First Word

One of the stock political villains of my Republican youth was George McGovern. As a teenager with a head addled by congeries of contradictory ideas that perhaps only the Republican Party of the second half of the twentieth century has had the audacity to simultaneously advocate (small government, yet world imperialism; low taxes, yet massive welfare state; localism, yet pro-“civil rights” movement), I saw McGovern as the epitome at once of socialism and stupidity. Never mind that there was not much content behind my judgment.

So it was edifying to see a treatment of McGovern (who is still living, in small town Mitchell, South Dakota) in American Conservative that brought his and my thread back together again after a separation of more than three decades.

It turns out those threads have much more the same tincture than I would have dreamed possible in my naïve youth.

Here are some excerpts from the article by Bill Kauffman.

Agrarianism

What could be an agrarian manifesto:

George McGovern is a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan and member in good standing of the Stan Musial Society. He lives most of the year in Mitchell, his hometown, and says, “There is a wholesomeness about life in a rural state that is a meaningful factor. It doesn’t guarantee you are going to be a good guy simply because you grow up in an agricultural area, but I think the chances of it are better, because of the sense of well-being, the confidence in the decency of life that comes with working not only with the land but also with the kinds of people who live on the land. Life tends to be more authentic and less artificial than in urban areas. You have a sense of belonging to a community. You’re closer to nature and you see the changing seasons.”

Likewise, McGovern writes in his autobiography, “I prefer old houses or churches or public buildings that are built for the ages rather than modern-style structures that quickly deteriorate. I am uncomfortable with any translation of the Bible other than the magnificent King James version.”

Alliances

The question is often raised, what kind of alliances can a Christian make in seeking a commonly-held goal. Kauffman writes,

Unlike the bilious Ed Muskie, who dismissed George Wallace’s Florida primary victory as a triumph of racism, McGovern credited Wallace’s appeal to “a sense of powerlessness in the face of big government, big corporations, and big labor unions.” He asked Wallace for his endorsement, though as he recalls with a smile, “he said, ‘Sena-tah, if I endorsed you I’d lose about half of my following and you’d lose half of yours.’”

That conversation is surely a credit to both Wallace and McGovern.

The Evil Political Center

McGovern said this in a campaign speech:

Most Americans see the establishment center as an empty, decaying void that commands neither their confidence nor their love. It is the establishment center that has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster – a terrible cancer eating away the soul of the nation… It was not the American worker who designed the Vietnam war or our military machine. It was the establishment wise men, the academicians of the center. As Walter Lippmann once observed, “There is nothing worse than a belligerent professor.”

Bad as Vietnam was, it would be hard to say that it was more stupid or cruel than WW2, or Lincoln’s War on our continent. And there is something slightly worse than a belligerent professor: a simpleton President with his twitchy finger hovering over the little red button.

Nevertheless, the sentiment is well-taken.

The Voice continues against the current neo-con hegemony

McGovern has continued to write. Here are some of his thoughts on our aggression against Iraq:

Let’s support our troops by keeping them safely at home with their families rather than dispatching them abroad under the cockeyed notion of what our president has called “preemptive war.”

And again,

I have no fear of doing battle with some character threatening me with a box cutter. What sets my teeth on edge is seeing a frail little aging woman trying to get her shoes off to be searched, lest she slip by with some trinket that could endanger the republic.

Oh, let that sentiment be tattooed on the forehead of every semi-American neo-con!

McGovern also said about Eisenhower, he “was the best president at recognizing the dangers of excessive military outlays. And he showed great courage in stopping the Israeli move against Egypt over the Suez Canal.”

Kauffman reports that McGovern calls the Patriot Act “completely unnecessary… a contradiction of the Bill of Rights’” and counsels resistance if and when the federal police come for our library cards: “I’ll go to jail rather than accept such an invasion of my freedom as an American.”

Conclusion

In 1972, the choice was Nixon or McGovern. I like some of Nixon’s instincts – especially the unmasking of Alger Hiss, and Watergate.

Now, I see things to like about McGovern.

Should we be “extreme” left or right? At the end of the day, of course, we should be right wing extremists. But when contemplating this vignette of McGovern, sometimes I think it doesn’t even matter very much, especially in view of the mainstream alternatives currently dished up.