I can't help but think that what happened last night was a truly watershed
event in American politics. I'm very pessimistic about where we're headed,
so beware - the following screed borders on a defeatist rant. That's just
where I am with what happened - I think it's over. For a very long time.
I'll start out with why I'm so pessimistic, and then go into my thoughts on what
"moral leadership" means, and why people think Kerry didn't show it.
Before last night, the Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate,
and last night that control was further solidified, with a number of very
ideologically hard-right candidates taking seats in both the House and the
Senate. It's no accident that last night saw victories by people that support
School Prayer, the teaching of evolution in the public schools, further
integration of Christianity and government, capital punishment for abortion
providers, and the criminalization of homosexuality. These positions are
strongly supported by a large enough segment of the population that as long
as an effort is made to enforce them with policy, electoral support is a
virtual lock, guaranteeing supremacy, at least in the House, for the forseeable
future. The non-social parts of the Republican agenda appear to be incidental,
at least to most of these voters. I expect to see further dismantling of
social programs and the new deal, both by poor management (i.e. bankrupting
Medicare) and by an ostensible need to "fix" the programs (i.e. privatization
of Social Security).
Bush has a mandate, and it comes from a very religious conservative segment of
the population. It's reasonable to expect him to consolidate Republican power
throughout the country by delivering policies for that constituency. As long
as the key social aims of the religious base are enacted into policy,
Republican domination of both the House and Senate seems to be insurmountable.
The fiscal objectives of the large corporate backers and high net worth
individuals will also be met by tax cuts for corporations and the top brackets,
as well as a massive deregulatory agenda and tort reform.
In the coming months, at least one, and perhaps more, Supreme Court vacancies
will occur. In the aftermath of the election, Democrats are unlikely to be
willing to stand up to a radical Bush appointee, especially if he does the
politically obvious thing and appoints Alberto Gonzalez. The consequences
of a Supreme Court Justice who was responsible for writing legal memos
preemptively justifying torture of detainees in Iraq hearing another enemy
combatant case are chilling, at least to me. O'Connor's ascension to the
Chief Justice chair is widely opposed by conservatives, and Breyer, Stevens,
and Ginsburg are out as well, and Thomas is, well, Thomas. Kennedy is a
possibility, as is Souter, but Scalia seems to be the most obvious choice.
There are ways in which I think a Scalia court would not be a bad thing - a
strict constructionist is likely to be more hostile to the government in civil
liberties cases, for example, but none of these options are very comforting
when one starts to think about Roe, not to mention the all-out assault
on individual liberty and civil rights being waged in the name of national
security. I expect the court will rule with the administration and against
the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th amendments.
The wartime power of the president is now buttressed by a mandate that
validates the concept of preemptive war, and given how the war in Iraq is
going, I had at one point thought a draft was a real possibility. Now that
the Democrats have brought it up, though, I just don't see it happening,
because it would be too politically difficult. On the other hand, the war
as is currently being fought isn't sustainable over even the medium term.
Something has to give. The most reasonable thing to do, politically, is
escalate the war in a manner where we are guaranteed superiority, while at
the same time minimizing the domestic effects. Up until now, we have tried
hard to minimize civilian casualties and collateral damage, but we don't
have enough troops on the ground to fight this way for much longer. I
expect to see the war become more and more bloody for Iraqi civilians as
we launch assaults on areas where the popular opposition to the IPG is
strong. As casualties mount, the international community will undoubtedly
raise objections, but the American people haven't taken notice so far, and
I don't see why they would, especially if the troop levels are brought down
and the dollar cost goes down.
In short, I feel crushed. My political awareness started when I was around
twelve. I remember deciding early that I was a conservative, because I
thought the most important thing was for individuals to be left alone to make
their own decisions. It wasn't until later that I realized that modern
conservatives don't believe this at all. Modern conservatives decry the
"nanny state" while at the same time enforcing strict ideological
conformity. Being a conservative today means believing in people making their
own decisions, unless those decisions aren't the right ones.
Why did we lose? As I was walking my dog this evening, I was thinking about
something that one of Heidi's fellow studio students said the other day. He
said that he disagreed with Bush on the war, on the tax cuts, on NCLB,
on economic polity, and on the environment, but he was going to vote for him
anyway because he felt like Bush was consistent. At the time, I thought it
was stupid to vote for someone you believe has been consistently wrong,
but I've since realized something important. When I first moved here, I
heard many people talking about how they disagreed with Paul Wellstone on any
number of issues, but they supported and respected him anyway because they
felt he had a coherent and consistent moral compass that guided the way he
approached government. I believe that is what people are talking about when
responding to exit polls by saying they voted for moral leadership. It's
not really "moral leadership" that people are talking about - it's about
your internal compass - your view of the world that drives you to make the
decisions that you make. Nobody can deny that Bush has a worldview that
people believe he uses in order to decide the correct course of action.
Quite often in the early days of the Dean campaign, I heard people say "I
disagree with Dean about XXXX, but he's a reasonable person, and I trust him
to make good decisions". They felt this way because Howard Dean was able to
articulate his worldview in such a way that people felt that he had a clear
sense of right, wrong, and his position relative to the rest of the world.
Intellectually, his positions were sensible and pragmatic, but that will
only carry a certain segment of the population, and that segment isn't big
enough to win elections. He was able to convince people that his positions
were not only right, but that he had arrived at them by way of a consistent
and meaningful way of looking at the world.
Kerry's problem, and that of the country in general, is that while his
decisions, positions, and policy prescriptions were logical, that's all they
were. They were right, but there was no clear indication of how he arrived
at them. Without knowing how a candidate gets to a particular policy
position, it's hard to say for sure what policies they'll embrace in the
future.
Policy is important, but IMO, people place a higher priority on process,
or worldview, or moral leadership, or whatever you want to call it. Without
a moral message, or a policy message, it's going to be very hard for us
to make much headway. Clinton, for all his faults, connected with people
in a way that made them feel that he was part of their experience - that
he arrived at decisions in the same way that normal people did. Dean was
always very insistent on process - the process of Democracy, the process
of social justice, and so on.
Kerry's message was seemingly geared towards people that could accept that
his policy objectives made logical sense. That won't work in a country where
intellectuals are seen as an effete self-appointed ruling class. People want
to trust how you get where you are, not just accept that you got the right
answer. This may not make a lot of sense, but decrying these people as
uneducated and ignorant religious extremists is not a winning recipe. We
need to connect with Americans on their terms, not on ours. These are
people that believe 9/11 was planned by Saddam, that we found WMD in Iraq,
and that al Qaeda was headquarted in Baghdad, but that doesn't make them
stupid - just misinformed. We're going to have a hell of a hard time reaching
these voters as long as our message is perceived as reproachful of their
concerns while at the same time implying that they're idiots.
If you got this far - congratulations. I haven't slept much, and the above
is more or less just a stream of conciousness. I don't know what I will do
moving forward - there doesn't seem to be much to do. We live in a one-party
oligarchy now, where the common lexicon has been completely appropriated
by ideological extremists with a lock on government, corporations, and
the media. The right has consolidated power by exploiting divisive social
issues that even moderates are going to have a hard time adressing. Dissent
has been made almost criminal, and those that oppose the policies of the
government are called traitors. The road from here to outright fascism is
straight, broad, downhill, and we have a tailwind. The main difference
between us and period leading up to the rise of European fascism is our
bogeyman is external. Anybody that doubts we're headed that way needs to
look more into the ideological underpinnings of people like AEI's Ledeen.
The excellent analysis by David Neiwert is also highly reccomended.
I'm thinking either Vancouver or Spain.