What is happening in America?
Jul. 22nd, 2007 11:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbSome of us look at recent American developments with bewildered incomprehension. When, last year, the Democrats conquered Congress, I found myself discussing the matter with a fellow Italian who loathes Bush and heartily dislikes many features of conservative politics. When I started saying that in my view the anti-war noises coming from the Democrat camp were no more than gestures in the direction of their electoral hard core, she hardly let me finish - "Well, of course! They'd never pull out of Iraq, the political consequences would be catastrophic - the country in civil war, American allies falling apart among each other backing rival groups, American prestige in the sewer, possibly even the collapse of NATO as a political force - it would amount to letting Al Qaeda win by default, without even having had to seriously fight." I answered, of course, that I quite agreed. My sympathy for Bush and the Republicans is modified at best; hers is wholly absent; but neither of us imagined that abandoning Iraq was in the realm of conceivable practical politics. That was eight months ago.
From that point of view, the present behaviour of House and Senate is beyond understanding. The presentation of resolutions that - however ambiguous their wording - bear, in the eye of the world, a demand for withdrawal; unprecedented all-night sessions in an attempt to force them through, showing to the world that the Democrats are serious on this issue; even the threat of starving the fighting troops of funds if their veto over Presidential policy is not carried; all this seems like nothing so much as a fury to destroy oneself, as the madman struggling against those who would restrain him from throwing himself headlong into a wood-pulping machine. What is more, it is taking place in a situation that was, on the whole, more conducive to American policy than it had been in years. The governments of France and Germany are friendlier to America than they have been in decades; those of Italy and Spain, which are not, have taken a series of diplomatic defeats and internal and external humiliations and are exposed as a gaggle of irresponsible wreckers, seriously in danger of losing the next elections; Russia had been edging away from Iran even before its diplomatic defeat on points against Britain showed Putin that he had been going too far; the collapse of the Palestinian entity had done nothing to encourage Israel's enemies, and the Arab world was looking increasingly willing to take America's lead against Iran, if that lead was given at all. The only government that had been dropping hints of increased distance from the USA was Britain's new cabinet, and even that was ambiguous at best.
However, one must remember a basic fact of politics: all politics are domestic politics first and foremost. What seems, from the outside, suicidal madness, makes sense - though in the sphere of emotion rather than reason - in the purely domestic context of the USA.
To understand that, we have to go back a further couple of years - and, indeed, a few decades. The crushing defeat of the Democrats in the Presidential elections of 2004 had seriously seemed to herald a new political season for the USA. It was the more depressing in that the Democrats had seriously intended to use every power at their disposal, from massive and undisguised mass media support to fierce voter registration drives, to crush a perceivedly unpopular President who was suspected of having stolen the previous election and who certainly had lost the popular vote. And with all this array of force and support - including one of the most memorable concert tours in the history of popular music, with headlines any promoter would murder his mother for, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, etc. etc. etc. - the Democrats had been left reeling by a decisive and nationwide defeat.
In fact, this was the third such phenomenon in recent history. The assertions of Republican/Conservative forces in recent American history have had, each time, the character of a smashing triumph. The line begins with Nixon, who - though pretty much a centre-left man in his politics - had known how to rouse "the silent majority" against the perceived elitism and distance of the post-Kennedy Democrats. Then there had been Reagan, and "it's morning in America". But Bush II's second election was in some ways the high water-mark of the conservative advance. While Nixon and Reagan were still men of the old order - Nixon's presidency saw the legalization of abortion, and Reagan's did nothing to alter it, for instance - Bush II was perceived to bear a positively revolutionary, religious ideology. IN point of fact, that was nonsense - Bush II's conventional religiousness is not really any more significant than that of any other President in recent history - but what was felt to be at the back of his success was the emergence of a new bloc of voters, the "values voters" - you all remember them, don't you?
The "values voters" were not only a new phenomenon, but a threat to one of the traditional Democrat areas of support - urban Catholics. The new expression "values voter" was meant to describe something that was no longer the old "silent majority" or "moral majority", since it now included masses of Catholics as well as Protestants, and large urban as well as suburban and rural votes. The Democrats had no such clearly visible area for expansion into formerly hostile electorates. The Netroots, though a fertile area for support and finance, had proved a broken reed nationally, and have since then done so again. Faced with crushing defeat, unfavourable long-term electoral trends, and the growth of a hostile and outspoken right-wing culture, the Democrats had good reason to fear a decisive shift that would strand them on the opposition benches for decades.
Remember that: two years ago, the Democrats realistically feared being marginalized. Also, they feared marginalization at the hands of people and values they heartily despised, whom they caricatured in their minds as gaggles of small-town bigots, dittoheads, racists under the skin. This is the psychological, if not rational, explanation of their behaviour today. It has something of the wild exultation of a man condemned to death who has been suddenly and fully reprieved; as well as the vindictive fury of someone who, on the edge of defeat and destruction, suddenly sees the enemy collapse and withdraw. The natural human impulse, in such circumstances, is not to break off the engagement, but to pursue the enemy till you destroyed him, make him pay for every drop of blood, sweat and tears left, humiliate him, crush him. The eager impulse of the Democrats now is to inflict the most crushing and signal humiliation upon the President; and as Iraq is the only important area in which he has not bowed to the prevailing wind, then the urge to make him knuckle under, to fight him and smash him where the public can best see it happen, is all but irresistible. The fact that Congress has so far outdone its Republican predecessor in do-nothingism shows that, for the Democrats, to make the President eat dirt is more important than even to implement the policies they themselves promised to the American people. The movement he represents must be crushed and marginalized - NOW.
This impulse to marginalize and humiliate seems to me very poor politics. Much of the Republican leadership still has plenty of common ground with the Democrats; but it has discredited itself with its own electoral base thanks to visible corruption, startling incompetence, and a complete absence of sense of direction. This is why, in my view, the triumph of 2004 was followed by the collapse of 2006. The "values voters" had not gone anywhere; they still are there - in fact, thanks to Pope Ratzinger, they may be actually growing in strength and influence. They just had sat on their hands while the Democrats, energized by one year of bad news and drift, had turned up to the polls in their millions. What is likely to happen in the long run if the Democrats are mad enough to withdraw their forces from Iraq - or if a coming Democrat President does - is that in five years or so, the vicious chaos, the visible collapse in American prestige, the political decline, if nothing worse happens (and there could be worse, for instance a serious trade depression brought about by skyrocketing oil prices, or more terrorist plots of the nine-eleven kind) will be blamed by the American electorate on the sitting administration, as they were in President Carter's time. At that point, too, the nationwide Republican leadership, guilty of electoral disaster, will have been worked over by the party, and replaced - almost certainly by a group much closer to the "values voters". And while the current Republican candidates are still likely to be comparative moderates such as Romney and Giuliani, the next time around the party may well be led by the Brownbacks and the Tancredos; and the Democrats will have brought about the very thing they loathed - the rise of a religiously-based, highly conservative national political party.
From that point of view, the present behaviour of House and Senate is beyond understanding. The presentation of resolutions that - however ambiguous their wording - bear, in the eye of the world, a demand for withdrawal; unprecedented all-night sessions in an attempt to force them through, showing to the world that the Democrats are serious on this issue; even the threat of starving the fighting troops of funds if their veto over Presidential policy is not carried; all this seems like nothing so much as a fury to destroy oneself, as the madman struggling against those who would restrain him from throwing himself headlong into a wood-pulping machine. What is more, it is taking place in a situation that was, on the whole, more conducive to American policy than it had been in years. The governments of France and Germany are friendlier to America than they have been in decades; those of Italy and Spain, which are not, have taken a series of diplomatic defeats and internal and external humiliations and are exposed as a gaggle of irresponsible wreckers, seriously in danger of losing the next elections; Russia had been edging away from Iran even before its diplomatic defeat on points against Britain showed Putin that he had been going too far; the collapse of the Palestinian entity had done nothing to encourage Israel's enemies, and the Arab world was looking increasingly willing to take America's lead against Iran, if that lead was given at all. The only government that had been dropping hints of increased distance from the USA was Britain's new cabinet, and even that was ambiguous at best.
However, one must remember a basic fact of politics: all politics are domestic politics first and foremost. What seems, from the outside, suicidal madness, makes sense - though in the sphere of emotion rather than reason - in the purely domestic context of the USA.
To understand that, we have to go back a further couple of years - and, indeed, a few decades. The crushing defeat of the Democrats in the Presidential elections of 2004 had seriously seemed to herald a new political season for the USA. It was the more depressing in that the Democrats had seriously intended to use every power at their disposal, from massive and undisguised mass media support to fierce voter registration drives, to crush a perceivedly unpopular President who was suspected of having stolen the previous election and who certainly had lost the popular vote. And with all this array of force and support - including one of the most memorable concert tours in the history of popular music, with headlines any promoter would murder his mother for, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, etc. etc. etc. - the Democrats had been left reeling by a decisive and nationwide defeat.
In fact, this was the third such phenomenon in recent history. The assertions of Republican/Conservative forces in recent American history have had, each time, the character of a smashing triumph. The line begins with Nixon, who - though pretty much a centre-left man in his politics - had known how to rouse "the silent majority" against the perceived elitism and distance of the post-Kennedy Democrats. Then there had been Reagan, and "it's morning in America". But Bush II's second election was in some ways the high water-mark of the conservative advance. While Nixon and Reagan were still men of the old order - Nixon's presidency saw the legalization of abortion, and Reagan's did nothing to alter it, for instance - Bush II was perceived to bear a positively revolutionary, religious ideology. IN point of fact, that was nonsense - Bush II's conventional religiousness is not really any more significant than that of any other President in recent history - but what was felt to be at the back of his success was the emergence of a new bloc of voters, the "values voters" - you all remember them, don't you?
The "values voters" were not only a new phenomenon, but a threat to one of the traditional Democrat areas of support - urban Catholics. The new expression "values voter" was meant to describe something that was no longer the old "silent majority" or "moral majority", since it now included masses of Catholics as well as Protestants, and large urban as well as suburban and rural votes. The Democrats had no such clearly visible area for expansion into formerly hostile electorates. The Netroots, though a fertile area for support and finance, had proved a broken reed nationally, and have since then done so again. Faced with crushing defeat, unfavourable long-term electoral trends, and the growth of a hostile and outspoken right-wing culture, the Democrats had good reason to fear a decisive shift that would strand them on the opposition benches for decades.
Remember that: two years ago, the Democrats realistically feared being marginalized. Also, they feared marginalization at the hands of people and values they heartily despised, whom they caricatured in their minds as gaggles of small-town bigots, dittoheads, racists under the skin. This is the psychological, if not rational, explanation of their behaviour today. It has something of the wild exultation of a man condemned to death who has been suddenly and fully reprieved; as well as the vindictive fury of someone who, on the edge of defeat and destruction, suddenly sees the enemy collapse and withdraw. The natural human impulse, in such circumstances, is not to break off the engagement, but to pursue the enemy till you destroyed him, make him pay for every drop of blood, sweat and tears left, humiliate him, crush him. The eager impulse of the Democrats now is to inflict the most crushing and signal humiliation upon the President; and as Iraq is the only important area in which he has not bowed to the prevailing wind, then the urge to make him knuckle under, to fight him and smash him where the public can best see it happen, is all but irresistible. The fact that Congress has so far outdone its Republican predecessor in do-nothingism shows that, for the Democrats, to make the President eat dirt is more important than even to implement the policies they themselves promised to the American people. The movement he represents must be crushed and marginalized - NOW.
This impulse to marginalize and humiliate seems to me very poor politics. Much of the Republican leadership still has plenty of common ground with the Democrats; but it has discredited itself with its own electoral base thanks to visible corruption, startling incompetence, and a complete absence of sense of direction. This is why, in my view, the triumph of 2004 was followed by the collapse of 2006. The "values voters" had not gone anywhere; they still are there - in fact, thanks to Pope Ratzinger, they may be actually growing in strength and influence. They just had sat on their hands while the Democrats, energized by one year of bad news and drift, had turned up to the polls in their millions. What is likely to happen in the long run if the Democrats are mad enough to withdraw their forces from Iraq - or if a coming Democrat President does - is that in five years or so, the vicious chaos, the visible collapse in American prestige, the political decline, if nothing worse happens (and there could be worse, for instance a serious trade depression brought about by skyrocketing oil prices, or more terrorist plots of the nine-eleven kind) will be blamed by the American electorate on the sitting administration, as they were in President Carter's time. At that point, too, the nationwide Republican leadership, guilty of electoral disaster, will have been worked over by the party, and replaced - almost certainly by a group much closer to the "values voters". And while the current Republican candidates are still likely to be comparative moderates such as Romney and Giuliani, the next time around the party may well be led by the Brownbacks and the Tancredos; and the Democrats will have brought about the very thing they loathed - the rise of a religiously-based, highly conservative national political party.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-22 11:58 pm (UTC)But that would require excellent intelligence and rapid deployment forces, and those services have been handled very crudely by the current administration. I'm sorry if that sounds like mere rhetoric; from where I sit it seems like something that hawks and doves might be willing to agree on.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-23 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-03 01:22 am (UTC)As an ally, no. As a willing collaborator, supporter and arms-supplier, yes... Adding tight China-Pakistani military cooperation (with Pakistan being another potential US base for Iran operation, not to mention Afganistan), it fast becomes a quagmire :(
no subject
Date: 2007-07-23 05:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-23 03:16 pm (UTC)Specifically, to the Mesopotamian empire-builders, whom he explicitly admired.
... and by 2001 he had managed, by sheer obstinacy coupled with massive bribery, to reduce the coalition against him to Britain and America alone. If he had been allowed to break the military grip these countries had on him, it is absolutely certain that he would have invaded some other country, probably Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Which would have forced us to fight him anyway, because we couldn't have tolerated Saddam Hussein holding most of the world's oil.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-23 03:12 pm (UTC)We don't need to hold Iran, merely topple its existing regime. The regime is sufficiently unpopular that the local democratic forces, if armed, can probably hold onto power. And during a brief occupation, we could dismantle their nuclear program: if necessary cart it back home as war booty.
If we need to take out Iran's nuclear program by force (a moot point: consider the recent success with North Korea), it seems clear that it will require something more like a surgical strike than a full-fledged invasion.
A surgical strike is fine, but we shouldn't be totally "surgical" -- instead of just taking out reactors, we should sink the Iranian Navy and smash the Iranian Air Force while we're there. Better yet, smash all the Iranian powerplants -- without electricity, they aren't building any atomic bombs.
I don't agree that our negotiations with North Korea constituted a "success." We gave them stuff and got a promise; they will almost certainly break that promise, as they have done the last three times. Our purpose was almost certainly to ensure that North Korea didn't actually attack during the upcoming Iran campaign.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-27 05:47 am (UTC)