If our old friends around the world can see a truly significant shift in the spirit with which America now wields its power in the world, what's the matter with these leftists who cannot see it?
This form of blindness -in which all shades of gray are simply seen as black""is a real disability. Blind to the new, deeper evil -in which America's worst elements become its ruling spirit""and thus misconceiving the nature of the battle we face, those who, with their passion for justice, might spearhead the battle to turn back this darkness may instead make themselves irrelevant to the present struggle.
This same kind of blindness is manifested, too, in the tendency to treat the inept and impotent Democratic opposition as the moral equivalent of the Bushites. They voted for the Iraq war after all, the leftist argument goes, so they are the same as the Bushites. But it is doubtful that any other American leadership in our times -any of our former presidents, or Gore, or Kerry""would have given us this particular war in Iraq. The more we learn about it, the more clear it becomes that nearly everything about it -from the pervasive deceptions, to the insatiable and uncheked lust for domination, to the political blackmail, to the outright incompetence born of arrogance""was remarkable in the history of American domestic politics and international conduct.
But the mind-set that dismisses all shades of gray as black will waste its days seeking the pure and unsullied. As the pure and unsullied are hardly ever to be found in the precincts of power, this quest would --just as much as the inability of the Democratic leadership to speak with moral power and conviction-- condemn leftist America to impotence.
Noble Posturing as an End in Itself
But then there is the question: do these leftists really care about such impotence? I regard it as an urgent matter to take power away from these forces of darkness and to see that it is wielded by others who care about more than their own power, who have some decent regard for the common good.
I wonder, though, whether some of my interlocutors -and should-be allies-- on the left truly share that central concern about who ends up wielding power.
I had an exchange not long ago with a woman who spoke to me in a celebratory way about Ralph Nader's run for the presidency in 2000. She was making the general point that people should never vote for the less objectionable candidate, but only for the person whose public stands on the issues match their own values and beliefs. I asked her whether, in view of all that has happened, she didn't wish that the 96,000 people in Florida who voted for Nader in 2000 had instead voted for their second choice. If they had, I said, then we would have been spared this whole dark and terrible Bushite presidency.
Not at all, she replied. "That's what the essence of democracy is," she explained. Democracy "is about voting for the person you most want and not having to concern yourself about the results."
I don't know what moral philosophy this woman may hold, that she would regard it a virtue to be able to act without concern for the results. But one thing would seem incontrovertibly clear: if, in the political arena, people who care about results are competing against people who don't care about results, the likely result is that the first group will gain power and the second group will be rendered impotent.
My exchange with the Naderite was brought back to my mind by another part of that interaction I had with the leftists in that college audience in the Northwest.
I had proposed a strategy that I believe offers our best hope for defeating the Bushite regime. This strategy is based on several premises.
First, I believe that to defeat these people -dominating as they do all three branches of government, catered to as they are by the mainstream media, and backed as they are by many of the private empires of wealth in America""it is necessary to get the main body of American public opinion (say, 60%) behind us. Only then, I believe, might the politicians (concerned about re-election) act as they should and only then might the media (concerned about ratings) tell the story as they should.
Second, because liberal America failed to rouse itself early on to combat the right-wing campaign to poison the minds of the American people -by using propaganda techniques to make "liberal" a dirty word (reflexively heard as the equivalent of immoral, irresponsible, ungodly)-- a lot of important issues simply play into the hands of the Bushites. Because liberal America slept while the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove have disabled tens of millions of our countrymen from thinking clearly or fairly about any issue which casts a shadow on the liberal-vs.-conservative dimension, we're compelled to deal with the sad consequences: even those issues on which the views of a majority of Americans are more like those of liberals than those of the Bushites have seemed in recent years to play out to the political advantage of the Bushite forces.
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