From Frank Rich, "The Coup at Home:
Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).
Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.
Anybody who is still stuck in the liberal/conservative dichotomy is hopelessly incapable of understanding what’s happening to us. We’re now into the American/unAmerican dichotomy, in which ‘American’ stands for honor, decency, and the rule of law, while unAmerican stands for the kind of corruption and brutality in the name of national security that has overtaken the GOP. As Rich says earlier in this column:
To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.
This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.
Democracies are certainly capable of electing governments that will do away with democracy. It’s happened elsewhere, and while most Americans don’t want to face up to it, it’s happening here. Lots of people understand this, but it has been troubling to me that it has taken those Americans who think of themselves as moderates and principled conservatives so long to catch on. There are a few like Andrew Sullivan and John Cole, both GOP cheerleaders earlier on, who have publicly and repentantly repudiated their earlier administration support. They both understand that the Republican Party no longer stands for what they thought it did, even remotely. Why they ever thought this particular group was trustworthy is another question, but both have become ardent critics, and they should be credited for not allowing their good sense and decency from being obscured by their ideology.
Yet while these two see that our current crisis has moved beyond
liberal and conservatives, how many more who think of themselves as
principled and moderate conservatives have been able to do so? Those
Republicans that have awakened to how their party has become corrupted
don’t seem to have much influence, because whatever the polling might
indicate about their disfavor, the GOP in congress continues in
lockstep with the president, a president every sane American at this
point sees as having disgraced himself and the country in ways that
have far, far, far more serious consequences than Clinton’s disgraceful
behavior ever did.
Why, then, are the Democrats so afraid to stand up to these
authoritarians and protofascists who control the GOP agenda? [It
should no longer be considered partisan or incendiary or over-the-top
to use such terms to describe the power core at the heart of the GOP.
Look the words up in a dictionary or encyclopedia, and then apply them
to what the most visible representatives of the GOP are saying and
doing.] It’s amazing that these people have any credibility or stature
at all among the American electorate or in the media. That they do, as
Rich points out, is a sign of how badly things have eroded.
Here’s why: Unlike Cole and Sullivan, an awful lot of people who
think of themselves as conservatives or moderates cannot bring
themselves to align with the Democrats, whom they despise. And let’s
face it, the Democrats are living up to every conservative stereotype
of them as weak-kneed appeasers who lack principle. So for these
moderates and principled conservatives, while they are not among the
hard-core right-wing 24%, they’re nevertheless more comfortable with
the rhetoric of the Republicans and are able to rationalize GOP
authoritarian policies as necessary in a time of war, and tend to
filter out all the truly alarming things that the authoritarians are
doing because, well, they’d rather not think about it. Most of these
will say that they don’t like what the GOP has become, but given the
Dems as the alternative, they feel forced to side with the GOP. It’s a
similar to dynamic to the one that led many of the rank-and-file French
to support the collaborationist Petain during the German occupation.
They disliked the Germans, but they hated the leftists who largely
composed the Resistance more.
The Dems recognize that for this reason conservative and moderate
rejection of the GOP is soft, and they fear that the vast middle third
of the American electorate can easily be won back by the GOP, so they
are bending over backwards now not to alienate this soft middle. But
this is a loser’s strategy. As I said in yesterday’s post, playing not
to lose almost always ends up in losing. They think they can win by
default, so why stand for anything? Why risk anything? Why be anything
that people can care about or feel pride about? So even if they win,
they’re still losers.
The Democrats have a huge opportunity, and they are likely to
squander it. They could restore American honor and win back the hearts
and minds of the middle, if they could just stand up for traditional
American values like decency and the rule of law and strongly and
loudly repudiate what the current administration has made of us. If no
one stands up for these things, we rank-and-file Americans are not
given the opportunity to throw our support to the candidates that truly
stand for something better than a crude, jingoistic, lapel-pin
imagination of what America means. But Americans need someone not to
just stand up in the rhetorical sense, but to fight for American honor,
values, and principles in the political sphere. That’s what we all want
to see–not just campaign rhetoric, but some fight from someone.
Someone who stands up and fights for these central values aggressively
and with some eloquence will win the respect of everyone in the soft
center, because all Americans care about these ideals deep down. These
ideals are beyond liberal and conservative.
If they did so, they would win the the grudging respect of
conservatives and moderates otherwise perceive Democrats through the
stereotypical lens in which they appear to lack courage, toughness, and
principle. But the Dems seem not to have it in them to do it. As a
group they do in fact lack courage and principle. They have no fight in
them. They seem incapable of organizing themselves into a coherent,
robust opposition, and they will continue to be outplayed,
outmaneuvered, and walked on by a better-focused, organized, and
politically savvy GOP. And the rest of us–liberals, moderates, and
sane conservatives alike–will not be able to do anything about it.
Because while the GOP has become the party of authoritarians, the
Democrats have become the party of collaborators.
Obama, who has the greatest potential to step up and to be a leader
who inspires a renewal of American ideals, has been a disappointment so
far. I see his not showing up for the Mukasey vote as a play-it-safe
capitulation to his play-it-safe political tacticians. The other Dem
senators who didn’t show are just as craven, but one hopes for more
from Obama–because we need more, we need a fighter. It’s looking more
and more to me that he is not the guy, but I’m not without hope that he
might yet step up. But so far he seems to be disappearing into the
‘politics-as-usual’ background.
Say what you want about how horrible the Republicans might be, and
they are horrible, but there’s a there there. It might be repugnant,
but it’s red meat and you know what you’re dealing with. With the
Dems, it’s all so vague and slippery. All tactics and no substance.
They’ll probably win in the ’08 cycle, but unless they find a way to
present themselves as something more than the "not Republicans", unless
they find a way to stand for positive–beyond liberal and
conservative–American values and work to restore a basic sense of
American honor and decency, they will be easy to reject next time
around.
But at this point it appears that they don’t have it in them to do that.
UPDATE: The conservative Sullivan agrees with liberal Rich that the latter’s idea of "silent coup"
is not alarmist or over the top. I know that. You know that. Anybody who is paying attention and has the ability to read between the lines knows that. But the
largely inattentive soft middle doesn’t know it. So what’s it going to take to get them on
board so that the party of authoritarians can be thoroughly repudiated
in ’08. The real political task should be to completely shut out the
far right
from the conversation as extremists who threaten to undermine the idea
of America. If they are taken out of the equation, then the
collaborationists in the Dem party will have to sniff out who the new
alpha dog is, so they’ll know what to think.
If we are somehow able to repudiate the authoritarian right–the
Cheneys, the discredited neoJacobin adventurism of the neocons, the Addingtons, Podhoretzes, Limbaughs, and Coulters–and keep them out of the
conversation. They have a right to their opinions, but so does the
unabomber and Charles Manson. Those opinions should not be taken
seriously by anyone who thinks. If we can marginalize the far right
where it belongs, we will be able to redefine right, left, and center,
and a legitimate debate can ensue. If others have a different way of
thinking about it, let me know, but I would redefine the right by the positions taken by Sullivan, Bruce Fein, American Conservative Magazine,
and Ron Paul types; the center by Barack Obama, Glenn Greenwald, and Russ Feingold types; and the left by Dennis Kucinich, Michael Moore, Arthur Silber, Dennis Perrin,
and Noam Chomsky types. Anybody want to edit that scheme? I’m open to
suggestions. But I would say that a fundamental criterion for being
allowed into the conversation is respect (real respect, not lipservice) for the constitutional system
of checks and balances and the rule of law in a secular political
sphere.
The debate should be about America’s proper role in the world and
about the role of the federal government in solving the problems like
health care, environmental degradation, energy policy, and the basic
problems relating to the wealth/power nexus and how it undermines and
corrupts democratic societies.
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