Saturday, September 13, 2003
(10:53 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Something decent from the Wall Street Journal
Although the publication mentioned in the title has a reputation for being a fascist propaganda center, this article (which is linked on the comments for this Pandagon post) is very interesting. It asserts what most of us probably unconsciously already knew:
In the same situation, the vocal right in Congress would have blamed Sept. 11 on the "weakness" of the Clinton-Gore policies. Jesse Helms would be ranting about the crippling of the CIA that began with Jimmy Carter and accelerated under Bill Clinton. (Somehow the Ronald Reagan, Bill Casey and George H.W. Bush years don't count.) The critics would go on to assert that capitulating to the Chinese with a semiapology when they downed a U.S. plane only encouraged Osama bin Laden.
The article goes on along this same line for a while, then concludes:
There is a need for legitimate argument and disagreement over economic policy and the criminal-justice approach, and certainly over sending young American men and women into harm's way. Such a debate will escalate in the coming weeks and months [this article was written in December of 2001], just as it did during previous conflicts.
But if Al Gore had been president, the narrow right would have turned that desirable debate into a vindictive, petty one.
Of course, he's right factually, but I think the article in general is insidious: it moves politics up from the level of concrete policy into the realm of infighting (which is usually the means to the end of getting particular policies passed, but is all too often an end-in-itself). For instance, after reading these paragraphs, who could possibly argue that we're better off with Bush?
The Bush foreign-policy team gets exceptionally high marks. But a Gore foreign-policy team--Dick Holbrooke at State, Sam Nunn at Defense, Leon Fuerth as national security adviser and George Mitchell as a roving troubleshooter--would be equal in experience, expertise and resolve. They also would be bolder.
The elements of today's basic policy formulation--state-building, a strong reliance on the United Nations, and multilateralism--all were articulated during the 2000 campaign by the Democratic candidate. "Bush has bought into the Clinton/Gore policy," notes Democratic Rep. Barney Frank.
A Gore economic team--Larry Summers, former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson and Wall Street whiz Steven Rattner--would be vastly superior to Mr. Bush's team, as would their policies. Certainly, a Gore administration would have pushed a more coherent and comprehensive homeland security initiative.
A President Gore would micromanage the terrorist crisis but would be more knowledgeable. The imponderable would be whether Mr. Gore, in a time of crisis, would be inspiring and constructively challenging, or unctuous and pedantic.
And because the right wing would go insane over everything Gore does, we're supposed to be glad that a competent, bold foreign policy team and (much more importantly, in my opinion) an economic team with actual coherent policies similar to those that led to actual economic growth in the late 1990s did not gain power in 2000? I have news for everyone: political discourse is not the only thing that matters. A spirit of cooperation and comeraderie among politicians is no more likely to produce desirable policies than is vigorous, even heated debate. In fact, the long-standing trend of shifting all political commentary to the level of infighting rather than the level of the actual effects of proposed policies is a big part of the reason that most people feel so alienated from politics today -- why should I get my ass out of bed to go vote, so that I can stroke some politician's ego or give some party ammunition to screw over the other party?
So as accurate as this article undoubtedly is, it is still part of the problem. It ignores the fact that politics actually effect people's lives, that the goal of politics is to produce policy that can, to a considerable extent, be judged on objective grounds as to its effectiveness -- not, finally, whether it is "liberal" or "conservative." (Another post shall come some day about the insidious effects of flattening all political discourse into those two categories.)
The abstraction of politics, as illustrated in this article (which, I must emphasize, is very good and insightful in its own way), ultimately ends up reinforcing the right-wing ascendancy in this country. I think that if the American people all attended some kind of all-day economic seminar on the likely ramifications of the policies of each party, they would be led to conclude that the current Republican policies just do not work -- they do not improve the quality of life of much of anyone. They make the rich richer, certainly, but the rich are already rich -- the whole thing with being rich is that you don't need more money, so that having more money is probably going to have only marginal effects on a rich person's life. By abstracting the debate to the level of the comparative power of two teams, each of whom have an absolutely equal claim to power, and each of whom "succeeds" or "fails" based solely on the way they "play the game" (the political game that only occasionally slouches down to the level of actual policy), the media does a great disservice to the nation. Policy does still matter, and by pretending it doesn't, the media encourages the American people to give up any claim to control their own destiny.
