Who's the real radical, McGovern or Lieberman?

The neoconservatives throw around George McGovern's name a lot, especially in the wake of Sen. Joe Lieberman's (D-Conn) Democratic primary defeat by Ned Lamont. It's a given that most U.S. citizens don't know who George McGovern is, weren't even born when the former South Dakota senator was the Democratic Presidential nominee in 1972 or if they were around back then, have forgotten him altogether.

So why be name droppers?

To the neocons, McGovern is a symbol rather than a real person. He's a symbol of something lost, namely, the Democratic Party itself away from them and to their opponents. When Joe Lieberman lost, it just reminded them of 1972 all over again. It reminded them of how the liberal post-World War II consensus was shattered irrevocably by those questioning the Cold War and U.S. entanglement away from home. To them, the McGovernite seizure of power was a coup de tat of campus radicals they were thoroughly opposed to.

But who are the real radicals?

I have written recently about the incoherence of McGovernite foreign policy because its natural instincts were towards Robert Taft isolationism while clashing with traditional liberal idealism about the community of nations (the one-world internationalist types). Part of this came from McGovern's background as a former Republican himself from a traditionally isolationist Midwestern state like South Dakota. In this his forefathers are more Robert LaFollette and George Norris rather than Adlai Stevenson as he would like to claim. Being a Midwestern, former Republican Methodist from a prairie state, McGovern is a huge culture clash with urban, ethnic, Catholic and Jewish intellectuals who call themselves neoconservatives.

Yet just to point out the dubious pasts of two prominent neocons? such a foreign policy is hardly radical, certainly when we compare it to neoconservative doctrine of creative destruction and nation building. In McGovern's 1972 acceptance speech of his party's nomination, he exclaimed "Come home, America." Could not Taft have said it any better? How about George Washington or John Quincy Adams? Does a man like McGovern who has five kids, was a World War II bomber pilot and church deacon sound anymore radical than an Irving Kristol who spent his college days at CCNY in Trotskyite sects or David Horowitz, who pimped for the Black Panthers

No, the real radicals are those neocons and other Jacobins who think the right amount of bomb tonnage can produce a "democracy" amidst the ruins. Well, in the ruins of Lebanon and Iraq right now, "democracy" is becoming a sick joke as the IEDs go off or as the Israeli bombs fall. "Come home, America" is hardly a utopian or radical call in comparison to the calls the current Administration make for nation building around the world or to construct a "new Middle East." To George Will, neoconservatism is astounding misleading label for such radicals.

McGovern himself was no radical. But the people around him were. To win the Democratic Party's nomination in 1972, he needed support of the New Left and the growing New Class that were rising to challenge for power in what was then the major party of the nation and the world's oldest continuous political party. Using rules that he helped to design along with strong grassroot support, McGovern won a first ballot victory over the neocons candidate of choice Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash.) along with Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie and George Wallace. Yet if even my liberal tree-hugging parents (God bless them' still) were put off by some of McGovern's supporters, you can imagine what the rest of America must of thought of them. Like Barry Goldwater to a certain extent, the antics of McGovern's supporters tagged the candidate with an extremist label he simply could not shake thanks largely to a poorly run general election campaign (McGovern campaign practically hid both his family and military background which would have made him more acceptable to voters.). This is something Ned Lamont should keep in mind every time he appears with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. People do judge you by the company you keep.

The neocons, back then just plain old liberal intellectuals, were just sick. The very campus radicals they had opposed had taken over the party. And what was worse, they didn't go away when McGovern was thrashed by Richard Nixon. "The old politicians who think that once McGovern is defeated it will be politics as usual are dead wrong and do not understand the social forces at work in the country…" wrote Peter Bourne, an adviser to Jimmy Carter, who's 1972 memo this statement is from accurately described how the McGovernites stayed on in the party even after his devastating defeat. Like the Goldwaterites, they integrated themselves into the party because they weren't just activists but a whole community of like minded people. A demonstrator at the 1968 Democratic Convention was asked in a public television documentary once why her fellow demonstrators protested the Democrats. Her reply: "Because we were the children of the Democratic Party." Indeed. And those children, locked out in 1968, broke down the door in 1972 and became the thing that wouldn't leave. Indeed, once upon a time Joe Lieberman was one of these persons, running and winning as a reform candidate in 1970 for the Connecticut State Senate helped along by Bill and Hilary Clinton who were both at Yale Law School at the time. Of course Clinton was McGovern's Texas campaign manager. Lieberman may very well have been opposed to Vietnam, but he doesn't mind the same kind of nation-building project in Iraq. If this is because of his strong support for Israel, well, I'll let the readers be the judge of that.

All this meant the neocons had to go and by 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, go they did, to the Republican Party. But the GOP is not their natural home and it explains why the neocons have been caterwauling over Lieberman's fate. His loss was like a repeating bad dream, another defeat to the so-called radicals who have driven them into political exile. Yet in reality, it may very turn out that sanity triumphed in the end against radicalism.

---Sean Scallon