NOTE: My French studies must be working I used something closer to a french construction of the word egoiste than the English Egotist.
Two stories caught my attention this morning. One was about Attorney General Bill Barr being a bully which exposes his adolescent cruelty. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/09/so-this-is-why-bill-barr-is-such-bully/ The other is an analysis of the difference between Mitt Romney and his father one of my early Republican heroes George Romney. In short it says nice things about Mitt but even nicer things about his Father. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/10/mitt-romney-his-father-both-marched-civil-rights-there-is-crucial-difference/.
This post is important enough that it is in contention to be the prologue for the book I will resume writing after getting a new campaign website set up.
In the time of Richard Nixon lots of armchair psychologists psychoanalyzed Nixon. It was sort of a new political past time. Allies of Nixon were indignant and said it was ridiculous. I always sided with the psychoanalyz-ers and my Mother was the main reason
as you will see if you read the Chapter including my old column “The Gift of Why.”
At the same time I had a conversation with my Dad who was devoted to the magazine “Psychology Today.” I once told him that I thought it was important to be “selfless.” He surprised me by disagreeing. He told me that it was important to be selfish. The gist of his argument was that before you could be selfless you had to take care of yourself.
In a discussion on MPR this morning a black activist pointed out that in an emergency on a airplane parents are told to put their own oxygen masks on first before doing the natural thing and putting the mask on their child first. Emotionally this may not seem right but is the rational thing to do. That was my father’s point.
But there is a point at which selfishness fails us. When we can not share enough or anything at all. Nixon had numerous demons. He was a rare introvert in politics and he harbored deep resentments about of JFK’s wealth polish and the likely electoral defeat that cost Nixon the Presidency in 1960. In his comeback in 1968 he pulled the race card which he renamed “law and order” and accelerated the Republican party’s drift away from Civil Rights. He spent the election of 1968 courting George Wallace supporters who were pragmatic enough to take Nixon’s soft pedaling over the almost certain defeat of Wallace.
Much of the book I’m writing is about the consequences of the Dixiecrat takeover of the Republican Party by the worst instincts of white southerners. So we get to Donald Trump a man/child for whom there is only one person who counts. He has always surrounded himself with a court of yes people. Bill Barr the Attorney General is a bird of a feather. The story above will share his brutish side and the history of his four brothers in the now notorious New York private school that birthed Jeffery Epstein a protegee” of the schools principal who was the father of the four Barr brothers. (This factoid has been covered elsewhere in the press although it doesn’t get mentioned in this story) My mother would have found this an important clue to his current behavior in her fascination with people. My Dad’s Psychology Today mind would certainly have agreed.
The book I’m writing is mostly about my youth and flawed years as a not very successful political wannabe. I think my upbringing and some of the actions I have taken which have been controversial as a politician, including my puny efforts to pull the elephant out of a tar pit, explain why I might be a very good Congressman in this particular time. I don’t know if the Republican Party can ever be rehabilitated by the sorts of Republicans it has estranged are an important part of America’s political fabric. They need to find a home somewhere.
That at any rate is the conclusion I hope readers of my book, If I crank it out in time, will draw.
Now about the Romneys. As I said George was Dad’s choice in 1968 for the GOP nomination. Two years earlier the arch conservative Goldwater forces had utterly routed the Rockefeller wing of the Party and Romney was making a bid for Presidency hoping for that wing’s resurgence. It was not to be. He was derailed when he changed his mind early on in 1967 about the Vietnam War. He had gone to Vietnam and the Generals he talked to had given him the soft soap about how well it was all going. It became obvious to Romney that this was hogwash and when he was asked about it he made the flip remark that he had been “brainwashed” by the generals. It was an unfortunate choice of words as brainwashing was what Americans at the time thought Communists did to week willed dupes. All Nixon’s partisans jumped on Romney for admitting to being a dupe and unsupportive of the troops.
The article I’ve linked to explains that while Mitt has challenged the Republican party, Trump’s Party which is chained to him like Princess Lea was chained to Jabba the Hutt, by walking with the BLM protesters his Dad not only defied the Republicans but George Romney also defied his church of the Latter Day Saints. That too is true. The Mormons had always been desperate to fit in to America despite the charge that their religion was a heresy and to that end they sided with Dixiecrat ethos of a white Supremacist America. One of the Apostles almost became the Vice Presidential running mate of George Wallace. George Romney’s civil rights work found no support in a church that at that time denied black members anything remotely like equal treatment.
I’d cut Mitt some slack. He learned two lessons from his father. First that too much separation from the party was politically disastrous. In a post Trump world Mitt may be one of the people who breaths new life in the Party of Lincoln although it may be far too late for that to happen.
As for defying the Church. To a large extent his father’s legacy made that unnecessary. The LDS Church has long set aside its racist past. George himself made sure his son went through all the steps to become a successful Mormon leader. Today Mitt represents one of the few states that has given him the freedom, limited as it has been, to defy Donald Trump.
That counts for something.
