Further Comments

I finally have the time to comment on the dialogue going on down at the Black Day post below. Both sides have made good points, and if it were simply a case of black and white, we wouldn’t be having such a discussion. However, I firmly and always will come down on the side of the left.

I’ll not address particular points because they have been articulately discussed by those commenting. But let me say something about the reaction of the left to the election. Many people—both here and in the media that I still manage to read—have commented on the “poor loser” ethos of liberal responses to Bush winning a second term. They, like one of the comments at “Black Day,” point out that they reacted much better during the Clinton years, and why can’t we be more like our candidate who offered a nice concession speech and departed quietly.

Here is why we will not just accept what happened. For a great many of the left, this administration does not merely represent a different path toward the future, but a full scale turn toward disaster (or not merely a turn but now fully in the car wreck). For us, voting Republican in the 2004 the national election was the equivalent of voting Democrat in 1856. We see the actions of the past four years as clearly bad for the country. And I do mean clearly. In so many categories—environmental, international relations, energy policies, civil rights, social programs, the very structure of government—this administration has taken a divisive, exploitive and manipulative stance. In many ways, the decisions of the populace baffles us because so many things do not seem points on which reasonable people would disagree.

Similarly, the stakes are remarkably high. Certainly putting soldiers at risk, unnecessarily, was a terrible move. But as I’ve mentioned before, I can see why people might believe that the end result of Iraq II could be for the betterment of humanity.

{digression: worth noting is that nearly every frickin’ justification for the Iraq war now given by the right relies upon the notion that the Iraq people are free and they have a shot—maybe a long shot—but a shot at democracy. I might value these justifications if that had been the STATED reason for going after Hussein. If Bush et. al. had said, “This is a tyranny that is an affront to all that is universally good, and we must act and act now to prevent the further abuse of the Iraqi people.” Instead, we were sold a lie that we were in immanent danger of attack. Now that that justification has been obliterated, the right marches out the flag of democracy and waves it even more vigorously than the bloody shirt. Such blatantly political—I’ll say it, sure—flip-flopping by the right will make it damn difficult to convince me that this wasn’t a cynical drive to an unneeded war.}

But the loss of our rights, the even more rapid widening of the gap between rich and poor, and the absolute devastating attacks on the environment put our world, our country, our communities and our persons at risk. To further my analogy of the country at ante-bellum, the left should and hopefully will find our Thoreau, our Garrison, our Stowe, and hopefully it doesn’t come down to finding our John Brown.

{Another digression: During the Clinton years, I was fond of quoting Thomas Frank that we had entered a new Gilded Age. I hope my analogy to ante-bellum America isn’t quite so accurate as his about the end of the 19th century. Those who fail to study the past are doomed to repeat it.}