Nicely put; thanks for that. May I, Oxford Don-ish (though I ain’t), add a few bits and see what you think?

I don’t think Joe McCarthy has much direct influence – that’s the thing about a succession process, it mutates from where it starts. But McCarthyism is part of US self-perception (sometimes nostalgic, sometimes fearful) and part of the perception of informed outsiders. I am inclined to think Bush junior and some of his supporters are nostalgic for Joe in the same way as that fool (whose name I forget) who was drummed out of the Brownies for expressing nostalgia for Strom Thurmond’s segregationist policies a few years ago. And I certainly think young Bush’s style is an intelligible mutation of Joe’s.

I deliberately left out Kennedy because his time in office was too short. I think he would have been highly effective, but I know reasonable people who think differently. As for the things Kennedy and Nixon agreed about, I have mostly tried to avoid saying whether I approve of the policies people have pursued (though it probably shows); I am very much with ‘Hellzapoppin’ when he suggests competence makes all the difference to whether a policy is popular or not. Here’s a contentious thought on those lines: Kennedy’s close engagement with Vietnam seems to have begun in 1963. The way I interpret what he did is that he wanted to oust the CIA from the dominance they held over Vietnam since 1955, so he could get a grip on what was happening. I wonder what he would have done if he had lived, and if he could have managed a short, successful war. If he could then the Vietnam war, with exactly the same purposes as those of Johnson and Nixon, might now be seen as a success.

I am not that keen on Eisenhower – my dad despises him and was a conscientious objector to the Korean war; but, despite McArthur, the balance of success and failure for Korea and the Philippines campaigns seems to me better than for Vietnam or Reagan’s murderous rampage through Central America – in either reapolitik or moral terms.

I am not advising anybody on who to vote for (except maybe that if they don’t belive in evolution you might be better pissing on them than voting at all), but I do think there is a lot of public appeal in being seen as belonging to a continuing tradition. That’s what Hitchens keeps trying for in this magazine, except that he keeps trying to sell Paine, Jefferson, Hamilton and Lincoln, when he might be better off with Woodie Guthrie and Dashiel Hammet.