I understand the points being made, but for me this not about having "my" party win or look better or have power. It's about being terribly nervous about what "four more years" could bring. Even brushing aside the hugely important matter of the economy for the moment, four more Bush years would be bad for the environment. And women's reproductive health. And minority rights. Children's education. Lots of voiceless civilians in other countries who might have to die for no good reason. I may be short-sighted, I've certainly been told that before, but those aren't things I'm willing to sacrifice in order to see the Democratic party come out ahead in the long run.
perhaps i'm overly cynical, but the next four years are already fucked, either way. minorities are fucked, women are fucked, the environment is fucked, poor anonymous brown people in countries most Americans have never even heard of are fucked. the country belongs to the conservatives, and it has for basically my entire lifetime. Clinton was able to be massively successful by being marginally less evil than the Republicans, and temporarily holding the gates against the onsalught of the Gingrich revolution, and that's the best anyone's going to be able to do until Reaganism visibly fails in the minds of Middle America.
let me explain. the Seventies were a rough period for Middle America, with what seemed like defeat after defeat after defeat. however, each of those defeats contained vital lessons we're re-learning again now, under Bush.
Vietnam: our military power has limits, we are as capable of wartime atrocities as any other country, and imperialism is a bad idea
Watergate: our hallowed democratic institutions are riddled with corruption
the economic downturn: our economic growth is slowing, our period of total economic domination of the globe is coming to an end, and we need to re-examine our basic assumptions on that front
the oil crisis: we're too dependent on foreign oil, our tendency to indulge in conspicuous consumption is potentially very dangerous, and we have to start looking at alternative sources of energy
the hostage crisis: our policy of propping up dictators in the service of imperial ambition is going to blow up in our faces
environmental crises (Love Canal, Three Mile Island, etc): we're totally fucking the environment
Middle America remembers this as a depressing time, and understandably so. however, what needed to happen was for America to acknowledge all of these problems, and start working on actually solving them. that process was sure to be uncomfortable and painful, but it was then and remains now ultimately necessary for long-term peace and prosperity.
this was the time for the Left to step up, but we dropped the ball. Reagan and Bush got their first, and, basically, gave Middle America a series of comforting lies which have enabled them to stick their heads up their asses and ignore all of these problems for decades.
Vietnam: our only problem in Vietnam is that we were too soft on Evil, and we let the hippie liberal peaceniks tie our hands and cut our budgets. the answer: a more belligerent foreign policy, massive military spending, and demonization of the counterculture and anyone opposed to any number of covert government wrongdoings, plus a few showpiece war victories (Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm)
Watergate: our hallowed democratic institutions are riddled with corruption because of liberals who are using it to meddle in your lives with socialistic regulations. the answer: get rid of virtually all government social services, specifically the New Deal and Great Society programs. assaults on the separation of church and state.
the economic downturn: our economy is falling behind because of government regulation, government social spending, and labor unions. the answer: a full-scale campaign to gut all three
the oil crisis: because we are so dependent on foreign oil, anything we need to do in the Middle East to secure our access to cheap oil is justified as a matter of national security. the answer: very aggressive Middle East policy
the hostage crisis: America looks weak because we let these brown guys with funny names walk all over us. the answer: fuck the Ayatollah, fuck Saddam, fuck (insert name of scapegoat du jour here)
environmental crises (Love Canal, Three Mile Island, etc): this is just a myth peddled by a bunch of tree-hugging pussies who care more about spotted owls than they do about people, and want to stop you from enjoying such all-American traditions as the barbecue and the big family car, and just want to tie down industry with useless red tape and bankrupt us all. the answer: deregulation, total apathy, and vilification of environmental activists.
Reagan succeeded by telling people things they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear, and we're reaping the results of that now. Bush followed that tradition, basically. Clinton could only win in Reagan's country by Reaganizing the Democrats, and all he was really able to accomplish was watering down Reaganism for an eight year interregnum until Bush II took up the Gipper's mantle with a vengeance.
because of this, i can definitely see the merits of those who argue that the shit is going to come down, and come down hard, regardless of who gets elected. what's most important, then, is that no one in their right minds can blame anything but Reaganism for that fall. not just the Republicans as a party, but the ideology itself has to be totally discredited so that the voters start doing a serious re-think and start looking around for alternatives. Reagan came to power, essentially, by blaming all of America's problems on the liberals, and his intellectual heirs have maintained power by either obscuring their failures, spinning them into perceived successes, or blaming them on the liberals. they've succeeded to such a degree that the Democrats have been forced to adopt their basic principles and assumptions to become electable. it may very well be that the only way to break the Reaganite stranglehold on American politics is to give its most fervent apostles enough rope to hang themselves with, and hope that things blow up in such a way that it's too big to hide, too big to spin, and no one else to blame. saving some semblance of the Democratic Party now may mean having a credible opposition to step in when it bottoms out in this next term. if Bush loses now, and it all gets fucked on Kerry's watch, the Bushes will be able to come in and claim "see, we told you he'd fuck it up!" then they'd come back in '08 and prolong the whole thing.
the only counter-argument to that that i can see is that the deceptions and multi-layered catastrophic failures relating to the Iraq war, if nothing else, should have been too big to hide and too big to spin, but they're hiding and spinning the shit out of it and it's working well enough to keep them electable. i think that it may be naive to assume that something even bigger would be any more effective.
As I see things, as long as Bush is at the helm instilling fear into the American people, we're going to continue on this frighteningly extreme conservative downswing.
we've already been on this hugely conservative downswing for 24 to 36 years, depending on whether you date it from Nixon or Reagan. the Bush regime is only a slight acceleration of our slow, steady drift to the far right over the course of decades. |
