A Tale as Old as Time

One of the great fallacies of this campaign season has been the widely-held notion that we are witnessing something entirely new, that both candidates are aberrations within their own parties and thus practice a "different kind of politics." But once all the self-congratulatory, pre-fabricated cliches fade away we are left with the same script that has been used since the time of Jefferson.

Putting the policies aside for a moment, at least those that have even been put forward, these two supposedly unconventional candidates have conducted a campaign that is as conventional as it is mundane. Obama may bring a flashy grip of his native tongue into the fold, and McCain may be buoyed by the illusion of his independent-minded past, but in the execution there is nothing to separate 2008 from 2004, 2000, or even 1800 for that matter.

The script is well-known by now. Americans are made to reject intellectualism as effete and feminine, out of touch with real Americans, and arrogant, a picture that has been applied to every Democratic candidate for decades and continues to find traction. What Americans want -- real, masculine Americans that is -- is a President like Grandpa John or Uncle George. A real man. A man who thinks with his gut, not with his head. A man who has no need for nuance, real understanding of world affairs, or that flashy education. No, when a real man looks at the world, he sees the clear lines separating the good from the bad, the light from the dark. Intellect simply renders those that possess it ineffectual. Americans want a man of action, a man of toil and sweat, not a sheltered college boy.

It is in this framework that a man such a George Bush, truly a man born into luxury and good fortune if ever there was one, can be presented as anti-elite. It is how Bush, though he embodies the very definition of 'elite' if the word is to have any meaning, can be transformed by the performing simple tasks on his quaint little ranch, dressing in simple clothes, and using simple language. Only then can a man with opportunities well beyond the dreams of most Americans be portrayed as a cowboy and a real American.

If rational thought ever makes its return to our shores, the scheme will be seen instantly as a farce, but for now the window is still wide enough for John McCain to climb through. Although I am no fan of Obama's foreign policy, it is painfully clear that he offers an understanding of world mechanisms that McCain has never even approached. McCain is in the vein of Bush, in that he sees what he needs to see -- good and evil -- and nothing more.

Words like 'victory,' 'freedom,' and 'democracy' provide him with all the understanding he needs. Any attempt to define those terms will be met with resistance, as it is much more beneficial to him to have the listener paint his own image of the word than for McCain to be boxed in with a constrictive definition. If 'victory' was defined, McCain wouldn't be able to declare it when he felt the time called for it. If we had clear aims, people might start asking questions about how they could be achieved.

Where contemporary liberals fail in their analysis of this pervasive motif, though, is in presuming that it began with their favorite straw man, Karl Rove. While Greenwald is correct in his assertion that the McCain campaign has been forced to diverge from discussion of the issues by a public that widely rejects his stances, he is wrong in assuming that this is an entirely new phenomenon. Karl Rove presents a bugaboo to Democrats looking for a scapegoat, but he merely represents the man most able to tap into prevailing themes in American politics that have been around since the early stages of the Republic. Rove didn't create the notion of ineffectual, effete intellectuals, he merely used it to greater advantage than anyone else.

William Loughton Smith wrote a pamphlet attacking Thomas Jefferson in 1796, the tone of which should be immediately familiar:

The characteristic traits of a philosopher, when he turns politician, are, timidity, whimsicalness, and a disposition to reason from certain principles, and not from the true nature of man; a proneness to predicate all his measures on certain abstract theories formed in the recess of his cabinet, and not on the existing state of things and circumstances; an inertness of mind, as applied to governmental policy, a wavering of disposition when great and sudden emergencies demand promptness of decision and energy of action.

Smith compares Jefferson disfavorably with Washington, who "was, thank God, no philosopher; had he been one, we should never have seen his great military exploits; we should never have prospered under his wise administration." Smith illustrates that even in the late 18th Century, military virtue was a good test of political leadership, a virtue that Jefferson, although one of the most important figures in American history, did not possess and was therefore unfit to lead. The parallel to the 2008 campaign is at once obvious.

In 1800, as the attacks against Jefferson continued, another typical American stalking horse appeared, animosity toward Europeans. Joseph Dennie writes:

At the seat of government his abstract, inapplicable, metaphysicopolitics are either nugatory or noxious. Besides, his principles relish so strongly of Paris and are seasoned with such a profusion of French garlic, that he offends the whole nation. Better for Americans that on their extended plains "thistles should grow, instead of wheat, and cockle, instead of barley," than that a philosopher should influence the councils of the country, and that his admiration of the works of Voltaire and Helvetius should induce him to wish a closer connexion with Frenchmen.

The language is of a different era, but the themes are familiar. Karl Rove, far from creating his attacks, merely represents the most recent bearer of arms that were developed centuries ago and have served politicians ever since.


Related:

Chasing Straw Men, July 29

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Chasing Straw Men

Since their victory in 2006, the only thing Congressional Democrats have demonstrated aptitude for is pageantry. The past two years have been full of hearings, hand-wringings, and witch hunts, all of which have succeeded in only one thing: preserving the status quo. The Congressional hearing is as stale a tradition as exists in American politics, an event which serves the dual purpose of allowing the side holding it to pretend it's doing something in response to public opinion while allowing the side under question to dodge questions all the while maintaining the ability to continue its scurrilous actions.

What, exactly, do Democrats and their supporters expect to gain from the testimony of Karl Rove? Surely no groundbreaking news that the current administration has been, gasp, a politicized affair. That point, I think, is beyond debate if available evidence is any guide, and certainly wouldn't be accentuated by testimony sure to resemble the award-winning performances of administration members who've gone before Rove in the sideshow on the Hill.

Americans are notorious for their lack of historical literacy, but are the Clinton years so far in the past as to be rendered unrecognizable? One would think that a period which included the impeachment of a sitting President wouldn't be so easily forgotten. Ann Coulter, even as she defends Bush to the last, just 10 or so years ago devoted an entire book to misdeeds by Clinton aides and friends, and even suggested the power couple was responsible for murder. Yet all of those on the left scandalized by such tripe are now on the other side performing that precise function.

And what is that function? To provide the populace with distractions and straw men to avert their eyes and minds from the realities of American democracy. To distort the true level of import that the average voter holds on Capitol Hill, which is next to nil.

In a totalitarian regime, manufacturing consent for the system is simple and straightforward. A democratic system however, must derive the consent from the people without force, something very easily accomplished by allowing the populace to censor themselves. It's done by feeding the public red herrings and other details to chase after, argue about, or vilify while the corridors of power remain unscathed. In China, the regime is supported through threats and force. In America, we dig our own graves.

In January, assuming the Democrats find a way not to screw up a sure thing, everyone will resume the roles they held in the Nineties, and business will continue as usual. Karl Rove will be gone from the scene, the last 8 years will go unmentioned and unprosecuted, and in their place will step new villains and new distractions. And power will still reside in the same place it does now: K Street.

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More on the Surge and the Political Realities of Iraq

This week has been an unmitigated disaster for McCain in the foreign policy arena, supposedly the source of his greatest advantage. Apart from the Maliki government asserting its opinion that US troops should begin preparations for withdrawal, McCain exhibited quite ably his inability to grasp anything in international relations beyond that of 'gut feeling,' a reality that became more clear each time McCain tried to walk back his previous statements.

After expressing anachronistic support for the efficacy of the Surge, McCain was forced to create a new history, explaining that the Surge was actually just a term employed to describe a general counterinsurgency strategy that began well before anybody thought to mention it. A nice try, but an argument that simply doesn't hold up under scrutiny, like most of McCain's policy statements. The term 'Surge' has been used from the start to describe the increase in US troops beginning in February 2007, to go back and retroactively apply the term to a overarching strategy post mortem flies in the face of 17 months of use.

But even if we allow for a midstream change of definition, McCain's claim that "the Surge has succeeded" doesn't hold up under his own definition of the term.

By controlling the violence, we can pave the way for a political settlement. Once the government wields greater authority, however, Iraqi leaders must take significant steps on their own. These include a commitment to go after the militias, a reconciliation process for insurgents and Baathists, a more equitable distribution of government resources, provincial elections that would bring Sunnis and the government, and a large increase in employment-generating economic projects.

In other words, the true aim of the Surge was exactly what Barack Obama and everyone else has been saying it was, political reconciliation, and on that front the Iraqis have failed miserably. They've pushed back provincial elections into next year, the country is still a broken arrangement of fiefdoms, and there is still no plan for dispersement of oil money to name just a few shortcomings.

The Maliki government has indeed gone after militias, most notably in Basra, but even that operation failed to achieve a pure strategic victory, as the most recent issue of Newsweek examines in a profile of the governor of Basra, Mohammed Waeli. Waeli exemplifies the ambiguities of enemies and allies that both Bush and McCain declare they ignore in favor of a 'gut' approach to foreign policy. On paper, Waeli, as a government official, is a friend of the US and Maliki and a ally in the fight against insurgents and Iran. In reality, he is an opportunist who has made millions off of oil smuggling and overseen the transformation of Basra from relatively liberal (for the Middle East) into a Shiite fundamentalist city indicative of Iranian influence throughout eastern and southern Iraq.

Even as Maliki and the US forces must concern themselves with insurgents from the street, they must also battle officials like Waeli who have carved out a profitable niche and will be reluctant to give it up in favor of political reconciliation. Waeli is an indication of the realities facing the country as a whole, a vast, diverse collection of power centers resistant to becoming part of a united whole. The number of US troops in Iraq has little bearing on solving that core issue.

If the past week has been an illustration of anything, it's that McCain is trying to make up for lost time by showing that he has the ability to grasp the intricacies of real-world conflicts and put away his past reliance on blanket statements and assessments of good versus evil. Unfortunately for him, every time he rolls out a new theory, facts and history shoot it down rather hastily.


Related:

McCain's Foreign Policy Illiteracy, July 22
Iraq Withdrawal: Clutching at Straws, July 22

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George Bush, Caped Crusader

Many thoughts passed through my mind as I watched The Dark Knight, but certainly not among those was the idea that real-world person Batman most resembles is President Bush.

A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .

Oh, wait a minute. That's not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a "W."

Classic.

Andrew Klaven offers up this gem which leads me to believe he wasn't watching the same movie: "Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They're wrong, of course, even on their own terms."

If there was one prevailing theme to the movie, it was precisely the opposite of Klaven's suggestion. Indeed, the film is a 150-minute lesson in the ambiguities of morality, that it is in no way simplistic. Even if Klaven drifted off for half of the film he could have caught enough to form a cogent opinion, but alas the readers of the Wall Street Journal were not so lucky.

To adopt Klaven's surface scratching, yes Batman roughs up the Joker and builds a high-tech spy apparatus -- apparently in a day or so, no less -- which would make ACLU members hemorrhage out of their ears, but Klaven ignores another significant character in the movie, the Joker.

For his part, the violet avenger portrays a character much closer to our dear leader, specifically in his ploy to prove the lowest can be brought out in everyone. It is the Joker who employs the Bush tactic of divide-and-conquer by pitting a ferry full of 'innocents' against one full of convicts in an attempt to elicit an LCD reaction.

Here Batman plays the role of Klaven's villains, 'leftists,' by showing to the Joker that even two groups who should be natural enemies can resist the lure of evil, not by engaging in it themselves, but by refusing to be brought down to the level of their puppet master. Picture a boat full of Midwesterners and another full of Iranians.

Further crushing Klaven's thesis is the Joker's continual taunting of Batman, saying that he will fail because he "lacks the courage to do what is necessary." That is, unlike Bush, Batman has rules which he won't break, rules the Joker is not bound by. For Klaven to be proven right, Batman and his scruples would have to fail. Needless to say, that does not happen.

Furthermore, at the start of the climactic scene, instead of Batman rushing in to save hostages, the SWAT teams would have started firing and killed the hostages, thus promoting Klaven's favored route of "invade first, ask questions later."

The only thing even approaching support of Klaven's thesis is the few boundaries Batman pushes in his pursuit of the Joker. The Joker, however, most closely resembles President Bush's desire to pit people against each other, making mortal enemies out of purely unrelated groups to serve his interests and further his own pleasure. The Joker's cause is furthered by fear throughout, and that is a parallel that can be drawn without half the effort Klaven employs in trying to drag a promotion of Bush policies out of a Summer blockbuster.

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