Monstrous Moderates

It probably sounds like hyperbole to say that cartoonist Jules Feiffer nailed today’s insane politics back in the Johnson years, but he did. Across two pages of the collection Jules Feiffer’s America: From Eisenhower to Reagan – 110 to 111 – he analyzed the twin specters of Trumpism and centrism while simultaneously teaching us how to read a respectable mainstream newspaper.

Obviously, Feiffer was not trying to be a soothsayer. He was trying to describe the underlying currents in the politics of his day. But the attitudes and rhetoric he portrayed are undeniably deep in the saddle today.

As I wrote before, Trumpism is just conservatism without apology or subtlety. To deny this is to studiously ignore not only the Tea Party (which I called “warmed-over Goldwaterism” in my book) but over a half century of the GOP’s cynically using Southern Strategy. Seriously, outside of Birtherism, the bulk of their conspiracy theories originate with the John Birch Society in the late 1950s. Their stupidity and bigotry have a long pedigree. You cannot omit this history and retain any credibility as an informed commentator.

Another facet that is impossible to credibly deny or ignore is the fact that the rhetoric of moderation has historically been the respectable face of reaction. In his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King professed his profound disappointment with white moderates, who he felt might be an even greater stumbling block to racial progress than the Klan.

Jules Feiffer also criticized the unreconstructed middle; but where King saw pampered ignorance, Feiffer also saw selfish malevolence. Of course, as a cartoonist, he has no incentive to pull punches.

The strip directly below shows the tone of establishment political opinion whatever the tactics of activists – nonviolent or otherwise. As you can see, each panel shows a newspaper cartoon clipping in which a Klansman shakes hands with a black protester and the caption “Thanks, partner.” Note that the protesters are labeled provocateurs whether they are violent or not. In fact, the March on Washington protesters are labeled “nonviolent provocation.”(1) This may explain why King found white moderates so frustrating.

Of course, moderate opposition to anything that upsets the apple cart or causes any sort of inconvenience or discomfort is predictable. Seeing concern trolling used to preserve the status quo is nothing new. As I wrote before, concern trolling is “the essence of centrism.”

In the very next strip, a reporter interviews an unnamed spokesman for the “Radical Middle.” That man-on-the-street blasts, “Too much spending on the poor, not enough spending on us!(2) Too much freedom for Negroes, not enough freedom for cops!” Again, this was during the Johnson years. Richard Nixon later called such voters “The Silent Majority.” Still later, they would be called “Reagan Democrats” (assuming they were actually Democrats to begin with). Each incarnation was frequently portrayed as “hardhats” to fit the familiar “hippie vs. hardhat” narrative, yet here in Jules Feiffer’s version the unofficial spokesman is clearly a businessman with his suit and briefcase. Funny about that.

In the next strip after that, Feiffer has another reporter interview another businessman in a suit. This one, a Mr. Whitey Backlash, is less thuggish and more polished. While the previous one is blunt, this one insists on discretion about his cynicism. He starts by saying, “Negroes are going too far with their protests.” But he does not want that quoted. Off the record, he cops to all sorts of awful thoughts. When finally asked for a quote they can print, he concern trolls, “For the record, Sonny, you may say that in my opinion extremist tactics are losing the Negroes their many moderate friends.” (emphasis original)

It echoes the second panel of the first strip I mentioned almost word-for-word. 

Both strips vividly illustrate how respectable opinion is routinely packaged. Both show concern trolling. But the first strip shows how quickly any activist tactic is maligned and the third strip teaches you how to read between the lines – how what is on the record relates to what is off of it. It's a decoder ring.

To those who swallow that horseshit known as Horseshoe Theory, the interviewees must seem completely incomprehensible. The first interviewee represents the “Radical Middle,” which must strike them as an oxymoron, but it actually fits perfectly. Trump is a textbook example of what political scientists call an “ideological moderate.” I learned this in a WaPo article entitled “Donald Trump is a textbook example of an ideological moderate.” The second interviewee, Mr. Whitey Backlash, says “On the record, you can even say I am for Democracy, Sonny.” This squares with a study that discovered that centrists are even less favorable towards democratic institutions like freedom of the press than conservatives are(3)

And, again, both are businessmen rather than hardhats. This shouldn't surprise anyone anymore.  In 2010, it was revealed that Tea Party supporters were not predominantly blue collar voters. Instead, they were the same suburban professionals that have always preferred the Republican Party. Therefore they were not voting against their economic interests. The same turns out to be true for Trump supporters. No shit: They are the same people. I guess betraying labor to make a play for their votes is a stupid gambit.

Again, none of this should surprise anyone because both businessmen are precisely the types of voters that New Democrats have always fruitlessly sought to woo – the type the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was founded to lure. I’d say there is a vast paper trail proving this, but it is more like a five-lane highway with overpasses and suspension bridges.  

The evidence is immense. Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment was not just a personal nadir: It was classic centrist strategy. To make extra certain that he would not get Willie Horton-ed, Clinton left the campaign trail to conspicuously attend the execution of a mentally impaired black man. Describing the original DLC in Listen Liberal: Or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People, Thomas Frank wrote, “As the DLC saw it, whenever Democrats lost an election, it was because their leaders were too weak on crime, too soft on communism, and too sympathetic to minorities.” (pg. 57)

You cannot feign disbelief or shock at Jules Feiffer's prescient characterization after decades of centrist arguments courting this type. Mr. Whitey Backlash and the reactionary Radical Middle are all too real.

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1) In the very last panel, the black figure is hilariously labeled “Booker T. Washington fanatics.” This added another layer to the humor because, apart from the fact that Booker T. accommodated segregation (“as separate as the fingers on the hand”), he was active in the 1910s – suggesting that the cartoonist in the cartoon had held his post for over a half century and was still mired in the same mindset. I grew up with anachronistic comic strips that were founded in the 1920s, so it is interesting to see political cartoonists like Feiffer already skewering this in the 1960s. I always thought mocking such fossils started in the 1980s.

2) The spokesman's perception was grossly incorrect. As Stephanie Coontz pointed out in The Way We Never Were: American Families in the Nostalgia Trap:

It is important to note that the most dramatic growth in government social expenditures since the 1960s has been in social insurance programs such as worker’s compensation, disability, and Medicare. Most benefits from these programs go to members of the white middle class. Although the programs are very important for the poor they do reach, even at the height of the Great Society antipoverty initiative, between 1965 and 1971, 75 percent of America’s social welfare dollars were spent on the non-poor. The proportion going to the poor has decreased substantially since then. (pg. 79-80)

Coontz’s book was published in 1992 - just before Bill Clinton signed “Welfare Reform” into law. Today, “substantially” would be a titanic understatement.

3) Speaking of the horseshit known as Horseshoe Theory, the first "Thanks, Partner" strip suggests that moderates and the establishment saw Klansmen and black activists as equally bad or nearly so - two sides of the same coin, hence their shaking hands as allies. Centrists despise protest (however non-violent) because it is disruptive, inconvenient, and makes people uncomfortable. In every era, they are less mad at injustice than at the people pointing it out because the injustice did not directly affect them.