Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Stabbed In the Back   [Jonah Goldberg]

Ross Douthat keeps giving credence to this "stabbed in the back" meme (ugh, I feel dirty using "meme" un-ironically). I think it started with Matt Yglesias. The basic idea is that after we fail in Iraq, conservatives will mount a "stabbed in the back" campaign against liberals, specifically the press,  who prevented the military from winning. 

Having spent a few year toiling on fascism and the use and abuse of fascism analogies, I found the whole conversation interesting at first. But at the end of the day, there's nothing there except the phrase "stabbed in the back." Yglesias, as far as I am aware, never bothered to make a tight link between the National Socialist reaction to German surrender at the end of WWI and, again as far as I'm aware, nobody since has tried to defend the analogy on the merits. But the Dolchstosslegende thing thrives.

Now, it's nothing new for liberals to draw invidious comparisons between American conservatives and Nazis, but I'm not clear why Ross so gamely goes along with it. If you read his post today, he uses the "stabbed in the back" phrase uncritically. Why? Why not just talk about the Vietnam syndrome? Or media bashing? Which, after all, is what he's really talking about anyway. I'm not reflexively opposed to the comparison to the end of WWI Germany, but nobody's really tried to make it in any serious way. The assertion has simply caught on. In that sense it really is a meme, an idea that spreads around because of its superficial seductiveness alone. (Oh and please spare me the emails from people who seem to know what I write in my book better than I do. You don't). 

And speaking of the Vietnam syndrome,  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. This is not to say that I think blaming the liberal media is a particularly persuasive explanation on the merits for failure in Iraq (if we fail), but it's far from clear that an American defeat in Iraq helps those Democrats who seemed, fair or not, determined to make failure a self-fulfilling prophecy. He may be right that if we fail in Iraq, conservatives will shrink their appeal if they blame anyone but themselves. But my guess is that the psychological and geostraategic fallout from failure will be sufficiently enormous and complex that nobody can predict who comes out a winner or a loser from it. 

06/27 02:16 PMShare