The Genesis of the Rift
There must be some misunderstanding:
…Max Sawicky’s tirade against the netroots as “a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party,” the message is nearly identical: the netroots are dumb and uninformed. It also really isn’t all that different from many older attacks on the netroots from sources such as Mike McCurry and Joe Klein, who have made it quite clear to me, in on and off the record sources, that they think netroots activists are pretty stupid.
Oooo-ooo-ooh
[Max is not like Joe Klein, Chris. Max is attacking, from the Left, not even you, but a certain type of Liberal — which that type richly needs and deserves. Klein, on the other hand, is trying to steer that type even farther Right than the place that type already occupies.]
The nub of the question here is … whether the public, netroots included, can be sold the next war.
[..]
It’s not about being pure in an ideological sense. It’s about extremes — being extremely opposed to another disastrous military intervention. Insofar as anti-war arguments with exceptions can be replaced with more comprehensive ones, the better off we are, say I.
The politics of war should be difficult for the aggressor.
My point in all of this blathering is that Max is right ..about certain people. Because of the obviously gigantic fuck-up that is Iraq, some people are now sounding, in their disgust with Wingnuts, like the Dirty Fucking Hippies who are seriously Leftwing in their ideology, who were right from the get-go on Iraq, whose politics are the legitimate antithesis of Wingnuttery. But they aren’t Dirty Fucking Hippies, and one needs to keep an eye on them when the next crisis comes, when the Next Wingnut Crusade foments, when they will again be tempted to be for something (or agnostic about it, or only against it out of partisanship) before they are against it ideologically.
[We] waited in the rain for hours:
[To oppose this stupid fucking war] was my duty as a citizen and I didn’t, and don’t, really care if it meant I coincidentally agreed with ANSWER or Free Mumia people or Pat Buchanan.
I almost feel guilty because I’m one of those people who obviously make Kevin Drum feel bad because I was right about the war and he was wrong. But he shouldn’t weep too much. He wouldn’t have his current position as a Respected Pundit if he’d been right before the war. That’s been proven time and time again.
Matt, Josh, and I all supported the war for a while…
There’s little appetite for fundamental government intervention in the economy, or enduring pacifism abroad.
In essence, we’re on the leftmost edge of the mainstream consensus on most, though not all, issues. American power can be good but Iraq is bad. Free trade is good but CAFTA is bad. The free market is good but relatively poor at providing health care. Etc, etc. Now, those all might be the right positions. They’re certainly my positions, so don’t think I’m exempting myself here. But they’re not “a left,” certainly not in the way the NeoCons and the libertarians compose the country’s right.
Retardo wins.
ok, i am glad that retardo is giving up his nom de blog, because i am going to have to assume the name ‘retardo’. i got the phil collins song, but i don’t understand the point of he post at all. can anyone put it in small words and possibly pictures for me in the comments? and, from the first comment, if retardo wins, who did he beat exactly? bowers, max, drum, or someone else?
The problem here is, in all this discussion and argument about war, pro-war, anti-war, pre-emptive war, long war, war on terror – in all the painfully rational discourse,war itself, the real thing, not the concept, not the strategy, the reality, gets lost. It’s like we’re talking about evolution or global warming or economic or education policy. We’re talking about fucking WAR. Yep. I used an obscenity to describe an obscenity. WAR. Too many people think they have an opinion when they haven’t seen, haven’t smelled, haven’t PARTICIPATED. They, like bush/cheney, don’t wake up at night soaked in sweat, gasping for breath, remembering…
In a way, the discussion itself is obscene. We’re not just talking about war, we’re talking about CHOOSING war. WW II, the “Greatest Generation”, is honored because they responded and won when war was forced upon us. It was powerful and heroic, not a warrior nation but a bunch of citizen soldiers. This is beyond criminal, it’s obscene. We don’t HAVE TO choose a path of killing, of destruction, of rotting bodies of HUMAN BEINGS and raped women and diseased refugees. But there is an element that WANTS to travel that path, and I wonder. If there was a way to make them know what I know, what my brothers know, would they still want war? If they had spent terrifying eternities under fire, twelve seven tracers bouncing around, mortars and rockets landing indescriminately, killing and maiming people you know and care about, trying to hold a perimeter at night in the horror and confusion of killling at eyeball range…
I know, you’ve heard it from me over and over again, it’s the same old shit. I accept that war and conflict can be necessary, and I’ll be the first in line to saddle up and take my spot in the line, but this is fucking CHOOSING when there are viable options, and that can only be the result of people making policy who’s ideas about war come from John Wayne movies. It hurts. It’s sick.
We are the United States of America. We do not need to fear a nation ten thousand miles away. We have military and economic power, less now than we did five years ago, but it’s still plenty of power. Anybody who encourages unleashing that power against a mostly civilian population is by definition a racist murderer. There is a LOT more suffering unleashed in war than simply the deaths of combatants, and when it’s unnecessary from the start, the horribly disfunctional enablers are guilty of the highest of crimes and misdemeanors. Sorry for the rant, but it’s really important not to lose sight of the misery visited upon a society when war is unleashed…
sorrowfully
mikey
My rejoinder to both pissy participants:
Wife: Honey, aren’t you going to work today?
Husband: No-o-o… I don’t think so.
Wife: Honey, you have a problem, and it won’t get better until you admit it. Husband: I admit this… You better shut your big yap!
Wife: Oh you shut up.
Husband: No, you shut up!
Wife: No shut up!
Husband: Oh shut up!
Wife: Shut up!
Husband: Shut up! [little kid enters the bedroom]
Kid: Why don’t you BOTH SHUT UP!
And by that, I meant Max and Steve. Try living in Texas if you like electoral powerlessness!
I’d sue you for this post if I wasn’t busy being a recluse.
That’s the problem, though, mikey. By the rules of High Broderism/Sensible Liberalism, your first-hand experience of the horrors of war and its human consequences is what disqualifies you from “serious debate” on the subject. Worse, you argue passionately for your position; that too is a no-no.
To be taken seriously by the Sensible Liberals and Broderties, you must be able to argue your position as if you were describing moves in a chess game. Bloodless strategery. By rooting your objections in basic human empathy and the revulsion of seeing what war really is, up close, you are (in their mind) silly, emotional, soft, and cloudy.
Worse still, those who– through ignorance, evil, or simple lack of conscience– manage to put aside such human considerations and say, with all apparent sadness, “exterminate the brutes” are taken as deeply serious and even morally courageous precisely because their arguments seem divorced from all human feeling. These are the “real men” who can “do what it takes” in spite “knee-jerk emotionalism”, etc.
This is the root of the Dirty Fucking Hippie/Angry Left attack, and how, in the mind of Sensible Liberal, we could be objectively right about every detail and aspect of the Iraq debacle and its consequences from before the beginning but still be wrong, wrong, wrong in a larger sense.
Hear, hear kingubu. Very well put.
From another angle: Mikey, we DFHs are always sympathetic to your objection; after all, it’s a lot like our though it comes from a different experience.
But, see, the ‘broad-mindedness’ — or as Dr. DeLong would put it, absence of ‘intellectual totalitarianism’ of the Sensible Liberals is what led them to accept the War.
But still another way, I think Max is saying that the evidence is that one’s likelihood of being a Fool for Bush’s Wars is directly proportional to how much one’s politics strains against Leftism.
Hippies weren’t gonna be fooled. Sensible Liberals were ripe for Bush’s picking, and they alone made themselves ripe.
Dammit!
mikey
— Which in turn is why I added the Ezra quote, which may seem at first glance incongruous to the rest.
It’s not. Ezra was anti-DFH, and at best agnostic on the war. He gets Max’s ideological point — Ezra puts himself in the Sensible Liberal middle; he admits he is not of the Left — but misses the broader point that this is exactly why he fell . to whatever degree, for the pro-war arguments.
Also, in Ezra’s post is the germ of war-acceptance that is precisely what Max is arguing against: “American power can be good”.
It’s not that this is or is not true, it’s that a certain type is compelled to say it to distance themselves from what is Left of them. It is also a signal to the Right that, hey, the writer is willing to listen to your latest depraved pro-war scheme.
It’s not that such people have no ideology to ground them; it’s that their ideology makes them fear the Left more than the Right, never mind that the Left has been correct about all this shit. Their ideology makes them think that they must engage and compromise with the Right.
And THAT, that is why otherwise good and smart people became useful idiots of wingnuttery, how they got to be willing accomplices in war-mongering.
I want some fucking accountability.
So ok, I have one question: I’d like to sign up. Can I be a DFH too? I mean, I only missed a few months, when you think about it….
mikey
Mikey, I was born in the middle of the Big Jungle Fun Adventure Time, and I’m a DFH through and through. Of course you’re welcome.
I think that may be part of why what Retardo says is so true. The mushy middle feels compelled to kowtow to the Right. Not so much because they fear the Left, but because the Left is inclusive and open and the Right is beligerent and “with us or against us” by nature.
I’m with gordonsowner here, I need somebody to re-do this with thought balloons and zip-a-tone.
I’m just guessing here, but I suspect once it’s been inked and colored, what I’ll be looking at is a fight over who gets to wear the blue satin cape with the big “L” on it.
I was going to write something clever, but I’m fixated on the word “nub.”
So, if the above formulation is close to right, what the Hell do we do about it? I see two paths:
1) Construct bloodless-sounding position frameworks that show, in detail, why increased profits for a few large companies is not the same as “America’s interests”, and that the “kick ’em over, take their shit, make them hostages to debt, and call it liberation” foreign policy (the consensus of both parties throughout the 20th century) is no longer workable. Then find clean-cut rubes to advance that idea in public.
and,
2) Reverse the process on the right: Apply direct attack on the warhawks’ clean-cut public rubes while exposing the emotionally-driven underpinnings behind the “war first, war always” crowd.
Yer thoughts?
I’m not sure that path number one would be all that useful. Because the people you need to convince have already been convinced that that’s not how American policy works. They’re sure that whatever we come up with, as a country, must be good, because it’s American. If you really want to try something like this, you’re going to be forced to help convince people that your option is, in fact, the patriotic option.
Hm, I don’t see how, for example, “don’t spend billions in public tax money on wars that stir up anti-American hatred and only benefit a few private interests” is any more or less patriotic than the warhawks’ positions.
I think you could make a credible (and more importantly “serious”-sounding) case against economic imperialism by presenting it as a cost/benefit analysis.
But there is an element that WANTS to travel that path, and I wonder. If there was a way to make them know what I know, what my brothers know, would they still want war? If they had spent terrifying eternities under fire, twelve seven tracers bouncing around, mortars and rockets landing indescriminately, killing and maiming people you know and care about, trying to hold a perimeter at night in the horror and confusion of killling at eyeball range…
Mikey, the older I get (and we are of approximately the same vintage, I believe), the more I suspect that a tragic percentage of the Pundit Class has fallen to the Mind/Body Dichotomy Fallacy. Simply put, a lot of the suburban-bred, college-educated, doing-well-enough-economically, white-acting-enough-to-pass, male-or-willing-to-pretend-to-be-male Americans who control both the political power and the media outlets considered “serious” are convinced, consciously or not, that “They” are each a tiny clean thoughtful Ego-Object trapped in a tedious sackful of hormones and goo. Cohen and Broder and Drum and Perle and Wolfowitz and probably even Cheney think of themselves as little tiny Mind Kings, sitting on their individual brain-pillows, forced to push levers & work gears in order to keep their rudely inefficient body-robots marching around giving orders to the lesser body-robots whose Mind-Kings are not as gifted or as busy as theirs. People who believe in the Mind-Body Dichotomy simply are not capable of internalizing, or truly understanding, the fact you so eloquently express: that War truly *is* Hell, for the ‘winners’ no less than the ‘losers’. Because they elevate their Ego Minds and denigrate their Body Sacks, they not only fail to understand that going into combat is a terrible stressor from which most subjects will never fully recover — they actively resent the Dirty Effing Hippies (those body-sack worshippers!) who keep insisting that War is not the same as a Risk boardgame or even a brisk afternoon at the paintball range. If, like them, you believe that anything primarily Mind-based is by definition *better* than anything-primarily Body-based, than of course a beautifully constructed argument in favor of War (however dishonest & meretricious) is always *better* than any mere recital of the body-limited facts concerning dead people, wounded cultures, societies bled of their treasures, or whole generations murdered before they can rise to the intellectual high grounds of believing in the Mind-Body Dichotomy.
Or, to put it more concisely: If you believe that Thought is always more important than Action, then a bad Thought is more important than a good Action. And anybody who insists — who acts! — as though bad Thought can only lead to bad Actions is a Dirty Effin’ Hippie, a.k.a. a member of the Reality-Based Community, and not to be taken seriously.
Probably misremembered quote from William James: “Societies that applaud bad philosophers because Philosophy is a noble calling, while denigrating good plumbers because Plumbing is a vulgar craft, will have neither good philosophers or good plumbers. Neither their theories nor their pipes will hold water.”
The political intertoobz are full of lousy philosophers complaining that their bad policy choices are still objectively “better” than the facts-on-the-ground objections we mere DFH plumbers raised prior to Operation Enduring FUBAR. The fact that Iraq is now knee-deep and rising in raw sewage — literally as well as figuratively! — means less to these Mind Kings than the purity, the intellectual beauty, of their own previous arguments about WMDs, evil dictators, future-forward small-force military incursions, and moving the plastic markers around the hex board of Mesopotamia.
These people cannot be convinced. They can only be ignored, worked around, overridden by vulgar reality. They will be nothing but an ongoing annoyance, distraction, and general impediment as we attempt to return America to the democracy we and the world once loved and respected. They are the political equivalent of hemorrhoids, jock itch, or bunions… nuisances that can’t kill you but can occasionally make you wish you were dead.
Too many people think they have an opinion when they haven’t seen, haven’t smelled, haven’t PARTICIPATED. They, like bush/cheney, don’t wake up at night soaked in sweat, gasping for breath, remembering…
How does one account for John McCain? I don’t get where he’s coming from at all.
That’s a good point, Lesley. I’ve been thinking in terms of pundits, not politicians, but you’re right about McCain being a sort of duckbilled platypus oddball in the barnyard of chickenhawks and warpigs.
Back to pundits, other oddballs, but on the other side of the coin, are Brad DeLong, a Sensible Liberal, meet-the-wingnuts-halfway type about everything BUT the war, and Steve Gilliard, a sort of left-populist who never fell for the war but despises hippies.
Then there are the idiots among the pro-war Left (no quotes, genuinely Leftwing, though an archaic sub-species), the Trotskyites who have only become neoconservative *about* the war: retards like those found at Hurry Up Harry. But these types are mostly British. They’re like Hitchens but without the new-found domestic libertarianism.
So obviously my theory doesn’t account for everybody. But generally I think it’s pretty sound. It’s the nature of Sensible Liberals to be fooled into thinking wars are gonna turn out grand and are prosecuted by people with the best intentions.
To be extremely offensive, even Grover Norquist-like, about it: Sensible Liberals know they are gonna be date-raped by the Wingnuts who flirt with them, and they’re ok with that. Both parties are merely conforming to their character. But the Iraq War ‘date’ was like being gangbanged. They’re upset about that now, understandably. Yet they don’t want to write-off any future dates with Wingnuts, because, well, Wingnuts are just so dreamy! It never occurs to them todate hippies instead — too stinky, and beside, who knows who the hippies have slept with previously! Besides, where’s the prestige in dating hippies? How’s that gonna make them popular? Everyone knows that’s no way to earn a pledge pin.
America needs a good psychiatrist. Seriously. The collective insanity isn’t cute anymore.
Well, this isn’t going to be a popular position, I don’t think, because it’s not even popular with me, but I think it’s raised a legitimate point. Some months back I read an op-ed about why people in largely the midwest and south vote republican, when it is obviously not in their best interests. These are working men and women, who tend to eschew the party that would indeed make their lives easier- why don’t they? The point the article was trying to make was that they felt degraded and/or misunderstood by the “intellectual left”. They like GWB because he is a “plain speaker” that appears to understand them. He seems to represent guys and gals who work blue collar jobs, with his homilies and family values speak. Misguided, you betcha! I have no idea how to fix this problem, but I think these Sensible Liberals think they have found the answer, and that is why they exist. Are they wrong? Goodness, yes… but I am at a loss to say what could be a good strategy at reaching a voting base that should be ours. Should we …(ahem) dumb down? God, that sounds awful, but, well, is it the truth?
Ahem. Why do they? Goodness, even WITH the preview button. Late here.
It’s kind of refreshing to get in a fight with people who are not outright screeching lunatics for a change. And is it just me, or has the wingnut loogiesphere shrunken in on itself somewhat in the last few days? It’s like the signals from the withering jackhammer kicks to the nuts they’ve been taking since November are finally starting to work their way up to the old brain. I get the feeling we’re going to witness a great crumbling in the coming weeks…
I hope so. I am so tired of Nebraska the way it is today. A collective epiphany? Please?
A sort of pheonix that surges above the spray of frothing screams ending in “surge” and the dust and sadness of chest beating gone wrong?
It’s no coincidence by the way that we see the war/dirty hippy vs. sensible liberal debate hashed out now, when America finally has a Democratic majority in Congress again.
As long as the Democratic Party was out in the cold, the Sensibles sort of needed us dirty hippies, but now that the victory has been secured, it’s time to cut us loose again and go back to their old ways..
Should we …(ahem) dumb down? God, that sounds awful, but, well, is it the truth?
Ah, the myth of “plain-speaking” George whose entire life has been characterized by silver spoons and bail outs, addictions, laziness, and the inability to articulate a simple thought.
Ok, maybe the Dems could loosen the ties and roll up of the sleeves to show their hairy arms. But given the results of the last election, I advise against mimicking Chimpy.
I’m with gordonsowner here, I need somebody to re-do this with thought balloons and zip-a-tone.
I’m just guessing here, but I suspect once it’s been inked and colored, what I’ll be looking at is a fight over who gets to wear the blue satin cape with the big “L� on it.
Oops, I missed this first time through, and since it’s less obviously troll-o-rific than your normal output, I’ll answer.
Max, I think, is saying that if the Sensible Liberals had been more Leftwing and less ‘Sensible’, they wouldn’t have fallen for the War. Ergo, to keep non-wingnuts from falling for future wars, they need to become more Leftwing.
I agree. Sensible Liberals don’t have to stop being idiots all the time (they can’t help it, after all, much like you can’t help it you’re a neo-liberal twit when it comes to eocnomics), but they need to come our way some of the time, or we’ll get more Iraqs.
As a matter of fact, if the DFH consensus post-Vietnam hadn’t been broken by fickle Sensible Liberals who thought Reaganism was sexy enough to have a fling with, we wouldn’t be in this position.
Kevin Drum is the very embodiment of mushy centrism
Dear Liberals:
Please stop running away from the Left. We won’t hurt you. We sort of want the same kinds of things, in a general way, for America. The Republicans have made a total career out of pandering to the most reactionary, fascist elements of the Right imagnable, and it hasn’t hurt their careers any. You may think the country is on some sort of rightward swing, but I guarantee you that has more to do with the way you’ve let our own homegrown Nazis get into bed with the Republican party without you once ever having said a word against it. And why should the Republicans *stop* doing it when they get no pushback for it and it keeps winning them elections? Here’s a hint: if it wins elections for them, there’s no reason why it can’t win elections for you.
Try this: look at what would happen for you in the Democratic party if, for the time being, you simply write off certain states in this country as unwinnable, and concentrate on improving your margins in the states which might still be winnable for you (here’s a hint: there’s a census coming up in three years). What you’ll end up doing is increasing your margins of dominance in the House and Senate, as well as increasing your number of governorships and your voice in state governments. Using my magic powers of prediction, I magically predict that suddenly, the whole country will start to look like it’s suddenly taken a leftward turn, as opposed to a rightward turn. Isn’t that magic?
And let me tell you, you Libs and Dems have done a good job of alienating what should be your base by pandering your party line in a slant toward those who will never vote for you anyway. Are you really that codependent? Have you considered therapy? Please stop kissing the asses of people who think you are wimps just because you hope that in doing so, they will stop giving you swirlies. Perhaps if you had gone to public schools, you’d realize that this doesn’t really work.
So go ahead, do it: say something nice about Noam Chomsky or Michael Moore in public. And when some gibbering rightwing pundit starts giving you grief for it, tell them to shut the fuck up. Be sure to put the emphasis on “fuck” when you say it. Don’t worry: they will screech like a bad set of car brakes for about fifteen minutes afterward, but then they will actually shut up. Because they are a bunch of bullies, and you have let them steal your lunch money for far too long now.
Love,
Your friends on the Left.
So which of Steve and Max is meant to be the sensible, pro-war DLC type? None of the various epithets upthread seem to describe any of the people involved. But then, I’ve never been able to follow other people’s stupid internecine bitchfighting without getting the brain-haze.
It seems to me, even after winning the elections on essentially a platform against Joe Lieberman & Co, the faction that self-identifies as DFH needs to have a Sensible Bogeyman, even though there aren’t that many of them left – essentially, the Sensible Pro-War count is down to two op-ed twerps and Lieberman. It used to be the other way round, but declaring a bogeyman is the vital requirement for the great leftist tradition of Fighting for Inner Purity.
The risk is that you’ll end up with the slogan “While they SURGE, we’ll PURGE!”
And let me tell you, you Libs and Dems have done a good job of alienating what should be your base by pandering your party line in a slant toward those who will never vote for you anyway.
Jillian, this is one of the things that most irks me about my home town. I mean, why do they do it? Why? There’s folks teetering on the brink, just waiting to be sweet-talked into their arms, and they abandon those for the right wing nutcases who probably think they’re DSH commiehomofascists.
And what is this abject terror of socialism? If most of them heard about the basic tenets, they’d think it’s damn fine, but because they know naught but the word, they go all freaky and shrieky and start waving crucifixes.
And mikey, I don’t know what’s to be done. I was a smidgeon too young to go to that particular abomination, although a cousin of mine was drafted and sent off. Fortunately, it was near the end of the debacle, and he came home relatively unscathed, although with a sudden interest in God and a determination to never mention the war.
But I too am perplexed as to why being compassionate is considered grounds for disqualification. Would it be better if we said “Well, okay, we don’t really care about foreign people, ‘cos they’re not really human after all, but this war is bad for us because…”? Would that have more credibility? Are we only considered worth listening to if we don’t care about anyone else?
I mean, I’ve heard, and read, a lot (a real lot) of justifications for the war on the grounds of “safeguarding American prestige”, and how significant is that, exactly, compared to lives and minds and limbs? How can anyone even consider that argument for a moment? How can anyone CHOOSE war, and still sleep at night?
Aaaaaaand another thing…
In the days of my yoof I read a lot of science fiction (yes, DSH here), and of course one of the writers was Robert Heinlein. Now I don’t care much for a lot of his politics, and many of his books are almost unreadable now (given my tendency to shriek in outrage about the constant parade of perky-breasted females being gleeful about sex).
But a couple of things stuck in my mind. The first, of course, is that he wrote one of the bibles of Dirty Stinking Hippyhood (the latter phase, in the 70s), with Stranger In A Strange Land.
The other, which is of more moment here, was contained within a book which has recently been turned into an unspeakably vile movie. Please bear with me for a moment, as I take you on a strange journey…
If any of you have seen the film Starship Troopers, you’ll be amazed to know (no, really!) that it’s utterly unlike the book. I know, Hollywood never takes liberties, but I tell you no lies.
Because the book, friends, is strongly anti-war. First up, the society is rather different, in that only those who’ve done their stint in the army get to vote. Everyone else has to STFU. The justification is that if you’re not willing to risk your life to defend your country, you’re not entitled to have any say in how it’s run. This would obviously remove any possibility of chickenhawks.
Secondly, the war the the hero gets into is unlike the media representation (no, really?). He goes to the aliens’ planet expecting to find hideous, ravening beasts, and finds aliens just living their lives like other sentient beings, and being slaughtered for no reason.
Sounds familiar? I thought so. There’s a lot of wisdom in science fiction, if you know where to look, and avoid the spaceships and dragons.
What Jillian said…
… adding only that the reason that Liberals and the Democratic Party have been devoid of new ideas, passion, or anything other than unconvincing save-my-seat windsock politics is precisely because they stopped cherry-picking ideas and talent from the Left.
That being said, Jillian, the fact that you, resident proud and unrepentant Leftist, would post your response in the form of a manifesto addressed to no one in particular tempts me to emit a king-sized “heh!”
62% of the American public now believes Invading and Occupying Iraq was a BAD IDEA.
HOORAY! Its been a long 3 years with many thousands of deaths and tragically many more to follow.
62% against means the Bloodthirsty warmongers have LOST the rhetorical battle.
A House and Senate under the control of Democrats demonstrates how badly they LOST THE RHETORICAL Battle.
These latest “It coulda been different if the sunlight had reflected just right off that shard of glass laying in the grass and blinded our enemies” are prime examples of why they lost the rhetorical battle.
Sensible liberals are always going to fall for “the good war.” Their intellectual tradition dates back to Victorian England. It is the same motivation that led the British to try to “civilize” Africa and the Indian sub-continent. It is the White Man’s Burden updated to the 21st century and purged of its overt racism. But covert, unacknowledged racism and elitism still lies at its fetid core.
The moment they got all hard (or moist) was when they started thinking about all the good they could do. They suck up to the rightards in a marriage of convenience between war porn and do-gooder porn.
Bring freedom and democracy to the middle east? Yes! Liberate the Iraqi people from a tyrant? Oh, yes! Bring Christian enlightenment to the brown people? OH GOD YES!
I know for sure that the Bush years have turned me from a more Sensible Liberal type into a DFH. The Clinton years were enticing for a lot of people. Red herring scandals aside, Clinton was a quite competent president who actually seemed to have a good grasp about how to use the government to improve peoples’ lives.
The right-wing response to Clinton’s successful, popular presidency was to ratchet up the ratfucking and build the smear machine into an unstoppable powerhouse. They have done this with brutal efficiency. This is why the Clintonesque “Third Way” Sensible Liberal style of politics really does not work anymore. The Left needs to play hardball just like the ratfucking Right plays hardballl, but the Sensible Liberals araen’t willing to do it. They’re not willing to CALL BULLSHIT and SCREAM BLOODY MURDER when the ratfucking starts. Kerry, Obama, H. Clinton and way too many other prominent democrats have been extremely disappointing when it comes to fighting back against the lies of the Right.
This is why DFHs are sick of Sensible Liberals. Fight back! Quit being George Bush’s fucking bitch, fer chrissakes. The Right has moved further right since 2000. What is the proper reaction to that? To move right with them, or to move left? Which preserves your precious “center” better?
Kids, kids, it’s all about manufacturing consent, isn’t it? I mean, there’s one game in town, and if you’re after money and an ego stroke and are so desperately insecure that you need to be Approved By All, then yes, you can have a job as a Sensible Liberal in the Great American Clusterfuck!
Being a dirty fucking hippie just doesn’t pay. Hitchens learned this. Ezra instinctively knows this. And so to declare that representative democracy has been utterly destroyed by the concerted effort of ratfuck power-fetishists to drive the U.S. into a consumer-fascist-warporn third-rate dystopian-knockoff village of idiots is to forsake the paycheck.
And all those Democrats in Congress are just waiting to knife each other in the back for that next “promotion.”
So congrats on the water-carrying, Sensible Liberals. Good thing we know never to ask you to actually take a stand. Because the further up you go, the less deviation is tolerated. Have fun, insensiate meat puppets!
American power can be good = stale urine can be a delightful and refreshing beverage after running a Marathon.
That goes both ways. Deriding liberals as at best impediments to progress instead of allies is a tradition as ollld as the left itself.
Well, giving away free crack instead of governing works for awhile.
Crack is bad for you, child. Anyway, we just won a big election without it.
Waitaminit, that’s what the fuck the Dems had been doing for years and we were getting our asses beat. The success we had in November was partly because we did challenge them in places we had previously written off as unwinnable. What the fuck. Ever heard of Howard Dean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is ass-backwards from reality as described above.
Who the fuck are you talking about? 99% of fucking liberals and Democrats went to public school. We’re also more pissed than you about the branch of the party that has been pandering to the Republicans. Get it straight: liberal and Democratic voters are not the same as the Lieberman crowd or the “liberal” Washington elites.
I’m an old punk, sweetness. I was telling people to shut the fuck up when you were learning your ABC’s.
We offered you guys Al Gore. You decided to counter with Ralph Nader. You were right on the war, but we were right about keeping Bush out of office.
It wasn’t the moderate libs who said “both these guys look pretty much the same to me!”
We offered you guys Al Gore. You decided to counter with Ralph Nader. You were right on the war, but we were right about keeping Bush out of office.
And you gave us John Kerry too. Thanks a lot for that one.
I apologize for nominating one of the most famous war protestors of all time. In any event, we already had a war by 2004, so it’s a pretty moot point.
Thank you, Retardo.
The problem I have with your explanation, or rather, I suppose, with the argument that Max has put forward, is that it is ahistorical. Not in any of its discussion of the American politics of 40 years ago, but in its assumptions about more recent events. The biggest problem is that Max writes, as the Bush administration speaks, of “The War.”
America fought two wars in the early 21st century.
By this I do not mean to make some distinction between that execrable rhetorical device, the “War on Terror,” and real wars— I refer only to two actual wars, the war against the Taliban and the war against Saddam Hussein. I also use the past tense deliberately, because the present military activity in each country is not war, but occupation. But how is this relevant to Max’s argument?
The Bush administration speaks of the two wars as “The War” because it wants to obliterate the distinction between attacking Afghanistan and occupying Iraq. Max, I am afraid, seeks the same muddying of the waters, though of course for very different reasons. The Bush administration would have us believe the occupation of Iraq is indisputably necessary, while Max wants us to believe that the attack on Afghanistan was indefensible, and preventable through some application or recognition of “True Left” ideals.
There are, in fact, a great many of these centrist liberals Retardo so despises (and whom Max considers so gulled) who had different positions on America’s two wars in this century. This is due to the fact that while Saddam Hussein did not attack America, did not sponsor terrorists, and did comply with demands that were made of him in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, it is also true that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda did attack America, that the Taliban did sponser them, and that Mullah Mohammad Omar refused to cooperate in the apprehension of Bin Laden &co in the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan.
I am being perhaps overly pedantic here, but I feel it is justified, given that both Left and Right seem to have some interest in obscuring these distinctions.
I certainly do not mean to belittle the purest sort of pacifism here when I say that those who opposed the invasion of Afghanistan on the grounds that all war is immoral can not be regarded as the “True” or “Real” left, certainly not in the historical sense Max presents, as he is at pains to note (if only to deplore) the many branchlets of mid-century American leftism that did in fact advocate the use of violence.
There are many sorts of leftist thought that conditionally justify, if not advocate, war. The relevant condition, in this case, is the defense on the part of sovereign states against aggression. And while one can complain that it was strategically unsound, or disproportionate (but when has war ever been proportionate?) there is and was a reality-based case to be made that the invasion of Afghanistan was, in fact, a tactically sound defense against an act of foreign aggression.
There is also an argument to be made (though I have little interest in defending it) that the failure of this tactic, insofar as the Taliban and Al Qaeda are both still alive and operational within Afghanistan, can be laid at the door of America’s second war of this century.
The war against Iraq was more vigorously opposed by the ever-nebulous “center left” than the war in Afghanistan, but as Max points out, it was hardly universally opposed. Why not? Was it really because of some failure of ideology, as he suggests?
Or was it, perhaps, because the center left, and everyone else, for that matter, was lied to?
This is why the WMD question still matters. The case for the invasion of Iraq was made by extension of the causus belli for the invasion of Afghanistan, which large numbers of leftists had accepted, and many still accept. America was told that Saddam Hussein had the means to conduct horrifying attacks against the US, and it was taken as a given that he had some motive to aid such attacks, or even conduct them himself.
If you go back and examine the arguments of the “left hawks” (a term that lumps together those who opposed the inavasion of Iraq but not Afghanistan, and those who opposed neither, and those who actually advocated one or the other or both, be it on Bush’s terms or not, etc etc) in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, you will find that many or even most of them were questioning Hussein’s means, and advocating further inspections, prior to the infamous tapestry of lies delivered by Colin Powell to the UN. And there was some questioning of Hussein’s motives— arguably not enough, but would any invigorating injection of some imagined “pure” or “true” leftist ideology have prompted such questioning, in those historical circumstances? Perhaps, to some extent. But would such ideological invigoration have been enough to counter the incontestably illiberal history of Hussein’s regime, on top of Powell’s fabrications?
Sadly, No.
Postscript: If I wrote comments like this more than once a month at best, I’d have a blog, and I would put this there. If you have a blog, and like this comment or some contiguous snippet thereof, go ahead and post it. If you have a blog and don’t like this comment, and would rather do that thing where you chop it up into a hundred snippets and add a comment of your own after each, instead of composing a cogent and readable argument of your own, well, I’d prefer you didn’t, but I suppose I can’t stop you. If you want to know why Retardo thinks I am a “twit” on “economics” (he means international trade), then you’ll have to ask him how he thinks the people of the world ought to go about exchanging goods and services.
dear grampaw:
as a DFH* I propose we barter bro… “how about a pound of some yummy organic sunflower seeds for some hentai vids? or an alpaca poncho?” groovay!
*actually I am more of a centrist than a DFH – but i’m not pro-war in anyway (who is?). tho I support a well defined invasion and plan to capture Al Qaeda in Afghanistan – f*cking up Iraq on the other hand had little appeal to me – tho Saddam was a real big f*ckstick and the Iraqis deserved to be relieved of the a-hole
If any of you have seen the film Starship Troopers, you’ll be amazed to know (no, really!) that it’s utterly unlike the book. I know, Hollywood never takes liberties, but I tell you no lies.
Because the book, friends, is strongly anti-war. First up, the society is rather different, in that only those who’ve done their stint in the army get to vote. Everyone else has to STFU. The justification is that if you’re not willing to risk your life to defend your country, you’re not entitled to have any say in how it’s run. This would obviously remove any possibility of chickenhawks.
Secondly, the war the the hero gets into is unlike the media representation (no, really?). He goes to the aliens’ planet expecting to find hideous, ravening beasts, and finds aliens just living their lives like other sentient beings, and being slaughtered for no reason.
Well, HLG, Bob Heinlein actually served in the American military, if not quite as glamorously as he would later imply. There is a thesis waiting to be written on the devolution of post-WWII Sci-Fi once the pulp editors decided that its target audience was no longer average-American adult male geeks (most of whom, in that generation, would have seen military service or at least grown up with relatives who had seen military service). Once the people buying the stories decided that the Golden Age of SF really was (age) Twelve, their target market became resentful adolescent male geeks whose most vivid imaginings tended towards embroideries on the theme of “Gosh, if I only I had a really big photon-lazer cannon, then those guys in the locker room would find out just how terrible was my vengeance! Plus, I could ask that cheerleader to the prom, and my mighty photon-lazer cannon would impress her so much I might even get to second base!…” Editors bought fewer stories from veterans & family heads like Vonnegut, Kornbluth, Kuttner (& Moore), and early Heinlein while encouraging the revival of simple earnest Burroughs-type BEM-huntin’, booby-leerin’, nuance-hatin’ Space Knights (most of what Campbell published in the 1960s, not excepting later Heinlein).
Of course, the backlash to this revival would give us some of what is now considered the best sf (Slaughter-House Five, The Left Hand of Darkness, even the post-artery-hardened Stranger in A Strange Land, *sigh*) just as the political backlash to post-war McCarthyism gave us the Dirty Stinkin’ Hippies. But the lure of the simple wish-fulfillment Bildungaspaychipromanz stories continues to contaminate our fiction (Neo, in the Matrix: “First, we’re gonna need guns. LOTSA guns!!!”) as well as our politics.
The Bush administration speaks of the two wars as “The War� because it wants to obliterate the distinction between attacking Afghanistan and occupying Iraq. Max, I am afraid, seeks the same muddying of the waters, though of course for very different reasons. The Bush administration would have us believe the occupation of Iraq is indisputably necessary, while Max wants us to believe that the attack on Afghanistan was indefensible, and preventable through some application or recognition of “True Left� ideals.
Does he? I’m not sure. I don’t. I get what you mean, I think, though. Yes, the pacifists totally objected to Afghanistan. Another hefty section of the authentic Left was deeply suspisicous of Afghanistan, even paranoid. And rightly so. I think most of the DFHs insisted on a police action and quick withdrawl, with the aim of bringing OBL to justice as well as avoiding an imperialistic/ looting occupation. While things didn’t turn out just as DFHs supposed, I think you have to agree that they were right about being paranoid, and that paranoia especially served them well when Iraq came up.
The war against Iraq was more vigorously opposed by the ever-nebulous “center left� than the war in Afghanistan, but as Max points out, it was hardly universally opposed. Why not? Was it really because of some failure of ideology, as he suggests?
Or was it, perhaps, because the center left, and everyone else, for that matter, was lied to?
Lemme stop trying to speak for Max and speak for myself instead. The Sensible Liberals were *never* paranoid enough of Bush. They sneered at the Left’s paranoia of Bush’s Afghanistan operation, of course — and much too quickly. I assumed Bush was lying because I thought his character was obvious — he carries his stupidity and depravity on his sleeve, he recieved more corporate money for his campaign than any in history, and he stole a fucking election. Max’s DFHs of the 70s rightly assumed that Nixon and Johnson were horrible horrible liars, terrible people, devious in intent, never to be believed. This was the right attitude to have, and more perceptive people, if I may say so, should have assumed this attitude to Bush. But they couldn’t because to them it was grim choice — side with DFHs or side with Bush, and, bluntly, they loathe and distrust hippies more than they do wingnuts. Period.
None of the arguments mattered. Saddam Hussein didn’t matter. The point was whether one thought the Bush government was trustworthy and decent or not. Idiots thought it was — or that it might be. DFHs knew the truth.
It’s true this is more a judgement of character than ideology, but ideology matters with regard to structure. Andrew Sullivan posted yesterday something that illustrates the point; he thinks the anti-War Left was wrong and he isn’t so much to blame for his stupidity, because as a default position, the burden of proof is on the anti-war side. A Sensible Liberal couldn’t have put it better. A strong Left means that the default position would be where it should be — that an immense burden of proof rests on the pro-war side. Always. It should be *difficult* to go to war. And though this can be seen as a conservative concept (backed-up in the Constitution’s demand that The People alone can declare war), it’s Leftist in the sense that it counters the wingnut propensity for knee-jerk warmongering, wingnuttia’s long-time goal of a Spartan society that is armed to the teeth and belligerent to the core.
WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!
BreakingNewsBreakingNewsBreakingNewsBreakingNewsBreakingNews
WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a special bulletin!
WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!
********************************************************************************
For the temporally challenged ….
According to my calendar, for which I paid $12.95 (plus tax) it’s 2007.
The 1960s ended 37 years ago.
Deal with it.
There are no Dirty/Clean/Moderately Grungy Fucking/HappilyMarried/Celibate Hippies roaming the streets of San Francisco with, or without, flowers in their hair.
We realize it is hard, and maybe even life shattering, but we have only the best of intentions for you, the gentle reader.
**********************************************************************************
This has been a BreakingNews Special Report.
WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!
(Poor Max Sawicky is crying for help and, thus, I offer him validation in the form of a hug and wet slobbery kiss: (((smmeeeeee-york))) There Max. Feel all better? Now for God’s sakes quit huffin’ glue and get a grip.)
@grampaw:
Max has clearly and consistently supported the U.S. military action against Afghanistan, including in the face of dissent from his fellow lefties. He might be fusing the Iraq and Afghan wars (though more likely, simply ignoring the Afghan case), but definitely not for the reasons you cite. It could be because his support for the Afghan war makes him closer to the “sensible lib” and netroots-Dem-following interventionists than is comfortable for the fight he’s waded into.
[…] That’s what Max Sawicky calls “the internet left”, by which he means the constellation of liberal blogs clustered around Eschaton, Kos, MyDD FireDogLake and such. For some reason it provoked some controversy, but be honest, it is a fair if rude characterisation. […]