Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

PREFACE

CHAPTER ONE
The John Wayne Syndrome

CHAPTER TWO
How Great American Hypocrites Feed Off One Another

CHAPTER THREE
Tough Guise

CHAPTER FOUR
Wholesome Family Men

CHAPTER FIVE
Small-Government Tyrants

CHAPTER SIX
John McCain

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY GLENN GREENWALD

COPYRIGHT

PREFACE

F
or the past three decades, American politics has been driven by a bizarre anomaly. Polls continuously show that on almost every issue, Americans vastly prefer the policies of the Democratic Party to those of the Republican Party. Yet during that time, the Republicans have won the majority of elections. This book examines how and why that has happened.

The most important factor, by far, is that the Republican Party employs the same set of personality smears and mythical, psychological, and cultural images to win elections. These myths and smears are amplified by the right-wing noise machine and mindlessly adopted and recited by the establishment media. Right-wing leaders are inflated into heroic cultural icons, while Democrats are demonized as weak and hapless losers. These personality-based myths overwhelm substantive discussions and consideration of the issues.

Time and again, Americans vote Republican due to their perceptions that right-wing leaders exude such admirable personality traits as courage, conviction, strength, wholesome family morality, identification with the “regular guy,” an affection for the military, fiscal restraint, and a belief in the supremacy of the individual over the government. Ronald Reagan, the wholesome “Everyman” rancher, and George W. Bush, the swaggering, conquering cowboy, rode to victory on the basis of the cartoon imagery and marketing themes that defined them.

Liberals and Democrats generally are relentlessly depicted as the opposite. Liberals are weak, irresolute, anti-military, elitist, effete, amoral, sexually deviant, profligate, and antagonistic to the values of “Real Americans.” Democratic males specifically are soft, sissified, effeminate losers (“faggots,” in the formulation of wildly popular right-wing author Ann Coulter), while liberal women are threatening, emasculating, icy, frigid, gender-confused, dyke-ish shrews (Rush Limbaugh: “I mean, where are the real men in the Democratic Party? Where are the real men? Hillary Clinton’s one of them, but where are the others?”).

It would be bad enough if these cultural themes were actually true. The argument would still be compelling that such themes are petty and manipulative and engender a corrupted and shallow political process. But if such imagery were real, it could at least be said that Americans decide their elections based on rational assessments of personality attributes rather than issues.

But these GOP marketing packages are complete fabrications. They bear no relationship to reality. Across the board, the leading heroes of the right wing who trumpet courageous masculine values and traditional morality exude exactly the opposite in reality. From Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, to Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the right-wing noise machine—to say nothing of the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney—those who playact as powerful Tough Guys and anti-Terrorist Warriors and Crusaders for the Values Voters have lives filled with weakness, fear, unbridled hedonism, unearned privilege, sheltered insulation, and none of the “Traditional Masculine Virtues” they endlessly tout.

Yet the myth of the plainspoken, honor-bound, courageous Republican man of the people persists. Throughout 2007, these themes were aggressively applied in order to dress up the most likely GOP presidential nominees into fictitious archetypes of the Strong, Courageous, and Moral Warrior even though those individuals practically never displayed any of those virtues in their actual lives. But these deceitful caricatures have worked, and it is long past the time to expose and stop them.

This rank mythmaking and exploitation of cultural, gender, and psychological themes had its roots in the transformation of actor Ronald Reagan into a John Wayne–archetype cowboy who alone had the courage to stand tall against the Soviet Empire. Combat-avoiding George Bush—who spent his entire life wallowing in privileged, sheltered hedonism—became the swaggering, brush-clearing, fighter-pilot warrior whose courage and masculine toughness we needed to protect us from the Terrorists.

Both of Bush’s opponents in the past two presidential elections—Al Gore and John Kerry—volunteered to go to Vietnam; yet each lost the election because they were portrayed as effeminate, soft, elitist cowards. In 2000, Gore was controlled by the emasculating feminist Naomi Wolf and, in Maureen Dowd’s formulation, he was “practically lactating,” whereas in 2004, Kerry was dominated by his rich foreign wife and was an effete, windsurfing French pansy.

That Bush’s and Cheney’s lives were completely devoid of any acts of authentic courage or toughness or the traditional masculine and moral virtues mattered not at all. These manipulative psychological and cultural marketing tactics of the Republican slime machine rolled over reality and infected the entire media narrative, as it has continuously for years. Millions of Americans who oppose the defining Republican beliefs nonetheless voted for Bush and Cheney because the character mythology that was created of the Upstanding Tough Guy versus the Sniveling Loser—drawn directly from American entertainment and marketing methods—easily overwhelmed issues of substance.

Most infuriating is that GOP leaders who dress up in the costumes of the heroic icons are engaged in pure deceit. In fact, the playacting is
more important,
more valued, than the reality. The handful of political figures who actually do have lives that exhibit these qualities of warrior courage—John McCain and Chuck Hagel and Jack Murtha and Wes Clark and John Kerry—end up being rejected and despised by the hard-right base. Democratic politicians such as Nancy Pelosi who have been married to the same person their entire lives and have raised large and healthy families are demonized for having “decadent San Francisco values.” And those accusations are voiced by right-wing moralists sitting next to their third wives obtained during an adulterous affair or on their way home from a Viagra-fueled weekend jaunt to Carribean islands.

The sheer pervasiveness of this political deceit is somewhat new, but the deceit itself goes back decades. As examined in
Chapter One,
one of the earliest pioneers of this manipulative right-wing marketing was John Wayne. Wayne was a draft dodger during World War II, staying at home in Hollywood, getting rich by playacting as a war hero in one film after the next while his acting peers were off fighting in combat. Wayne then spent the rest of his life preening around as a swaggering, über-patriotic tough guy—cheering for one war after another and viciously castigating war opponents as cowards and subversives.

With the enormous gap between his self-righteous moralizing rhetoric and the way he actually lived his life, John Wayne proved himself to be one of the first right-wing Great American Hypocrites. He tirelessly crusaded for wholesome American morals and publicly condemned any perceived deviations. Yet Wayne’s personal life was a never-ending carousel of adultery, divorces, new wives, shattered families, pills, booze, and unrestrained hedonism.

Wayne was the true precursor to the Republican Party of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and all the various and sundry leaders of the Clinton sex witch hunts of the 1990s. The more acts of cowardice in Wayne’s life, the greater his compulsion to cheer on wars to show his masculine courage. And the more unbridled hedonism he wallowed in, the more self-righteous became his public moralizing. John Wayne is often held up as the model of the right-wing male leader, and he is—though not for the reasons they would like to believe. In the realm of reality, rather than image, today’s Republican Party is, in every respect, the party of John Wayne.

These manipulative fictions could never succeed without the active help of the establishment media. And as demonstrated in
Chapter Two,
the media does far more than merely help to perpetuate these images. Far beyond that, its political coverage is dominated by the personality-based attacks cooked up by the right-wing noise machine during election time.

Discussions of political candidates in the establishment press are driven primarily by these personality caricatures. These vapid depictions completely drown out any examination of substantive issues, the candidates’ positions, or even the truth of their claims. In Establishment Media Land, Ronald Reagan was the wholesome cowboy; Michael Dukakis, the limp and nerdy loser; Al Gore, the stiff and overly earnest bore; John Kerry, the effete, elitist windsurfer; and George W. Bush, the swaggering tough guy, fighter pilot, and amiable rancher.

Throughout 2007, this pattern continued and even escalated. The GOP presidential candidates were almost uniformly described by our media stars as masculine, strong, and tough, while Democratic males were mocked as weak and even effeminate, and Hillary Clinton was invariably castigated as “icy,” controlling, and domineering.

As was candidly acknowledged by two of the nation’s most establishment political journalists—Mark Halperin and John Harris—our entire political press has become Drudge-ified, taking its reporting cues from the lowly, dirtmongering right-wing gossip who was launched into stardom by Rush Limbaugh and helped fuel the most scurrilous aspects of the Clinton witch hunts of the 1990s. Our media now obsesses on what Harris and Halperin call the “Freak Show,” dominated by “personality-based attacks.” Ever since Halperin and Harris proclaimed Matt Drudge the “Walter Cronkite of our era,” numerous other establishment journalists have stepped forward to acknowledge his supremacy in shaping our media’s political coverage. The fact that our political press—by its own acknowledgment—is now shaped by the bottom-scraping methods pioneered by Matt Drudge has received relatively little attention, yet it is of incomparable importance in understanding how the media works hand-in-hand with right-wing smear artists to determine our elections.

The most important right-wing marketing method, as examined in
Chapter Three,
is the relentless effort to depict GOP male leaders as tough guys, real men of courage, and swaggering warriors. Conversely, Democrats and liberals are gender-confused freaks—their males are effeminate, soft weaklings, and their women are emasculating, controlling, threatening dykes.

Thus, virtually all Republican political leaders endlessly prance around as Real Men in the John Wayne mold. Yet just like Wayne, virtually none has anything in his life that remotely demonstrates any of these attributes. Despite many being of draft age during Vietnam, they ran away from combat. Instead, cheerleading for wars from a great and safe distance—sending other people to risk their lives in combat—has become the time-tested way in American politics for individuals to demonstrate their masculinity, strength, and courage.