Political message gurus always need bogeymen from the other side of the aisle to instill fear in the ranks, open their wallets, get them to the political rallies, line them up at the phone banks and motivate them to take a canvass packet and knock some doors. But, with Nancy Pelosi, it has always been more than that. She’s a woman, first of all– a powerful woman who wields her power as forcefully as any man. But she’s from San Francisco– the Bay Area– birth place of the hippies, the Black Panthers, the Berkeley student protesters, the Mecca for the gay pride movement. Those things need not be itemized when “San Francisco Democrat” can encapsulate all of them at once.
Never mind that these forces of the left were disrupted, became disorganized, and, as Hunter S. Thompson put it in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, hit their high-water mark in 1965 or 1966. With the right kind of eyes, you can see that they’ve begun to prevail in the Obama Era.
At the very least, it feels that way to a good part of conservative America which has watched in horror as a national health care law finally passed, gay rights gave way to Supreme Court-sanctioned gay marriage, #BlackLivesMatter protesters revived the Black Panthers’ obsession with police violence, and the administration moved us beyond our stalemates with Cold War adversaries like Cuba and Iran.
Go back and read Thompson’s lament about the death of the mid-1960’s Bay Area dream.
You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
The high and beautiful wave crashed and ebbed back out to sea. What our nation got instead was the conservative backlash, the Reagan Revolution, which was more than anything a creation of and reaction to Reagan’s experiences as governor of California. This country wasn’t going to be overrun by freaks and faggots. Students would behave themselves and blacks wouldn’t be exercising their Second Amendment rights and shadowing cops. The Establishment, discredited by Watergate and Vietnam, would reassert itself and deal harshly with punks and criminals.
When the right attacked Nancy Pelosi, they did so, initially at least, from a position of strength. What she represented had been stopped, put in a box, and sent back to the margins of society where poets, peaceniks, race-mixers, and sexual deviants belonged.
That Pelosi has faded as the bogeyman of the right is an indication that things have changed. The Obama coalition has fared poorly in midterm elections, but its mixed-race leader and his army of multicultural leftists have rolled over the Conservative Coalition twice and has all the momentum and (whether justified or not) a feeling of inevitable victory in the upcoming presidential campaign.
The new bogeyman of the right is Chuck Schumer. The senior senator from New York is poised to take over for Harry Reid as the leader of the Senate Democrats, and he’s become a punching bag on the campaign trail. But Schumer doesn’t symbolize the New Left coalition. As a representative of the financial sector on Wall Street, he doesn’t line up with the anti-establishmentarianism of #OccupyWallStreet or Elizabeth Warren or the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. In opposing the president’s nuclear deal with Iran, Schumer was an extreme outlier on the left who outraged the Pelosi wing of the party. Where he has aligned himself best is on immigration, where he helped the Gang of Eight broker a deal to pass the Senate’s comprehensive bill.
When the right describes Schumer, they easily slip into anti-Semitic tropes. Schumer is “cunning” and “crafty” and “conniving.” He’s “wily” and “shrewd.”
In 2005, the conservative magazine National Review branded him “The Inquisitor” for his rough treatment of President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. The magazine cover featured a caricature of Mr. Schumer, who is Jewish, in the garb of a medieval cardinal and drew complaints of anti-Semitism for its exaggerated depiction of his features.
A few years later, in 2008, Mr. Schumer made a cameo appearance in a Kentucky Senate race when Senator Mitch McConnell, now the Republican majority leader, released a campaign video that warned Mr. Schumer was attempting to meddle in Kentucky politics.
The video featured narration in a pronounced and stereotypical New York accent.
At the moment, he’s being tied to Marco Rubio, one of his partners in the Gang of Eight immigration negotiations.
Ms. [Laura] Ingraham, the radio host, said Mr. Schumer’s prominence this time stemmed from both his designation as the Democratic leader-to-be and from the perception that he “completely snookered Marco Rubio” on immigration.
“It is very, very risky for the Republicans to nominate a presidential candidate who has already proven himself to be in over his head when it comes to dealing with the future Democratic leader in the Senate,” Ms. Ingraham said in an email. “And yet that is precisely what much of the G.O.P. establishment is proposing. And that helps to explain why conservatives are thinking a great deal about Chuck Schumer these days.”
As the poster boy for comprehensive immigration reform, Schumer becomes a symbol of a multiethnic, multicultural America rather than a symbol of the counterculture. In a way, Schumer is a kind of demarkation, serving to delineate where the counterculture’s advance stops and where we should expect it to begin its rollback.
This far you shall go, but no further.
Perhaps he will serve as a check, an obstacle that allows the left to stop and digest its victories and assimilate into the actual culture rather than the counterculture. In this way, he’s as likely to serve as the new bogeyman of the left as the new bogeyman of the right.
There is energy to take on Wall Street, but no apparent momentum. If the right were seeing and thinking clearly, they wouldn’t consider Schumer their enemy. But they’re not interested in managing the changes overtaking the forces of Old and Evil. They have their collective heads stuck in the sand and lack the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, the courage to change the things they can, or the wisdom to know the difference.