Saturday, March 19, 2005
Against the war in Montclair and the perpetual opposition
Hindrocket was wondering more or less the same thing this afternoon. While retrieving his daughter from a liberal neighborhood in St. Paul -- "in political terms, the belly of the beast" -- Rocket Man considers all the vestigial Kerry paraphernalia strewn about on cars and lawns and such.
It seems to me that many Democrats--not a majority, probably, but certainly most of the party's core--have gone into a state of permanent opposition. No election is ever over. No administration not favored by them can ever be legitimate. This is, I think, something new in American history--or modern history, anyway. In the past, elections were hard-fought, but when they were over, the lawn signs came down and life went on. Hatreds were not nursed--not, at least, on the mass scale that we see today. And people, by and large, accepted the quaint idea that once a government had been chosen by the majority, people should accept it and even, in foreign policy at least, give it their support.
For many, today, unrelenting opposition has become not just a political position, but a way of life.
I don't disagree with Hindrocket, but I'm not sure that it began with the Democrats. The conservative opposition to Clinton was basically unrelenting, and when all was said and done it may have done more harm than good, both for the country and Republican fortunes. If leftist opposition to Bush seems even more intense and persistent -- and it certainly does to me -- it probably isn't because lefties have suddenly become more inclined to opposition. But there may be other reasons.
First, opposition is all they have. For six of the eight years of Clinton's presidency, the Republicans controlled the Congress. The intensity of Republican opposition was tempered, occasionally, by the simple thought that they had something to lose. If today's conservatives were as emphatically out of power as today's liberals, they'd be pretty damned opposed too.
Second, Bush, like Clinton, is a triangulator. It has to drive liberals insane that a Republican President with a Republican Congress at his back have created the largest entitlement program (prescription drugs) in a generation.
Third, most people who consider themselves "activists" -- you know, people who do not have a real job, but work on "social change" issues as if it were a career -- are leftist (the big exception being the anti-abortion crowd). This class has been growing steadily since the seventies, and now amounts to tens of thousands people in cities and college towns around the country. If you identify yourself as an "activist" instead of as a "lawyer" or, more likely, a "waiter," of course you are going to keep that Kerry sticker on right up until you can replace it with "Dr. Dean in Oughty-Eight."
Fourth, the damned bumper stickers are hard to get off! Living in Princeton, I naturally tried to remove the single "W" on the back of my Beamer on November 3 (one can be too triumphalist), but could barely get my fingernail under the edge! Maybe Kerry used good glue...
The question is why the left has not adopted the posture of the "loyal opposition" during the war as Republicans did during World War II. The answer is that this time the opposition believes that America is in the wrong, and that the fascists are the victims.
1 Comments:
By 
fester, at
Sun Mar 20, 03:23:00 PM:
On your comment of loyal opposition, I think that you have already answered your question --- what is the incentive for Democrats to cooperate as from my point of view, every time that the Democrats have tried to cooperate with the Bush administration they suffer severe political consequences --- tax cuts in 2001 and their resultant deficits are being used as part of a cudget against Social Security, Homeland Security (a Democratic idea) was used as an anti-union wedge vote club by Bush (those wonderful anti-Cleland ads do so much for cooperative equilibria), the Medicare drug policy is more expensive then the Democratic alternative and most likely less effective, and asking for accountability for supplemental funding for Iraq makes one a "flipflopper" and near traitorous. What is the incentive to cooperate, especially given the recent history of Democratic cooperators being specifically targeted by Bush to campaign against.
Secondly, the job of a loyal opposition is to oppose and provide alternatives --- that means constant criticism when the governing party is proposing ideas that are either not thought out, counterproductive or incoherent. Those are pretty damm common these days --- see the votes on PAYGO and Medicaid cuts for the most recent example.
