Discontented Soul

The following comments, taken from Theodore Roszak's Where Did the Middle Go, published on 10 October 2004 in The San Francisco Gate, are a warning to us all, even here in the backwater of the Crocodile Hunter.

...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 … The secret of their [the Conservatives’] success? Covertly, they draw upon the racist fears of rednecks and blue collars, but overtly, they attribute their triumph to unswerving evangelical faith.
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?
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, 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 US 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 Defence 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 defence 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 — 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? … Here is how David Armstrong, in a Harper's essay from the The I Hate Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice. . . Reader: Behind the Bush Cabal's War on America anthology, characterizes the capital-P "Plan" of the Bush administration, an agenda foreshadowed in a 1990 Defence 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...