Liberal Sanctimony

One of the accusations from some of the readers at Ambivablog that I did not address is their feeling that I am a typical liberal elitist who thinks he 'knows better' than the beknighted fools who were conned into voting for Bush. The truth is that I think many decent people were conned into voting for Bush.  The evidence for that is piling up day after day, and you have to be the most willful ideologue with a pathological case of cognitive dissonance if you are among the 30% or so who still approve of his performance or still think that he's an honest broker for his policies.

I think that voting for him the first time around was understandable, but not the second time.  Too much evidence was available in 2004 for anyone who was half awake to what was going on to give this adminstration another four years. The feckless Democrats bear some of the blame for not providing a robust alternative, but still.  A vote for Bush in 2004 means either, like big energy, big pharma, and big media, you approve of his underlying agenda, which makes you complicit crony capitalist corruption of the political process.  Either that or you took at face value what he actually said were his more conventional conservative values,  which means you were conned. 

The motives of the former group are transparent, those of the latter more more difficult to fathom.  So a big theme for my writing here has been simply an honest attempt to understand why this con was so successful.  I can understand why those who were conned feel that this is condescending, but in turn I would say to them: Get over it.  You were wrong, admit it, learn from your mistake.  I have been in your position many,many times--that's the only attitude that enables you to go forward. 

I don't feel any sense of gloating in saying this, but I am, quite frankly exasperated by anyone who at this point in time can still defend this administration and its policies.  It has been an unmitigated disaster, and if you were a supporter or still are, you bear responsibility for enabling it.  And, yes, I'm angry about that, and so it's understandable that from time time I direct my anger toward those of you who continue to defend the indefensible.  You don't need me or anyone to hold your hand or to gently reason with you; you need a slap upside the head.

That being said I will do my best to enter into an honest dialogue with anyone who presents himself as sincerely seeking the truth, no matter how different his views are from mine.  God  knows I have no monopoly on truth, and that there is more that I don't know than I do know.   But I make no apologies for my intolerance of foolishness or pigheadedness. And while there's plenty of that to be found among Liberals, they're not the one posing the gravest threat at this moment.

And for the record I'm not a Liberal.  You don't have to be a Liberal to hate what this administration is doing to our country.  You just have to have some common sense.

Comments

[ckreiz]

Aging is a wonderful thing. In 1975, one could've substituted Nixon's name in this essay. An entire generation was alarmist and hysterical about the impact of Nixon's presidency on the body politic. Fast forward 31 years. Few ponder Dick's impact our present course.

Bush will pass. The vexing and seemingly insurmountable issues of our times will remain. New issues will appear. Take a deep breath and think long run.

[Jack Whelan]

I don't accept the world weary, nothing-new-under-the-sun shrugging of the shoulders implicit in your comment, and I hope that aging doesn't become an excuse for me for complaceny and lack of vigiliance.

My view, if you have been reading me over time, is very much a long run perspective. Bush is a leaf blowing in the wind; it's the wind and its movements that concern me. Bush isn't the issue; it's the longer-term sytemic corruption of the system that worries me.

To shift metaphors, Nixon was the shot across the bow--a relatively insignificant moment in the larger flow of events here, but indicative of an attitude endemic among the rightist power elite in the GOP that has only deepened in the last several decades.

Reagan's was a more serious first assault, for the most part unsuccessful. The Clinton years were a period for these GOP rightists to regroup and to keep the Dems off balance through blatantly obvious harassment techniques, and the Bush years have been the most serious and vicious, attack yet, made all the more dangerous by their control of all three branches of government and their ability to resist any kind of scrutiny or transparency.

It's the foundation that they are building for the long run that I find most disturbing. They may be beaten back for a while, but when they mount their next attack, the infrastructure for their success is stronger than the time before.

If they are beaten back this time, I will be relieved, but it's for me an open question whether they will be. And as I've written before, even if the Dems win in November and in '08, it's not the end of it because these GOP right-wingers are themselves thinking long run, and the Dems are for the most part hapless with no real goals or counter strategy.

These rightists are high-stakes gamesmen, and are capable of almost anything. They are bad guys, they have a long-term strategy, and they are not going away. And whatever hope for success they may have depends on ordinary citizens thinking that what they're up to is no big deal--just politics as usual.

[ckreiz]

In fairness to both of us, I'm a new visitor. So rather than going off half-cocked, I'll reserve judgment and read more. Perhaps this isn't business as usual and there is a basis for concern.

[Jack Whelan]

Ckreiz--

I appreciate your fairmindedness. And I apologize for my prickliness in response to what I perceived to be your patronizing me for my overly youthful 56-year-old perspective.

As I said in my Ambivablog post, I don't expect to convince you of anything; the most I can ask is for a fair hearing. At the very least I think you'll find that I'm really not saying what most other administration critics are saying. Even if there is some obvious overlap, my angle of approach is different. If I thought I was doing what everyone else was doing, I wouldn't bother.

My more basic interest is in understanding how a group mythos gains and loses cultural legitimacy. Along those lines, I see the mythos of the left as obsolete causing the left to fall into disarray. There is very little enthusiasm for singing its song anymore. They are tedious, fragmented, and ineffectual, and they offer no narrative that offers a robust way forward or a robust counter to the mythos of the right which plays on insecurity and the need for order. (The Libertarian mythos is grounded differently, but I covered that in my Ambivablog post and repsonse to comments.)

In foreign affairs the PNAC right-wing of the GOP saw in the fall of the Soviet Union an historic opportunity to move into what had been a Soviet sphere of influence. There was a lot of talk about democratizing the region, but I think it's pretty obvious that such an objective was never really very high on their agenda or that they ever gave it much thought. That in part explains their blundering.

They miscalculated mainly because they didn't care about or know anything about local history and culture. They thought that muscle was all that counted. They think in obsolete cold-war, nation-state, power-politics terms and thought that Iraq was low-hanging fruit with no farmer around anymore to prevent them from simply plucking it. They thought Iraq could be easily manipulated into being a client state in the old cold war style. This remarkably naive thinking by otherwise pretty smart people has led to the current disaster.

But here's the point I really want to make: In the same way the neocons saw an opportunity in the Middle East, operatives like Karl Rove saw an opportunity in the domestic political arena because of the aforementioned disarray of the Democrats.

They have been like clay in his hands, and he has been able to push all the right levers to lay the foundation for what would be a functional one-party crony capitalist system. Before you roll your eyes, think about it for a minute: Isn't that the way the south was run throughout the post-reconstruction era through the sixties? Why is it so far-fetched to believe that these southern Republicans would seek to effect the same kind of system nationally. This is what I mean in my earlier reference to a long-term right wing strategy.

Had it not been for the miscalculation of the war, he may have been far more successful. My take is that he didn't really care that much about invading Iraq, but was convinced by the neocon crowd that it would be a cakewalk and that it would create all kinds of poltical capital for his protege. I'm sure now he sees the invasion as a grave blunder that has put in jeopardy everything he hoped to accomplish.

But he has for the most part succeeded in his objective to reduce the Democrats into a token opposition party, as the Republicans were in the South until Reagan.

The Dems have become easy to dismiss as not ever to be taken seriously, but useful idiots nonetheless for helping the new crony capitalist GOP regime to maintain some window dressing as a democracy. We'll see if they can make a comeback in the light of this GOP disaster, but I doubt that they can be very effective because of the mythos problem.

That's the way I connect the dots. I think there's plenty of evidence to support this view. I also realize the case I'm making is circumstantial at best. But at the very least I would hope that you and other skeptics entertain it as a possibility and use it as a lens through which to view unfolding events--it may enable you to see dots that before were invisible or easily dismissed as aberrations or otherwise inconsequential.

P.S. Since few people are likely to see this since hardly any body comments on my blog, I might use this as the basis for a post later this week.

My hope is that this GOP strategy can be beaten back in the short run to allow time for a new, more robust Progressive mythos to emerge that gets past the reason/faith impasse that seems to be at the heart of our political confusion.

[ckreiz]

What is it about this medium that makes us assume that we're all about 22? Still, it appears that I'm a couple of years younger than you, Jack. I'm suddenly feeling refreshed.

[Mike McG...]

Hey Jack, what makes you infer that very few see your posts because hardly anyone comments?

My wife and I never miss a post, but she never comments and I infrequently do so. We find we just need to let what you write steep. It's daunting to respond to powerful essays without sounding superficial.

[Jack Whelan]

Mike--

Not talking about you or Matt, Robert, Micah, and Adrienne--Other than you and those others, I have no sense of who my readers are.

I'm not complaining because I'd rather have quality than quantity, and I've got that consistently from you all. So it's just an observation. I know from my own experience with the limited time I have for reading other blogs, I rarely spend time with comments because so many of them are goofy and off point.

But I like it when I get questions, because it often forces me to go a little deeper and to make clearer what might have been presented too glibly.

[Matt Zemek]

Mike McG:

I care about getting comments. I ran a blog for 15 months once, but when comments dried up, I stopped.

I currently edit the Seattle St Vincent de Paul bulletin. No one comments on the Vincentian essays I write at the end of each bulletin. Why invest the energy if you don't think you're inspiring people to reach within themselves and express something meaningful about them?

Comments matter for anyone whose words or products are publicly published.