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What the breakdown of political debate portends for this country
The polarization of American politics between the irrational anti-American left and the mindless cheerleading “right” has often been rued at this website. The immediate consequence of that polarization has been the precluding of meaningful debate about a highly questionable war and the misbegotten policy of democratization that followed it, both of which desperately required serious discussion and the testing of opposing views. The fact is that, aside from the debate about the justification for the war, which went on exhaustively for over year, we embarked on this vast and dangerous enterprise without any serious national debate about its pros and cons, its prospects for success, or even how we defined success. For example, has any member of the administration ever been asked on national television why democratization by itself would end Moslem terror? Not to my knowledge. It is simply a slogan, a dogma, a mantra, that democracy (1) will somehow occur in Moslem countries and (2) will somehow drain the “hate” from those countries. No one has ever asked the president and his lieutenants why anyone should believe these assertions to be true. No one has ever asked them the hard questions concerning the characteristics of Arab Muslim societies that are antithetical to democracy. Instead of making cogent arguments, the president and his twin brain, Condoleezza Rice, simply pronounced from on high that anyone who doubted the inevitable success of Moslem democratization was condescending and racist. Neither the liberal nor the conservative media criticized Bush and Rice for using the racism card to silence debate. And that was that. I blame this situation primarily on the left. The left’s vicious anti-Americanism and Bush-hatred made useful discussion impossible, at least between the left and the right. The left’s disloyal opposition (when loyal opposition and criticism is the very lifeblood of free government) made the “right” hunker down in its own mindless mode of super-patriotism and Bush-worship. As for the president, because he has never faced any responsible and searching questions from the left or the leftist media, he has never been required to make a rational case for his policy, a situation made more harmful by the fact that Bush only makes an effort to go beyond his usual intellectual limitations when circumstances force him to do so. Smug slogans about how everyone in the world has the same feelings as us and therefore “deserves” democracy have comprised the totality of Bush’s argument for “spreading democracy to the Moslem world,” a phrase that makes democratizing the Moslem world sound as easy and mechanical as fertilizing a lawn: just toss around those seeds of democracy, and democracy will sprout. Nevertheless, the fact that the left may have initially set off this polarization does not relieve Bush and his supporters of their share of responsibility for building and sustaining it. For example, the left’s hatred of Bush did not force conservatives to indulge in mindless effusions about the “exhilaration” and “intoxication” of having created “democracy” in Iraq, when all that had happened was the holding of a single election, an election that had only been possible because the U.S. military had shut down the entire country— a country where all political life is confined to “green zones” protected by the U.S. armed forces. For conservatives to call such a situation “democracy” indicates a radical loss of contact with reality.
And here’s why I’m going over these points, which I’ve made so many times before. The loss of the ability to engage in an even minimally rational discussion about one of the most ambitious and risk-filled projects on which our country has ever embarked suggests to my mind the onset of national political incompetence. This incompetence may in turn portend, or so the thought occurs to me, the imminent loss of national power and national greatness. Email entry |