Mark Phillips: The American Question
2/27/03: Rabble.
Right-wing ideologist Tim Graham puts his rhetoric where his heart lies in
today's
National Review,
labeling antiwar demonstrators "rabble".
His context is bête noir Dan Rather's recent interview with Saddam Hussein. Graham
mobilizes the standard
narratives:
the myth of the "liberal media";
the
false mantle of anti-elitism; the notion that debate during wartime provides "aid
and comfort" to the enemy. In the midst of which comes something unexpected:
his true feelings about the American people:
In the days leading up to the Dan's big "get," the liberal media seemed
to rally around the anchorman, refusing to acknowledge a potentially damaging first
impression: The interview was providing aid and comfort to the enemy, as if Edward R.
Murrow would have jumped at interviewing Hitler; it would also provide aid and comfort
to the antiwar rabble here and abroad, a political boost to the forces arrayed against
Saddam's disarmament.
Right-wing ideology is permeated with anti-democratic contempt for the views and aspirations
of everyday Americans. Normally this contempt is insinuated more than trumpeted: that unions
are "special interests", or that
"heartland"
America is the "real" America. Graham's extremism has one merit: it gives
up the game.
Where does the word "rabble" come from?
From the
class-centric
discourse of society's betters. Typically while looking
down in alarm as their inferiors organize themselves. Here are some interesting examples:
-
"I every day curse Columbus and all the discoverers of this diabolical country,"
wrote the aristocratic British Major John Bowater during the American rebellion, describing
the Patriot army as "truly nothing but a drunken, canting, lying, praying, hypocritical
rabble."1
-
After British troops shot down five demonstrators in Boston in 1770, an event which Patriots
came to label "The Boston Massacre", the aristocratic lawyer for the soldiers told
the aristocratic jury that the crowd had been "a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and
molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs," therefore deserving of what they got.
The soldiers were acquitted. (This aristocratic lawyer was one John Adams, later
our country's second President.)2
-
Lord Dartmouth found himself incredulous that Massachusetts Governor Gage had been defeated by
"a tumultuous Rabble, without any Appearance of general Concert, or without any Head
to advise, or Leader to conduct." Historian Ray Raphael notes, "Dartmouth failed
to comprehend the power of the people to act in their behalf, and even today, the revelation
that ordinary people, 'without any Head to advise,' toppled the British-controlled government
in Massachusetts engenders blank, incredulous stares."3
-
After the Battle of Breed's Hill/Bunker Hill, British commanding General Gage declared,
"The rebels are not the despicable rabble too many have supposed them
to be." He was right, they were the American people.4
-
As late as the war of 1812, aristocratic Brits labeled
American commoners with the dreaded R-word. "Collecting regular troops, militia, pirates, free
Creoles (Afro-French) and volunteers, Jackson rapidly organized a defensive position behind bales of
cotton covered with mud. Advancing British forces did not believe 'low log breastwork manned by a
backwoods rabble' could contain the veterans of the Peninsula campaign. A flood wave of red tunics
marched in rows into the Great Turkey shoot. Within two hours, most of the British attackers were
dead or in flight." The great Wellington meanwhile "had proposed terms in the belief
that his brother in law Pakenham would easily defeat the 'American rabble' at New Orleans and
proclaim English sovereignty over the entire Louisiana territory."5
Which raises the question: which side would today's right-wingers have been on in 1776?
ENDNOTES
1
"The American Revolution As Seen by the British".
(Back to article.)
2
Jerry Fresia,
Toward an American Revolution
(Back to article.)
3
Ray Raphael,
The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord.
(Back to article.)
4
"The American Revolution".
(Back to article.)
5
"The Adams Chronicles", PBS.
(Back to article.)
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