Published on Sunday, October 10, 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle
Where Did the Middle Go?
How Polarized Politics and a Radical GOP have Put a Chill on Measured Debate
by Theodore Roszak
Walk into a bookstore today, throw a stick in any direction, and it's likely you'll hit a dozen savage attacks upon George W. Bush. Future historians will surely regard the deluge of Bush-bashing books and films that appeared in 2004 as a remarkable cultural phenomenon, a tribute to the vitality of American publishing and to the surviving political literacy of the public.
They will certainly note that elevating the nation's liberal blood pressure helped rally the troops to John Kerry's campaign. But they may find themselves puzzling over why the assault on Bush had so little effect on his political base. They may conclude that this was the year partisan polarization spun out of control, the point at which persuasion and dialogue -- always in short supply -- became things of the past.
Behind all the Bush-bashing we have seen this year stands the same idealistic assumption that once inspired the muckrakers of old: If only we can get the truth out, the public will rise up in wrath and drive the "lying liars" from power. For that matter, Bush's handlers make the same assumption. That's why they labor so strenuously to exploit all the latest techniques for manufacturing consent.
But what if both sides are wrong about how much can be achieved by shocking revelations on film or in print? What if Bush's political base never needed to be lied to? That might explain why, despite "Fahrenheit 9/11" and all the other enraged documentaries (the best of which, incidentally, is "Hijacking Catastrophe" by the Media Education Foundation), the polls keep reflecting strong popular support for Bush's "leadership" and why he continues to find cheering crowds, especially at military bases where troops give their commander-in-chief the big "hoo-ah." These people aren't deceived. They know exactly what Bush is up to -- and it's OK with them.
And here we have the root cause of polarization, the difference that has set political left and right in America at each other's throats. There is a fundamental moral asymmetry between left and right in the United States. Vietnam-era liberals such as me suffered through the anguish of losing faith in their party and turning against it. The crowds that demonstrated in the streets of Chicago in 1968 weren't irate conservatives; they were conscience- stricken liberals who were prepared to sacrifice an election victory -- and with it Lyndon Johnson's Great Society agenda -- on an issue of principle.
Looking back, Republicans might want to thank people like the young John Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans for Peace. Their opposition cost the Democratic Party dearly and launched the country toward the great conservative backlash of the Ronald Reagan presidency. For that matter, liberals were doing electoral favors for the GOP long before Vietnam.
One of my earliest political memories is the Democrat convention of 1948. With my ear to the radio, I recall Hubert Humphrey galvanizing the party liberals to push through a strong civil rights platform against powerful Southern opposition. How thrilling, I thought. But I recall my Roosevelt- Democrat father fuming, "They're throwing away the election!" Following that speech, the Dixiecrat wing of the party walked out on the convention. It looked as if my father might be right. (Incidentally, the Dixiecrat candidate in 1948 was Strom Thurmond, destined to become a Republican stalwart.) Harry Truman won that election, but in the end, principled liberal support for civil rights led to Barry Goldwater's Sunbelt coalition and Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy," the first steps toward a new solid South of disgruntled white voters. The GOP was on its way to becoming the most mono-racial party since Reconstruction.
Here's what I think most infuriates liberals. They are up against a Republican opposition that has shown no comparable willingness to risk party unity on a matter of conscience -- nothing that compares to the sacrifice liberals were willing to make over civil rights and Vietnam. Republicans have had no difficulty swallowing episodes like McCarthyism and Watergate. Indeed, the relentless effort to impeach Bill Clinton was largely retaliation for what conservatives still see as the "persecution" of poor Richard Nixon. Others (like Ann Coulter) are now toiling to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy, including his charge that liberals are traitors. And Ronald Reagan went to his grave this year all but officially pardoned by Republicans for Iran-Contra, the most blatant violation of constitutional government in American history.
We have yet to see any sizable group of Republicans who will admit to a single moral blemish, let alone display a willingness to defect. Hardly surprising, then, that Bush supporters display no discomfort over a war that liberals see as an obvious hoax. Bush's political base has become so ideologically entrenched that it is willing to offer his administration a blank ethical check.
During the Cold War, right-wingers purported to be horrified by the way Communists bowed to the iron discipline of the Party. How could people abase themselves so abjectly? Well, their own conduct would seem to answer that question. And the loyal moderates among them would do well to remember who got purged first by Communist zealots once the dust had cleared: the moderates, of course. Which is exactly what we see happening now as Republican ultraconservatives declare open season on "rhinos" (as they call moderates) in their own party. In an election year, this unfolding campaign to oust the moderates is being soft-pedaled, but it will soon return full force. Recall how Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney savaged Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords back in 2001 after a minor show of disobedience.
The wrath of liberals, their all but desperate willingness to vote for any Democratic candidate who might defeat George W. Bush, arises from the fact that we have had no sign of bona fides from the right wing, no willingness by Republicans to stand up to malefactors and fanatics in their party's leadership. Right wingers have registered the spleen of their liberal opponents, but have they recognized our honest fear?
Let me be the first to admit it: The Republican Party scares the living daylights out of me, and that has nothing to do with differing interpretations of "The Federalist Papers." It has to do with presidential adviser Karl Rove. I cannot think of a single principle Rove's party would hesitate to trample into dust for the sake of holding power. There is much talk of God and values on the right, but the ruthlessness of right-wing politics belies the sincerity of those professions for me.
As a case in point, consider House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, whose remarkable career is the subject of Lou Dubose and Jan Reid's recent study The Hammer: Tom DeLay: God, Money and the United States Congress (Public Affairs; 306 pages; $26). There could be no better example of a "stupid white man" (to borrow Michael Moore's contemptuous label), provided one recognizes that a certain kind of stupidity is compatible with a certain kind of cunning. After all, politicians such as DeLay helped capture the Sun Belt for the Reagan Republicans, along with the Archie Bunker, working-class vote. DeLay is a crafty strategist, no doubt about that. But how could any honest conservative fail to find DeLay an embarrassment to the country -- in the same way that liberals once found Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo a national disgrace?
There are more college graduates than ever in the United States; there is a world of information available through the media -- and yet here we have a major political leader whose world view is a bizarre stew of evangelical religion and Social Darwinist business values. Balance, moderation and discriminating intelligence play no role in his politics. This is a man who believes the Environmental Protection Agency is the equivalent of the Gestapo. And as Dubose and Reid make clear, DeLay has been as willing to target moderates for destruction as Democrats.
By DeLay's standards, even Newt Gingrich didn't qualify as a true conservative. After all, Gingrich called off the great government shutdown of 1995, which DeLay would have continued until hell froze over. In DeLay's eyes, Gingrich was a "think-tank pontificator and a flake" who never read the Bible. By the late 1990s, DeLay's take-no-prisoners political style was well along toward giving the Republicans permanent control of Congress. Today in Washington, DeLay and his colleagues govern with a winner-take-all ferocity, as if the Democrats simply didn't exist. They invite lobbyists to write legislation and give Democrats no chance to debate or amend.
The secret of their success? Covertly, they draw upon the racist fears of rednecks and blue collars, but overtly, they attribute their triumph to unswerving evangelical faith. DeLay, who faithfully attends Bible classes, is an ally of the Rev. John Hagee's Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. In this capacity, he fancies himself the congressional voice of "God's foreign policy," which calls for unstinting economic and military support for Israeli hard-liners from here to the Second Coming.
No question but that liberals have been caught off guard by the politicization of born-again Christians. But then who could have foreseen the impact of an ideology that believes Armageddon is just around the corner and that Christianity should be made the official religion of the United States?
Another reason for liberal alarm can be found in a pamphlet-size analysis of Bush versus Gore, Irreparable Harm: The US Supreme Court and the Decision That Made George W. Bush President (Melville House Publishing; 61 pages; $8. 95), New Yorker staff writer Renata Adler argues persuasively that the Supreme Court has "become quite openly the most dangerous branch" of government. She reminds us that the court is a body with life tenure whose members cannot be recalled and from whose decisions there is no appeal. That is why it's the branch of government that requires the greatest possible public trust.
But how better to sacrifice that trust than to take sides between the parties? In 2000, the court assumed the right to intervene in presidential elections on the flimsiest grounds, setting aside one candidate's 500,000-vote lead in favor of a 5-to-4 vote of the justices. Given that precedent, how will any disputed election -- and elections can always be disputed by the loser - - ever stand against this court? A majority on the court could easily come to outweigh a majority at the ballot box.
Bear in mind that liberal voters are the only Americans ever to have had their votes discounted in this way; is their fear and their anger so hard to understand? There have been Supreme Courts I've disliked, but this is the first I've feared.
Take still another example of how fast and loose the Bush administration has played with old-style conservatism. This year, in search of senior citizen votes, Bush presented a Medicare reform authored by health care industry lobbyists and then all but beat congressional Republicans into supporting it. (DeLay was instrumental in keeping the vote open while he worked toward another of his patented one-vote victories.) Only afterward did Republicans discover that they had been lied to about the true cost of the bill. It would cost more than $500 billion rather than $400 billion. But, in fact, it really made no difference what the price tag was. There is no money to pay for it. The money had gone on tax cuts and war. (Remember when Republicans lambasted Lyndon Johnson for not raising taxes as he escalated the war in Vietnam? What would they have said if he had cut taxes?)
Like all of the White House's social programs, the new Medicare bill will be financed on the national credit card. Isn't fiscal deception like this supposed to matter to Republicans? But how many of them would be the first to ask about money to pay for various liberal programs? I can recall when Republicans were the fiscal conscience of the nation. No more. Since the Reagan years, they have become addicted to deficit spending on the Pentagon -- and with barely a hint of protest within their ranks.
The right wing of American politics today is a crazy quilt made up of single-issue voters, many of whom were disaffected Democrats. It is the party of anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-tax, anti-gun-control, anti-Darwin, anti- affirmative-action, anti-environment, pro-prayers-in-the-school, pro-faith- based-social-services voters. Maybe this is a clever way of winning elections, but there is no philosophy that unites this spectrum of discontent. No great Republican leader ever taught that the world was created in six days or that the Second Amendment must be read as approval for the sale of assault rifles. Raw political opportunism is the only glue holding this bundle of impassioned causes together.
By far the most unprincipled bullying that Republicans have had to accept is regarding the Iraq war, fought by a president who, only four years ago, rejected nation building -- a theme that echoes the isolationist tradition of his party back to the days of Robert Taft. I never agreed with that orientation, but at least it was open and honest. How things have changed. In a recent insightful analysis of Bush foreign policy, The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq (Akashic Books and Seven Stories Press; 197 pages; $9. 95 paperback), Robert and Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry conclude that the Iraq war stems from "the neoconservative vision for a 'New American Century,' a world defined by U.S. military domination over much of Europe and Asia, buttressed by a global ring of military bases, each ready to dispatch troops at the slightest hint of resistance from 'hostile' states. It was time, neoconservatives argued, to take advantage of an unparalleled 'unipolar moment' marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union."
In their view, "the Iraqis, like the American people, [are] merely pawns in a global game of empire-building." I would agree, but what the authors overlook is how willingly many of those American pawns rally to the cross and the flag for the sake of party unity. The neoconservatives who engineered the Iraq war have not been all that secretive about their grandiose designs. Perhaps they sense they have less and less need to be so. The colonial pipe dreams they are spinning in the Defense Department these days read like Realpolitik from the era of Cecil Rhodes and Count von Bülow. When was that ever a Republican priority? Why, then, has it become acceptable to moderates in the party to see the United States resurrect the discredited imperialism of the past and, worse, to turn our nation's military defense over to battalions of privately contracted troops? Outsourcing the armed forces is a central aspect of "transformation," as Donald Rumsfeld calls his reform of the Pentagon. If the neoconservatives can pull that off -- if they can replace citizen soldiers with mercenaries from many nations who are off-budget and whose casualties need not be reported -- they will have gone well beyond Iran-Contra in removing control of our foreign policy, including war making, from Congress and the people. How does that jibe with the conservative principle of limited government?
Given the gravity of the constitutional issues these policies raise, I would expect to find conservatives willing to join with liberals in declaring that the Bush administration has gone too far. But given the unshakable loyalty of the Republican base, I cannot imagine that happening, no matter how much skullduggery in high places Bush-bashers reveal. Suppose, then, George W. Bush dropped all pretenses and simply declared, "OK, you wanna know my domestic agenda? Here it is. Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay and I aren't just gonna defeat the liberals, we're gonna obliterate them, along with every progressive reform since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, every New Deal program, every Great Society entitlement. Why else do you think we're running these sky-high deficits? We're handing as much dough as we can to the people who know how to run this country -- namely the super-rich. Sure, that's gonna cost the rest of you jobs and social services, but isn't it worth it to give the poor, the nonwhite, the welfare queens, the gays and the feminazis a swift kick in the teeth?
"What's my foreign policy? Listen up. We're gonna yank that oil out from under those dysfunctional Arabs because we need it to preserve our gas- guzzling way of life, and I'm not asking anybody for a permission slip to do that. We're God's chosen people and we intend to make the most of it. And if anybody gets in our way, we've got what it takes to clobber them."
If Bush took that line, I wonder if it would it cost him a single vote he doesn't already have. And how many swing voters might be won over by such decisive, non-flip-flopping leadership? As for the single-minded evangelicals who have become the key to any winning political strategy, the Republicans have them so locked in that even if Bush were discovered having lunch with the devil, they would still vote for him -- as long as he treated them to an occasional kick at the gays and the feminists.
By any defensible historical standard, we are living under the most ideologically aggressive regime since the 1920s. Its style comes straight out of the CEO's how-to handbook. The compulsive board-room secrecy and iron corporate discipline of this administration break all records. So, too, the entrepreneurial back-scratching of the last four years, beginning with Dick Cheney's clandestine meetings with the country's energy moguls before Bush had even been sworn into office. At those gatherings, did Cheney guarantee his cronies a free hand at bilking the public for billions -- especially the ratepayers of California? Those tapes we have of gloating Enron traders, is that the voice of the free market? And how can one not be curious about the maps of the Iraqi oilfields that were on the table at those meetings? Were those perhaps investment brochures?
The words I use here about the Bush administration are stronger and more embittered than I would use as part of an honest political dialogue. I hate feeling that I must cling to mediocre candidates and compromised agendas because the alternative is so much worse. I take no pleasure in reading all the anti-Bush literature that has poured off the presses, like some small- press anthologies such as The I Hate George W. Bush Reader: Why Dubya Is Wrong About Absolutely Everything (Thunder's Mouth Press; 381 pages; $13.95 paperback) and The I Hate Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice ... Reader: Behind the Bush Cabal's War on America (Thunder's Mouth Press; 368 pages; $13.95 paperback). The selections are vitriolic, but they include convincing analyses of the unprecedented hubris of Bush and company. Here is how David Armstrong, in a Harper's essay from the "Hate Cheney" anthology, characterizes the capital-P "Plan" of the Bush administration, an agenda foreshadowed in a 1990 Defense Planning Guidance authored by Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz:
"The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for domination over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful."
The intoxication of such a fantastic design is its most frightening aspect. Yet the plan is being turned into reality at breathtaking speed. Central to its realization is control of a major political party that wins and wins and wins because it tolerates and expects no internal dissent.
In a very real sense, the health of our democracy may hinge on the conscience of Republican moderates. Only they can keep their party from being hijacked by crony capitalists and gay-and-feminist-bashing evangelicals. If they stand by and let Cheney reinterpret the free market as a playground for corporations who need not worry about competitive bidding or honest accounting, if they let the fiscal conservatism that was once the hallmark of their party be drowned in red ink, if they stand by and watch the Patriot Act be used to squelch dissent, if they let neoconservative advisers hand our foreign policy over to a militarized corporate elite, then there will be no stopping the continued descent of American politics into the slough of megalomania.
When polarization becomes as severe as it is in our country today, politics becomes pathological. Unprincipled campaign managers (and they exist in both parties) and slick spin doctors become the arbiters of elections. Obfuscation is honed to a high art, moderation becomes "girlie-man" cowardice, war becomes the touchstone of patriotism. Worst of all, people not only lose sight of the common good but of their own obvious interests, which ought surely to include having a steady job, a decent retirement and health care, and, at a minimum, not sending their kids to get killed for reasons unknown in the streets of Baghdad.
Theodore Roszak is the author of "The Devil and Daniel Silverman." His most recent book, "World, Beware! American Triumphalism in an Age of Terror," an appeal to America's global constituency, is being published in several foreign editions, but not in the United States.
source: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1012-22.htm
