Tuesday, June 22, 2004
(6:38 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
So what exactly happened to Howard Dean again?
He was a one-issue candidate -- all he could talk about was the Iraq war. He let out a creepy scream, which showed he was objectively unfit for the presidency. He could sometimes be an asshole in private. John Kerry just did a better job of grass-roots campaigning.
Yeah, whatever. I don't know if people realize this fully, but the official line of the Democratic Party is to support the Iraq War. They voted overwhelmingly in favor of the authorization to use force and for the $87 billion. (My only glimmer of hope is that John Kerry voted against the second.) So how exactly were they going to select the anti-war candidate? These are people who are trying to gain some "credibility" on national-security issues. I mean, forget the fact that Democrats are obviously more skilled in actually running the country and designing effective government programs -- no, we need to prove that we're tough guys, too. We need to prove that deep down, we really do believe that the government exists only to fight wars and brutalize criminals. That's credibility -- not creating an environment in which young people can live with hope for the future, outside the long-shot chance of cashing in on the stock market, but creating an environment in which as many young people as possible are killed.
The complaint against the Bush administration is that they did the Iraq war poorly. Period. The Democrats, however, will do it right -- they'll take the stupid idea and make it livable and plausible, just like Clinton did with Reaganism. The terms of debate are effectively beyond question: the Democratic party has apparently accepted the "fact" that people are naturally Republican and have resigned themselves to "swinging right" in order to make the occasional cynical grab for power.
Meanwhile, as all the tough-minded liberal hawks mouth the idiocies of the Bush administration's American messianism, people are dying for no reason at all. Saddam is out of power already. We have already achieved the only possible positive outcome of this war. Before us, there is only miserable failure. We can either have miserable failure right now and withdraw right now, or we can have miserable failure after this war has become a "generational event" -- another Vietnam. I am honestly afraid that John Kerry and the Democratic Party, in their capacity as the "fixer" of Republican messes, will choose the latter.
I want John Kerry to prove me wrong. I want him to give the American people an actual choice in this election by promising to withdraw our troops from Iraq. I want him to be relentless in exposing the lies of the administration. I want him to go negative at the most fundamental level -- to opt for evil, not incompetence. And I want the Democratic Party to prove me wrong. I liked how outspokenly critical Nancy Pelosi was of the president a while back, but I'd like to get past hatred of the man to hatred of his entire political philosophy. I fear that they won't be able to make that shift, however, because the real scandal here is how much the Democrats share with George W. Bush, whether sincerely or for cynical reasons.
Meanwhile, there remains an untapped resource of genuinely progressive people, or people who could be persuaded to be progressive if anyone gave them the option. By pretending this multitude does not exist, the Democratic Party shows contempt for the American people, tacitly "admitting" that our nation is made up of nothing but Christian fundamentalists and gun-toting rednecks.
To conclude: a thought experiment. George W. Bush is not really as hardnosed and uncompromisingly principled as he seems. Although the standard criticism of Democrats is that they flip-flop (and, if you've been watching TV for the last 15 years, you realize that this is true), Bush has flip-flopped on nearly every issue: nation-building, small government, etc. He has just decided that the appropriate strategy is to cultivate an air of infallibility by taking the position that anything he in fact does was his intention the whole time, despite evidence to the contrary. It's an effective strategy -- apparently it's brilliant in terms of fooling highly educated journalists. The thing is, the Administration is just willing to do anything to remain in power. They don't care about "finishing the job" or anything like that; just look at Afghanistan. And so, what if the best way to ensure that the doomed policy of war in Iraq is overturned is to keep Bush in office? The propaganda machine could declare victory, then on to the next thing -- like Afghanistan, Iraq could be forgotten (according to the "liberal" elites running the media, all those country yokels out in the heartland don't have the patience for international news anyway). Eventually we'd start talking about our massive success in Iraq the same way that we now unabashedly say that Al Gore lost the 2000 election.
But as I said, it's just a thought experiment. The official party line of The Weblog is still anti-Bush, or I mean, pro-Kerry.
