97 lines
6.6 KiB
Plaintext
97 lines
6.6 KiB
Plaintext
Post-postmodern politics
|
|
<p>The Democratic Party fell off a cliff last night. Never mind their<br />
|
|
shiny new governorships — the `smart’ money pre-election was on<br />
|
|
them picking up an absolute majority of governor’s seats, and at the<br />
|
|
Congressional level they took a shellacking nearly as bad as 1994’s.<br />
|
|
The races Terry McAuliffe targeted as most critical — notably<br />
|
|
the Florida governorship — were all lost. And the big Democrat<br />
|
|
losses bucked historical trends — the mid-term election and the<br />
|
|
weak economy should have helped them.</p>
|
|
<p>We’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’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’s funeral<br />
|
|
is diagnostic. We were treated to trumpet calls about honoring<br />
|
|
Wellstone’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 — 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’ 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’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’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’, or `evil’, it’s <em>`feckless’</em>.</p>
|
|
<p>Republicans, by contrast, forged a workable consensus during<br />
|
|
the Reagan years and never quite lost it. They’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 “Homeland Security” all<br />
|
|
you like — 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’ of<br />
|
|
1994. Unless Bush’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’t rummage up a better Wellstone replacement than<br />
|
|
Walter “What decade is this, anyway?” 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’s “No War for Oil!” chanting.</p>
|
|
<p>Welcome to post-postmodern politics. Meaning is back, but<br />
|
|
the uncertainties are greater than ever.</p>
|
|
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&commentid=84133776">Blogspot comments</a></p>
|