Frank Gaffney and the New Confederacy

Yesterday, Frank Gaffney, a well-known neo-conservative writer, published an op-ed in the Washington Times that called "surge" opponents as "saboteurs" and claimed that Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan should be hanged. Referring to Levin, Gaffney states that:

If there's one thing that really should be a hanging offense, it is behavior that results in our being even less equipped to deal with such threats than we were before this phase of the War for the Free World began on September 11, 2001.

In analyzing Gaffney's article, it is possible to go right for the underlying attitudes and insist that Gaffney hates political dissent in particular and liberty in general. That's what Glenn Greenwald does in a Feb. 14 post on his Salon blog. Nevertheless, superficiality has its virtues and it's useful to linger on the surface of the issues with Gaffney before plunging deeper. On the surface, Gaffney's article is part of a broad right-wing attack on the Democrats and especially the new Democratic congress. In this sense, Gaffney's strident accusations should be considered as a companion to conservative accusations concerning Nancy Pelosi's air travel, John Edwards' bloggers, claims concerning the effect of anti-surge resolutions on troop morale, claim about Barack Obama being educated in radical madrassas, and the Bush administration's aggressive stance toward Iran. They're all experiments by the right-wing in the effort to find a rhetorical edge that would allow them to mobilize public opinion against the Democrats. The right-wing does not care about Pelosi's plane any more than they care about Edwards' bloggers. The point is to find something, anything that will damage the Democrats at a time when President Bush, the war, and the Republicans are becoming less and less popular.

It is important to emphasize that the right-wing is up against the political wall. There's a 21 month time frame before the 2008 election with no viable candidate from the right and all the political trends favoring Democrats and liberals. If the right does not reverse the trends against President Bush, against the war, and against the right-wing view of foreign policy, the right is going to find itself excluded from Presidential as well as Congressional power. As a result, they're throwing all the mud against the wall that they can in the hope that something, anything, will stick. In many ways, Gaffney's "hanging rhetoric" is just another bit of right-wing mud. One can really question the extent to which Gaffney agrees with his position any more than Levin.

However, Gaffney's rhetoric does embody a real anger and desperation that isn't part of the insinuations about Nancy Pelosi's air travel. Beginning with the defeat of impeachment in 1998, the right's patience with any kind of political interaction with the Democrats has gradually worn out. The Bush administration has maintained as much of a "no negotiation" policy with the Democratic leadership as they have with the Iran, a strategy that began when the Republican leadership refused to negotiate with the Clinton administration after the failure of impeachment in 1998. Now that the Democrats are winning elections and are a real threat to run the table in 2008 by winning the presidency and controlling both houses of Congress, the Republicans are becoming even more strident. In this sense, the pointed invoking of the language of treason by Gaffney is a follow-up to Newt Gingrich's calls to effectively revoke the First Amendment in relation to the War on Terror. The best way to view this is that the right-wing is preparing itself to adopt a scorched-earth policy toward the Democrats controlling the government after the 2008. That should be no surprise. Right-wingers in the minority won't be any prettier than right-wing government has been over the last six years.

Plunging a little deeper into values ideas, right-wingers like Gaffney don't just reject liberty. Of course they reject dissent, but what they particularly reject about liberty is the the ability of dissenters to win democratic elections and adapt their views into law. However, the right-wing rejects a great deal about American society besides political dissent. They also reject abortion rights, the broad social tolerance toward gays, the high level of comfort that most of American society has with illegal immigration, the persistence of African-American, Hispanic and other non-Anglo sub-cultures, and the relatively high rates of divorce, pre-marital sex, drug use, and other evidence of moral laxness. In other words, the right-wing rejects most of contemporary American life for the pre-1960's world as they imagine it.

In this context, the threat posed by the Gaffney article is that it represents the possibility of a broad, right-wing rejectionist movement after the potential Democratic victories of 2008. To put the issue in Dick Cheney language, Gaffney's positions could be the harbinger of a New Confederacy as it were.