| Monday, November 1, 2004 |
14:14 - Have we already lost?
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I don't expect to be able to say anything intelligent about politics between now and the election, so I'm not going to try. However, there's one thing that's been nagging at my mind for just the last few hours. It's been somewhere in the back of my skull for a long time, but I've been refusing to acknowledge it. Bill Whittle puts his finger on it:
I will be able to live with a Kerry Presidency. But what tortures me is the thought that this country is no longer capable of doing hard, dirty work -- that we have reached the point where nothing difficult is attainable because the cost is something less than free.
This is similar to what I've been saying off and on for many months now, and many other writers I've linked to in trying to crystallize just why I think this election is so important. Just the other day I said that:
But terrorist attacks don't worry me all that much, really. What worries me is what we show of our character in response to such an attack. Any country can be happy in time of peace, after all—it's only in those periods of trial, like World War II, or Vietnam, that we really see what each country is made of. Now that Jimmy Carter has repudiated the Revolutionary War, blithely throwing away the two-hundred-year legacy of this country's fighting spirit that would never have existed if America had somehow gained its independence peacefully (which would not have happened, Jimmy), we see that shamefacedness over what this country has come to stand for has reached even into the uppermost echelons of our leadership, into the mind of someone who was once our President, and someone who now shares a box seat at the Democratic National Convention with Michael Moore, endorsing a philosophy that says the world would be better off without an America gumming up the works. If a sizable proportion of the populace comes to agree with Carter, or with the people who think like him, then we truly have left behind any traces of the generation that hurled itself into the forests of Belgium or the jungles of the South Pacific, let alone the one that tore itself to pieces on Little Round Top, each man believing deep in his heart that the cause for which he was taking a bayonet in the gut was right, right, right, and to hell with anyone who would tell him otherwise.
And I wasn't talking about the election. But at the time, somehow, I thought I was: I thought that I was equating the outcome of the election with how we would as a nation react to another potential terrorist attack. I wanted to believe that because this election is de facto a referendum on our War on Terror and whether it's worth fighting, we could use the election's results to determine whether our national character still had the fight in it that we did on 9/12/2001, or whether we're a completely different people than we were fifty or a hundred years ago.
My fears would have been assuaged by a Bush victory with a large margin; it would have told me that a clear majority of us are still united behind a stark task that we all agree needs doing, no matter how difficult or bloody. That's what it looked, for some time, like what we'd get.
But you know, it really doesn't depend on the outcome of the election after all. The polls have spoken.
This election has come down to a dead heat. Everybody agrees on that by now: a dead heat between a vote of confidence in our path as set by the 9/11 attacks, and a repudiation of all we've done since that day.
If we as a country really are divided right down the middle on that seminal question of our age, then the election will decide nothing. Whether Bush wins or Kerry wins, it'll be the same deal as in 2000: the winner won't have a mandate from a clear majority. His policies won't be what gave him victory. Neither candidate, if he wins, can claim that what he stands for is a representation of what the majority of Americans wants; it'll all come down to flukes of turnout, weather at polling places, peer pressure, vote-counting vagaries, and early calls by the network news stations (as detailed here). When the popular vote is decided within the margin of error, a butterfly's wings flapping in Beijing—as the saying goes—will spell the difference between whether America is a tiger or a poodle, and whichever one wins, fairly or not, is what will define the whole of the country's character in everyone's estimation. The winner takes all. But it won't reflect reality.
The reality will be that we're now a nation perpetually undecided. We can't make a decision anymore, even with the clearest of threats before us and the most well-defined courses of action demanding only our signature. Once upon a time the numerical difference between the people on one side of an argument and the people on the other other would direct our policy with a voice as strong as every head counted above parity; but now, half of us cancel out the other half, leaving only whispers of decisiveness one way or the other.
I'm disappointed by this... dreadfully disappointed. Whether Bush wins or loses tomorrow, the outcome as far as the people are concerned is meaningless— the very fact that after all we've been through we're still divided down the middle means we've resigned ourselves to making politics itself our primary battlefield, rather than a tool through which we choose how to fight the real war.
Jay Nordlinger (via Cold Fury) said:
A little story: Some time ago, England had what was called "the Metric Martyr." This was a fellow — a grocer or a butcher, I forget which — who sold his goods in imperial measures: pounds, ounces, etc. But because England is now beholden to Brussels, he was prosecuted for not using the metric system (hence, Metric Martyr).
I asked our senior editor David Pryce-Jones (a Brit), "How could the British people permit this? I mean, it's their system — the imperial system, or the English system — to begin with." David answered, "The British people wouldn't permit it. The question is whether they remain the British people."
I have thought about that story in the last few weeks.
I suppose it's still possible for the election to break strongly one way or the other; obviously I'd prefer one way a lot more than the other, but either direction is more palatable than a 50/50 split that will doom us to four more years of "missing mandates" and "stolen election" claims and legislative paralysis that can't be shaken loose by anything shy of another 9/11. Which, by the way, I'm feeling more and more as though is the only thing that can reawaken our interest in the war on which we embarked on 9/12, seemingly unaware that three years later we would have shelved it to the backs of our minds in favor of reality shows and celebrity worship and the rest of the lotuses that we stuff down our throats whenever we can possibly get away with it.
I'm sorry if this is uncharacteristically morbid. Maybe I'm just driving down my expectations, so tomorrow won't be too painful even if we lose. Maybe if it weren't election season, the American people would indeed speak with a more unanimous voice on the subject of Islamic terrorism, and maybe we would prove we're still who our movies say we are. But to me, nothing's more disheartening than after all we've collectively been through, after all the suffering and all the pain and all the joy and all the remarkable transformation we've all witnessed, seeing the election come down to another toss-up.
Please, please let me be proved wrong.
UPDATE: Reader Thom T. expands on this thought:
You stated that, even more important than confronting the terrorists, the worst thing that could happen is that this nation finds itself incapable of making a decision in times of turmoil, and displays itself as such to the world. You are absolutely right. I would put it a different way, though: the worst thing that could happen tomorrow, for the long-term health of the republic, is a repeat of 2000.
I have several friends who are fellow Republicans/conservative/people of the Right who still do not understand that we are in a tripartite war, and that the Islamist are the latest entrant, not the second. These people also still trust the Big Media model for their news, disparrage blogs, and at least one or two of them will be voting for Kerry. The first battle in this war was the one between Alger Hiss and Whitaker Chambers; all HUAC activity before that case was a series of skirmishes. Chambers framed it perfectly in "Witness", his autobiography: communism succeeded to the extent that it did for one very basic, primal reason. It inspired people to DO SOMETHING. What was being done was incidental, until the other side responded. Thus, freedom, and free people, could only win to the extent that freedom was able to awaken its supporters to do something in response, with at least the same degree of passion that communism had roused its supporters.
And it was only at that point that the precise temporal ideological battle would matter, because in essence, communism was nothing new, not even when Marx and Engels published "Das Kapital". Freedom and Communism were only the two terms currently being applied to a battle that went back to the beginning of humankind: the battle of Man vs. God (or, as Thomas Sowell put it, in a way which I prefer, the constrained vision vs. the unconstrained vision). And that, to me, is what this election is about. It is the latest battle between those who think they know best, and will stop at nothing to depose one who disagrees with them, and those who have no such delusions of their own infallibility, and who will do what IS in their power to do to secure our safety, and will thus take the most direct route possible toward that goal, even if that route is a horrible one, because it is also the route that is the best of a bad lot.
Chambers believed that the reason that liberals of the time could never bring themselves to condemn the likes of Hiss is because in their minds, Hiss was only half-wrong. I believe that we are now seeing the seeds that were planted then come to full bloom, and that we have, since that time, been in a war against the type of people who would support Hiss, and now support Kerry, and, more importantly, themselves, because they believe they are so wise and infallible that they can solve the terrorism problem if THEY could just sit down with all the relevant parties and talk it all out.
And it is their intransigence regarding the reality of the situation that has created the current deadlock, America's inablility to either fuck or die, if you will. This war, since the late '40s, has been more truly between those in the West who would rise to their own defense, and those in the West who would remain asleep, than between all of us and any third party, such as the Soviet Union or al Queda.
And that is why you are absolutely correct: the worst aspect of this election is the deadlock between the "Men of the West", if I may borrow from Tolkein. :) And that is why the best outcome of this election is a decisive victory, NO MATTER WHO WINS. You're absolutely right: we can survive a Kerry presidency, although the cost in blood and treasure will be higher than if Bush wins. What we can't survive is another 2000, Bush-Gore type result, something that will tear both the U.S. and the West apart. Even if Kerry wins, the sleepers can still be roused to rise and fight. If we tear ourselves apart, however, we do al Queda's job for them.
Central to this argument is the question of whether the fundamental struggle between the abovementioned opposed forces that have manifested themselves differently over the centuries is a pendulum-like affair, or a one-way deal. In our current terms, once a society is committed to the gray senescence of socialism and the bartering of freedom for safety and security, can it ever be turned around and rolled back through formal means, without bloody revolution?
I really don't know, but from my perspective it sure doesn't look like it. That's why I'm so dead-set against giving up any ground now, irrational though it might appear to friends and acquaintances who wonder just what could have driven me so far off the deep end.
And Christopher M. mails:
FWIW: I think President Bush will win, by a comfortable margin in the popular vote and a wide margin in the Electoral College. Just my "gut feeling," plus a suspicion that many will choose him in the privacy of the polling booth, no matter what they've told friends, pollsters....
In the long term however, I have the sinking feeling that we may be losing. That is to say: unashamed love of country, service to the nation, valor, steadfast devotion to the cause of freedom--all these seem to be slowly dying. In Britain we see the near future--a land that fought the Nazis alone in 1940 under Churchill is now a place where Tony Blair is reviled for the crime of standing up to Islamic terrorism. We are only millimeters behind them.
(Actually the rot was already there when Churchill took power--read the biography by William Manchester. Lord Halifax was just the most prominent of the urbane voices sneering at Churchill's lack of sophistication, urging the Government to sue for peace with Hitler. Heck, read Orwell's commentary on the times.)
What to do? In the short term: fight at the ballot box. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Long term? Better minds than mine are needed....
Exactly. Even if we "win", what will we have won?
Just so everyone knows, I'm not predictin' jack. Sorry if that disappoints anyone.
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Brian Tiemann
