Monday, September 06, 2004
(8:16 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
So about this "Bush will win" meme
What if Bush wins? The Washington Monthly has sixteen distinguished panelists discussing that very question this month. (I read the one entitled "Vengeance is His," and it seemed plausible enough to me. I'll read the others in due course, I'm sure.) I'd like to pursue that same question from the direction of what will likely happen if he is re-elected.First, it is clear that Bush's re-election is our best hope for getting out of Iraq in a timely fashion, as well as our best hope for avoiding a draft. This is precisely because he has no recognizable political principles aside from a desire to retain power (backed up, perhaps, by the idea that his righteousness makes him the only man for the job). The utter whorishness of the press will also help in this. I predict a basically illegitimate, powerless government for Iraq, with nothing even approaching a monopoly of force in Iraqi territory, parallel to that of Afghanistan. The chaos will spread to neighboring states, and regime after arbitrary regime will be overthrown until the world witnesses the emergence of a New Caliphate spreading from Morocco to Indonesia. And, ironically enough, once the Muslims are back in power, things eventually go back to how they were in the Middle Ages -- living in Muslim territory is preferable by far to living in Christian territory (viz., the United States). Bush will go down in history as one of the most influential presidents of all time, inadvertantly ushering in the most significant shift in geopolitics since the emergence of European modernity itself.
On the home front, Bush's deficit dovishness will continue apace, until taxation is abolished altogether. Entitlements will be expanded, and as a token gesture to satisfy his conservative base, Bush will institute a program wherein people can make voluntary donations to the federal government. The entire military will be sold off to private security firms as a cost-cutting measure. Eventually it will become clear that the US national debt, which provided a major foundation for the explosion of finance capital in recent decades, will never be repaid -- the US will effectively be reduced to the status of a Third World nation, unable even to keep up its interest payments, despite Bush's repeated pleas for more donations.
One of two things will follow: first, the UN Security Council could vote to abolish the capitalist mode of production altogether (conveniently freeing my readers from the obligation of paying their student loans). Second, Chinese and Japanese investors could buy every piece of land in the United States and raise rents to such a high point that Americans will have to move to either Canada or Europe. In the meantime, the governments of those nations, seeing the future influx of American refugees, will have opened up new Re-education Centers for Former Americans. Each American citizen, in order to be admitted to the host country, will have to undergo five years of rigorous instruction in the true story of American hegemony, in foreign languages, and in art appreciation. The emerging Former Americans will go through several stages of repentance: walking around on their knees in sackcloth and ashes, weeping and gnashing teeth, tracking down and burning every Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity book they can find, joining the Green Party, and demonstrating in favor of world citizenship, a social wage, and the right of the appropriation of the means of production. The right-wing blogosphere will completely collapse. All told, this will lead to a Second Renaissance, an unprecedented explosion of cultural production in all the non-US nations of the NATO alliance. The United States will be kept open as an amusement park.
Thus, it doesn't sound so bad for Bush to be re-elected. Certainly there will be some adjustments, often painful, to be made in the short-run, but in the medium- to long-run, a second term of Bush ends up ushering in a utopian future for humanity that the tepid moderation of a Kerry presidency could never hope to achieve.
