Politics Through the Looking Glass : Name-calling and vilification by both the left and the right are stripping the civility away from our lives.

Sometime during the stormy election season just past, as an exercise in open-mindedness, I began tuning in to Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show. Limbaugh’s main targets are “femi-Nazis” and “militant environmental wackos,” and I am proudly one among them, a political progressive who believes that a legitimate role of government is to help the less fortunate. From my liberal elitist perch, I anticipated that listening to Limbaugh would bring at most a bitter laugh. Instead I find the experience oddly liberating. In Limbaugh-land, everything I think of as good is bad. Every hero of history, according to Limbaugh’s term, is the devil. For a few brief moments, my whole world turns upside down and I feel immediately the power of adrenalin (pardon the expression) rush.

If the content of our concerns makes me and Limbaugh polar opposites, in respect to tactics we are peculiarly alike. The same anger, resentment, sense of powerlessness and moral rectitude that has embedded itself into the Limbaugh audience and the leadership of the newly victorious political right seem eerily familiar to me from the years when Republicans controlled the White House. The difference is that in those days, the left spoke to one another in consciousness-raising call-in shows over the tiny Pacifica Radio network, not across the megawattage of commercial radio where the right now holds forth.

But the message has a familiar ring. Which shouldn’t be a surprise. The relationship between the new right and the former baby-boomer generation is clear, part of the unfolding Clinton-Gingrich dialectic (even their silver haircuts are similarly airbrushed.) This generation, which historian Christopher Lasch termed “the culture of narcissism” because it expects society to ceaselessly meet its demands, is still angry and still counterculture, in this case rebelling against a culture that has failed to provide the economic stability and opportunity baby boomers felt were promised them at birth. There are still white men among the political left, but the numbers are thinning. As for women, they are either failing to vote at all or, as in the case of the Kathleen Brown gubernatorial bid, going 52% to Gov. Pete Wilson. Which is why it is rare to find a day when Limbaugh doesn’t boom out, “Welcome to our side,” to some self-confessed former leftist who now sees the conservative light.

And in that light, we are finding the resurfacing of many of the counterculture attitudes and tactics. There is the same tendency to demonize the opposition, willingness to destroy a person’s reputation for the sake of a political goal, obsession with conspiracy, lack of respect for authority and basic unwillingness to engage in a debate on facts. These characterized the left during the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush administrations, when we were the outsiders filled with rage, “megadittoing” each other with stories of conspiracies and dunderheads lurking everywhere. Now the politics of resentment has settled in at Congress, and its effects are unnerving.

Is the right’s obsession with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton the mirror of the left’s with Nancy Reagan? Are the putative “conspiracies” surrounding Vince Foster’s suicide and Whitewater a way of getting even for 30 years of Watergate, Iran-Contra and the failure of the thrifts? And will the younger Gingrich Republicans turn on their father-figure Bob Dole, just as the left spit out L.B.J.?

It’s harder for the left to draw ethical distinctions about the behavior of its adversaries, having played the game of “gotcha” so often ourselves. And it’s difficult to mount the flag of moral superiority toward Limbaugh’s and Gingrich’s use of sophomoric names for enemies (“femi-Nazi” and “McGoverniks”) when we on the left have done a fair share of adolescent name-calling (“male chauvinist pig.”) The septic system of politics sullies us all.

The politics of resentment is not pleasant, no matter who plays it. Worse, it may be built into the fabric of American reform, an organizing tactic for those cast into the role of outsider. How long will we allow the corrosion to continue? As the new Republican majority is soon to discover, an attitude of resentment is not easily abandoned when outsiders finally win their way back in. Our modern political thuggery is exacting a high price and demands that each of us share the responsibility if civility, that paper-thin layer that separates us from the jungle, is ever to be restored.