Why Bush [Should Have] Lost

It doesn't look like I am going to have time to do an original post today, so I am going to post instead something I wrote nine months ago in a vain (in both senses) attempt to get on the NYT's Op-Ed page. (BTW: The futility of that effort is in some ways the genesis of my interest in blogging).

The basic premise of the essay -- that Bush would lose the election because he had alienated even old, "rich" heterosexual, white guys like me -- turned out to be spectacularly wrong, of course. Either he didn't alienate enough of us, or there aren't enough of us to matter. Nevertheless, I have included the whole piece in the interests of candor regarding my political perspicacity. Despite the failure of prediction, this does do a pretty good job of explaining why I believe Bush should have lost. And, it explains the thinking that led me to "go Democratic" after two+ decades of voting for Republicans.

In addition, though, this piece also provides something of an indirect response to Peter Beinart's Article -- "A Fighting Faith" in the current issue of The New Republic -- an article which, along with Kevin Drum's critique (See Drum 1), generated a spectacularly partisan and vituperative exchange of posts and comments spreading across a dozen or more blogs. See Drum 2, Drum 3, and Drum 4, and the links/trackbacks/and comments in each.

In arguing that the threat of current-day terrorism is comparable to the threat posed by Germany/Japan in the '30s and '40s and by the Soviet Union in the '50s-70's, Beinart seriously exaggerates the danger posed by terrorism. The struggles with both the Axis in WWII and the Soviet Union in the Cold War were struggles for the survival of the West. To suggest that terrorism poses a similar threat devalues the importance of the previous struggles and wildly exaggerates the current risks. The destruction that terrorist groups could wreak on America and Europe if they were to obtain WMDs -- particularly nuclear WMDs -- would be truly horrific. Yet even in that absolutely worst case scenario, there would be no threat to our survival as a nation.

The analogy to WWII and the Cold War is so overblown that one is tempted to ignore the rest of Beinart's argument as well. But that would be a mistake, because I think he has put his finger on something important: "liberals" DO need to take the fight against terrorism more seriously. In part this is because the threat is real. But, equally important, this is because the threat is perceived to be real by the vast majority of Americans, and a political movement that ignores or belittles what is the single most important issue for much of the electorate is doomed to be marginalized. The rest of the liberal agenda is, at this point at least, a hostage to the concerns the electorate has regarding terrorism and ("moral values", of course).

But what I found most surprising about the debate on on Beinart article was how little attention was paid the question of how. Beinart contents himself with addressing the question of whether liberals should get fully engaged in the"war on terrorism". Drum raises (but does not try to answer) the antecedent question of why liberals should do this. But neither of them moves on the critical question of how liberals should do this. That is, assuming liberals heed Beinart's call to arms, what is it that they should advocate -- and if ever they come to power again -- do.

My thoughts on that issue are also embedded in what follows.

Why George Bush Will Lose

I think George Bush is going to lose the election.

This belief has nothing to do with Mr. Kerry. What, pray tell, does that man believe in besides getting elected? Nor does it have anything to do with Mr. Bush’s national guard service (the silliest issue since Gennifer Flowers), or his supposed simple-mindedness (Reagan was no rocket scientist, but he won twice), or with his willingness to play fast and loose with the truth (Clinton was a master at this but he won twice too). Nor does it have much to do with the economy. We give Presidents way too much credit and blame for business cycles that are largely beyond their or anyone else’s control. Nor, finally, does it have much to do with Iraq. I do believe invading Iraq was a mistake, but I do not claim to have been duped. No one who paid any attention to Colin Powell's presentation at the UN could possibly have believed Iraq’s chemical or biological weapons posed any imminent threat to the United States, even if they existed. Going to war in Iraq was and always has been about preventing a threat from becoming imminent. I have never been comfortable with that as a rationale for war. But then again, neither can I reject the principle out of hand. Why do we have to wait to for a threat to become imminent before we can move? Would anyone today argue that the Israelis acted irresponsibly when they bombed Iraq's Osiriq nuclear reactor in 1981, ten years before Desert Storm? If they had not done this, where would the Kuwait and Saudi oil fields be today?

In short, my belief that Bush will lose is not based on any of the issues that have so completely consumed the Democrats and the media. Rather, I think Bush will lose because even people like me -- old, "rich", heterosexual, secular, mainstream conservative, white guys who have voted Republican for years -- consider Bush a genuine threat to things we value even more than tax cuts: civil rights and liberties; long-term security; and the separation of Church and State.

Civil Rights and Liberties

What happened on 9/11 was horrible. But the uses to which the Bush Administration is putting those events are far worse. The Administration’s rhetoric would have us believe that 9/11 was an attack on freedom and liberty. It was not. It was an attack on symbolic buildings and people. The attack on liberty and freedom (and all of the other values we associate with America like fairness, due process, a presumption of innocence, rights of privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches) came later and was perpetrated by the Administration (with a big assist from Congress).

September 11th has become the Bush Administration's Reichstag fire: a pretext for a relentless expansion of the perceived right and actual ability of the federal government to control peoples’ lives. Three years ago, it would have unthinkable for the federal government to claim the right to imprison thousands of people indefinitely, without charges or trial, without access to counsel, and in many cases without even having to reveal who is being held. Now, it not only claims those rights, it is actually doing all of those things. Three years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the federal government to claim the power to monitor and record and investigate the thoughts, ideas, expressions, affiliations and movements of American citizens without warrant or notice and without any basis beyond some vague "national security" claim. Now it is the accepted practice. In the name of defending freedom, the Bush administration is in the process of destroying it.

Long-Term Security

My second issue is security. Not national security, mind you. There is no individual, group or nation that poses any meaningful threat to the viability of the nation. There is, however, a threat to people and places, and this threat does need to be dealt with as aggressively as possible consistent with our other, even more important values Yet, for all the President's rhetoric, his actions are better designed to perpetuate the security threat than to diminish it. Indeed, I have come to believe that the Administration may actually want to perpetuate the threat because of the political leverage it provides.

Force of arms does have a role in reducing the threat of terrorism. But force of arms alone does not eliminate terrorism; it perpetuates it. The Israeli experience in Palestine, the British experience in both Palestine and Northern Ireland, the Russian experience in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and our own experience in Viet Nam prove this beyond any reasonable doubt.

If we are to deal with the threat posed by terrorism, we have to deal with the causes. And the cause of terrorism is not "evildoers". Yes, the leaders of some of these groups may be evil. And, yes, these leaders need to be hunted down. But we are deluding ourselves -- and condemning ourselves to an endless cycle of violence -- if we believe that the battle against terrorism is a battle between good and evil.
Even the label "terrorism" is an exercise in self-delusion. At bottom, the actions of Al Queda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other such groups are not so very different from the actions of French, Yugoslav and Greek resistance movements in World War II and are indistinguishable from the actions of the Israeli Hagganah, and especially the Irgun, in 1948.

Although what these people do may well be evil, it is not evil that motivates them; it is a cause that they believe is worth fighting, killing and dying for. Because they are much weaker militarily than those against whom they are fighting, they fight with the only means they have at their disposal: stealth, trickery, rocket propelled grenades, small arms and now suicide bombs. But it is the cause that drives them. Unless and until we begin to address that cause, we will be no more successful in defeating Islamic terrorism than the Israelis have been.

I am not so naïve to think that there is any single cause of terrorism. However, there is one cause that stands head and shoulders above all the rest: the plight of the Palestinians. The Palestinians do have legitimate grievances. They were dispossessed of their homes and lives, and, at least since 1967, they have been living under a brutal, oppressive and humiliating occupation. Yes, this oppression is perpetrated by our ally, and yes, that ally has legitimate grievances of its own. But that does not alter the fact that the Palestinian people are being subjected to political and economic deprivation, humiliation, and indiscriminate death and destruction of property. Nor does it change the fact that the threat of terrorism in America will not abate unless that situation changes.

Addressing the legitimate grievances of the Palestinians will not alone be enough to end the threat of terrorism from the Middle East. It might have been enough 10 or 20 years ago, but there are now far too many additional causes for fighting (and dying) to expect that even a perfect solution to the Palestinian question would put an end to Middle Eastern terrorism disappear. Moreover, in the near term at least, a perfect solution to the Palestinian issue is nothing more than a pipe dream.

But, I do know this much: while American commitment to the Palestinian cause may not be sufficient to abate the threat Middle Eastern terrorism poses to America, it clearly is necessary to that end. Yes, the Israelis are entitled to well-defined, independent, territorially contiguous state that is reasonably free from the threat of violence by their neighbors. But, the Israelis have no greater entitlement to these things than do the Palestinians. And, unless and until the Palestinian people perceive that America is as committed to guaranteeing those rights to Palestinians as it is to securing them for the Israelis, then there is no hope of ever reducing the threat terrorism poses to America.

The Israelis and Palestinians are no more capable of solving their differences themselves than were the Serbs and the Kosovars, and speeches, exhortations, peace plans, negotiations, "road maps", incentives and sanctions will be no more effective in stopping that conflict that they were in stopping the Balkan wars. At this point, the only way to bring the conflict to an end is the same method used so successfully to bring an end to the Serb-Kosovar conflict: build and deploy a NATO-led, UN-sanctioned coalition of forces that, whether by invitation or not, intervenes to physically separate the combatants; to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank; to set up a free, independent and geographically contiguous Palestinian State there; and to thereafter provide the citizens of each State with protection from the other. That would be a far better use of the 82nd Airborne than what Mr. Bush has them doing today.

America As Theocracy

The third and most important reason I will not vote for Mr. Bush is that -- whether out of conviction or expedience, I cannot tell -- this Administration has self-consciously identified itself with, and has become politically dependent on, our own version of Islamic fundamentalism: the evangelical Christian right. To some degree, this dependence explains why Mr. Bush cannot ever be expected to do -- or even attempt -- anything that might actually be effective in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the Christian Right believes that the establishment of a Jewish State in the whole of biblical Palestine is essential to the Second Coming. As a result, they will not tolerate anything that might actually result in the formation of a Palestinian State on a part of biblical Israel.

Christian fundamentalism also lies at the heart of the assault on civil rights and liberties. The differences between the Christian Right and the Taliban are differences of plumage not principal. No less than the Islamic fundamentalists, the Christian fundamentalists believe they have a (literally) God-given right to impose on the rest of us a narrow-minded, utterly intolerant, religiously-based code of beliefs and conduct; to tell people what to do, what to think, what to believe, how to act, and even what to be.

The Christian Right claims that government is hostile to religion, that the atheists and agnostics are driving religion from public life, that the country has established humanism as the State religion. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Republican Party has become the dominant political party in this country, and the Christian Right is by far the most dominant faction within that party. As a consequence, it is not religion but humanism, rationalism and tolerance that are in full retreat.

This is a trend that has been emerging for some time now, of course. I did not like it, but I continued to vote Republican anyway because I was able to convince myself that the religious zealots were simply a fringe group that I could use to help me get may taxes cut. Now, though, I see a President who is fully in their thrall and utterly dependent upon them for his political survival. Fool me once, shame on him; fool me twice, shame on me. I will not vote for him again.