broken bread with at their kitchen tables, and championed on the floor of Congress— working people who wanted fair treatment from business and government—had become the kind of Americans my family knew nothing about...

...there was only a crisis because there were racists), I asked my mother whether she would allow me to be bused from my relatively good junior high school into one of the weaker ones...

...The Turner Diaries' answer is to hang blacks and Jews from lampposts around Los Angeles...

...The poor aren't poor by some fault of their own, nor is capitalism the root cause of poverty...

...Black claims on society are always valid...

...Perhaps a better adjective than feminine is infantile...

...All the economic trends of the past two decades—the decline of American manufacturing under pressure from foreign imports, the growing inequality in wealth, the contraction of the middle class, the narrowing of opportunity—began in 1973...

...Compare this early political education to my grandfather's—Southern defeat, rural poverty, farmers' and workers' revolt—or to my parents'—the Great Depression, government activism, war against fascism—and you begin to see how badly prepared we were to be responsible...

...Their sons were the kids who sometimes jumped me while I was biking through their part of town to junior high (my elementary school, a five-minute bike ride from our house, had been almost all Stanford kids...

...They were probably racist...

...They seemed unlikely liberal allies—and what's more, liberals no longer spoke their language or knew how to reach them...

...On the one hand I held the moral high ground on all the issues of the day, and on the other hand I was a casual cynic...

...By the time I entered adolescence, liberalism seemed only able to thrive in the rarefied world of college campuses and eccentric city precincts...

...They owned two American-made cars and had bad taste...

...The principal got complaints from parents, and I was called into his office...

...When Nixon was trapping himself in the coils of his Watergate tapes, my friend Lewis Cohen and I sang "Jail to the Chief, he's a mighty motherfucker" and drew Xs one by one across the mug shots on his bedroom poster of all the president's convicted men, waiting for the day when the unindicted coconspirator with the beady eyes would get his...

...It began by speaking for all mankind, and by 1972, when George McGovern was wiped out by Richard Nixon, it spoke for Massachusetts and Washington, D.C...

...By then, years of white backlash and anti-government rhetoric and economic decline had made The Turner Diaries palatable to a sizeable subculture of angry rejects and freelance desperados...

...This alongside anarchic neo-Dylan verse that began with lines like "Yogurt round my toes goes/Plippety-plop...

...The cold war is a given, and permanent...

...But the choice for every generation is ultimately between taking politics seriously and letting power and wealth go unchecked...

...GEORGE PACKER is the author of The Village of Waiting, a memoir about Africa, and two novels...

...greater social equality...

...What remained of the spirit of youthful revolt was basically drugs and pranks...

...Liberalism, the word that the early New Republic group brought over from England and gave its modern American use, the word that Herbert Hoover tried and failed to wrest away from Franklin Roosevelt, began in the seventies to acquire the connotations that have made it an epithet, a term of scorn and abuse, a word that dares not speak its name: the "L word...

...During these years a novel appeared that spelled out this view in the obsessive detail of a sadistic (but not stupid) lunatic's nightmare fantasy...

...Unions were too fat and corrupt to bestir themselves...

...Nixon's father should have pulled out sooner...

...They are simply the poor, and as such they deserve compassion and taxpayers' dollars...

...He began his career fighting the princes of wealth on behalf of the steelworkers and coal miners and dirt farmers in his district, and he ended it opposing the New Deal on behalf of Jeffersonian principles...

...George Huddleston might have known, but he was long gone...

...A copy of the magazine lay on his table...

...In 1969, after announcing his plans to leave the administration and return to teaching, he suffered a massive stroke that paralyzed his right side...

...The decade of the seventies was one long preparation for Reagan, the signs of conservative revival were everywhere, but even by 1978, when California's Proposition 13 passed in a landslide the year I graduated from high school, ushering in the national tax revolt, I still didn't see it...

...Every fourth November a general election came along to confirm that the ideas on which my parents had raised me were discredited...

...I grew up during the years of liberal defeat...

...13 public schools and a lax curfew...

...My inheritance was paid in a devalued currency...

...If I think back to the mental world of my teens, what comes to mind is a Richard Pryor record, That Nigger's Crazy, which my friends and I listened to endlessly and secretly...

...Nor should spiritually healthy men of our race even want the world to be like that, if it could be so...

...As for the good society, we had it right there in California: well-funded, preProp...

...Some of these beliefs were little more than reflexes, in my case hereditary reflexes...

...Watergate was a joyride (and how unfair it was that my father missed by just a few months his old enemy's slide into disgrace...

...Abortion should be federally funded because black women will be the ones who can't afford to have one...

...74 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 But it has permeated our whole society...

...Communism is bad, but not as bad as fascism...

...Say "poverty" and a genetically programmed nerve called "government spending" twitched...

...It isn't just a bad book, it's an evil one...

...You were having fun— and now you're a pain in my ass...

...Once, during the BosGROWING UP LIBERAL ton busing crisis (of course we were for busing...

...As long as they don't hurt anyone else, people should be allowed to live their lives as they please...

...Then, in a few short years, it ripped itself apart over the three great issues of the sixties: race, war, and student revolt...

...My maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman who represented Birmingham, Alabama, from 1915 to 1937...

...And in Stanford they seldom were challenged...

...When The Turner Diaries, written by a Virginia physicist named William Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, was first published in 1977, no one noticed...

...A passage describing liberalism could have been uttered, two decades later and mildly censored, on the Rush Limbaugh Show: The corruption of our people by the Jewishliberaldemocratic-equalitarian plague which afflicts us is more clearly manifested in our soft-mindedness, our unwillingness to recognize the harder realities of life, than in anything else...

...Ten or fifteen years later, they emerge toned-down as acceptable public speech...

...Race, meaning black and white, trumps everything else...

...Basically, we had the New Deal plus sixties liberation...

...Through junior high, high school, and college, I enjoyed an ideological free ride through a scenery of billboard slogans and low amusements— until, ten years after my father's death, I decided to get off and see what lay behind the fun house...

...liberty and self-government...

...Impeach the President...

...The working class and the lower middle class don't exist, except in cultural terms as, for example, the people throwing rocks and screaming curses at the Boston school buses bringing black students to white high schools...

...Wha's happenin', Tricky Dick...

...Welfare is organized compassion, therefore a good thing...

...Without liberalism, America would have been a much harsher country, less equal and less free...

...The day of Nixon's resignation speech was the happiest I'd seen my mother in years...

...My friends and I got to live out history as farce...

...It is the world view of men who do not have the moral toughness, the spiritual strength to stand up and do single combat with life, who cannot adjust to the reality that the world is not a huge, pink-andblue, padded nursery in which the lions lie down with the lambs and everyone lives happily ever after...

...To be educated means that whatever your political views and income level, you have a set of cultural traits and tastes that make you someone who could sit comfortably at our dinner table...

...One reality that escaped me and everyone else for years after was that 1973, a year dominated by stories like Watergate, Vietnam pullout, Roe v. Wade—in other words, by some fairly colorful fallout from the wars of the sixties— was also the end of one economic era and the beginning of another...

...A half-century after that, in my father's and mother's youth, it came to power in the modern state and made government activism its signature...