Michael J. Totten, among others, points out that the left seems more like Pat Buchanan’s isolationist right these days.
Yeah, I kinda get that feeling myself, sometimes. On a lot of things. The Republicans have veered left on a wide range of issues, seemingly, leaving liberals standing around looking flabbergasted and shell-shocked.
Problem is, the right is doing it in a way that makes liberals very angry: their way.
Please note that as a liberal, I include myself in this.
If someone had told me even 5 years ago that I would be standing here today in mild opposition to a war to remove Saddam Hussein from power, I’d have laughed in their faces. If someone had told me 5 years ago that I’d be fiercely advocating a return to a balanced budget while the right spent so freely it would make Bob Bennet in a casino blush, I’d have laughed in their faces. If someone had told me 5 years ago that I’d be cautioning restraint in my fellow Americans when it comes to foreign involvement, I’d have laughed in their faces.
Trouble is, my positions now as opposed to 5 years ago haven’t changed all that significantly. So obviously, something is off.
Part of it, obviously, is that the neo-conservatives are reigning supreme in Washington right now, and theirs is a schizoid policy of benevolent revolution taken directly from the pages of Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky, a brilliant but flawed man, believed in a global revolution of communism brought about on a local level by citizens of each country, assisted by the economic might of the Soviet Union. He believed that the world would not be safe for communism until the world itself was communist. Stalin took the man out — along with most of his supporters — in large part because he utterly disagreed with the man, and believed that the revolution could be supported within the Soviet Union alone.
Neo-conservatives believe in a global revolution of democracy brought about with assistance from the United States on a local level by citizens of each country. They believe that the world will not be safe for democracy until the world itself is fully democratic.
This is the New Cold War that the military-industrial complex — a term I did not invent, but rather a hero of our country, Dwight <span class="caps">D. </span>Eisenhower, used famously — has been looking for since the Soviet Union crumbled. For a very long time, I was convinced that it would be China. When the spy plane was downed at the beginning of Bush’s term, I believed that this would be our big chance. Certainly, China gives us enough reasons to dislike them — their smugly imperialistic, supremacist views masquerading as communism, their dismal record on human rights, their expansionism into places like Tibet and Taiwan — and they are increasing so economically quickly that they could be a real force to be reckoned with in the very near future. But they’re strangely weak militarily for all their expendable military manpower, and their military is too dated at the moment to be more than a nuisance.
But terrorism and the Middle East, now, there’s something for just about every hawk to sink their teeth into. Terrorism demands updated technology, vast amounts of intelligence, and a high hand to combat. Spend, spend, spend. The Middle East is a hotbed of reactionary politics, just ripe for exploitation and bullying. And, yes, the Middle East has something the <span class="caps">MIC</span> very much wants — oil. But that’s just frosting.
When I talk about humanitarian actions, I really mean humanitarian actions. I think that the blood from Rwanda, Somalia, Lebanon, Eritrea, Burundi, and countless other petty nations is on our hands because we did not have the balls to stick with a real effort to rid the world of tin-pot dictators. Worse, we supported many dictators in South America and Africa on strategic grounds during the Cold War. I’m not a friend to, and never will be, dictatorships or human suffering.
But I get the general feeling that when neo-conservatives talk about bringing Democracy to the Middle East, they mean it in the same sense that they ment it when talking about the Nicaraguan contras or the mujahedeen of Afghanistan. They’re not really talking about Democracy for the sake of the ideal, they’re talking about it because it serves a valuable strategic and political purpose. And hey, I wouldn’t mind it so much if their record on this issue hadn’t been dismal at best over the past half century.
And people keep saying this, but nobody’s listening: war demands sacrifice, and yet the neo-conservatives ask none of us to sacrifice anything. Which sounds delightful, except that nothing is without cost: if not to us, then to a future generation. That $530,000,000,000 debt that we’ve incurred over the past year is going to require paying up on someday, and we’ve already proven as a citizenry that the first thing we look for when we’re in good economic times is either for ways to spend the surplus we have or to demand tax cuts. If people wonder why I no longer use the words “million” or “billion”, I think it’s because we have forgotten exactly what the terms mean.
We are running a half-trillian dollar debt right now. It just doesn’t have the same visceral impact as 53 with 10 zeros after it.
That’s $2,000 for every American, and Bush isn’t asking current taxpayers to pay for it, so that means that it’s going to get shoved down to our children. And in case you haven’t noticed, the debt incurred to the next generation will be larger than that for the current one by the simple fact that there will be less people.The Baby Boomers are going to retire soon, and start actually using some of that hard-won money for themselves, rather than investing it as they have. The newer, smaller generations will have to pick up the slack.
And certainly, not every man, woman, and child in America pays taxes, so that $2,000 very quickly balloons into something really quite larger.
And the more we wait, the tougher it gets to pay that back, because interest accrues.
But even if we took out the war, and we took out Bush’s tax cuts, we’d still be running a deficit right now. Why? Because our budget is one massive case of collective denial. Social Security right now is a boondoggle consisting of the American government loaning money to itself in the form of Treasury bonds with a fixed rate of return that is greater than the rate of return on the sorts of bonds that you or I can purchase. That’s where your money is going. And no, I’m not talking about personal privatization, but good Lord, we need to start talking about how that’s going to change, and yet we can’t, because the <span class="caps">AARP</span> won’t let us. And the President that asked us to take personal responsibility for our own actions is requiring nothing of us.
And that’s just one small part of our domestic economic idiocy right now.
We have some hard decisions to make about our future, both regarding our standing in the world and regarding our standing in our own country, and the things we value and the things we consider expendable. What we have right now is not sustainable, either with regards to foreign or domestic policy.
But those that say this are derided as doomsayers and pessimistic nuts. And while in the past it may have been good enough to sit back and wait for the “I-told-you-sos” to start flowing, we are currently in too important a time for this country to sit back.
I worry for us like I never have before. 9/11 made us all a little nuts, yes, but there’s absolutely no explaining the insanity I’m witnessing these days.