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 02:58 pm (UTC)1) The Democratic Congress see themselves as having been elected in large part because Americans are fed up with the futile military adventure in Iraq. It was a horrendous act of hubris for the Bush administration to engineer the invasion and they've been unbelievably incompetent in managing the country after they conquered it. While I have some sympathy for the notion that having gone in and created chaos, America ought to stay and fix things, it's become more and more aparent that there is "no fixing of things" that America, as an occupying power, can realistically accomplish. The Democrats in Congress are doing what they can to either end the debacle as soon as possible or--failing that--make it blatantly clear that the albatross hangs around Republican necks--where it fairly belongs.
2) The "value voters" are certainly a real phenomena, but as to their party affiliation, I think they are more up for grabs than previously. This is due to the blatant corruption shown by the Republicans in power over the last 8 years, moral as well as political corruption in many cases. While there will always be hard--line religious conservatives as well as hard-line anti-Government ideologues, in the last eight years Americans have experienced a Government in their dual image and mostly not liked the results.
3) There are growing populist sentiments in the U.S. that you fail to mention--spearheaded by commentators like Lou Dobbs and percipitated by the illegal immigrant issue, the miserable state of our health care system and the general economic squeeze on the middle class--which has gotten severe, believe me. Whatever their religious or polical values, Americans tend to vote based on their sense of security and their pocketbooks, and for the majority, these feel very threatened.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-22 07:48 pm (UTC)Bush got 51% of the popular vote in 2004. That doesn't count as a crushing defeat of the other side, particularly as the US has a habit of returning incumbents by comfortable margins. And I'm not engaging in tinfoil-hat-conspiracy-theory when I say that there was some weird stuff going on in Ohio. I don't know that it was enough to tilt the vote significantly, but here's no reasonable doubt that it was intended to do so.
"The eager impulse of the Democrats now is to inflict the most crushing and signal humiliation upon the President"
I think you're mistaken about this. The recent hard line that Harry Reid has been taking in the Senate, for instance, is nothing like the strategy he was following as recently as spring. But that strategy didn't work. There is no compromise with the zealots who run the White House and their lackeys in the legislative branch--not on any issue, from stem cells to the unitary executive (=elective monarchy).
"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."
Why are you sure it shows that the Democrats are unwilling to cooperate with Republicans? Maybe it means that Republicans are unwilling to cooperate with Democrats. This seems, on the evidence, the more likely possibility. It's to the Republicans' political advantage to keep the Democrats from even seeming to deliver on the policies they promised.
On the external policy question, we disagree even more strongly, I'm afraid. The Iraq War never could have resulted in an advantageous strategic result for the US; many of us knew that before the debacle began, but I would say a strong voting majority of US citizens is aware of it now. Every day the fearful cost in blood and treasure mounts higher. And every second we take our eyes off Afghanistan and Pakistan is advantageous to the real enemy, i.e. Osama bin Laden and the genuine accept-no-substitutes Al Qaeda.
It's really not a question of whether the US will withdraw from Iraq. It's a question of when and how. If the Bush administration is smart, the withdrawal will take place as part of a multi-state regional process that ensures some stability and peace in the region. However, the Bush administration is not smart. All they seem to be doing now is trying to wait it out so that the withdrawal will happen on someone else's watch.
Will this result in a net political advantage for the "movement" conservatives who (rightly or wrongly) are associated with this president more than any other? I doubt it. (But if I'm wrong, it won't be the first or last time...)
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Date: 2007-07-23 04:03 am (UTC)As one of those urban-Catholic "values voters" who did not sit on their hands in 2006, the primaries are of upmost importance. I could not in good conscience vote for Guilianis when there are Brownbacks on the ballot.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2007-07-23 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-24 07:39 am (UTC)Last election, every single person I voted for lost, and I didn't vote a straight-ticket. Us poor crunchy conservatives.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-26 10:31 pm (UTC)America has not declared war, has not put the economy on a wartime footing, has not imposed wartime taxes and rationing, has not imposed a draft, has not passed sedition acts, has not suspended habeus corpus, can not rounded up internal enemies into concentration camps. Before you recoil in horror, remember that this country did all these things in the Civil War, WWI and WWII. It is what a serious country does when it is seriously devoted to fighting and winning.
The ACLU brought a lawsuit on behalf of plaintiffs who, in their law case, and I am not kidding, said the PATRIOT act had a chilling effect on their First Amendment free speech rights to conspire with known terrorists and with terrorists suspects. The case was pursued for a long while, and eventually thrown out of court as frivolous. The ACLU members have not, to the best of my knowledge, been brought up on charges of treason or hanged. They have not even been scolded by an outraged public. Can you imagine the public outcry if the ACLU had attempted to hinder prosecutions of Nazis at Nuremberg?
The enemy in this case has adopted the one tactic to which the Western mind, especially the Western liberal mind, cannot adopt or adjust. Instead of attacking meaningful civilian targets, they attack meaningless targets that have propaganda or psychological-war value only. Instead of declaring war, marching in the open, taking the field against the enemy, they snipe at enemy civilians, targets chosen at random. Instead of hiding in caves, they hide among civilians.
These means have absolutely no military value: none.
They only have value as a tactic to demoralize the foe. They only have value if the foe (us) has a theory of the laws of war making it unlawful to fight if war is not declares, soldiers are not in uniform, enemy civilians get hurt. Conservatives believe in this theory of the laws of war to a degree consonant with practical military prudence; liberals agree with it as an abstract absolute, to be invoked only when it agrees with their progressive moral self-congratulation, or, in other words, only when it is imprudent. A confident culture cannot be defeated by these means; confident cultures merely grow more cold and deadly in wrath when attacked.
The psychology of it this: Americans believe that an enemy is not really real unless he is in uniform and represents a nation-state. Of course, this theory has no foundation in law or in logic. The Barbary pirates were not a nation-state, did not fight in uniform, and did not attack military targets, but, nonetheless, President Jefferson asked the congress for, and received, a declaration of war against them, and the armed force killed them. The line about "to the shores of Tripoly" is a memory of this war.
America has no civilian defense; we have no (real) border control; our security precautions at airports and seaports are nearly meaningless rituals of inefficiency.
What is sad is, things will not change after millions die in terrorist outbreaks of plague (I am assuming bioterror rather than nuclear). All that will happen after the next successful terrorist attack is the same voices as now shout meaningless slogans at each other will shout the same slogans at a louder volume.
We have lost the will to fight. My liberal friend, their faces shining with divine indignation, have told me in no uncertain terms that it is better for a nation to perish than to overstep even the tiniest jot or tittle of international law, and we must respect the Geneva Conventions even when facing enemies who are not signatories. We cannot fight anyone except an army put into a field by a nation-state, and then only if they fight in uniform. Furthermore, all encounters must be blood-free and cost-free and over in six days. The strongest nation on Earth has the weakest will to live.
When the Chinese become the hegemonic power dominating world politics, they will make short work of the Muslim terrorists.
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