Have we fully awakened from our six-year nightmare, or are we just going to stretch, yawn, and go back to sleep? For a particularly cogent analysis that attempts to describe to a blinking, sleepy-eyed public what we've just gone through, read Tom Englehardt's piece "Plebiscite on an Outlaw Empire." It's a failed empire, but we're still stuck with all the wreckage and the expense of cleaning it up and maintaining what's left. But let's not think about that. Let's just go back to sleep where this time let's hope our dreams will be pleasanter.
So another litmus test for the Democrats that I did not directly address in my election postmortem earlier this week is whether they will be able to lead the American public to repudiate the imperial legacy of the last sixty years, or whether they will continue to find excuses to keep propping it up. It's a question of whether they will be able to lead the American people to recognize that it's too late for empire. It's not just a question of extricating ourselves from Iraq, but of reevaluating who we Americans think we are in relationship to the rest of the world.
As with the other litmus tests I discussed the other day, I don't think there is much reason to hope that, say, by the year 2012 that much will have changed even if the Dems hang on to the pilot wheel until then. The Democrats are too complicit, and they not strong enough, nor commited enough, to take on the biggest special interest of them all--the military industrial complex. A lot of Americans still resist the idea that we have become an empire, and it's understandable because it's not stated policy. It's not something we consciously set out to become. The United States has drifted into empire unconsciously. It has done it step by step as the military industrial complex got bigger and its feeding demands increased.
And Democrats have gone along with it, not because they wanted empire, but because they felt compelled to feed it. It meant jobs for their constituents, and to refuse to feed it meant (and still means) political suicide. It's a beast that gets cranky when its blood sugar is low and it'll bite your head off. If you want a career in politics, you find ways to accommodate yourself to it. For Republicans it's called being strong on national security. For Democrats it's called being a moderate. To want to put a check on it will earn you dismissal by the punditry as 'unserious'.
And so as with the other issues I discussed the other day, this one is central regarding the future coherency of the Democrats as a party. And there's little reason to hope in that regard. As Englehardt puts it: Can the Democrats even be considered a party?
If Rovian plans for a Republican Party ensconced in Washington for eons to come now look to be in tatters, the Democrats have retaken the House (and possibly the Senate) largely as the not-GOP Party. The election may leave the Republicans with a dead presidency and a leading candidate for 2008 wedded to possibly the least popular war in our history; the Democrats may arrive victorious but without the genuine desire for a mandate to lead. Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats in recent years were not, in any normal sense, a party at all. They were perhaps a coalition of four or five or six parties (some trailing hordes of pundits and consultants, but without a base). Now, with the recruitment of so many ex-Republicans and conservatives into their House and Senate ranks, they may be a coalition of six or seven parties. Who knows? They have a genuine mandate on Iraq and a mandate on oversight. What they will actually do -- what they are capable of doing (other than the normal money, career, and earmark-trading in Washington) -- remains to be seen. They will be weak, the surroundings fierce and strong.
Exactly. It's the very incoherency of the Democrats, no matter how much of a majority of Americans it embraces, that has made the country defenseless to the assaults of extremist minority groups that are clear and focused about what they want. And when such groups, like the Neocons, get hold of the pilot wheel, there's no coherent counterforce to stop them from running the ship aground, as they have done over the last six years. The general American public will support factions in the political sphere who present themselves as strong and decisive, no matter how horrible their program. Until some coherency, some consensus about what American common sense and common decency mean, both domestically and in foreign affairs, the government will be continuously vulnerable to boarding by buccaneers. These pirates push the competent but timid crew aside telling the passengers wild stories about horrible threats they alone can protect them from and filling them with false promises that they will make everyone rich.
But behind the phony smiles and glib rhetoric is the real message: "Everyone do as your told, and no one gets hurt." They pillage the ship and then jump off when it's run aground and there's nothing left to steal, leaving the hapless former crew to clean up the mess. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, glad that this nightmare is over. Thing is this will be a recurrent nightmare--the pirates will go into hiding for awhile, but they'll be back. And they will be met with as little resistance in the future as met them in the last six years unless the American people figure out what's happening and develop a strategy to resist their assault. And in order to do that, you need a party that knows what it stands for and has a power base that enables it to fight back. That's simply not a description of the Democrats.