Great Piece on McGovern--By a Conservative

Because establishment political party hacks, flacks, and propagandists have reduced public discussion of politics to a big pile of incumbent protection crap, it's almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion of political ideology. Liberal, Conservative, and Radical have become nothing but political God and Devil terms, reduced to bullet points in pathetic campaign literature. I tried to resuscite these terms last year in a piece for the Valley Scene.

In the latest American Conservative magazine, Bill Kauffman does a wonderful job of showing how former South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern--long demonized by the Right and reduced to a peace movement era icon on the Left--is actually misunderstood by both camps. The real McGovern, argues the conservative Kauffman, is best summed up in a quote from biographer Robert Sam Anson:

"To the extent that his vision of life is bounded by certain, immutable values—the importance of family, the dependence on nature, the strength of community, the worth of living things—he is a conservative. He seeks not so much to change America as to restore it, to return it to the earliest days of the Republic, which he believes, naively or not, were fundamentally decent, humane, and just. Like the Populists, he is willing to gamble with radical means to accomplish his end. There remains in him, though, as it remained in the Populists, a lingering distrust of government, a suspicion of bigness in all its forms.”

As described by Kauffman, the liberal McGovern stood and stands not against real conservatives (he admits to admiring Bob Taft and liking Barry Goldwater and Bob Dole), but against the reactionary, arrogant approach to politics and power represented by the Bush Administration neocons. The neocons are a dangerous force that Kauffman realizes should be of worry to real conservatives as much as liberals. Says McGovern of the Bush neocons:

"They have this view that we are so much more powerful than any other country in the world that we need to run the world—none of this business of coexistence. I think that’s just terrible. It’s not conservatism, and it’s not liberalism, either. It’s a new doctrine that I find frightening. If Iraq hadn’t gone sour, there was a whole string of countries they were gonna knock off. That’s not conservatism to me.”

Like all real liberals and real conservatives (and real radicals too), Kauffman's McGovern is not the one-dimensional man constructed by the establishment party hacks and flacks.