Post-postmodern politics
<p>The Democratic Party fell off a cliff last night.  Never mind their<br />
shiny new governorships &mdash; the `smart&#8217; money pre-election was on<br />
them picking up an absolute majority of governor&#8217;s seats, and at the<br />
Congressional level they took a shellacking nearly as bad as 1994&#8217;s.<br />
The races Terry McAuliffe targeted as most critical &mdash; notably<br />
the Florida governorship &mdash; were all lost.  And the big Democrat<br />
losses bucked historical trends &mdash; the mid-term election and the<br />
weak economy should have helped them.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re going to hear a lot of gloating from Republicans and<br />
soul-searching from Democrats in the aftermath.  The easy explanation<br />
is that 9/11 did the Democrats in; that American elected to get behind<br />
a president who seems to be handling the terror war with decisiveness,<br />
prudence, and strategic acumen.</p>
<p>I think this conventional wisdom is wrong.  I think 9/11 merely<br />
exposed a longer-term weakness in the Democratic position, which is<br />
this: the Democrats have forgotten how to do politics that is about<br />
anything but politics itself.  They&#8217;re a post-modern political party,<br />
endlessly recycling texts that have little or no referent outside<br />
the discourse of politics itself.</p>
<p>The disgusting spectacle they made of Paul Wellstone&#8217;s funeral<br />
is diagnostic.  We were treated to trumpet calls about honoring<br />
Wellstone&#8217;s legacy without any discussion beyond the most superficial<br />
cliches of what that legacy was.  All the ritual invocations of<br />
time-honored Democratic shibboleths had a tired, shopworn, unreal<br />
and self-referential feel to them &mdash; politics as the literature<br />
of exhaustion.</p>
<p>The preconditions for paralysis had been building up for a long<br />
time; arguably, ever since the New Left beat out the Dixiecrats for<br />
control of the party apparat in 1968-1972.  Caught between the<br />
blame-America-first, hard-left instincts of its most zealous cadres<br />
and the bland dishwater centrism recently exemplified by the DLC, the<br />
Democrats found it more and more difficult to be about anything at<br />
all.  The trend was self-reinforcing; as Democratic strategy drifted,<br />
the party became ever more dependent on cooperation between dozens of<br />
fractious pressure groups (feminists, gays, race-baiters, the AARP,<br />
the teachers&#8217; and public-employee unions), which made the long-term<br />
drift worse.</p>
<p>Bill Clinton was the perfect master of political postmodernism and<br />
James Carville his prophet.  For eight years they were able to<br />
disguise the paralysis and vacuum at the heart of Democratic thinking,<br />
centering party strategy on a cult of personality and an<br />
anything-but-Republicanism that was cunning but merely reactive.  The<br />
Republicans cooperated with this strategy with all the naive eagerness<br />
of Charlie Brown running up to kick Lucy&#8217;s football, perpetually<br />
surprised when it was snatched away at the last second, repeatedly<br />
taking pratfalls eagerly magnified by a Democratic-leaning national<br />
media.</p>
<p>But Bill Clinton was also a borderline sociopath and a liar, a man<br />
whose superficial charm, anything-to-get-elected energy, and utter<br />
lack of principle perfectly mirrored the abyss at the heart of the<br />
Democratic party.  The greedy, glittery, soulless Wellstone-funeral<br />
fiasco was the last hurrah of Clintonism, and it cost Walter Mondale<br />
his last election fight.</p>
<p>Reality had to intrude sometime.  The destruction of the WTC<br />
reduced all the politics-about-politics rhetoric of the Democrats to<br />
irrelevance.  They stood mute in the face of the worst atrocity on<br />
American soil since Pearl Harbor, arguably the worst in U.S. history.<br />
The superficial reason was that their anti-terror policy was hostage<br />
to the party&#8217;s left wing, but the deeper problem was that they long<br />
ago lost the ability to rise above petty interest-group jockying<br />
on any issue of principle at all. The most relevant adjective is not<br />
`wrong&#8217;, or `evil&#8217;, it&#8217;s <em>`feckless&#8217;</em>.</p>
<p>Republicans, by contrast, forged a workable consensus during<br />
the Reagan years and never quite lost it.  They&#8217;ve often been wrong,<br />
frequently been obnoxious as hell, and have their own loony fringe<br />
(abortion-clinic bombers, neo-fascists like Pat Buchanan, and<br />
the Christian Coalition) to cope with.  But when Osama bin Laden<br />
demonstrated a clear and present danger to the United States of<br />
America <em>they were able to respond</em>.</p>
<p>They were able to respond not merely with reaction, but by taking<br />
a moral position against terrorism that could serve as the basis of<br />
an effective national strategy.  Quarrel with &#8220;Homeland Security&#8221; all<br />
you like &mdash; but then imagine Al Gore in charge of defeating<br />
Al-Qaeda and shudder.  He would actually have had to take the likes of<br />
Cynthia McKinney and Maxine Waters <em>seriously</em>.</p>
<p>I think these 2002 elections are going to turn out to have been much<br />
more of a turning point than the aborted `Republican Revolution&#8217; of<br />
1994.  Unless Bush&#8217;s war strategy completely screws the pooch, he is<br />
going to completely walk over the Democratic candidate in 2004.  The<br />
Democrats show no sign of developing a foreign-policy doctrine that can<br />
cope with the post-9/11 world, and their domestic-policy agenda is<br />
tired and retrogressive.  Their voter base is aging, and their national<br />
leadership couldn&#8217;t rummage up a better Wellstone replacement than<br />
Walter &#8220;What decade is this, anyway?&#8221; Mondale.  The Democratic<br />
party could end up disintegrating within the decade.</p>
<p>This is not a prospect that fills me with uncomplicated glee.<br />
Right-wing statism is not an improvement on left-wing statism; a smug<br />
and dominant GOP could easily become captive to theocrats and<br />
know-nothings, a very bad thing for our nation and the world.  And,<br />
unfortunately, the Libertarian Party has courted self-destruction by<br />
choosing to respond to 9/11 with an isolationism every bit as vapid<br />
and mindless as the left&#8217;s &#8220;No War for Oil!&#8221; chanting.</p>
<p>Welcome to post-postmodern politics.  Meaning is back, but<br />
the uncertainties are greater than ever.</p>
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