BORN AGAIN VIRGINITY ON THE LEFT:

The Mighty Wurlitzer : What progressives can learn from David Brock's account of the conservative machine. (Robert Borosage, 5.6.02, American Prospect)

...Brock tours the political infrastructure that makes the right wing so formidable. [...]

The "vast right-wing conspiracy" against Clinton isn't news. [...]More important is what Brock describes in passing: the institutions and arrangements that enable the right to drive the political debate. Here the contrast between the right-wing apparat and what exists on the left is stark.

Most formidable, of course, is the right's money machine. The imbalance between right and left is neither secret nor surprising. The Heritage Foundation, the most influential conservative think tank, runs on more than $25 million a year; the Economic Policy Institute, the premier think tank of progressives, gets by on less than $6 million annually. [...]

There is nothing on the progressive side of town remotely competitive with this. There is no progressive TV network and few progressive pundits. Several good journals of opinion exist, but nothing with the reach of Rush Limbaugh, the Journal editorial page, Rupert Murdoch's Fox News network, or even The Washington Times. [...]

[U]ntil progressives develop the institutions and the arrangements needed simply to get into the debate -- to be able to present ideas, broadcast them, echo them, and defend them against the assault from the right -- our politics will be driven and degraded by the institutional forces Brock describes.

Up in these parts, we call what Mr. Borosage says there the equivalent of cramming ten pounds of cow flap in a five pound bag.

After the disgraceful demonization of Robert Bork when he was up for a Supreme Court seat in 1987, Ethan Bonner, wrote a very fine book Battle for Justice : How the Bork Nomination Shook America, in which he detailed the sophisticated, coordinated, and vicious campaign by liberal politicians and Left wing organizations to kill the nomination at all costs.

Mr. Bonner was then a legal affairs reporter for the Boston Globe, I think he may have moved on to the NY Times, and could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered a partisan, in fact, his discussions of Bork's jurisprudence and philosophy suggested that he might have opposed the nominee on purely legal grounds. But his account of the battle is fair and it is chilling. Everyone knew that Mr. Bork would eventually be appointed to the Court, and with his relative youth and unparalleled mind, he was the man the Left most feared--knowing he might become the Right's Brennan. So they had been gearing up for the fight for several years, doing opposition research and laying the groundwork for a unified campaign against the judge.

The process started with a truly repellent speech by Ted Kennedy when the nomination was announced, in which he declared that putting Mr. Bork on the Court would mean women would be getting abortions in back alleys; it continued with well orchestrated denunciations by "civil rights" groups, led by Ralph Neas, as I recall; and ended with Senator Howell Heflin implying that he was voting against the nominee because of his video rental habits. A few years later many of the same tricks were trotted out against Clarence Thomas, but he outbrazened them with his "high tech lynching" remarks and just barely snuck through.

These kinds of attacks were made possible then, just as they are today (witness the recent campaign against Charles Pickering), by a combination of friendly media (the NY Times, the networks, etc.), labor and foundation money, political pressure groups, etc., etc., etc. Yet Mr. Borosage seems to want us to believe that saintly progressives are sitting around like the little girl plucking daisy petals in the infamous LBJ ad, while the nasty conservatives wield atomic bombs. The Left has indeed been deflowered, but it was some years ago that they lost their innocence. Mr. Borosage's review of the vile David Brock's book is risible--the two are welcome to one another.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 16, 2002 8:31 PM