The American public was actually skeptical about attacking Iraq up until near the invasion date. It took a massive Madison Avenue disinformation campaign to ultimately sell the war. Imagine, just for a moment, if Colin Powell had resigned as Secretary of State a month before the war, saying that he couldn’t be part of such a tragedy and such a lie. Bush was still commander-in-chief, and he would have done what he wanted to do, of course. But it would have been so much harder for him, and the explicit costs would have risen dramatically had Powell had the courage to change the channel so dramatically on Bush’s ceaseless war commercial. Rove no doubt would have calculated that a Powell resignation would change considerably the betting line on Election 2004. Where it had seemed that, even if the worst happened in Iraq (it did), his candidate could still have stumbled across the finish line a year-and-a-half later, by hook or by crook (he did), Rove would have known that Powell’s defection would have substantially narrowed the margin for error in Iraq. He would have understood that the public would have been much more primed to blame Bush for a stupid policy gone wrong if it had been launched in explicit defiance of Powell’s moral warning shot across the bow. If Bush had gone up against the once-mighty Colin Powell in a moral showdown, he would have had, minimally, to get Iraq very, very right. Of course, anything but that is what ultimately transpired.
Obviously, Colin Powell is no Democrat, but in many ways his old, pre-sell-out persona transcended partisan politics in America. I’ve used his name here simply because he illustrates the principle in question better than any Democrat could, though the concept is the same. Powell’s apostasy would have produced many laudable effects. It would have raised the stakes dramatically for Bush, perhaps to the point of forcing him to call off the war. Perhaps as importantly, it would presented a new concept for Americans to even entertain. How many of them knew at the time (or even now) that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11? How many of them managed to consider that possession of WMD, even had that been true, was hardly a reason to justify war? How many of them thought through the consequences of invading a country with historically hostile ethnic divisions, if they even knew (as Bush did not) the difference between Sunni, Shia and Kurd? How many would dare to let themselves think, especially in the shadow of 9/11 hysteria, that opposing the commander-in-chief’s supposed crucial national security (also supposed) initiative was not only acceptable, but even quite patriotic? How many can be that independent in a sea of yellow ribbon bumper-stickers and bunting-laced war cheerleading masked as news coverage? Not many. Not only could you get yourself shunned as some kinda commie-raghead-terrorist-sympathizer for thinking like this in many places, you might get your butt severely kicked as well.
But what if the leadership of the opposition party was boldly arguing the alternative case, with, as it turns out in this scenario, a massive helping of truth on their side? The risk to Democrats in the short term might have been substantial, but only if one sets aside that they were hammered as being weak on security anyhow, just as they always have been by the McCarthys, Nixons, Reagans and Bushes of this world, who never miss a chance to use national security (and race, and gay-baiting, and...) as a political cudgel, just as they always will. What Democrats so devoted to their own self-destruction always miss, however, is the vicious cycle their silence locks them into every time they refuse to step into the ring with GOP thugs. Not countering Republican lies gives those lies additional power, thus actually driving the Democrats deeper into a hole. Besides, in the long-term, the positive effects of offering a counter-narrative would have been devastating to the GOP, and might well have ended the war by now, given its multiple and manifest failures, by ramping up public disgust and much more deeply discrediting Bush and his cronies.
The same is true across the board of policy issues. There was a near vacuum of opposition when Bush took a meat-axe to slashing taxes. What if there had been a wholesale argument against this foolishness as fiscally irresponsible and incredibly unkind to our children? What if the supposed opposition party had stood four-square and loudly against torture and everything associated with Guantánamo? What if the Democrats had forcefully demanded action on global warming? And so on. The list is endless.
Of course, few of these actions would have been likely to change the behavior of the Bush administration. But they would have significantly raised the stakes for them to indulge in their destructive follies. As it’s been, instead, there has been far too little gamble associated with their reckless policies, not least because they can, partly correctly, claim widespread retrospective support for their actions. Thus, even when it all comes a cropper – as it does every time – there’s little penalty since no one was out there in advance saying what a bad idea this or that policy was. The esteem of Bush and his regressive acolytes has fallen, but largely only because the disastrous products of his policy choices are so bloated as to be transparent to even a tuned-out public. Imagine how much deeper and more permanent would have been the plunge had these policies been adopted in the face of serious prior opposition.
What is clear is that the politics we get are ultimately the product of an interaction between various agents able to shape the discourse and influence the other agents. During the meltdown of the Bush years, almost every one of these actors was MIA – Congress, the courts, the press, the public – and the opposition party. For the most part, the only beacon of sanity for many of these years was coming from abroad.
This is a problem worse than the sum of its parts, and this again explains why the role of an opposition party is so crucial in exercising epistemological leadership. It is clear that these various agents of potential opposition exist in a reactive universe, interactively swirling against each other into a vicious or virtuous cycle. If no one in the opposition party is saying that it is complete madness and shamelessly immoral to invade Iraq (as few did), no one in the media is going to be emboldened to articulate that position (as few were), nor is Congress (it didn’t). Can it be any wonder, then, that the public – lacking any leadership whatsoever on the issue – largely writes itself out of the equation (as they mostly did)?
It takes a little courage – a term not often found in the same sentence as the word Democrat these days – but one begins to see how crucial it is for legitimated, supposedly in-the-know leadership figures to articulate a counter-narrative if the public is to be engaged, and if the stakes are to be raised for bad policy choices. Most people can’t, or won’t, get there on their own, especially when doing so is not only lonely and unpopular, but also made out to be essentially treasonous.
In fact, however, during this disastrous epoch in American history, it was ultimately the public who led their ‘leadership’ in the Democratic Party, and continue to do so now. In almost every case the public is out front of the Democratic politicians, who nervously lick all ten of their fingers and stick them in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. Meanwhile, even gale-force hurricanes have already passed them by without their knowing.
That dynamic of followers leading ‘leaders’ means that progressive change is going to be slow to occur – or at least slower. But there is also a certain virtue to public-led policymaking, and a significant small-d democratic flavor to it.
If the American public is demanding enough of progressive change, we’ll ultimately be able to wrest it from the walking sheets of litmus paper (especially Madame Clinton) who call themselves the Democratic Party.
It’s just that we could have had the same result with the added bonus of a million Iraqis and thousands of Americans still alive today, a semblance of fiscal sanity, a revived New Orleans, a start on solving global warming, and much, much more – had there been an opposition party actually resident in America these last years.
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