THE TRIUMPH OF MEANNESS

CHAPTER ONE

Mean Times

As the 1990s draw to a close, it is clear that we are not the same country we were when the decade began. There is a meanness in our public and private lives that has changed the way we see ourselves and the future. Like the bumper stickers that ask "Where is Lee Harvey Oswald when his country needs him?" we have crossed a line that not long ago seemed to mark the outer bounds of decency.

Meanness--as a politics of spite and cruelty that targets the vulnerable--is not new in American life. In the past it has been used to defend everything from Indian removal to immigration quotas. More recently it has been the basis of whole political careers. During the Great Depression Father Charles E. Coughlin gained national prominence when he combined his criticism of the Roosevelt administration with attacks on Jewish international bankers. In the 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy achieved even greater power by creating a red scare that panicked the country and cost thousands of innocent people their jobs, and in the 1960s Governor George Wallace became a national figure when, in a dramatic showdown with the Kennedy administration, he challenged the right of blacks to enroll in the University of Alabama.

In the long run Coughlin, McCarthy, and Wallace could not withstand the test of public scrutiny; decency triumphed over the political meanness they embodied. But the meanness of the 1990s, which is as much cultural as political, is an altogether different matter. Like the old meanness, it surfaces in the savaging of an opponent or in an appeal to hidden fears that makes it easy to scapegoat a person or group. The vindictiveness of the new meanness was impossible to miss in the first weeks of the 104th Congress, when the openly gay Democrat Barney Frank was called "Barney Fag" by Dick Armey, the Republican House majority leader, and more recently the new meanness has surfaced in the South, where a wave of black church burnings has revived memories of the Jim Crow past. But in contrast to the old meanness, which tended to be directed at distinct and limited targets, what characterizes the new meanness is that its spite and cruelty have become pervasive. They are part of our everyday world in ways that we now take for granted.

The new meanness is not just reflected in a political shift to the right that sends welfare back to the states for the first time since the New Deal and says we should cut Head Start while adding billions more to the defense budget than the military requested. The new meanness is also style and attitude, meanness without guilt, as one critic of it observed. We see the new meanness in a combativeness in which the president's opponents insist that he is "the enemy of normal Americans" and a senator warns him that he "better have a bodyguard" if he enters the senator's state. We hear it on talk radio when G. Gordon Liddy advises his listeners on the best way to shoot a federal agent. We read about it after law enforcement officials raid a California sweatshop in which foreign workers were kept under guard around the clock and paid fifty cents an hour for the sewing they did. We observe it in professional sports, where veteran basketball coach Pat Riley fines his players for helping an opponent up from the court.