Loyal Opposition

Inaugural Doggerel, With Thanks to George W. Bush and Rudyard Kipling

2005-01-20T13:46:00.000-08:00

“Dubya Bush,” in the style of “Gunga Din”

You may talk of your “blue states”
When you eat your gourmet plates
And you sip on wines from California’s valleys.
But when all hell’s broken loose,
And villains try to cook your goose,
You’ll thank God when each “red state” soldier rallies.
Now, post-Cold War and post-Clinton
Our learned class paid scant attention
And assumed that trade would make the whole world love you.
When this wretched myth was dashed
As four hijacked airplanes crashed
We found a finer chief commander in old “Dubya.”

It was “Bush! Bush! Bush!
You spoiled usurper, Bush!
Dynasty! Recount!
Make the cowboy Pres. dismount!
For America is saddled with this Bush!”

The English Dubya spoke
Would easily provoke
An opposition seething as it hated.
The Senator’s son Gore
Whom the Left had backed before
Would never say “misunderestimated.”
The ship of state they feared capsized
And we’d all be Texanized
As George lassoed Yankees with his Bible Belt.
For all the scripture and tax cuts
Must have proven he was nuts,
But the Left needed no proof for what it felt.

It was “Bush! Bush! Bush!
The brainless heir, George Bush!
I’d sooner move to Canada
Or start up my own intifada
Than grant a word of praise to Dubya Bush!”

His appointments were diverse,
But this only made it worse.
Rivals screamed advisers had all true control,
And they strove to make it known
That the force behind the throne
Was someone else, but disagreed about which soul.
Was Bush a John Ashcroft fanatic,
Or like Kissinger, pragmatic?
Henry’s protégés filled the administration:
Cheney, Rice and Powell
Still made progressives howl;
And neocons drew further salivation.

It was “Bush! Bush! Bush!
You right-wing throwback, Bush!
Are you Nixon? Are you Reagan?
Artful Dodger to Rove’s Fagin?
You uncivilized Republican, George Bush!”

I shan’t forget the day
When the false peace went away
And jihadists killed by thousands in one hour.
And as my anti-Bush friends cried
I knew why the victims died:
For years, we’d been a lazy superpower.
We near-forgot the whole Cold War,
With conflicts orphaned by the score,
And First Worlders talked of subsidies and glamour
While old threats had converged
And the new terror had surged
As the rust grew on the sickle and the hammer.

It was “Bush! Bush! Bush!
You insane crusader, Bush!
Is your new war a huge put on?
Shouldn’t we all just Move On?
Can’t we be more European, Dubya Bush?”

And while the left-wing cursed
Our decline had been reversed.
Bush’s White House led America, reborn.
Soon we put the world on notice
That according to our POTUS
Rogue states were very worthy of our scorn.
Bush was not without his flaws,
But he was balanced by our laws
And he knew terror was an act of total war:
That for all the “non-state actors”
And the “background social factors”
Our armed force alone would even up the score.

I voted “Bush! Bush! Bush!”
The Dems gave me a bad primary
Where I could not vote contrary.
But the Bush Doctrine’s visionary:
You’re a better man than Kerry, Dubya Bush!

One Week After

2004-11-10T18:05:00.000-08:00

George Bush's re-election was confirmed seven mornings ago by a modest but considerable margin of roughly three and a half million votes or three percentage points. Now there is a great deal of hand-wringing over the extent of Bush's mandate. Republicans and conservatives are gloating while Democrats and progressives are panicking. One almost gets the impression that neither side anticipated that there would be a winner and a loser. How else can one explain hysteria over a fairly narrow 51%-48% divide (both nationally and in Ohio) as if it were an unforseen landslide? Even the poetically populist Bill Moyers and his successor David Brancaccio reminded their TV audiences that each candidate won 43%-45% of the total votes in the combined states won by his opponent. Talk of mass emigration, partition, secession and civil war is more than a bit exaggerated.

I have already written that the noisy sexual moralism of this year's campaign was a powerful force, but also mostly a senior citizen voting trend. Institutional homophobia is the prevailing wisdom of the dying generation; the same elders, however, also have the highest voter turnout. Youth-oriented "Rock the Vote" campaigning, despite a lot of sentimental hopes, does not yield a high enough rate to overwhelm the senior citizen ballots. It never has, contrary to the myth that MTV helped Bill Clinton to unseat George H.W. Bush in 1992, and it probably never will. There are different predominant temperaments across age groups, and in the age of birth control the older ones outnumber the younger ones. Ultimately, banning gay marriage was not the chief means of Bush's re-election. It might be the case, on the other hand, that the push for gay marriage in the last year was the reason for the hastened victory of backlash votes against the same in eleven states.

Putting aside the demographics of anti-homosexuality, the Democrats under Senator Kerry were beaten somewhat badly. David Brooks argues that the myth of the deterministic "values" vote obscures a more startling development: namely, Bush won a higher share of votes in the bulk of the Democrat/Kerry majority states than he had in 2000. The President improved his performance in New York, in Connecticut and even in Kerry's home state of Massachusetts.

Bush's "minority presidency" is no more. Bill Clinton, remember, had two "minority administrations" and won the first because of Ross Perot's effect on the GOP vote in 1992. Despite Republican control of Congress, he barely eked out a plurality re-election in 1996. Perhaps the two wins obscured the Democrats' increasing vulnerability throughout the 1990s. By contrast, the 2004 incumbent who was ostensibly the "most polarizing national figure" in the history of everything has now won over a raw majority of the country. Many of Bush's newer supporters, like myself, preferred his Republican war strategy to the Democrats'. I cannot emphasize this issue enough, for it is the reason that I held my nose and forgave Bush's right-wing cultural politics.

The Democratic Party, by contrast, spent most of the last four years with a rudderless foreign policy. As the opposition party, it had no need for consensus. Perhaps the most polarized was the divide between an increasingly anti-war grassroots base and an initially pro-war leadership. The national Democrats gave near-unanimous support to operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. (The exception, Rep. Barbara Lee, won easy re-election last week.) The war in Iraq broke that consensus, and put hawkish party elites in conflict with an increasingly dovish rank-and-file.

The Democrats' dilemma, then and now, was whether or not to oppose the escalation of war against terrorists and rogue states. The Kerry/Edwards ticket was an attempt to bridge the gap: two nominees who once supported a wider war, then grew displeased with the administration conducting it. It was not enough to win the country, and not enough to win my vote.

The defeated party may now wish to pursue a more determined anti-war course, perhaps along the lines of Senator George McGovern's failed 1972 candidacy. Being out of power, the Democrats have little incentive to applaud the policies of those who have the responsibility of exercising it. Radicals to the Left of the Democrats may soon despair even further. I often worry that the stripe of campus/cosmopolitan Marxists may turn to violence like their Baby Boom predecessors. Let us sincerely hope they do not.

In any case, the Democrats are in a dire strait: during wartime, they are torn in two. It would take a great deal to overcome anti-war sentiment in the party. If the fight against Islamic fascism remains popular in general--as I suspect it will--then the Republicans will be the ones running the show. Moderates who might disagree on other issues will continue supporting the GOP for the sake of triumph in battle.

For the Democrats to win back the White House, they would have to do so with a more pro-war candidate. Indeed, a generation of geostrategic thinking tinged by the New Left would need to be discarded. The more progressive wing of the party would have to trade aspirations of restoring social democracy for Third Way centrism and a larger military budget.

If the residual strength of a dovish left-wing requires that the Democrats stand for twentieth century entitlement programs and the Vietnam Syndrome, then they will be the permanent minority. In that situation, the party would risk splitting between semi-Greens and centrists. A winner-take-all system makes this more unlikely, but one cannot rule it out. My guess is that the left-wing party would be the smaller one, while a larger centrist one might siphon-off considerable moderate Republican support and split the GOP. Unfortunately, the middle-of-the-road majority party is usually just a fantasy. During larger realignments, one might rule temporarily before the third party switches sides. For example, in 1968 Nixon won as a centrist against the Democrats and right-wing Southerner George Wallace; soon the splinter voters became Republicans.

Now, presuming that the Democrats are about to make a hard Left turn, and that the puritan Republicans are disproportionately elderly, I cautiously predict that GOP moderates will become more powerful over time. In the next few years, I suspect Bush will try to maximize the number and extent of conservative reforms. The four Republican U.S. Senate seats from Maine and Pennsylvania might prove susceptible to Democratic contenders, while a fifth held by Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island might go the way of Jim Jeffords' and leave the party. The Senate is the first place where the GOP could lose its current monopoly, and there the moderates would be the most vulnerable. The House of Representatives' districts are gerrymandered to the point of perversity, foretelling little change before the next national census. In presidential contests, however, I see an enduring Democratic weakness and a likely Republican strength.

A more rabid Democratic Party in 2008 and after will give the Republicans the opportunity to keep power with comparative centrism. McCain, Giuliani and Schwarzenegger have already bedazzled many swing voters and moderate Democrats, and they are the key to future victory. Bush has many fine qualities, but an inflexible social conservatism (aside from being objectionable in its own right) cannot have a great longevity in a cosmopolitan U.S. society. Wartime emergency and a weak challenger can give a culturally half-reactionary administration a very broad base of support. A more lasting strategy requires pragmatism, compromise and modernization. Considering the Republican moderates have greater popularity than Democrat counterparts like Joe Lieberman and the now-retiring Dick Gephardt, I think the former will ascend in coming years.

Feeling Not So Gay?

2004-11-09T19:25:00.000-08:00

The great, big U.S. election is over and my blog has been silent for a week. Like many people across the political spectrum, I felt an exhausted relief after a winner was announced.

I'll begin with the caveat that some have said that the election was not really determined by gay rights and the backlash against them. "Moral values" was the top criterion for an estimated twenty-one million Bush voters, leaving about thirty-eight million others. Bush won Ohio by around three points in 2000, and did so again; the heterosexual marriage initiative in that state had the support of one third of Democrats as well as most Republicans. This was more or less true in most places. An earlier California referendum banning gay marriage passed with sixty-one percent, as is typical of "blue states." In "red states," such laws pass with seventy percent. Vive la difference?

The Democrats should not abandon gay rights, but no one should be suprised that there was a backlash. The fact that courts and local governments were the only effective bodies that could support gay marriage underscores that overwhelming numbers of voters opposed it. State and federal executives and legislatures have no popular backing in favor of extending marriage rights, and we all knew that going in to this election.

According to gay Massachussetts' US Rep. Barney Frank, it was not so much a question of "closeting" these reforms as it was a question of timing and strategy, i.e., would it have killed my mayor Gavin Newsom to wait until 2005? Or for civil unionism to have been used piecemeal toward marriage? (Notice how Bush said states should determine civil union laws right before the election? Even if he was being insincere, that's a startling cosmetic concession.)

Considering how much the SF Greens and more immoderate Dems hate the guy, Newsom pushed for same sex marriage licenses in order to guard his own Left flank as much as anything else. True, as a West Coast liberal it was only natural for him to oppose Bush's plans to ban the same, and as a politician to for him to take a stand against the President's goal. Could Newsom have just sued California first, rather than using the city and county against the state and then litigating as a second choice? (I'll leave aside the slippery slope of usurping authority: what if some right-wing township copies Newsom and puts creationism in the public school curriculum? Is ideological mutiny a good trend in government?) Although Newsom took a brave stand for civil rights--on the correct side of history, and all that--he may have helped to mobilize the measure's currently more numerous opponents. A brilliant tactic to undercut Newsom's local rivals might have been a great disservice to the party nationally, perhaps even to the cause as well.

On a happier note, the opposition to gay rights is predominant among the elderly and attracts only a minority among the young. It is "only" a matter of time, but that means also that it is truly a matter of time. It is one thing to support gay rights because they are correct; it is quite another to assume that doing so will suddenly win over large numbers of people who view gays with antipathy. If anything, that's just stupidity about strategy.

The Democrats supported desegregation and civil rights in the 1948 presidential platform but they and the non-partisan movement could not pass a bloody law until 1964. Times changed, and the blessed court intervened along the way in 1954.

The future of gay rights will go the same way: state by state, court by court, before reaching a critical (i.e., federal) mass. As a moderate Republican who supports gay marriage, I expect to see inroads through the courts in the more liberal states. I expect the whole process will take a decade or two. Furthermore, fence-sitters will be more comfortable in the short term with granting gay couples marriage rights under a different name. This is a shame, but also an opportunity to push for civil unions far and wide as a major step. Pretending that it will happen much more quickly because we the young are so enlightened is vanity: not only self-deceptive, but electorally self-destructive.

Which leads to my general observation on recent elections: if one is progressive enough to have even flirted with liking Nader (without voting for him), OR to have assumed that America would applaud San Franciscan daring from coast to coast with no obstacles, then one is in no position to judge "what is needed to win" in national politics.

Thank You, Citizen Journal

2004-11-09T16:51:00.000-08:00

William Lalor's new website was very kind to republish my assessment of pre-election advise from "The Nation". Much oliged. According to "San Francisco Chronicle" columnist the Night Cabbie, my piece was "okay." Huurah for my very first instance of faint but public praise from a genuine Hearst Company employee.

SF Television Newscaster Howler

2004-11-02T17:00:00.000-08:00

Belva Davis of KRON Channel 4 in San Francisco just said that those little states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida--with twenty, twenty-one and twenty-seven electoral votes, respectively--do not sound big to Califiornians. We have fifty-five electoral votes, and are therefore oh-so-important. Her fellow panelists chuckled in agreement.

If the Golden State has one eighth of the country's people, and therefore one eighth of the country's problems, it might also have one eighth of the country's narcissism. When the fourth largest state strikes a major local broadcaster as relatively small potatoes, Northern California's chattering classes are exhibiting a psychological problem.

Stop Carole Migden, Vote Felder

2004-11-02T13:57:00.000-08:00

Crooked and high-handed Carole Migden should not be elected to State Senate District 3.
If you don't believe me, here's a story from "San Francisco Chronicle" columnists Phil Matier and Andrew Ross. She treats democracy like her personal servant and will not acknowledge her opponent, Andrew Felder. San Francisco, Marin and Sonoma counties, please support the socially liberal Republican instead of the machine candidate who did not bother to respect the public in her campaign.

How Creepy is Ira Ruskin's State Assembly Campaign? A Liberal Democrat in Palo Alto Reports

2004-11-02T13:23:00.000-08:00

Andy Bayer hates George Bush and honestly believes that John Kerry and the left-wing of the Democratic Party will be America's salvation. Even Bayer has been put off by stealth-campaigning in southern San Mateo County on behalf of shoddy Democrat Ira Ruskin's run for State Assembly. A former Redwood City official with no endorsements from a single newspaper--but plenty from the political machine--Ruskin is one of few Bay Area contenders who faces a challenge from a liberal Republican. Steve Poizner, by contrast, impressed both the "San Jose Mercury News" and the usually partisan "San Francisco Chronicle." People of State Assembly District 21, I implore you: JOIN STEVE.

What About Congressional Races in California?

2004-11-02T13:12:00.000-08:00

A fancy lad asked me how straight-ticket Republican voting in fifty-three congressional races--the most in any state in this nation--could be centrist.

That's fair question, and my brief answer: every district is a safe district and the majority delegation is Democrat. Selecting the GOP would be relatively indeterminate in most of the races statewide, which will be won or lost by large margins; the net result will still be a Republican minority delegation to the House.

Some of the seats so safe, in fact, that there might not be an opposition candidate. We all remember an important childhood lesson: safety first.

Jim Sparkman, Thank You Again

2004-11-02T13:04:00.000-08:00

ChronWatch has republished my story on Claudia Bermudez and her challenge to semi-traitor Rep. Barbara Lee. Thank you again, Jim Sparkman, for giving my work a forum.

Somebody Please vote Bill Jones for U.S. Senate.

2004-11-02T13:00:00.000-08:00

Please? Pretty please? Senator Barbara Boxer did not even know that the United States had enemeis prior to 2001--even though she chair a subcommittee on counter-terrorism.

Bill Jones, unfortunately, never gathered much steam or purchased a television ad; and Boxer's campaign finances dwarfed his.

Let's put her out of business, or at least give her a zesty....protest vote.

I would rather be represented by an incompetent campaigner than an incompetent U.S. Senator.

Speaking as a California Centrist.....

2004-11-02T04:35:00.000-08:00

I advise voting straight-ticket Republican in all state and federal races. Bush is not going to win this state, so if you are a moderate who does not like Kerry, why give the bastard a graveyard ballot? This goes for still-undecided (or really, unexcited) swing voters in all of the "blue" states. Do not give the contemporary parody of John F. Kennedy a free pass if the Republicans are not going to win your state anyway.

Regarding California, save our legislature. Enough is enough.

Slate snapshot predicts a dead heat

2004-11-02T04:20:00.000-08:00

As of 2:30 AM Eastern Time, Slate's electoral college index forsees a presidential tie. (Okay, then it retracts the same suggestion.) How miserable a thought, but at least it would be over quickly in the House of Representaives.

Thank You, CaliforniaRepublic.org

2004-11-02T04:14:00.000-08:00

The very good people at CaliforniaRepublic.org have posted my endorsement profile of Congressional candidate Jennifer DePalma and State Senate-hopeful Andrew Felder. Thank you, my fellow not-so-vast right-wing co-conspirators.

Intimidation Tactics Against Republicans at San Francisco State University

2004-11-02T03:55:00.000-08:00

My colleague Lee Kaplan has a new story about the harassment of student Republicans at San Francisco State University. Does anybody know why the radical Left is so pathological on college campuses and/or in the Bay Area? Some day a local youth is going to start the next Weather Underground or Symbionese Liberation Army and inflict some real (if amateur) damage. When the Man comes for them, I will appplaud.

Defeat Rep. Barbara Lee, and Elect Claudia Bermudez

2004-11-02T03:33:00.000-08:00

Claudia Bermudez is a fighter. Although the underdog, she has raised the strongest Republican opposition to Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland, CA) that the incumbent has ever seen. “The time is come for someone as fearless as me to run against her,” said the challenger in an interview with the author.

For Bermudez, challenging a powerful leftist is nothing new. Neither is iconoclasm. “My father fought the communists in the mountains of Nicaragua, so I can certainly fight a communist here wearing high heels,” as she told the Oakland Tribune. Daughter of slain Contra co-founder Enrique Bermudez, she muses that her tenacious conservatism might be in her DNA. A longtime resident of the left-leaning Bay Area, she added “I can’t see myself living anyplace else.” She was an outspoken in college, also. “When my professors were Marxist, I never hid the fact that I was a conservative,” and she does not intend to do so now.

After leaving Nicaragua in her youth, Bermudez lived for a time in Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s pseudo-democratic oligarchy before arriving in San Francisco’s Mission District. During the tumultuous rise of the New Left in that neighborhood, she and her family stood apart. “It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. First people became my friends. Then they became my enemies.” With her father’s background as a military officer and his upbringing as an old (i.e., pre-Sandinista) Managua gentleman, Claudia nurtured a conservative ethos in an unfriendly time and place.

She was a traditionalist and anti-communist surrounded by revolutionary fellow travelers and occasionally shocking violence. At the height of the 1960s unrest, Bermudez saw a National Guard tank deployed on 24th Street while a race riot was being quelled. On a visceral, emotional level she felt that it was “improper to be ungrateful” toward the United States and “didn’t feel compelled” by radicalism. “I knew I was lucky to be here and didn’t feel I needed to be angry.” She considered the Leftist movement as both unnecessarily vitriolic and also as the ironically privileged beneficiaries of American freedom and abundance.

Locally, the MEChA-allied Brown Berets were all the rage with young Chicanos who sought to emulate groups like the Black Panthers. Their rhetoric was a Marxist and separatist blend concentrated on the image of the American Southwest and California as “occupied Aztlan,” the ancestral lands forsaken by the medieval Aztecs when they moved south to conquer pre-Hispanic Central Mexico. While the Left sported a paramilitary chic, the officer’s daughter starched her blouses. A cousin lost an eye while serving in Vietnam, but neither he nor Claudia Bermudez’s family turned against the war effort. “I didn’t get on that bandwagon of blaming America first.”

Eventually, Enrique Bermudez was more afraid of international terrorism than tense American domestic politics. As the 1960s rebellion ebbed in the United States, another one escalated in Nicaragua. In the age of Cuban contacts with U.S. groups like the Panthers, the Weather Underground and the Venceremos Brigade, Castro’s imitators surged across Latin America. The Nicaraguan Marxists donned the mantle of the long-dead nationalist warlord Augusto Cesar Sandino, calling themselves the Sandinista National Liberation Front. For eighteen years, the FSLN fought the dynastic Somoza presidents and the Guardia Nacional, in which Enrique Bermudez was eventually a Colonel. He was fearful of contacts between foreign communists and their American sympathizers. Particularly after the Sandinistas seized power in 1979, Claudia’s father feared that she might be the target of kidnapping or assassination.

For over a decade, Enrique Bermudez helped to coordinate a broad opposition as the pro-Soviet Sandinista government grew more authoritarian. The resistance quickly linked dispossessed peasants, oppressed indigenous tribes and conservative Nicaraguans together with former anti-Somoza FSLN allies and members. It was known informally as the Contra movement, short for “contrarevolucion,” but officially called the National Democratic Force.

The Nicaraguan Civil War reminds Claudia Bermudez of the war in Iraq today. “How many times in the 1980s did I hear it wasn’t working?” Despite accusations of corruption and the mass media’s dire predictions of a permanent Third World quagmire, U.S. assistance helped a determined, diverse and democratic coalition to overcome well-armed and well-organized opponents. “Today the turbas,” street enforcers of the old Sandinista regime, “are driving taxis.” Bermudez predicts a similar future for the Islamist and Ba’athist insurgents in Iraq.

In both conflicts, she has viewed the struggles as dangerous but necessary. Back in Managua, her father Enrique was assassinated in 1991 shortly after the defeat of the FSLN by the Contra-allied democratic opposition. Presently, she has a brother serving in Iraq who will soon be joined by a cousin. Bermudez says that she prays they survive the hazards of war in the Middle East, but will not waver from the goal of victory. Between the American forces and the emerging Iraqi military, she expects that a persistent U.S. effort can defeat the anti-democratic terrorists. The worried tone of mass media coverage about Iraq only reminds her of the premature and mistaken pessimism the press gave to Contras. Considering the outcome of the Nicaraguan struggle, Bermudez is also confident that her politics will ultimately triumph again.

Today, Claudia Bermudez confronts a left-liberal incumbent who is also a veteran of the local Bay Area political environment. Rep. Lee and many of her supporters organized regional opposition to the U.S.-Contra alliance. In Bermudez’s mind, their rhetoric against America’s role as a superpower has changed very little since her arrival decades ago.

The incumbent Lee is a formidable opponent with a decades-old base of power. Barbara Lee spent many years as chief of staff to Oakland Rep. Ron Dellums. Elected to the Berkeley City Council in 1967 and Congress in 1970, Dellums acted as a bridge between the left-wing of the Democratic Party and the Black Panthers and other revolutionaries. By the mid-80s, the Congressman was a spokesman for the anti-containment opposition during the late Cold War. The Sandinistas and the short-lived Marxist government of Grenada were particular favorites of his, and Lee served as one of his envoys to the latter before its overthrow by the U.S. invasion of October, 1983. As an opponent of Reagan’s goals with a secure seat on the House Armed Services Committee, Dellums was an early foe of the Contras and the Bermudez family.

Having left his staff to serve eight years in the California legislature, Lee won Dellums’ District 9 seat in a 1998 special election after the Congressman’s sudden retirement during his political prime at age sixty-two. She also inherited Dellums’ staff and the donors’ list he developed over three decades. “Now that I’m a candidate, I know that donors’ lists are more valuable than gold,” Bermudez laughed.

To Claudia Bermudez, Barbara Lee continues injecting the embittered extremism of Ron Dellums into the House of Representatives. With a seat that is generally considered very safe, the current Congresswoman votes to the Left of her entire party as a matter of habit, according to the challenger. The lack of a credible competitor has allowed Lee to float to re-election against GOP candidates that Bermudez calls “sacrificial lambs.”

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Lee was the only member of Congress to oppose declaring war on terrorists in general and in particular the invasion of Afghanistan. Even the usually pacifist Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who co-chairs the Progressive Caucus with Lee, voted for the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a moderate Democrat from neighboring District 10, was outraged and had even threatened to run against Lee at one point.

Claudia Bermudez was horrified that the East Bay GOP activists had not seized the moment two years ago, missing a grand opportunity to challenge Lee. “Had I known the extent of the disarray in the party, I would have run in 2002.” Her own campaign has been far more vigorous, having raised more money this year than seven-term Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles). “Go to OpenSecrets.org, you can see it for yourself!”

Earlier in the year, Bermudez won over supportive volunteers through meet-ups organized on-line. This initial strategy has dovetailed with relentless outreach to the community. Chiding Republicans for passively ignoring disaffected potential voters, she has targeted moderate Democrats who might be alienated by Lee’s more extreme leftism, particularly socially conservative persons of color. “I don’t have anything against Democrats….This is a competition between individuals….If I were to win, it would speak volumes about how people really feel,” showing a split between a radical “loud minority versus a patriotic silent majority.” Bermudez added that the Bay Area has been her true home for decades.

Although herself a social conservative, she has allied with local Log Cabin Republicans who, like her, prioritize national security, the economy and education. “I will not become distracted by wedge issues,” stated Bermudez, instead emphasizing her core agenda. Lee strikes her as a relatively irresponsible foot-dragger in the war on terrorism. Many Bay Area progressives like Rep. Lee, by contrast, have denounced many security measures as Orwellian intrusions rather than vital components of defense. In Bermudez judgment, this is especially egregious considering District 9’s latent vulnerability to attack, particularly at the Port of Oakland.

On domestic issues, Bermudez believes that the economic stimulus provided by tax relief has already begun to hoist the United States out of recession. She hopes to preserve the opportunity for macroeconomic growth by making the tax cuts permanent and allowing enterprising investment. As the successful CEO of SeniorJobShop.com, the first online employment service for persons over fifty, Bermudez is especially sensitive to taxes and regulations that impede small businesses. Lee, on the other hand, supports repeal of the Bush tax cuts on behalf of more generous government entitlements.

While Rep. Lee proposes larger federal spending on education, Bermudez cites the state’s takeover of the ailing Oakland Unified School District and argues that taxpayers need to hold failing schools accountable. The challenger supports the No Child Left Behind Act as a worthwhile first step in this national project, while acknowledging that the law may prove to need some amendment. Lee, like many Democrats, disagrees with Bush’s legislation.

There is little doubt that Rep. Barbara Lee entered this election cycle at a great advantage. Whatever the outcome Tuesday, Claudia Bermudez has nevertheless shown that an outspoken challenger can compete for even the safest seat. “If she doesn’t beat Lee this year, Claudia will do it in 2006,” added Leo Lacayo, an enthusiastic ally from the Republican National Hispanic Assembly. Even if she loses, Bermudez represents a major outreach effort to rebuild the GOP in the Bay Area.

Another Past Nader Voter Turns to George W. Bush

2004-11-02T02:35:00.000-08:00

In addition to my mother and my comrade Cinnamon Stillwell, I have now found a third individual who previously voted for Ralph Nader but now casts a ballot for George W. Bush: Texan Philosophy Professor Keith Burgess-Jackson, writing for TechCentralStation.com.

Could this represent a trend? Might there be a large share of ex-left-wing voters who have become closeted war supporters? If the three of them could become Bush Doctrinaire after a Green episode, how many more? Come out, come out, wherever you are. Take what's in your soul and visit the poll.

Two Wonderful Republican Candidates in San Francisco: Jennifer DePalma for Congress and Andrew Felder for State Senate

2004-11-02T01:35:00.000-08:00

In an election year when Democrats and Republicans are considered polarized, local GOP candidates in San Francisco represent a moderate alternative to partisan extremes.

District 3 State Senate-hopeful Andrew Felder is a self-described Schwarzenegger Republican who is socially liberal and fiscally center-right. Jennifer DePalma is a GOP libertarian running against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in Congressional District 8. Both Republican candidates defy the puritanical party stereotypes and offer a competitive vision of politics to voters.

DePalma’s opponent Pelosi and Felder’s opponent Carole Migden appear falsely centrist to local San Francisco Democrats who are accustomed to a more radical opposition. In truth, Pelosi’s succession to the head of the party Congressional delegation represented a sharp nationwide move Left away from fourteen years of Rep. Dick Gephardt’s more moderate leadership. Former State Assemblywoman Migden was part of the Democrats’ decades-long domination in the legislature. Since 1966, the California party’s excesses have motivated voters to elect Capitol-taming Republican governors seven times from Reagan to the recall as the public attempts to check irresponsible progressive deficits. Gerrymandered safe-districts have usually allowed the more partisan legislators to keep their seats in Sacramento and Washington.

To challenge these confining boundaries, the California Republicans have reinvigorated their drive to support centrists under new chairman Duf Sundheim. After Arnold Schwarzenegger’s smashing 2003 gubernatorial victory, the GOP has launched a new wave of challenges all over the Bay Area. “It did give me hope,” says DePalma. “We can get the economic messages across to people.” South Bay entrepreneur Steve Poizner may become the District 21 State Assemblyman, while East Bay businesswoman and activist Claudia Bermudez has given Oakland’s Rep. Barbara Lee unforeseen competition. They and their San Francisco counterparts are bringing the Republicans back to Northern California, and moderates back into the party.

Attorney Jennifer DePalma bristles at the accusation that Republicans are all identical, much less that they are exclusively wrong. She is pro-choice, favors legal gay marriage, and criticizes the USA PATRIOT Act as excessive. Although the Pittsburgh native had an internship with Pennsylvania’s arch-conservative U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, DePalma always agreed more with her home state’s other Senator, the socially liberal Arlen Specter. A free market advocate, she also regularly takes pro bono cases in her spare time.

She emphasizes her libertarian principles. As a research analyst at Washington’s Cato Institute, the movement’s foremost think-tank, DePalma investigated privacy issues and the information technology industry. These issues, she argues, are not abstract for San Francisco voters who are struggling to rebuild after the dot-com bust. The burden on recuperating investment and employment would be much greater if Bush’s tax cuts were repealed, as Nancy Pelosi wishes. “She doesn’t have an understanding of how small businesses help our economy,” DePalma argues.

Incumbent Pelosi’s voting record is also one of preferring expensive federal services and opposing tax credits that allow citizens to choose the same benefits on an open market. To DePalma and the Republicans, the latter strategy allows a mixture of egalitarian subsidy with free enterprise rather than an unaccountable government bureaucracy. The Democrats have declared Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” to have disappeared, despite the Republican’s historic expansion of Medicare. The sitting president’s use of commercial mechanisms, rather than centralized statist control, drove Pelosi and party into a rage. When mixed with clichés about evangelicalism and global strategy coming in the GOP, the House Minority leader usually coasts back to Washington, D.C. every two years. It is beneath Pelosi to recognize the fact that her opponent DePalma is a cautious pragmatist regarding war and a social libertarian.

As a powerful Congresswoman in a safe district, however, she is inert to acknowledging voters and competitors. “She never debated in a general election,” laments DePalma. In 2002, even New York Times liberal columnist Bill Keller denounced Pelosi for her egregious fundraising and having become distant from the electorate. By keeping her challengers invisible, Pelosi denies the San Franciscan public a clear view of the moderate politics of her local Republican opponents. Even on classic non-ideological pork-barreling, DePalma judges the incumbent a relative failure. Projects like the rehabilitation of the Bayview Hunter’s Point Naval shipyard are “undernourished. She’s letting them linger,” and the city is paying the price. GOP centrists like DePalma offer the viable alternative at San Francisco’s polls, and are struggling to improve their outreach efforts.

In his race for State Senate, mergers and acquisitions consultant Andrew Felder has been making exactly this sort of successful inroads for the local Republicans. Like DePalma, he breaks from his national party’s consensus on heterosexual marriage activism and abortion. He, too, faces an entrenched San Francisco machine politician who does not acknowledge competition (and in his race, one who does not even have a website). Lesbian progressive Carole Migden treats her current job on the Board of Equalization as a “parking space” between term limits, complete with a $41,000 Cadillac purchased at public expense.

Whenever she is not enjoying the spoils of pseudo-competitive office, “she is the epitome of the type of extremist ideologue that has ruined the state’s finances,” added Felder. Migden’s State Assembly voting record on critical business and tax issues was consistently wrong, and as Chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee she was directly responsible for the spendthrift frenzy during the 1990s boom whose obligations created the $38 billion Californian budget deficit debacle by 2002.

Felder’s drive to hold Migden accountable has been picking up steam. After winning the endorsement of the San Rafael Chamber of Commerce, five local newspapers lined up to support him as well, including The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, The Marin Independent-Journal, and The San Francisco Examiner. Despite very modest campaign resources, he is raising an unprecedented challenge. Get out the Bay Area vote for Jennifer DePalma, Andrew Felder and the centrist Republican opposition.

How Could I Forget My Extended Family?

2004-11-01T18:42:00.000-08:00

In a recent post celebrating my mother's birthday and my parents' thirtieth wedding anniversary, I did not give much attention to my large, loving extended family, leaving one maternal uncle especially disappointed.

Joe is the sixth of nine children; Mom was the second. He was one of my playful relatives who made family visits in my own childhood a lot of fun. He served twenty years as a career US Army nurse, and was deployed in Desert Storm. Worrying about him in that war led my mother into a pacifist and isolationist period for a decade before she reversed course after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Since retiring from the military, Uncle Joe has continued working in medicine and performed volunteer healthcare work in Bangladesh. He is a fine man who proved to me: that one can find happiness after a somewhat troubled period; that my mother's family has a lot of joyous smart-asses in it; and that the same ultra-conservative family that called John Kennedy "that BOLSHEVIK" can be surprisingly forgiving to wayward relatives.

There are many, many more in my parents' clans, but I could not easily take the time to describe them all. My mother's eight siblings alone (not to mention their spouses or my cousins, or in-laws) are a wonderful bunch with a wide range of insights and experiences. My father's three brothers and their families are no slouches, either.

So here is a message of love and appreciation to all on the Balling and Yungbluth sides of my relations. I am sorry if it is necessarily brief, but Uncle Joe was right that my parents' union brough in all of the extended kin, too, and I treasure all of you.

Now I have to study all of California's inane ballot initiatives. Between state, regional and local I have thirty-two proposed laws to digest. Some of you feel my pain.

"Who Can Save The Universe?"

2004-11-01T15:13:00.000-08:00

In a 1968 film by French director Roger Vadim, the answer was "Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy" as portrayed by Jane Fonda at her most ravishing. CaliforniaRepbulic.org offers this "psychedella" satire. Be sure to notice who has taken the place of loinclothed Pygar ("an angel does not make love; an angel is love") in the background.

"It is to safeguard democracy in America"? Electoral delusions from "The Nation"

2004-11-01T14:54:00.000-08:00

The oldest progressive weekly in the United States has pronounced that this year's presidential election will decide the fate of constitutional democracy in its entirety. Just in case their partisan anti-Bush hysteria was too subtle, this story was the only item on the cover of "The Nation" endorsements issue. If it was not enough for them to judge the Republicans as enemies of consensual sovereignty, rather than just advocates of rival policies, the editors worry that the Democrats might not save the country. "Kerry's election would not necessarily save, and Bush's election would not necessarily destroy, democratic government in the United States."

On Friday, "The Nation" editor-in-chief Katrina vanden Heuvel appeared on "Charlie Rose" with her magazine colleagues Jonathan Schell and Katha Pollitt where the trio made the same argument. They remarked at some length about the Lessons of a disembodied History, particularly those regarding war: and their Manhattanite ignorance showed itself in full force.

Schell and vanden Heuvel pondered that all military occupations are unwinnable failures. Clearly they are ignoring South Korea the European Union, home of two dozen nations that were mostly war-ruined banana republics sixty years ago. The United States has had enormous garrisons in both places for over half a century, and in the interim those unlikely lands have prospered and democratized. Perhaps "The Nation" would like us to discount the nation-building under Amerian occupation which succeeds.

On the other hand, they might be as politically blind as columnist Pollitt. During last week's "Charlie Rose" panel, she contrasted the current global war with Islamic fascists against the Vietnam war which was "discrete" and limited to Southeast Asia. She is wrong on every level. The Soviet Union supported Ho Chi Minh's communists before the Second World War, adding an international dimension rather early. From 1949 until 1975 North Vietnam received enormous direct military aid from Mao's China. The war in Indochina was the last USSR-PRC joint venture on behalf of world revolution.

Meanwhile in the Western Hemisphere, a swarm of First World and Third World guerrilla terrorists fancied themselves as the regional strike forces in solidarity with the Viet Cong and Castro's Cuba. They included the Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army and Weather Underground in the United States to the Uruguayan Tupamoros and Central American "focalists." In Europe, the trend encompassed the Maoist Direct Action in France, the Red Army Fraction (a.k.a. the Baader-Meinhof Gang) in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy as well as Marxist-separatist terror militias like the Provisional Irish Repbulican Army/Sinn Fein, the Basque ETA and their counterparts in Corsica. Although Moscow, Hanoi and Havana gave direct assistance to these groups, the Soviet Bloc never helped them to realize the full destructive potential reached by al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, the Cold War was still global during the Vietnam conflict. A wave of communist parties seized power in the 1970s, from the Caribbean and Africa to Afghanistan and Indochina. The Reagan Doctrine, anathema to "The Nation" in the 1980s, reversed the tide and helped to win the worldwide struggle.

Katha Pollitt, however, is known for her bad judgment. In an embarassing move, the New York leftist wrote about how she did not want her daugther to display the American flag after the September 11, 2001 attacks. She fits in at "The Nation," a magazine which has made poor predictions ever since it met the Bolshevik Revolution with optimism in 1917. EIC vanden Heuvel's husband and occasional contributor Stephen F. Cohen has made career in the 1970s and 1980s claiming that Western anti-communists had misunderstood the Soviet Union by using derogatory terms like "totalitarian." Since the 1990s, Cohen has lamented the social conditions in the new Russia, but given his inability to predict the USSR's weakness, he might also be underestimating the post-Stalinist developments.

In any event, "The Nation" embodies a snide Manhattan progressive attitude, the sort that imagines that the borough has no relationship to the United States until the next federal election. At times the attitude is mockingly secessionist regarding the mainland republic, as if New York City would function better as a second Puerto Rico or a North American Singapore. At campaign time, all of a sudden the mood in question switches to a continental imperialism: you inland states who are Not Like Us must do What We New Yorkers Say. Two Yale-educated Mahnattan attorneys--people of privilege who ought to know better--made the same display to me last summer. One of them, deaf to my statement that I would be voting for Bush, then told me that I should be campaigning for Kerry in Ohio. In an unwitting anticpation of "The Nation" the other lawyer, her husband, explained to their son that George Bush was a totalitarian and that John Kerry believed in democracy. This sub-O'Reilly anti-intellectualism is not the conventional image of the New York left-liberal professional class, but there you have it.

Even if one concedes that there have been some government abuses of civil liberties in the current war--as in all wars--is it beyond "The Nation" staff to consult History for further Lessons? Franklin D. Roosevelt imprisoned Japanese Americans en masse, and constitutional government did not collapse as a result of his 1944 re-election. Woodrow Wilson's administration was even harder on doves and ethnic Germans during the First World War. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, put Marlyand under martial law during the Civil War. American democracy has survived all of these graver temporary abridgments of the constitution, and the courts are already challenging the much smaller ones today.

Of course, in 1863 New Yorkers rose in violent rebellion against the Union's war effort. The anti-draft riots are an unfortunate reminder that a supposedly forward-thinking and cosmopolitan city has many residents who are prone to self-obsession during monumental fights against slavery and oligarchy. So it was then, so it is now.

Thanks Again, ChronWatch.com

2004-11-01T13:16:00.000-08:00

Cheers to the Bay Area's foremost dissident website for republishing my reflections on moving from Gore in 2000 to Bush this year.

San Francisco Ex-Naderite for Bush

2004-11-01T03:44:00.000-08:00

My local neoconservative cyber-colleague Cinnamon Stillwell reveals that she voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Some people thought I had made a severe shift from Bush-hating militaristic Democrat four years ago to the Bush-Doctrinaire moderate Republican they know and fear today. Cinnamon's post-September 11, 2001 conversion to GOP hawk is a more dramatic tale than mine and at twice the pace. Once upon a time, I read Che Guevara for inspiration, but even then I voted for Bill Clinton over Bob Dole. Having declined to write-in Nader in 1996, I missed my chance for good. Four years later I had long since lost any potential ideological interest in the Greens, to say nothing of the Marxists. It just proves, once again, that we Bushites are many, varied and sometimes even liberal.

A Note for My Parents

2004-10-27T19:00:00.000-07:00

My mother and father celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary yesterday, and today is Mom's birthday. It might be ungentlemanly to put her in an unladylike predicament by revealing her age, so I'll put it somewhere between six and sixty. Back in 1974, she had demanded to be married before her next birthday. In his classic manner--which I have inherited--my father put it off until the last possible minute. I am the product of their union in every respect, including politically.

Dad comes from a small Appalachian community in Central Pennsylvania. Eldest son of a Republican family in a failing coal mining town, he became a moderate liberal in college and has stayed that way ever since. As fas as I know, throughout his life my father has adhered to firm Lutheran beliefs, although not so strictly as to have prevented inter-marrriage with a Catholic. After medical school, he volunteered for a tour in Vietnam and returned home a war opponent in 1969. While stationed at Bethesda, Maryland he soon doubled as a volunteer doctor for the wave of D.C. anti-war rallies led by veterans.

Sound like anyone else we know? Yeah, but my father has actual integrity. He never liked Marxists, never joined the militant New Left, and never even joined the counter-culture. In fact, he despised the ignorant hippie horde at the Washington demonstrations, morons who required his emergency medical attention not because of clashes with police, but rather broken glass embedded in bare feet, drug abuse, and so on.

In the thirty-five years since then, Dad has never fully forgiven the counter-culture but also never voted for a Republican. It is an unlikely mix, one sustained by his quietly religious principles and skeptical intellect. This year, he is torn between former virtual comrade John Kerry (they never met, but overlapped) and simply abstaining from a vote for president. My father opposes wars that he feels inexorably turn into Third World quagmires, but also never fell for any romanticized, despotic "liberators," either. He helped to cure my Marxist cycle with good, solid liberalism from "The Atlantic Monthly" and "The New Republic." Despite a reserved personal style, he is no conservative.

While my father has spent his entire adult life as a citizen of the Center-Left, my mother has almost always been on the religious Right. Roman Catholic daughter of a Brooklyn Irishwoman and a Euro-mutt South Dakotan farm boy, she grew up in the shadow of Omaha's Boys' Town orphanage where Grandpa taught vocational classes. She accepted the rite of confirmation before the watershed Second Vatican Council reforms. Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that she emerged a devout member of the Church. Not so devout, of course, that she could not marry a Protestant thirty years ago yesterday. At the time it was more of a shock to their elders.

If my mother has been an impassioned Catholic for most of her life--there may have been a brief lapse in mass attendance during early adulthood--she has never wavered at all from right-wing bombast. Better said, she might waver from one or the other, the Right or bombast, but never from both. In 1960, when others in the Church cheered "their boy" Kennedy, Mom and her family lined up behind Nixon. Her parents were downright offended at their priest's suggestion that they owed a Democrat their loyalty simply because he was also a Catholic. Despite JFK's hardened anti-communism, Mom still refers to him as "that BOLSHEVIK" from time to time.

When I was finally attracted to neoconservatism, I discovered a surprise: the intellectual Right was nothing like my mother. Among other things, the scholars are almost all pessimists (particularly about innately imperfect human character), while Mom is a right-wing optimist, even a religious utopian. For years, I was in revolt against her conservatism, which I imagined as representative of the whole. It turned out to be quite the opposite, and that Russell Kirk and William Buckley had a grim view of people, more like mine than hers.

She has always been opinionated but also iconoclastic: no one is spared from her moralistic probe, not even the Church. Among other things, she finds the Catholic hierarchy deplorably soft on the Irish Republican Army, and not because she secretly likes the regime of the British or the Ulster Scots. As a physician, she also prays that the papacy allow contraception. Abortion, on the other hand, is something she equates with slavery and genocide. She dislikes the Left, but has expended her love affair with Right-wing talk radio. She has no love for Israel, but wonders how rich, old Palestinian politicians can send peasant children to explode themselves. Shouldn't the geriatrics like Arafat, having lived long enough lives in devotion to nationalism, be the ones who self-detonate? Ah, but that would jeapordize their hold on power, so they are better served by cynically mobilizing suicide bombers who are young and impoverished. Mom has got a point.

She has only voted for one Democratic presidential candidate, but not a moderate. George McGovern received her support for being a native of South Dakota. An ardent Clinton-hater, she abandoned George H.W. Bush in 1992 for Ross Perot, and still preferred the latter to Bob Dole in 1996. Through it all, Clinton was a faux-populist yuppie "Slickster," a "Dogpatch governor," and (like President Kennedy) "that BOLSHEVIK!" Yes, the labels are somewhat mutually exclusive. Despite voting for hard Right candidates in Republican primaries (like Alan Keyes, currently failing against Barack Obama in Illinois' US Senate race), Mom voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. This year, she will be making a triumphant(?) return to the GOP and cast a ballot for Bush. It will be the first election when she and I have supported the same politician. How odd.

She has an Irish religiosity, but a Great Plains populist distaste for elitism, consumerism and pretentious mannerisms. Mom might be a suburban Republican, but she would never want to be anywhere near a country club. Neither would my father. Both of my parents are, in some sense, rural people who emigrated to the cities; despite joining the upper middle class, they have humble, rustic temperaments. Thank heavens they did not name me "Taylor" or "Bailey" and partake in some trendy idiocy; their aversion to keeping up with the Joneses is something I am grateful for in hindsight.

I could thank them for so many things, from giving me a sharp mind, a strong conscience and a loud mouth to proving that a two-income medical family can be both affluent and ascetic. I could thank them for reminding me why I would never want to be a physician. I could thank them for my sister, my colorful extended family, and my education. Mostly, I just want to congratulate them on the annual October 26-27 double celebration.

Happy anniversary, I love you both, and happy birthday, Mom.

Zell Miller, the South, and the Emerging Democratic Misery

2004-10-21T16:41:00.000-07:00

Although discussing him may seem “so two months ago,” controversial Georgia Democrat Zell Miller draws attention to a major development in American politics: his party’s divorce from the South. I just finished his most recent book, "A National Party No More: the Conscience of a Conservative Democrat," published late last year. It is a slight but thoughtful memoir of Southern politics from the New Deal to the present. Both Miller’s growling speech at the Republican National Convention and most of his public comments in the last year offer a shorter and less eloquent account of the same ideas.

Miller’s narrative ranges from firsthand anecdotes to historical comparisons and electoral analysis, all written in a quaint mixture of back-country folksy phrasing and hard-headed political insight. Far from being an unlettered hick, the Senator has now written seven books, including a musicological study. The fact that his Madison Square Garden address left progressives cold underscores the accuracy of the Senator and the importance of the larger phenomena in national politics that he represents. The book and speeches themselves are not likely to become classics, but they are fine reminders of a continuing realignment on a grand scale. This year’s election has seemed too close for me to call, and the deeper reasons for this near-total polarization will remain forceful whichever party wins.

Miller has made left-liberals like author Ruy Teixeira thankful that the aged, angry hillbilly no longer liked their party. Many found the Senator’s recent about face regarding the Democrats in general and John Kerry in particular latently opportunistic. No one, however, can deny Zell Miller’s following comment from early in the book:
Once upon a time, the most successful Democratic
leader of them all, FDR, looked south and said,
“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad
and ill-nourished.” Today our national Democratic
leaders look south and say, “I see one-third of a
nation and it can go to hell.”
Whatever one’s opinion of the matter, the Democrats were once based in the American South and have now all but lost the region. Even John Edwards was given the party’s nomination for Vice-President so that he might appeal to swing voters up North; the Carolinian would have been vulnerable had he run for re-election as Senator.

The Sun Belt has the most rapid population and economic growth in the country: at last, the former Confederacy and the Mountain Time Zone are being built up and filled in. A generation or two ago, these regions were more thinly-peopled and essentially underdeveloped at their most remote spots. As the Southeast slips through the Democrats’ fingers, they are losing an enormous swath of the rising economy while inheriting a great deal of rust-belt urban decay in the Midwest, the Northeast and even in Northern California’s East Bay. As one of many cities that shed inhabitants, Cleveland’s population is half of what it was in the 1970s and its suburbs have stagnated. The Bay Area grows, but has shed its large-scale industry and suffers a regional recession in the wake of the dot-com bust. Southern and Southwestern sprawl, by contrast, is now advancing despite the national economic setbacks, and taking a soaring portion of the census in the process.

It is bad enough that a regional deadlock has become so pronounced. It is even worse for the Democrats that they have inherited regions in comparative decline. In their 2002 book "The Emerging Democratic Majority" and elsewhere, Ruy Teixeira and his co-author John B. Judis have made the astute, cheery observation that the Democrats new East Coast-West Coast-“Third Coast” bloc is built on “ideopolises.” These cities and suburbs are buoyed by the information economy, and are plentiful enough that they see a potential progressive renaissance on a large scale. The open-ended possibility of technological growth gives the ideopolis its biggest chances for economic, and therefore demographic and electoral, preeminence.

Last spring in "The American Prospect," the same Teixeira, however, co-wrote a rejoinder to ex-Republican Kevin Phillips’ worry that Democrats will not have sufficient centrist credentials in 2004 to appeal to the moderate South and thus key conservative swing voters in other regions. Phillips, the author of 1969’s "The Emerging Republican Majority" and architect of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” now advocated a mostly “Northern Strategy” for the Democrats, but with a qualifier. Both priority-region strategies required sufficient moderation to capture additional states in the secondary region as well: as his Republicans once carried several Northern states, now the Democrats would need to carry some of the more modernized Southern ones. Whatever chances for future growth might be, the party now needs to win back social conservatives with modest incomes and not just moderate “ideopolitans” below the Mason-Dixon Line.

No worry, Teixeira answered, the Democrats should eschew the South and target depressed postindustrial states like Ohio. Focusing on rotting regions rather than rising ones, as it were, is the exact opposite of the allied "ideopolitan" strategy. Teixeira had failed to see the South as early as his analysis of the 1994 Congressional GOP landslide, which for all its demographic acumen had no comments on regionalism; likewise his analysis of the 1996 elections. Yet it is he, along with Judis, who argues that there is an “emerging Democratic majority.” Their central thesis forecasts the growth of Democratic constituencies (ideopolitans and ethnic minorities), and the demographic decline of Republican ones (rustic whites) by sometime in the middle twenty-first century. The prevailing present just delays the inevitable reversal.

In the last decade, however, the Republican Congressional majority has become all but unbreakable. The bicameral Democratic hegemony of the early Clinton administration was propped up considerably by Southern conservatives in the party. A large share of the GOP’s captured seats in 1994 overturned these “Yellow Dog” Democrats, continuing a trend dating back to mid-century. Teixeira had made the same emerging Left predictions prior to the 2000 census and subsequent redistricting: but Republicans still hold the majority anchored in the rising South and West. Their rule is intact and their strongest regions are projected to keep growing and hold ever more seats in the House of Representatives. It may be a long time until the Sun Belt becomes incrementally “Yankified” from within by one ideopolis or another. What’s more, the near-future South may claim an ever larger share of the national wealth generated by the “ideopolitan” economy, a crucial point made by Miller’s "A National Party No More."

Much of Zell Miller’s book recounts his solid credentials as liberal Democrat at the state level, both before and after his admittedly reactionary, allegedly insincere and failed 1964 campaign for office on a platform against desegregation. Born to a loyal partisan family and raised under the developmental wonders of the New Deal, reconciled to civil rights after his mid-1960s defeat, as a state politician Miller partnered with black Democrats by the early 1970s and fought the Georgia’s slide to the Republicans. He served in the state legislature, several bureaucracies, as longtime lieutenant governor and eventually successful governor. Over thirty years, the state’s population and economy throve, a transformation made largely without the GOP in charge. In the process, Miller and the party kept their power intact through a combination of modest social programs and a reluctance to tilt particularly far to the Left with the national Democrats. Indeed, Miller makes the striking point that only the party’s Southerners have won the White House since 1964: Texan populist Lyndon Johnson, his evangelical former state government colleague Jimmy Carter, and Democratic Leadership Council champion Bill Clinton.

Despite charges that the all-but-retired Miller—-his terms ends this year and he is not seeking re-election—-is an opportunist hoping for an appointment should Bush win this year, I judge the story differently. When the Democratic Governor Roy Barnes called Miller out of retirement to fill the late Republican U.S. Senator Paul Coverdell’s term, there was no premeditation of a partisan crossover. The stalwart Miller had proven that he was securely part of the Center-Left in a conservative state, but upon arriving in Washington, D.C. as a Senator found himself on the right-wing of the nation’s progressive party. Considering the near-complete takeover of the South by the Republicans, Miller is only a representative of a massive regional trend. Even his “conservative conscience” turning against abortion, allegedly upon seeing his great-grandchildren, can be explained through crude demographics. He is not only a former U.S. Marine drill sergeant from Georgia's mountains but also seventy-two years old.

With exceptions, however, I would argue that Zell Miller’s defection does not just represent a cranky upcountry geriatric who feels out of place in the urbanizing present and yearns nostalgically for a rural past. He was once a part of "the Vital Center," which is now split somewhat more severely to the Left and Right. This is not, however, exclusively a Southern predicament. A corollary to Miller is that the Republican Party has lost its former base in the Northeast; Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords and Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee could offer mirror-image disenchantment about the GOP as their colleague from Georgia. White collar moderates and blue collar conservatives are adrift without their former Rockefeller Republican and Roosevelt Democrat champions.

The conservative commentator Christopher Caldwell captured this problem more tellingly than Zell Miller and even more damningly than Ruy Teixeira in a 1998 "Atlantic Monthly" article called “The Southern Captivity of the GOP.” Whatever your opinion, I urge you to read this prescient and overlooked piece. Caldwell argues that the two major parties spent the 20th century trading constituencies. Almost to a state, the Republicans dominate the old Southern and Western Democrat (and Populist) strongholds and the anti-urban resentment politics therein. Likewise, the Democrats now have the Pacific, Great Lakes and Northeastern advantage once held by Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive Republicans. In Caldwell’s emphasis, the change came in the 1960s, but others have pointed out that the New Deal coalition was in danger of losing the South long before. Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat and Henry Wallace’s Progressive splinter candidacies, after all, were in the 1948 presidential race. In any event, it has happened. In a more recent column, Caldwell also pondered if Miller’s RNC speech would energize supererogatory majorities in the right-wing Sun Belt. That is entirely possible; what is striking is that many of these same states had remained conservative Democrat cantons until very recently. Now the bottom has fallen out of not just the FDR coalition, but even the William Jennings Bryan one the preceded it from the 1890s to the 1910s.

The reason that Massachusetts progressive Kerry and Texan right-winger Bush are fighting so bitterly over the centrists now is that both parties have abandoned them for so long. Counting entire regions as safe districts, the 2004 campaign focused on at first one-third, and now one-fifth or fewer of the states: the only ones where neither Democrats nor Republicans have easy dominance. Drunk on the support of the militant New Rich, the left-liberals and religious capitalists lost their focus on the socioeconomic and ideological middle. Despite being the wrong leaders for the job, both candidates are now attempting to over-compensate for their respective lack of centrism.

Only the return of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans would bring nationwide moderation. Otherwise, region by region, state by state, district by gerrymandered district, the country is perched for a near future of uncompetitive elections won by candidates who are polarized on everything except a generic commitment to the Third Way. Micro-targeting swing voters in swing states with wedge issues will pass for “centrism” on a national scale. Worse still, both the indignantly right-wing South and West and the elitist “Tri-Coastal” ideopolises are becoming large enough to keep a firm hold on their respective parties. The suburban Midwest might be the only places left for them to compete.

If the more conservative regions of the country are growing the most rapidly precisely because they are the most conservative (attracting the disillusioned from elsewhere, inviting new business developments, etc.), then the Republicans who gave Miller the podium can give themselves a round of applause. If nothing else, they have captured the demographic zeitgeist. The Democrats have become too snobbish regarding “flyover country,” and the GOP can reap a bountiful harvest in the booming interior. They can only do so, however, up to a point. If Christopher Caldwell is correct, the Republicans are in peril of becoming too immoderate, too rustic and too resentful of the cosmopolitan “Tri-Coast.” The only hope for the Center-Right is if the continued growth of the South and West brings a diversity that tempers the rural and evangelical streak in party. From Phoenix to Atlanta, we will see if the ideopolis can flourish in a moderate Republican manner.

Against this grain, I hope for the return of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Considering the successes of Schwarzenegger and Giuliani, I see some prospect for the former: GOP moderates who are still distinct from the party fugitives Jeffords and Chafee. Despite Bill Clinton’s successes, however, I feel that Southern Democrats may be losing their chances in the short term. Gore could not even win his home state of Tennessee in 2000. Prolonged and unchecked Republican hegemony in the Sun Belt could provoke an eventual conservative Democrat backlash, making the region bipartisan again. In the same manner, the liberal Republicans have won against the odds in “Tri-Coastal” states when voters have rejected generational Democratic dominance. Only this fighting spirit can make our states and localities competitively bipartisan. Otherwise, whichever side has the majority, the nation will be bipartisan through inert regional blocs. I do not look fondly on a long future of choosing between snide Bostonians and hard-headed West Texans for president. Under those circumstances, it is anybody’s guess which party’s worst elitism can find an emerging majority.

What a shame. Moderation and competition are what keep the parties honest, not polarization and emerging generation-long majorities. Beneath the cerebral hillbilly rage, Zell Miller knows the same thing. What a shame also that he comes across better toward his book’s small audience than the masses watching his RNC address.

International ANSWER, My Answers and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

2004-10-18T18:36:00.000-07:00

My friends have had dueling objections regarding the clandestinely-researched opinion piece that I coauthored for FrontPageMagazine. On one end, some said that I should not judge the entire anti-war Left by the exaggerated influence of totalitarianism in the Bay Area “peace” movement. Those who think I am tarring an otherwise honorable world movement based on local perversity, I remind you that International ANSWER has swept the college campuses. Rank and file adult war opponents might not be swayed by the coalition's rhetoric, but ANSWER organizes the rallies and most of the students among the younger shock troops.

Another wrote that I was disgracefully negative and belligerent toward our honorable local dissidents. I regret that HaloScan crashed and froze out her comments, an affliction felt all over the “blogosphere” this week.

Adam, while I usually totally disagree with (but fully
respect) your arguments and writing, I found this
"investigative journalism" piece about the recent
Palestinian Solidarity Movement’s one-day conference
in San Francisco to be inflammatory and down-right
shiesty.

With quotes like: "That the San Francisco Unified
School District rented its space to an exclusionary
meeting of terrorist-supporting fanatics—in violation
of state and federal laws, and possibly the USA
PATRIOT Act—defies description. These people want
America destroyed, and are not shy about it." Want
America destroyed? That sounds like the pure
rheotoricized drivel that you were so enraged about at
the conference.

Plus, if this was an "undercover" piece fully based on
being at the conference and reporting about it -- what
exactly did Lee Kaplan add, if this person was not
allowed in? And while I understand the significance of
"sneaking in" to this conference in order to hear what
was going on, as a journalist, I would respect you
more if you had identified yourself and what you were
doing. I personally believe -- that in the midst of
this "war of terror" that you seem to be so excited to
support -- that groups expressing their right to free
speech have every right to be paranoid. Reading your
article in accordance with the PATRIOT Act would say
that everyone at the conference should be labeled a
terrorist and that means that they should/could be
detained for days without release.

I am familiar with your stance against the Palestinian
struggle for sovereignty, but I was alarmed at the
severe statement near the conclusion to your article
where you state: "Do not be fooled: the only tangible
result of [a Palestinian Revolution] would be the mass
murder of all but those Israelis who managed to
escape."

Again, I am not sure how exactly the collaboration
between you and Mr. Kaplan worked but, if I were you,
I would be wary of putting my name to this kind of
piece and sending it out into the world.

* * * * *
Her charges are strong, and it is only fair to answer them.

ACTIVIST PUBLICITY IS NOT PRIVATE

My article’s tone, admittedly, was sharp and I did not inform the intifada conference hosts that I was a writer with a hostile opinion. While composing the article, I had e-mailed inquiries to the rather small but influential Party for Socialism and Liberation, but they did not respond. Lee Kaplan, for his part, has great experience as an investigative critic of the pro-PLO solidarity movement. Our common ground led to our mutual consultation on the project. Lee is well known enough for this work that his adversaries in the Bay Area chose to deny him access to what was allegedly a more open public dialogue. They also barred him on the flimsy pretext that children might be endangered: a complete lie. Hannah Arendt wrote that totalitarian movements always behave like secret societies that have suddenly emerged from underground into broad daylight: open yet occult simultaneously. Perhaps that explains the paradox. Of course, the event was being held on city-owned property and I felt some right of access. If the various parts of the ANSWER coalition fear for their absolute privacy, activism is not their appropriate calling. Neither is a public school the proper venue for them to choose as a hiding place.

Moreover, the annual celebration of the al-Aqsa intifada has the same organizers each year in San Francisco. Last year’s had been in a public park, and the speeches (and indeed, many of the individual speakers) were nearly identical to this year’s. My guess was that this 2004 indoor event would sound about the same in ideology, tone and content as 2003 outdoors: that much was correct. A poster outside the Horace Mann campus announced “4000 Dead and Proud”—-so much for being anti-war-—and the conferees’ denunciation of “56 Years of Zionist Apartheid,” otherwise known as Israeli statehood, made clear its feelings on the war-torn but democratic Jewish state.

ANSWER’s discourse is fairly outspoken, and the rhetoric of its directors’ original Workers World Party and newly founded Party for Socialism and Liberation is considerably more so. The American politburo that runs ANSWER is not in the same category as other opponents of U.S. policy. They WWP-PSL activists are not equivalent to Greens, or world-government advocates or even democratic socialists, but infiltrators. In a constitutional system that does not offer much to third parties, activist groups are the strongest potential mouthpieces for popular fronts.

They imagine themselves as the heirs to Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution, but attempt a more subtle line for their popular front groups. Richard Becker and his brother(?) Brian said as much in their tributes to party founder Sam Marcy. To me, this is a repellent deception. Despite its use of activist causes to attract moderates, Leninism is not “liberalism in a hurry,” but a consistently totalitarian form of political organization. The communists have always used progressive allies to hide their full intentions.

MARX, MAO, MARCY AND MEGALOMANIA

Karl Marx’s judgment was quite clear regarding the unacceptability of socialist and democratic reforms in a capitalist system: they only delay the Revolution. Lenin shunned the “parliamentary idiocy” that Engels and the German Social Democrats had later embraced. Like Marx, he could not even abide independent labor unions to represent the worthy but untrustworthy masses. Instead of reformist betrayal, Lenin built the professional revolutionary elite, self-appointed in advance. It is an aristocratic and conspiratorial approach that indulges the worst of leftist megalomania. What’s more, every time Leninists have gained power, the once-underground partisans have consistently proven to be totalitarian oligarchs.

The post-Cold War world knows only two qualified exceptions. The first cases are when communist parties win minority seats or provincial and local elections in otherwise stabilized democratic systems. The second is when communist parties have reconstituted as mere leftists in the post-Soviet states. That is not really Leninist rule, but bourgeois “parliamentary idiocy.” Marcy, the Beckers, Hackwell, la Riva and their Leninist party are not making compromises to win seats in France, Eastern Europe or India. The ANSWER politburo is further from the centers of power, and its enthusiasm for literal communism is what sustains the vanguard. They are making tactical compromises to win limelight, but they are only tactical.

The Trotskyists had a harder time approving the entire Stalinist bloc, with varying degrees of forgiveness. They and some of their New Left heirs attempted to be somewhat selective regarding governments and movements that might receive their solidarity. For fellow travelers and converts, the tradition is to hope that the most recent revolution will transcend the despotic corruption of previous victorious movements. Guerillas who gain power are especially romantic in this regard. The ideal candidates for solidarity would be a pairing of a recently triumphant revolutionary state with an allied movement that has not yet won power. The decades of decolonization provided ample such situations, and they did have a domino-like effect.

In the late 1940s, many outside the communist nations hoped that either Mao’s party or Tito’s—-both fresh from prolonged guerrilla wars—-would prove pure in ways that the Soviet Union no longer could. Later, the Havana and Hanoi regimes would carry the same hopes of improving Sovietism, followed by the guerilla Marxists of Africa and Central America. Solidarity with the USSR necessitated loving communist China and Eastern Europe. Belief in the People’s Republic demanded supporting North Korea and North Vietnam as well. Siding with North Vietnam required doing so for other aspiring communists in Southeast Asia. Solidarity with Cuba invited the same for Castroist-Guevarist protégés trying to follow with their own revolutions. When the Sandinistas won Nicaragua, their international supporters rallied to the new wave of Latin American Marxists as well. Today, there are only leftovers among the Third World orphans of the Cold War.

ANSWER is not so picky about its solidarity, and it cannot afford to be. The WWP-PSL creed is Sam Marcy’s uniquely American blend of Maoism. Breaking from other far Left purists who always shun elections, Marcy was eager to use popular front tactics as early as Henry Wallace’s splinter campaign in the 1948 presidential race. One side of Marcy’s technique is based on subverting the protesters at the minority margins of democratic politics. At the same time, the other direction of his strategy was to build a much broader alliance of regimes and movements than other rival Western radical parties might have done. This has proven particularly expedient since the fall of the USSR and decline of militancy in communist China. Other sects commonly deplete their possible allies by seeking partnership abroad only with like sects: other Maoists or Trotskyists only, for example. Much like the popular front, Marcy’s vision was an international solidarity network that need not have Maoist orthodoxy, but welcomed any anti-American states or movements in a pinch, like Sudan and Iran. Marcy split the WWP from the Trotsky-founded Socialist Workers Party in the late 1950s after he heretically approved the Soviet invasion that crushed a revolt in Hungary.

I have made no unfair accusations. If anything, I respect my opponents enough to take them at their word. When they trumpet their Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideas, I do not then decide that they are kidding. Accepting as fact the seriousness of their belief in communist solidarity is neither inflammatory nor irresponsible. They are proud advertisers for armed anti-Americanism.

Maoism might not strike you as a desire to destroy America. I would argue that a project of worldwide socialist domination—that declares America to be its principal counter-revolutionary obstacle—at least wishes to defeat and conquer the United States and its allies. It is a matter of semantics on whether or not that constitutes “destroying” America, but I am inclined to think so. What distinguishes Maoism is its obsession with piecemeal victories on the way toward total conquest. In mid-century China, it was a territorial strategy: the communists captured the countryside gradually, and only later seized the cities. Once in power, Mao’s state then purged the society, and inevitably purged the revolutionaries. Some thirty million citizens died in the process. All of it was a vain search for Leninist purity, one that the People’s Republic of China has wisely chosen to abandon.

THEY MADE A WASTELAND AND CALLED IT A PEACE MOVEMENT

Marcy’s version of Maoism reaches out to both the maximum number of communist or anti-American regimes and rebels, and also the maximum number of front group protesters at home. In these liberated zones, the Marcy-style partisans can find both territory and institutions from which to fight for further influence. That Islamist guerrillas and anti-Western theocracies would have appealed to Sam Marcy as much as American peace activists shows his ambitious reach. Considering the Islamic-communist broad front alliances advocated by the Palestinian and Filipino Maoists, it seems that Marcy was not alone in his vision.

The Maoist guerrilla parties that are still active all deserve the name terrorist. To cite the article’s first example, the fact that intifada conference organizers specifically endorsed the Communist Party of the Philippines’ New People’s Army was quite disturbing. A minority vanguard wishes to conquer the islands and then Sovietize them. To do so the CPP-NPA has resorted to war in concert with al-Qaeda affiliates, many of whom are even more actively violent. Clearly, they do not object to military occupation in the provincial Philippines when their forces are the ones doing it.

The young Filipino-American Maoist shilling for the CPP-NPA indeed might not be violating the law. Under the circumstances, I freely admit that his work as a committed spokesman led me to wonder if the cadre had actual links to a declared, armed and active enemy. You are correct: it would be unfair to detain the gentleman indefinitely on a whim for no good reason. It is not unfair to investigate whether he is a fundraiser, salesman or agent for the murderous CPP-NPA or merely part of an unofficial and unaffiliated fan club. I would like somebody to find out, and if that requires discreet surveillance, I think that the nature of the CPP-NPA’s terrorist campaign in the archipelago justifies it.

As an aside on the enforcement of the USA PATRIOT Act, I concede that it has flaws and is broad enough that some of its (already struck-down) measures can be abused. It is also fair for its critics to acknowledge that the courts are reforming it piecemeal to check against excesses. The danger of unregulated detention, I will admit, is a grave concern, but it was also the first aspect of the Act to be successfully challenged in the courts. “Sneak and peek” on an eagerly networking fellow traveler is one of its applications that I find appropriate. I suspect that the open-ended detentions will continue to be rolled back in court, but not the measures for secret detective work.

Much of what we are discussing was no secret, however, and I needed no fancy surveillance methods. WWP and PSL wish to proselytize, and use events like this to do so. They pointed us toward the relevant guerrilla terrorist heroes and even websites.

It is ironic that this international brigade has volunteered on behalf of world communist revolution, now a relic. The heyday of Leninism is gone, and particularly so in war-torn Islamic polities where religious radicals have captured the zeitgeist from the Left consistently since the 1970s. They once presumed the religious radicals were “useful idiots” against colonial or conservative enemies. Now, they have encountered another dilemma faced by the founder of Bolshevism: when a radical minority conquers a reactionary society, who conquers whom? Will the state become as backward as its subjects?

The faded Third Worldist rebels who rule Algeria fight against a massive jihadist insurrection. The global influence of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism continues to grow both legally and illicitly. From the rule of fundamentalist parties and militia in Lebanon, Iran, Sudan, and (until recently) Afghanistan to the co-optation of theocratic discourse in allegedly secularist Libya, Egypt, Pakistan, Syria and (again, until recently) Iraq: the spirit of the age is not Marxist. Islamists have the cultural tide of revolution from the shari’a gangs of northern Nigeria to the Moro insurgents in Mindanao. The communists are dinosaurs in these countries’ conflicts, and aside from making nice museum pieces, they face complete extinction within the uprising of militant Islam. Even among the Palestinians, the ailing Marxist PLO has survived in large part because of the religious Arafat's outreach to a new generation of jihadi supporters. In a "Red-Green" alliance, the revolution still devours its children.

REPATRIATION, REVANCHISM, AND THE RIGHT OF RETURN TO THE 1940s

Regarding the main subject of the conference, I do not deny the sovereignty of the Palestinian people. I deny that the Palestinian vanguard has a legitimate claim to displace the Israeli population. Furthermore, I deny that Israelis must refuse to fight back while the Palestinian leaders’ wage war against them. The Jewish state has a right to exist that cannot be overturned by the proposal to give the exiles a right of return to the 1940s.

Consider how many nationalities suffered dislocation by war in the Second World War and immediately after. The Red Army expelled millions of ethnic Germans from their minority communities in Eastern Europe. They and their descendants in Germany should not suddenly relocate as a bloc to their old addresses just because Stalin rousted them out illegally. The Germans, as we know, had a habit of breaking nations as well, and it is appropriately pragmatic and poetic justice for them to have absorbed their fellow ethnics whom were uprooted by a war that Germany launched. The victorious USSR demanded the forcible return of refugees. The postwar Allies complied, and in Operation Keelhaul repatriated two million unwilling former Soviet POWs straight toward Stalin and the Gulag. Other civilians were deported from occupied Germany and Austria back to the Eastern Bloc as well. Under the circumstances, it might have been better to have a right of non-return.

Meanwhile in wartime Yugoslavia, Croat and Bosniak Muslim fascists ruled over the Serbs, and killed hundreds of thousands with death squads and concentration camps. These two nationalist factions were backed by both the Nazi army and the largest deployment of Mussolini’s forces ever. The counterinsurgency in the Balkans was willfully atrocious, and by 1945 countless natives had become permanently displaced persons. Many of the refugees also feared the murderous Stalinist new regime; some more generally wanted to escape the ravages of war. Tito’s communists promoted a half-effective multiethnic authoritarianism, which collapsed with the Yugoslav state. Were the depredations of the 1940s enough to justify irredentist war and ethnic cleansing atrocities on behalf of a Greater Serbia after 1991? Despite their brutal predecessors, I believe that Slovenia, Croatia and the ill-fated Bosnia had a right to self-rule without having to redress every single grievance suffered in World War II. No seceding government was entirely admirable, nor were the leading Albanian nationalists of Kosovo and Macedonia, but neither should they have been required subjects of Serbian chauvinism under Milosevic and Karadzic. In the current NATO-created Balkan peace, the 1990s refugees may only be repatriated insofar as the relevant countries can accept one another’s existence.

The British withdrawal from South Asia in 1947 was dangerously inconsiderate of ethnic and regional tensions. Partition caused upheaval, war and mass expulsions repeatedly. The Kashmir conflict is only the latest expression. Yet we cannot deny that the South Asian Muslim communities wished to be politically separate from the predominantly Hindu India. For that matter, we cannot deny that Bangladeshis desired independence from Pakistan a generation later in 1971. Must all the expelled Muslims and Hindus and their descendants be repatriated? Such a move strikes me as romanticized and unrealistic. What is lost is sometimes truly lost, and the South Asian states that led the post-partition wars must resettle the refugees that they created. To suggest that now is the time to reassign tens of millions of citizens in order to unmake the unpleasant past would be dogmatic and wildly impractical. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh must make the best of the historical tragedies by integrating the displaced persons whom they created in the land where the refugees arrived, not the lands where they originated. They need détente as a means toward reconciliation, not a deluded revanchism.

The state of Israel emerged from the same background of British decolonization under the Attlee Labour government in 1947. True, the first waves of Jewish refugees had been uprooted from Europe. It is also true that Arab violence against the native Jews dates back to at least the 1830s under Muslim rule, long before the advent of modern Zionism or the British Mandate. Palestinians continued the attacks periodically over the next century, long before Jewish immigrants had come in large numbers or developed political ambitions. After inciting and leading several large pogroms in the late 1920s, the Palestinian leadership partnered with the Axis and fought to kill or expel the hundreds of thousands of Jews in their midst. The Zionist movement retaliated and defeated the even larger Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. Following massive postwar Jewish immigration, the two communities fought another round from 1947-1948, and after the Jews prevailed in battle the neighboring Arab states fought them until 1949.

The refugee crisis created by this fighting was absolutely immense. Around three quarters of a million or more Palestinians were expelled from their homes in the Israeli-Arab conflict: most of them at decolonization, plus some in each war since. Between the 1940s and 1970s, the Middle Eastern nations expelled roughly as many Mizrahi Jews, and the bulk of them relocated to Israel. Most of the refugees (half a million or so) fled at the dawn of Zionist statehood. Others followed when the Arabs launched pogroms after later wars with Israel. There had been 135,000 Iraqi Jews and Baghdad been one third Jewish in the 1940s. All of Iraq became effectively Judenrein by 1973.

Many of the Palestinians refugees arrived at camps in the territory of neighboring combatants: principally Lebanon, Egypt and Syria, but also as far away as Kuwait. The host states always kept them in permanent ghettoes rather than offering them citizenship, and levied special exile taxes to pay for re-conquest rather than integrating the Palestinians into their societies. Even more of the displaced Palestinians wound up in Gaza, the West Bank and the kingdom of Transjordan. The Hashemite Amman monarchy annexed the West Bank and gave the refugees citizenship. To this day Jordan’s population is roughly two-thirds Palestinian. The only reason that “Jordan” is not “Palestine” is that non-Palestinian Bedouin natives and the ancestrally Hijazi dynasty resist the idea. Any future Jordanian democracy would likely have a change of plan, and seek (con-)federation or reunification with the Palestinians on the other side of the river.

The answer is not for Palestinians to return to the homes that they lost in the 1940s. This makes no more sense, and is no easier, than making Baghdad one third Jewish again. The solution is for the Arab host nations to follow Jordan’s example and integrate their Palestinian refugees as citizens, as Israel integrated the uprooted Middle Eastern Jews into its polity. This is not a denial of sovereignty, although it does mean a denial of lost territory. There is a world of difference. Self-determination does not justify Palestinian revanchism. It justifies the spread of constitutional democracy to the citizens of Arab countries. That would be true sovereignty.

DEFENSE AND DISENGAGEMENT

Revanchism and atrocities against Israeli civilians, however, are the chief practices of the Palestinian resistance. In the midst of a campaign of terrorism and counterinsurgency, the West Bank and Gaza communities are a constant war zone. Palestinian leadership and paramilitaries are eager for a no-holds-barred intifada, until the retaliation inevitably reaches their own population. War is war, and the Israelis have a right to defend themselves. It is a tragedy that the Palestinian militia is deployed throughout civilian areas, but that is often where irregular forces seek harbor. Ethnic warfare is all the more brutal from the intimacy of fighting, both between hostile parties and binding combatant and community. The constant battle is a grotesque stalemate, however, and even the hawkish Sharon sees the value of disengagement from the hemorrhaging occupation. His desire to leave Gaza and parts of the West Bank has proven highly controversial with the Israeli parliament.

Unfortunately for both nations, there are no Palestinian politicians so moderate as to renounce the right of return for exiles en masse; nor so diplomatic as to accept the presence of five million Jews on their formerly Arab land as legitimate; nor so democratic as to accept a unified bi-communal state with rights of residence for today’s Israeli citizenry. The liberal end of the PLO coalition features Marwan Barghouti and Hanan Ashrawi, advocates of intra-Arab reform but absolute irredentists against the existence of Israel.

The current options are either continued fighting until one dogmatic ethnic force decisively destroys the other, or the decidedly unromantic option of partition in hopes of building peace between two hostile nations. There are two of them, and they are both going to receive less of the land than either of their ideologues considers “legitimate.” A reactionary Zionist fringe—-not to be confused with the ruling center-right Likud party—-wishes for a Greater Israel extending across the Jordan river to “reclaim” the Hebrew lands of Biblical antiquity. The bulk of the Israeli Right opposes Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza and parts of the West Bank: a government is prepared to defy its own coalition.

If there is to be peace, neither side will receive rights to all of the land. It is true that the current plan of partition through unilateral disengagement and the national security wall is disruptive. In crisscrossing the territory, the construction of the fence has been harsh and even confiscatory. It is true that the isolation of Gaza and the West Bank from the Israeli economy has all but vaporized the earnings of Palestinian laborers. There is a state of war, and the perpetuation of combat is the root cause of partition’s harming of the national income on both sides of the frontlines. Although it is often cruel, inconsiderate and politically unwise, even the current course of walling-off the West Bank is in some sense Israel’s prerogative. So long as the Palestinian political class refuses to make negotiated sacrifices of the right of return, the Israelis have the gruesome privilege of determining whatever shape and size they shall leave behind.

Even if Israel completed exactly such a partition, the Palestinians could still fight a “revolution until victory” under a Red-Green alliance that demands the expulsion of the Jewish population. To my mind, a two-state ceasefire is preferable, even if an embittered Israeli government gerrymanders much of the West Bank into its possession. The alternative is indefinite war. Unification would not bring peace, but merely rename the conflict as a civil war: two communities are far from concluding their hostilities. Disengagement, division and détente are the best means for defense and development, for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. By contrast, all that Al-Awda, the ISM and the ANSWER coalition have to offer is propaganda demanding one ethnic group’s total triumph against another in war. That goal strikes me as bigoted and nihilistic. If this grab-bag is also partnering with the PFLP—a possibility worth investigating—the project might be criminal as well. Either way, it deserves my written opposition.

"Bluffing Kills," or Why Bush: Even After the Duelfer Report

2004-10-11T13:03:00.000-07:00

An offended progressive friend--I have several--asked me to abstain from the presidential election rather than vote for Bush. As a war opponent who supports the semi-warlike Democrats, he holds me to a higher standard than himself and demands that I vote only for candidates with whom I absolutely agree 100%. For some time, he has been hoping that each week's news would discredit Bush enough to rehabilitate my interest in Kerry, Edwards and the Democrats. My friend's latest line of attack involved the Duelfer Report on Iraq's largely feigned weapons of mass destruction. How could war with a fascist still be justified? As a further entreaty to throw out my ballot, he cited "Fahrenheit 9/11," in which a hopeful early Bush administration presumed the best about Iraq. In my friend's mind, the al-Qaeda attacks did not show America's false security and consequent need for a pre-emptive strategy. Instead, he blames the Republicans for changing their minds about the definition of "threat." With minor corrections, I told him thus:
* * * * *
The Duelfer Report also stated that the UN sanctions were corrupted by Iraqi bribes and state smuggling, and that Saddam not only planned to resume weapons production but (most important of all) Saddam demanded that his entire regime pretend, internally and externally, that it still maintained the arsenal. It is not America's fault that Saddam tempted war because he could not stop bluffing. Bluffing with an impoverished WMD program may have been Saddam's means of looking tough in the Middle East, but it was also the noose that he put around his own neck.

Before the invasion, Hans Blix claimed that the Ba'athists were still hiding something despite handing over the "final" 11,000 pages. The Iraqis had been ordered by the UN to open up and turn over absolutely everything. The new report complied 36 million pages of documents, a hell of a gap from the "everything" given Blix.

Saddam's mass slaughter of the Kurds violated the UN charter's prohibition on genocide, therefore demanding enforcement. There is not statute of limitations on genocide or war crimes, either. The UN credibility cannot survive if it continues to pretend that genocides are something else, like they are presently doing regarding Sudan. The same applies to overlooking Saddam's million victims. He also supported terrorist groups up until the bitter end. Once again, this made Iraq a legitimate target of anyone in the world community who so desired, including the United States and Britain. Since according to the Duelfer Report three fifths of the permanent Security Council--France, Russia and China--were on the Iraqi take via the Oil for Food program then I suppose a UN imprimatur was unlikely. That does not justify Chirac and company veiling their corruption as supposed diplomatic principles.

Saddam's was still a genocidal and terrorist rogue state, and though only bluffing it would never truly submit to transparent inspections or surrender its precious image of secretly having WMD. This was Saddam's choice and his regime's gamble. The Iraqis were lying, but their refusal to give up the image of perceived WMD strength invited the wrath of Blair and Bush and whoever else chose to join in. Baghdad could not admit that it was faking, and that choice accelerated the coming of war.

If Saddam had wanted, he could have blinked like Khruschev in the Cuban Missile Crisis and strategically avoided war, sparing his country at his own expense. Instead, he was so delusional that he reportedly could not even accept that the U.S. and U.K. had physically invaded Iraq. Stalin was the same way for days when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, and Hitler denied the existence of Allied victories from his bunker in 1945.

Condi Rice had warned about the danger of Iraq's unknown potential in a January/February 2000 "Foreign Affairs" article publicizing her advice to Bush, and at the time it was a bipartisan consensus from the Clinton Administration, Richard Clarke and John Kerry all the way to the neocons and the Bible Belt. The disagreement was over how long to put off "regime change" advocated by both parties since 1998, and not about Ba'athist practices which everyone agreed were being hidden.

Now, at the beginning of the Bush administration, the Republicans inherited the mixed Clinton policy: calling Iraq "successfully contained" in a "box" while officially supporting "regime change." No doubt "Fahrenheit 9/11" caught Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell in this pre-9/11/01 consensus: half wishful thinking, half worry about what had transpired since the end of obstructed inspections in 1998. The al-Qaeda attacks showed that we could no longer afford wishful thinking; weak states and their terrorist proxies could do great damage. One rogue state that may or may not have been bluffing about its WMD was one too many.

So with that background and a genocidal terrorist despot who refused to admit that he has no more WMDs: the invasion made sense. No one knew if Saddam was faking it, not the French, not even the rest of the closely watched Ba'ath party. By making the world play that guessing game, Iraq invited war. Bluffing can be deadly.

His gun turned out to be unloaded, your honor, but he was still a mugger.

Besides, Mr. President had been linking totalitarianism to terrorism and proliferation since at least January, 2002 with the "Axis of Evil" state of the Union Address. In nearly every speech since over a year before the invasion, he invoked the need for regime change (official US policy since 1998) and the goal of not just disarmament, but replacing the Ba'athi dictatorship with "freedom," one of Bush's favorite words.

You cannot tell me that WMD was the "only" justification the administration ever gave. "Freedom" was a big part of it, repeated almost ad nauseam. If you have forgotten or were not paying attention, that is your fault, not mine, Blair's or Bush's. I remember your complaints before the invasion, and you disliked the democracy-spreading ideas of the administration's neoconservative rhetoric: but you at least noticed it was there. "Regime change" was a hot phrase in late 2002, not just "disarmament" or "inspections."

Who are you to tell me to abstain from the presidential election? Are you afraid Bush will win California? Even if that were possible: my ballot is mine, to be marked as I please.

It is my protest vote against a lousy nominee who wanted to bring the 2000 Nader voters back into the party rather than supporting the war and campaigning on domestic issues alone. It is my protest against a party that agreed to elevate Nancy Pelosi over Dick Gephardt. It is my protest against a grassroots base that paid especially great attention to the amateurish demagogue Howard Dean and that makes Michael Moore richer with his every endeavor. It is my protest against Kerry and the party voters that nominated him because they hoped that any veteran would sell well with naive working class people in swing states.

The Democrats have failed, and the reasons have roots all the way back to when the Baby Boomers brought the Vietnam Syndrome into that party. The September 11 attacks should have ended the reluctance to fight in the Third World that middle aged liberals nursed in their younger days, the same way Pearl Harbor had smashed the popular illusions of isolationism regarding Europe and Asia. History tested them, and the Democrats failed to support a candidate who told his own party "I'm sorry doves, but it's the right war at the right time, even if I oppose the President otherwise. You anti-war folks can take your chances with the Greens."

But the Democrats could not give the nomination to an honest dove, either. They might have lost, but someone loses in every election. At the least the Democrats would have been known as a pro-war or anti-war party. Can you honestly tell me which they are? Dovish or hawkish regarding Iraq? It's a major problem that the Democrats cannot honestly identify either way. Why should a hawk like me take his chances?

There is an international security crisis, after all. Having the superior position on abortion and gay marriage does not grant anyone a right to the White House. There is only one true litmus test for the commander-in-chief: foreign policy. The remainder known as "domestic" can be more easily checked, balanced and controlled by the other branches of government, where both parties are represented and thus required to be more pragmatic. The Democrats cannot even choose a side on the major foreign policy dispute of our time. How can I choose theirs?

Infiltrating the San Francisco Intifada Festival

2004-10-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

Special thanks must go to my collaborator Lee Kaplan and to David Horowitz's FrontPageMagazine for publishing our investigative piece. Together, we have turned impromptu outrage about a popular front into a more revealing look at an international Maoist movement that has made a partnership with Islamist murderers. As General Douglas MacArthur said, there is no substitute for victory.

Red Stars, Fright Stripes: or "No, YOU solve it from 11,000 miles away!"

2004-10-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

A lovely dove whom I have known for five years made a comment that I have decided to respond to on the main blog rather than in the HaloScan pop-up.

She pointed out that North Korea's neighbors have mostly backed bilateral Washington-Pyongyang negotitations rather than six-party talks. Is not John Kerry merely reflecting the wishes of that consensus? Yes, but the consensus is a big mistake.

The People's Republic of China would love to abdicate geopolitical responsibility for its unruly toady, but does not have the right to do so. Beijing helped to create and works to sustain the DPRK, and with the USSR backed the attempted conquest of the anti-communist South, creating the present stand-off on the Peninsula. More recently, it was China that gave nuclear weaponry to Pakistan (the latter was under U.S. sanctions at the time), and together the two have proliferated to North Korea. It is not the PRC's privilege to pretend non-involvement with its misbehaving henchmen just so Kim Jong Il can obtain a more appeasing blackmail package from the United States. The Chinese state must accept a consequent role in reigning in and subduing a nasty proxy. That would be diplomacy, unlike Kerry's quick-fix idea that America should not demand better.

Ex-KGB chief Putin is a heel, and his creeping dictatorship is effectively untouchable, but his Russia might be a good broker between the two communist governments and the three democracies. Russia and China are both nuclear-armed powers with seats on the UN Security Council; they are by definition arbiters in world affairs, particularly in northeast Asia. They do not have the option of ignoring the crisis with North Korea and instead handing it to a superpower on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

As for Japan and South Korea, right now they have taken a position much like West Germany under the Social Democrats, from 1966-1982, regarding East Germany and the Soviet Bloc: begging. They are the ones in danger of immediate attack, they are afraid, and they are willing to pay protection money to their aggressive Stalinist neighbor in hopes that the problem will go away. They both feel, whether they admit it or not, like they are in some sense already rich hostages willing to pay ransom.

Appeasement, however, did not work in Eastern Europe and it will not work now. The South Korean opposition knows this very well, but they do not have the upper hand in the currently divided government. The ruling progressive party, although backed by a contrary voter mandate, must accept the unpopular duty of negotiating directly with its neighbor on their own behalf rather than handing the job to America alone and then criticizing us for being there at all. They want a "sunshine policy" with Pyongyang: then they must work for it in six-party negotiations. Deferring that obligation to the U.S. and hiding makes them not doves, but ostriches with their birdbrains lodged in a hole.

In Japan, the constitution (a product of U.S. tutelage during the post-WWII occupation) prohibits, in effect, having a military that can be used at all effectively overseas. Since North Korea has already fired several test missiles toward (and sometimes over) the archipelago, one could argue that a Japanese military build-up would be justified for defensive purposes alone. Their citizens are not ready for that: they still nurse a neutralist post-Axis hangover like their former confederates in Germany. That may be understandable, but they are a democracy of 120 million people with the second largest economy in the world. Even if they wish to remain strategically dependent on the United States, the Japanese must accept a diplomatic role, particularly in their own region. They are too rich and important to decline the responsibility, much like the United States.

In any event, even a terrified Japan and South Korea do not have the grounds to pretend that they are absent as well. Allowing them to do so would be an act of anti-diplomacy in the name of "listening to our allies" in a shallow and careless manner. They and the U.S. have different strengths, capabilities, vulnerabilities and interests, with only some overlap but enough to call it an alliance of democracies.

Our country underwrites East Asian security, not just for ourselves, and not least for a prosperous newer democracy headquatered in Seoul, and nor for the more prosperous and older U.S.-authored democracy in Tokyo. They can help matters by standing by their most powerful ally when asked to do so against the bully who is harassing them; that is what good allies do for one another.

If John Kerry does not have the courage, intelligence and honesty to demand as much, then it does not matter if he is thinking for himself. If Bush demands six-party responsibility because his advisors have coached him well, bravo: when the man is correct, the man is correct, regardless of how.

San Francisco Alert: Report to 23rd Street and Valencia, ASAP

2004-10-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

The protesters in sympathy with Palestinian fascism, with the rejection of the Oslo peace process and with the al-Aqsa Intifada have rented out a public middle school in my neighborhood today for a twelve-hour teach-in. Protest Warrior and SF Voice for Israel have decided to show up and remind the Mission District that free speech does not apply exclusively to supporters of Arafat, Hamas, and rioting. (I know, I know, the radicals are allegedly supporting a disembodied, romanticized, apolitical and leaderless Palestinian people, but those comments are always pauses before a return to defying Israel's right to fight terrorism. The radicals also frequently show up affecting Palestinian dress, like the kuffiyeh. Yankees appropriating other cultures are still Yankees appropriating other cultures.)

I officially support a two-state solution and body-bags for senior Palestinian guerrilla leadership. If the "resistance" did their business in New York or southern Russia we would all call it terrorism, rather than merely "complicated."

Anyone who is in San Francisco, pleaze mobilize. The cheerleaders of "liberating" Arab extremists always hold these events on Saturdays, when religious Jews will not show up. This liberal Zionist Shabbas Goy must go do his part. I am tired of the free pass given to totalitarians in this city, particularly in the neighborhood.

All who are interested may report to the Horace Mann Academic Middle School, at the corner of 23rd Street and Valencia, only two blocks from the BART station, accessible from downtown by the Mission 14 and 49 buses, and from crosstown by the 48 bus along 24th Street. At least our buses will not be hit by suicide bombers today. The Israelis have no such assurances.

If you would like to e-mail the San Francisco Board of Education and inquire about renting out "neutral" public spaces to anti-Western (and occasionally, you guessed it, anti-Semitic) militants, visit the feedback page for the Horace Mann campus. Luckily, non-residents can do that as well.

The Palestinain nationalist fellow travellers deserve severe criticism. Many leaders are communists with popular front groups, and many of their slogans are on behalf of "all intifadas everywhere." There you have it: suicide bombings, improvised rockets, snipers. Welcome to the Bay Area. Let's take it back.

Correspondence on the Presidential Debate

2004-10-01T15:46:00.000-07:00

A good progressive friend wrote to me that President Bush merely repeated his impossible promises in last night's debate, while Senator Kerry had a fine point that American nuclear facilites are too lightly defended and that other first-responders are very, very short of funds. Aghast, as usual, at my Republican realignment, he comically asked me to put up my rhetorical dukes. Here is the result, minorly edited to protect the young man's identity and spare my family from undue profanity.
* * * * *
I thought (as a number of PBS commentators did) that both gentlemen did better than I had expected. Kerry kept his comments brief and less meandering, but from the footage I saw of the 1996 debate with Massachusetts liberal Republican Governor William Weld I figured he would hold up okay. He is a better at parliamentary argument than at giving speeches. Bush, to my surprise, was better on the rebuttals: he could actually cut back against Kerry. I did not think he had it in him. The President is a generally poor public speaker, and I was amazed he did not simply fold.

That said, I am not certain that they changed the polarized dynamics of the race, or that either of them will win over too many people. (Can dynamics be polarized, or is that a bad chemistry and physics mixed metaphor?) Bush offered, as a strength and potential fault, his resolute stances on diplomacy and war. Kerry, in what I view as his weakness, claimed that as the New Guy he would be able to breathe life into very similar policy proposals. European nations have very few deployable military units in the first place: France has two aircraft carriers only, one frequently under repair, Germany (and Japan) has none, and the other republics have tiny infantries (some of whom, both noted, are already in Iraq).

Kerry is either fooling voters or himself by thinking that he, as President, would solve Iraq by handing sovereignty to the UN rather than the provisional government. The UN, as Bush pointed out, has been a bit afraid that it is not safe. This predicament, multilateral timidity, has dogged the august international body in every peacekeeping and nation-building venture. Kerry would, in the White House, quickly find that a U.S.-guided reconstruction is preferable to one run by the UN.

I was also impressed that every time Kerry said "what about X, which has been overlooked?" Bush could honestly say "we've been working on X": UN-U.S. pressure on Iran; Powell upbraiding Sudan; training, supplying and deploying the new Iraqi army and police; having further summits; and even boosting homeland security and intelligence overhauls.

Why are we closing firehouses in Ohio? Who is “we”? They aren't federally funded, anyway, and thus not the president's immediate responsibility. Unlucky America, we have had budget shortfalls at all levels of government during a wartime recession. Bush and Kerry are not contending for the office of county commissioner, either. Will Kerry make the money appear for all of it by hitting the macroeconomic brakes on growth and repealing the tax cuts?

Shall we have warplanes protecting vulnerable facilities? Sure, and I'd propose paying for it (and a general expansion of our military) by getting out of the mistaken frame of mind that says we don't need to spend money expanding our military. Social services, also, should be increasingly the responsibility of the states. Let them pay for their own schools and welfare rather than demanding that we gut federal defense in order to bail out fifty sovereign little governments. Kerry does not have the chutzpah or the tough-love principles to say that the presidency has a different function than pandering to every precinct on every local expenditure. There is only so much money in the universe, and even higher tax revenues will not cure the mistaken idea that federal money should go toward all projects, however small. Homeland security will be easier when cities, counties and states get over themselves, pay for their own small scale desires, and then let the big guys take care of the big things.

Another non-issue: the difficulty of capturing Bin Laden, symbolic head of a DECENTRALIZED network that must be fought globally in every theater. Tora Bora, and the Afghani-Pakistani frontier in general, is lousy, rough terrain. In a canyon, one who is hiding out can hear any intruders echoing their way in from many, many miles away. During war in an unfamiliar land, it is good to use local guides, even (and perhaps especially) if they are turncoats from the enemy's side. The only alternative Kerry could offer would be a much larger US presence that would stick out like the proverbial sore thumb in the tribally "governed" border region.

He would soon find--and I admit this is a concrete strategic and tactical problem that transcends candidate differences--that America has to maintain nuanced relations with Musharraf's atomic and atomized Pakistan rather than charging across its boundaries. We cannot just invade the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan; Islamabad has tried from time to time, and they cannot control those territories, ostensibly their "own." Of course, if we escalate too drastically, we could also destabilize Pakistan and yield a nuclear-armed anti-American successor to Musharraf. Is Kerry ready for that kind of crisis, or would he prefer compromising painfully some of our battlefield objectives in the name of preserving the alliance as Bush has done? Fair is fair.

On North Korea, I thought they very respectfully outlined different positions. Kerry wishes to gamble on bilateral talks with Pyongyang that bypass Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo and Moscow; Bush wishes to gamble on six-party negotiations. The Republican President has the more diplomatic and multilateral approach, and I prefer it to blackmail that excludes several relevant nations. Wouldn't you agree? Kim Jong Il may want two-country only discussions, but I do not think he or DC has the privilege to exclude the DPRK's neighboring likely victims. Also, how much sense does it make to negotiate with a client state while leaving out its patron, the People's Republic of China? Who has the power over there? Just America and a Stalinist monarch? Weak, dude. Kerry sounded just like Jimmy Carter (politically, not in terms of accent.)

Final note: in (the generally pro-Kerry) Slate Magazine, one of their pro-Kerry correspondents noted a while ago that the Senator is not, per se, a flip-flopper. He is a straddler (this from a supporter!) who wishes to be in two positions more or less simultaneously, rather than a crude back-and-forth. I saw that straddling on display last night: promising to win a war he thinks was a mistake, except for all of the "little things" he liked about it. He would win it by doing more of what Bush is doing, but by being taller, not having a drawl, and calling the other guy a failure. What the hell was that? He embraced mutually exclusive positions within one night, in an effort to please pro-war and anti-war voters alike. Well, he can't. Bush's point, that Carteresque "Why are we doing this?" doubts are demoralizing to actual troops in the field, was very salient. I'm not saying we need to lie and tell our forces that everything is coming up roses, but we should at least say the mission was and is for a worthwhile goal. Otherwise, one is straddling between the cries of protest and the pursuit of victory. That is why I feel John Kerry can go get bent.

On the Debate over Limited Government

2004-09-30T18:02:00.000-07:00

The first debate is set to be about foreign policy, one of my favorite topics, but let us consider the large-scale economic objectives of the Democrat Kerry and the Republican Bush. Despite strong-sounding rhetoric (or perhaps, attitude), this year is not a life and death struggle between social democracy and the invisible hand of the market. According to the late historian Richard Hofstadter, we are still witnessing a duel between rival adjustments of a “liberal consensus” that has guided the United States since independence. Its latest articulation is haggling over conservative and progressive versions of the Third Way.

Around a century ago, Sigmund Freud catalogued “the narcissism of minor differences” and the psychologically powerful, even grandiose, rivalry felt between similar entities. A generation ago, the scholar Albert O. Hirschman wrote that: “loyalty is at its most functional when it looks most irrational, when loyalty means strong attachment to an organization that does not seem to warrant such attachment because it is so much like another one that is also available. Such seemingly irrational loyalties are often encountered, for example, in relation to clubs, football teams, and political parties. [The more] parties in a two-party system move toward and resemble each other…the more irrational and outright silly does stubborn party loyalty look; yet that is precisely when it is most useful.”

The fact that America’s conservative party is somewhat statist invites scorn from the Left, when it should elicit appreciation from the opposing Democrats instead. In this case, Hirschman is insightful: the more similar the two major parties become regarding economic ideas, the greater the threat they pose to one another’s voter base, and thus the greater the animosity between them. Competition between bodies with such interchangeable goals heightens the enmity between the loyalists of each opposing group.

Since the Great Depression, Republican rhetoric has been divided between the outright rejection of social democratic welfare policy and a minimizing restraint of the same. Ohio’s popular U.S. Senator Robert A. Taft and his 1960s Arizona counterpart Barry Goldwater ambitiously hoped to overturn the New Deal, and Ronald Reagan followed their lead. William F. Buckley, Jr.—founder of National Review in 1955, which inspired Goldwater and Reagan—pointed out that the two western Republicans campaigned on nearly identical platforms in 1964 and 1980. In this reading, the same politics that could lose in a landslide election were resurrected and triumphant sixteen years later, demonstrating a national move to the Right.

As critics from all over the political spectrum have pointed out, however, Reagan’s presidency did not trim the public sector so much as retard its rate of growth. Aside from the dramatic increases in defense spending the conservative leader had wanted, the 1980s also saw a rise in the ordinary entitlement spending as well, both guns and butter, as it were. Although the Reagan administration significantly rolled back economic regulations and taxes, they did not ultimately shrink the size of government.

David Horowitz, another conservative author, contrasts the presidential politics of the 1960s and 1980s. Unlike Buckley, he does not compare Reagan’s campaign to Goldwater’s. Horowitz instead cites the tax-cutting, Red-hunting Cold Warrior John F. Kennedy as a sensible forerunner to Reaganism. From the perspective of a former 1960s Marxist, the nation had moved so far to the Left by 1980 that only a hardened Goldwater Republican could govern like the liberal icon of twenty years earlier.

One might think Buckley’s and Horowitz’s interpretations are mutually exclusive: Reagan may have been heir to John Kennedy, or to Goldwater, but surely not to both. Or could he? The synthesis of the two arguments is that Reagan campaigned like an extremist in the defense of liberty, but was willing to bear any burden in the name of practical government. Considering that Reaganism largely remade first the Republican Party, and then by its popularity dragged the New Democrats toward the Center, it puts modern politics into perspective.

As pragmatic conservative columnist David Brooks argued recently in the New York Times Magazine, the collapse of socialism has also meant the collapse of absolute capitalism. The libertarian economic ideas of the Right were a potent negative ideology against advocates of open-ended statism, but a more modest Left has defanged the notion of a purely free enterprise system. Just as the Democrats are displeased that the Republicans are selective proponents of government spending programs, the GOP has been more annoyed by market-friendly Democrats than grateful for sharing a greater economic consensus with the opposing party.

Clinton’s co-optation of the most popular parts of the Contract With America (e.g. welfare reform, budget-balancing measures) allowed him to defeat Bob Dole in 1996. The Democrats are now livid about Bush’s Medicare prescription drug benefit, a new government entitlement to be spent on private sector companies. Each party reacts as if its ideas had been stolen and somehow inherently bastardized by the other. Then the intellectual activists wonder if political consensus is being dragged toward the Left or the Right.

Even as a newly registered Republican, I take some comfort in the fact that both major parties are generally in favor of expanded international trade and limited government, even if they differ on how to expand the former and limit the latter. Fair enough. It reassures me to know that Republicans can still be practitioners of social-democratic programs and that Democrats can cut spending and promote globalization.

A final note on budgets is worthwhile. A balanced budget can be very, very large. A government that runs up a debt might still have a relatively small public sector. America’s rulers spend around a third or so of the Gross Domestic Product, and have more or less since the New Deal. It’s not as much as in the welfare democracies of Europe, and not as little as other more roguishly capitalist societies. So be it. Getting mired in comparative penny-pinching on a small scale can obscure the larger issues.

Time to watch the debate, citizens. Enjoy life in the Third Way.

Donkeys, Elephants, Bear Flags and Tigers, or "Have We Learned Nothing From Siegfried and Roy?"

2004-09-25T15:08:00.000-07:00

My last post pointed out the many national and international security reasons why I have cast my lot with the Grand Old Party. There were specifically Californian reasons, also, and I should not neglect them.

A very close left-liberal friend said to me that it was very different to be a Republican in the San Francisco Bay Area than in our own native Chicago suburb. I found her comment to be not entirely true. The area where we both grew up has elected pro-choice moderate GOP Congressmen for at least 25 years. On the especially polarized and "litmus-test" issues of (how to put it delicately for both sides?) family-planning, John E. Porter's successor Mark Steven Kirk received medium scores from the watchdog ProgressivePunch and went against the American Conservative Union. This is the representation chosen by a supposedly rock-ribbed Republican district in that dowdy, old American Middle West. The Great Lakes' suburbia is positively full of surprises.

Another progressive friend, an Ohioan, pointed out that his home state and Illinois were the finest bookends of their region: each having a little bit of every demographic, but not too much of any one. A grouchy but balanced diversity is the unglamorous and pragmatic result.

My Illinoian friend had something of a good point, though. I might have revised her comparison to say that being a Republican in liberal San Francisco is different than being one in Mississippi, for example, according to the estimates of our two previous Left and Right monitors. Were I living in the latter, I would feel a centrist's revulsion about the Trent Lott wing of the party and vote more or less straight-ticket for the little donkey instead of the big elephant, excepting presidential contests.

It is much more accurate to say that it is quite different to be a Democrat in California than in Illinois. At the Congressional level, both of these states are populous and diverse enough to feature some moderates in each major party.

These looks are deceiving, however, when it comes to the style of government at the state and local levels. The divide between suburban centrists and rural hardliners tempers the Illinois GOP. The Windy City is almost a time capsule of an older fashioned governing machine, one that predates the New Deal and simultaneously co-opts the New Left, and would never allow for a Giuliani or even a "Republican-in-name-only" like Michael Bloomberg to win office as they did in New York City. Chicagoan politics of total Democrat domination are built on a foundation of trade unions and civil servants, but with a large dose of blue collar conservatism keeping that bulwark of the statewide party on a somewhat moderate course.

That is not the case in California, despite the presence of some centrist Democrats and plenty of powerful organized labor. Other Democrats in the Golden State have found that their party's long-lasting bicameral legislative hegemony has succumbed to arrogance and excess. Under Governor Gray Davis, the Assembly and Senate were given a freer reign than under Republicans George Duekmejian (served 1983-1991) and Pete Wilson (1991-1999).

(On a related note, bipartisan political consultant and commentator Dick Morris recently compared the state politics of Massachusetts to California's while appearing on a San Francisco radio show. In the former state, a liberal electorate has chosen exclusively four moderate Republican governors since 1990--first William Weld and currently Mitt Romney--to control a Democratic legislature which is not widely trusted. Morris predicted that Sacramento government may soon become the same.)

The California Democratic legislature did not have a completely free reign under Davis, however, and since his inauguration almost six years ago he had annoyed party militants with a limited spate of vetoes at the end of every legislative session.

This very same matter was ultimately enough to tilt many moderate Democrat voters in the other direction, as it became clear what pork-barreling, favoritism and virtual corruption guided the former governor's last-minute decisions in this cyclical scenario. Soon, the emittered swing-voting centrists and independents defected to Davis' recall and replacement by GOP moderate Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 2003 special election. It even turned out that the Democrat Attorney General Bill Lockyer, though voting to retain the incumbent on part one of the ballot, opted against his party's machine politican Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and selected the victorious liberal Republican instead on part two.

The state legislatrue, unfortunately, has not changed a whit since the 2002 elections, and given the gerrymandered safe-districting regime, it probably will not this year or any time soon. Raging moderate Californian Jill Stewart wrote for the now-defunct New Times Los Angeles and now pens the syndicated column Capitol Punishment, detailing the state's migraine-inducing politics. "As a Democrat, but also a big believer in the need for two parties, I suspect we Democrats have simply ruled the legislature for too long," she lamented recently. "When politicos of either party have no fear of being ousted, rational thought disappears."

Two State Senators are on a quest to restrict the taste-testing of unwashed grapes by pickers. Someone else has a plan to make ALL new buildings in the state according to Feng Shui principles, a wildly expensive and impractical idea. Imagine if all construction from now on had to face the same direction in a land of 35 million residents (and always growing). There are many more debacles, but two legislative Democrat proposals stand out as the worst and the funniest, respectively. San Jose's Sen. John Vasconcelos--and San Jose is not the most radical place in the Bay Area-- wants to lower the voting age to fourteen, which would end all debate about the Bear Flag Republic as the refuge of utopian idiocy. My favorite, however, is West Hollywood Assemblyman Paul Koretz's drive to prohibit the declawing of exotic cats. Jill Stewart: "As one appalled legislative staffer asked me, 'Have we learned nothing from Siegfried and Roy?'" This is a long, long way from the practical bread and butter issues of Chicago's Daley dynasty and its "Irish mafia" on the shores of Lake Michigan. No wonder the people chose a new, more veto-prone governor.

In a world ruled by foolish and extreme Democrats, this one man prefers to be ruled by Republicans.

The Making of a Republican By Default

2004-09-24T15:25:00.000-07:00

Since I last posted, both major American parties have held their conventions. Could my silence in excess of two months mean that I have retro-aligned with Democrat John Kerry? Not at all: this 2000 Gore voter wore a cowboy hat during George W. Bush’s keynote address to show his solidarity, something unforeseen and unforeseeable four years ago. It did not happen all at once.

The September 11, 2001 attacks inspired my bipartisan support of the Bush Doctrine, if little else about the administration. I presumed that this zero-tolerance policy for terrorists and rogue states would catch on with the Democrats. The subsequent rejection of that global strategy (among other things) by presidential hopeful Kerry and the bulk of the other primary candidates led me to the reluctant support of the Republican incumbent. With neoliberal domestic views, I would be voting for the Doctrine, and little else of Bush; party loyalty be damned.

Instead of remaining a quiet Democrat for Bush, I became a more vocal one. The creation of my blog an was a part of breaking the polite silence with my leftist pals, most of whom see as alien my support for a war against contemporary fascism. They also deplore the mediocre conservative news providers as a matter of faith, but generally give a free pass to shoddy left-wing journalism and pro-totalitarian activism that happens to be “on the right side” and “against Bush, which is what truly matters.” One can imagine that as a card-carrying member of the liberal arts college-educated intelligentsia none of my neoconservative tendencies are very popular with my demographic peers.

Soon, however, I noticed that the campaign-heightened dogmatism had spread well beyond the campuses and hipster neighborhoods. The uncritical mainstream Democrats excused the disgraceful anti-Bush absolutism of the Marxoid hard Left, and applauded the new, hit Michael Moore fraud-umentary Fahrenheit 9/11. After the warm, “what errors?” attitude that greeted this outrageously unfunny defamation film at a screening for the Congressional Democrats, I decided to not only vote for the Bush/Cheney ticket, but to volunteer for the official campaign against a fevered and increasingly senseless and incoherent opposition. (To be exact, I made this decision while watching this childish propaganda a few weeks into its theatrical run.) This particular movie was only a symptom of a progressive illness in America. Even without the crypto-communist Moore, this election year still would feature similar, slightly milder opinions championed by (for example) New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, eminence grise Bill Moyers and countless ordinary liberals nationwide.

A week later, the Democratic National Convention lowered the bar further, basing an undecided message (e.g., militarist or anti-war?) on the ostensibly heroic nominee’s four months of service thirty-five years ago in a war that he and most of the attending delegates opposed. It was a logical absurdity: a largely dovish party trying to run a generally dovish veteran with an insincere hawkish posture in order to “out-war” Bush’s image as commander-in-chief in the swing states.

The Kerry convention made me decide to change my registration from Democratic to Republican, so that I might vote in the Reaganite primaries for the party of the Bush Doctrine, rather than the Carterite contests for the party of the I Voted For It, Before I Voted Against It Doctrine (formerly known as Clintonitis, the Vietnam Syndrome, and the Kennedy dynasty.) The Republican National Convention, locally protested by some of my New York friends, booed by many more from coast to coast, made me proud to have changed, despite being a good San Franciscan with progressive views on culture. True, I am on the minority liberal end of my newly chosen party, but among the first orders of government is “to provide for the common defence,” and on that count I trust the arch-conservative Bill Frist and Tom DeLay over the uncertain minimalism of Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi.

The Gore/Lieberman ticket advocated a more aggressive and interventionist foreign policy than the Bush/Cheney campaign’s pitch for scaling back on “nation-building” in 2000. The 2001 terrorism should have propelled this tendency of the Democrats into predominance within the party. Instead, Gephardt and Lieberman were forsaken for MoveOn.org and Jimmy Carter’s anti-invasion antics while accepting the Nobel Prize. The raging Howard Dean and the blander all-things-to-all-voters Kerry/Edwards ticket have shown that the Democrats are quite proficient at complaining about Republicans. They are inept at deciding between the anti-war isolationism of the 2000 Nader and Buchanan candidacies and the pro-war internationalism of party moderates, independent voters and opposition centrists. In 2002 Al Gore himself denounced the sort of hawkish liberalism he had espoused only two years earlier, and it seems that the majority of the party agrees with his about face.

The blame for this Center-Left incoherence rests solely with the Democrats themselves. Under the circumstances, I would rather be a dissident supporter of American victory abroad among Republicans than attempt an alliance with Democrat war opponents who want no triumph overseas at all. If the Democrats wish to be “blue” on the outside and Green on the inside, it is their mistake. Whether or not they win the election, the country has all but lost a Democratic Party worthy of leading a democratic superpower. I would not wager that a hypothetical President Kerry would reverse the decline, but one never knows what could happen in four yeas. After all, I became a reluctant Republican by default, and the Winter Soldier seems to change his mind even more often than I do. We will see if he shall have the chance.

California Republicans: Still In Trouble

2004-07-13T14:46:00.000-07:00

Special thanks to CaliforniaRepublic.org for running my piece on the U.S. Senate race. A different version of it ran earlier at ChronWatch.com.

Bill Jones has begun to attract more help from powerful Republican politicians and donors, but the state party still has an underdeveloped sense of grassroots activity or internet campaign savvy. The California GOP and its country committees have yet to really exploit their internet potential, and are sometimes embarassingly late in what gestures they take: for example, notices for meetings are posted online after the fact. As I mention in the newer draft, my local "meetup" for Bill Jones was canceled for lack of three warm bodies. You might chuckle that so it goes in left-wing San Francisco, but 12% of the fog city's voters are Republican, around 54,000 people. It should not be that hard for two of them to meet me at a cafe once a month.

Some of this may be generational, a gap in imagination and computer fluency that does not matter. Consider that the elderly have the highest voter turnout rates, and the lowest interest in the web. The Dean campaign was a hot cyber-topic and a great, big failure at ballot boxes. Conservatives never have rallies or demonstrations on the scale of the Left, and yet Republicans dominate the House of Representatives. One might even assume that the 2004 elections will not be turned by the internet.

All of this is true, for now. It is a cliche that California trends are heralds for the rest of the nation: having been heavily settled and developed at the height of the industrial revolution and continuously ever since, the state is imagined as being at the forefront of new social tensions. It was the first place in the country to grapple with massive non-white immigration and the corresponding mass white xenophobia, the Hollywood revolution in modern popular culture, and so forth.

In poltics, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century witnessed the corrupting predominance of the railroads, fought in the Progressive Era by new legislation permitting the ballot initiative, the refrendum and the recall. During the New Deal, California Democrats and labor unions built many close ties to Socialists and Communists, by most accounts more strongly than counterparts in most other places in the nation. In the 1960s, the state brought forth America's first fully developed New Left campus culture at UC Berkeley. At the same time, California also gave the country Nixon and then Reagan, the first potent Republican alternatives to Democrat rule since before the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, the current condition of state politics is not foreshadowing something good. Gerrymandering and wedge issues have fostered a political culture that is locally sanitized and almost segregated. I am told that Democrats frequently do not run candidates for Congress in Bakersfield, a growing city of 250,000 whose Republican Bill Thomas has been serving in the House of Representatives since 1978. Despite the efforts of Republican candidates in San Francisco the House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is similarly untouchable, while Democrats are a presumed lock for all state offices. Last March's primary election was a depressing joke, ratifying two imcumbents and a career politician running for State Senate with no significant opposition, and John Kerry's nomination was already a foregone conclusion. It is amazing that something as dynamic as the recall election emerged from this stagnant public sphere, because it was the most powerful political competition California had seen in some time. It frightens me that neglected and neglectful voters will return to sleepwalking.

It is also dispiriting to live in a safe district where your leaders are generally unaccountable because no one ever challenges them, and local oppositon is usually extremist. San Francisco abounds with leftists who accuse the mighty Democrats of being insufficiently progressive. In Bakersfield last fall, the local newspaper urged against very minor sales tax increases whose revenues would have been committed to public schools. Anyone with any sense could tell you that both cities are crazy. Then again, no one with any sense is speaking up consistently, and that is the problem.

Californian localities have demonstrated their aptitude at being needlessly polarized. The center-left in Bakersfield and the Central Valley and the center-right in the San Francisco Bay Area need to wake up and remember that their votes count statewide and their voices should count locally (and not just on call-in talk radio programs.)

These days, each party should have a candidate, and each candidate should have a home page. A Google search revealed no Democrat running in California's 22nd Congressional District against Bakersfield Republican Bill Thomas. In San Francisco, Gail Neira is running for State Assembly but without a campaign website. I have met Neira twice, and I have no idea what her stances are on key issues. Jennifer DePalma, who is bravely challenging Nancy Pelosi's Congressional seat, has also not filled out her own positions on the issues at her website, although one might find some of them piecemeal at her weblog, which alas has not been updated since June 1. Andrew Felder, my local Republican contender for State Senate, has dutifully listed a few of his stands on select issues. Bill Jones has the most ambitious website of the lot, and he is still losing. In the age of MoveOn.org, internet incompetence is the keystone of campaign failure.

On the bright side of things, there are other websites and a few months until the election. The samizdat nature of the internet is still a potentially great thing. Bakersfield has its own underground newspaper, the Blackboard, even if it does not have a credible Democratic party. I do not live in Kern County, and even if they are disagreeably far to the radical Left, good luck to the alternative press and whomever else is uneasy living in that one-party ghetto. I must worry about my own.

In the Bay Area, Contra Costa County resident Thomas G. Del Beccaro runs the conservative activist weblog Political Vanguad, mining the major news media and providing original commentary as well. I had the pleasure of hearing Del Beccaro speak last week at a meeting of the San Francisco Republican County Central Committee, and it's a shame that the room was not crowded. Among other insights, Del Beccaro predicts that the Kerry/Edwards ticket will not win more than one major eastern swing state at great campaign expense; having lost several large swing states, West Coast Democrats will know they have been mathematically defeated and lose their will to have a large voter turnout.

In this scenario, Del Beccaro argues, Bush will begin to wear down Kerry after the Republican National Convention, since through the worst of times the Massachusetts Senator has persuaded few if any new people to like him or his politics. Gradual economic recovery and consolidation in Iraq will give amiable President Bush the means to reach swing voters while his opponents gamble everything on rust-belt resentment and mostly lose. Meanwhile in California, the Del Beccaro story continues, the equally unlikable Barbara Boxer will watch her poll lead collapse incrementally. By election day, she and perhaps Kerry would be vulnerable after a Democratic loss in the Eastern time zone takes the wind out of Californians' sails. It's an intriguing possibility, but I am worried that it relies so much on out of state developments and so little on organization per se out here. Spiteful Democrats, after all, could rush to the polls in order to battle a victorious Bush and shore up America's third most progressive Senator, according to Boxer's rating by Americans for Democratic Action. In the interim, I would suggest practical measures like internet outreach to silent local constituencies as a better long term strategy.

My Man in Baghdad

2004-07-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

Freelance writer Charlie Crain is a good friend of mine now reporting from Baghdad and blogging about his observations. His postings have a dark sense of humor and sobering unpretentious realism about human flaws on display in Iraq, like this one about a botched terrorist operation last week. He has behind the scenes anecdotes about the Major Media in Iraq that you will not get anywhere else, stranger than fiction ethnographic accounts of the paranoid style in Iraqi politics, and a running naked eye appraisal of the strategic and tactical problems of social and military instability.

To interject my own second order conclusions from Charlie's dispatches, the insurgency is going to get a lot worse before Iraq gets any better. Charlie fears that the new government and a public backlash against lawlessness and terrorists could mean the return of authoritarian rule. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a former Ba'athist who survived an assassination attempt by Iraqi intelligence early in his exile, is especially eager to mobilize counterguerrilla warfare.

Can this portend well for the new regime? Taking lessons from America's Cold War allies, I think it possibly could. In the narrowest sense, even a weak democracy fraught with civil violence is preferable to a victorious revolutionary vanguard. Peru under the liberal despot Alberto Fujimori was better off than it would have been if ruled by the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) or Movimiento Revolucionario du Tupac Amaru (MRTA). The same applies to any of Colombia's governemts, Conservative or Liberal, especially in the last few decades; despite drug corruption, oligarchy and underdevelopment, that status quo is far superior to the alternative represented by the narco-guerilla FARC and ELN. The same goes for monarchist Greece during its civil war with communist partisans in the 1940s--a struggle that gave birth to the United States' Truman Doctrine when that great president took over the duties of a bankrupted Britain in supporting a mediocre present against a bleaker possible future. The lesson also applies to El Salvador, where the five guerrilla organiztions united by Fidel Castro as the FMLN lost their bid for revolution and eventually became a mere political party in the 1990s. There are many more cases.

We know what the opposite outcome looks like as well: on a good day, a Castroist Cuba supported by the dollars of expatriates; on a bad day, Cambodia and North Korea under the genocidal Maoists or Afghanistan under the Taliban. The revolution is dead in its populist Third World variety, and the world cannot tolerate additional zombie-like rogue states. No new ones can be allowed to take power, and the older ones must be rolled back.

It may not be pretty, and an emerging Iraqi civil war could join the tragic annals of other such conflicts. Make no mistake, however, the self-appointed guerrilla vanguards do not usually win. In my Marxist days, I puzzled over why so few Castro/Guevara imitators won power in Latin America and elsewhere. Since that time, I have not only better come to understand why not, but become thankful that they did not. For starters, the old states that are most susceptible to revolutions are often dynastic, and Iraq is not anymore. That fact separated the fourteen richest families of El Salvador and their many clients from the Somoza father-and-sons dictatorship in Nicaragua that was toppled by the Sandinistas and their popular front allies in 1979. Saddam Hussein is on trial, his two boys Uday and Qusai are feeding the maggots, and Iraq's militiamen and uniformed security forces are no longer defending a Tikriti family business.

There might still be worry that Iraq will become a failed state, more like 1980s Lebanon or 1990s Somalia, but if a law and order mentality is growing on the street, if the Thulfiqar Brigades were quietly murdering Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army jihadists in Najaf this spring, and if the rest of the fractious country gets tired of forgiving the metropolitan blight that is Fallujah--well, it seems like the pushy mujahidin and retro-Ba'athists might have paupers' graves waiting for them while the rest of the country moves on. Twenty six million people are not going to submit without a fight. I'm counting on it, but it's going to be bloody and scary. A weak-kneed press and homefront asking "are we there yet?" every five minutes will not make the trip any shorter or more pleasant, but we are not going to just turn this car right around if we hear one more peep out of those damned kids. Destination: victory.

By the way, a belated Happy Indepedence Day to my American readership, with hopes that all my foreign audience also appreciates the eighteenth century revolution that brought the first successful model of a mature democracy into the modern world. Even if a non-guerrilla Iraq cannot become one tomorrow, a semi-competitive developing democracy with strong patron-client relationships and ethnic and religious blocs is still a step up from their recent past and beautiful compared the rule of the Islamic fascist rebels. Besides, who knows when the next pro-Western banana republic will turn the proverbial corner and become another South Korea or Taiwan or Argentina, a new liberal state that long knew the rule of generals and party bosses? Even Chile's dreaded General Pinochet surrendered power in the late 1980s after a referendum; the communists (preparing their own coup at the time of Allende's ovetrhrow in 1973) never would have. No one should ever say that war and democratization are processes without multiple steps.

Civil Rights Act 40th Anniversary, Part One

2004-07-02T13:50:00.000-07:00

Forty years ago today, as the San Francisco Chronicle reports, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, outlawing discrimination in public places. It was the first of three such landmarks during his administration, followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and a law against housing discrimination in 1968. Previously the East Texas populist Johnson had proposed several similar bills during his time as U.S. Senate majority leader in the 1950s; segregationist Southern Democrats had prevented each one from passing before the breakthrough of 1964.

Lyndon Johnson, perhaps the single most important white political ally of the whole movement, is often overlooked in the civil rights pantheon. The end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the rise of Jim Crow laws in the New South had halted many of the accomplishments of Lincoln in destroying the slave society and Grant’s no-nonsense counterinsurgency against the retro-Confederate Ku Klux Klan. (The KKK was crushed so badly that it would not re-emerge in the New South until after D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “Birth of a Nation” gave it a new patina of legitimacy.) Harry Truman, also underrated, had integrated the military in 1947 and put civil rights in the modern Democrat platform the following year, inspiring South Carolinian Strom Thurmond to lead the segregationist Dixiecrat revolt and setting the stage for the subsequent political realignment of the American South. Eisenhower, in deference to the Supreme Court, used soldiers to desegregate American schools and challenge resistant mobs. Massachusetts liberal John F. Kennedy talked a good game, but was timid about civil rights and only briefly in office prior to his assassination. Lyndon Johnson delivered more than any president in a century.

Some imagine that LBJ’s contributions are ignored because of “greater” disapproval for his escalation of the Vietnam War. In my mind, this is a piece of a larger thankless attitude toward America’s thirty sixth president. As the Chronicle article notes, the age of civil rights reform was also the era of massive black ghetto riots, with the latter portending the end of the former. (Revolution from below?) Johnson’s Great Society was the last major cluster of social democratic policies in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Nixon’s election in 1968 opened a long, gradual rise of a contrary conservatism that changed both major parties. Perhaps some on the Left felt this coming at the time in the turbulent 1960s and have decided to blame the last New Dealer on duty for the end of Democrat dominance.

What I suspect is that Lyndon Johnson’s reformism was so generally successful that it elevated the expectations of radicals to unsustainable heights. All of a sudden, in their eyes, the most important progressive president and “master of the Senate” appeared as a shabby gradualist who had not delivered enough. (I must thank brilliant conservative political scientist Samuel P. Huntington and liberal former New Leftist John B. Judis, both Democrats, for much of this insight.) Earlier in the decade, the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had struggled for exactly the sort of reforms that Johnson’s Great Society was enacting. These organizations’ fates explain a great deal.

The 1960s were a revolution in Bad Judgment as often as anything else, one that made the outlandish Nation of Islam temporarily “respectable” against the “Uncle Tom” Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Council. Trinidadian American civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael changed himself into the pandering, anti-Semitic pan-Africanist Kwame Ture. In 1967, Carmichael threw all Jews out of the once-integrationist SNCC (under the pretext of punishing a victorious Israel), and one year earlier under the slogan of “black power” encouraged the formation of paramilitary Black Panther Parties for Self-Defense all over the United States.

Eventually, he merged SNCC with the most powerful of them, the Maoist Oakland, California party founded by street thugs Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. Experiencing buyer’s remorse as the BPP descended into a factional war between Newton and rapist-turned-author Eldridge Cleaver, Carmichael then moved to dictatorial Guinea in West Africa, renaming himself after Ghana’s despotic independence leader Kwame Nkrumah and Senegalese counterpart Ahmed Sekou Ture, later dying in banana republican exile.

Luckily, SDS had transformed entirely from the anti-communism and non-violence of its 1962 founding Port Huron Statement toward instigating riots and advocating guerrilla warfare. Cofounder Tom Hayden led one such “uprising” in Newark, New Jersey. Then with Seale, anarchist clown prince Abbie Hoffman, trust fund socialist Jerry Rubin and recently deceased “anti-war” activist David Dellinger he co-led the assault on the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The clandestine Maoist Progressive Labor Party had joined SDS en masse in middle of the decade and absorbed it completely after the 1969 SDS national convention; the other leadership splintered and formed the Revolutionary Union and the terrorist Weather Underground.

Now think, did all of this happen because the civil rights movement and President Johnson had delivered nothing, or because of utopian and apocalyptic expectations of the New Left? If the Vietnam War “drove them crazy,” it is their fault for appropriating the Marxist-Leninism that America fought against as their new guide and inspiration. The movement only needed a few years to devolve from constitutional liberalism into totalitarianism. They soon hated Johnson’s unprecedented domestic policy accomplishments as too little and demonized him for challenging Ho Chi Minh and other champions of Stalinist “liberation” abroad. By 1968, the “anti-war” movement’s consensus was that Johnson was an enemy of “people’s revolution” rather than a great reformer.

It was the New Left’s mistake, across the board.

Strategy and the American Presidency

2004-06-29T18:30:00.000-07:00

Pre-emption and unilateralism are morally neutral concepts: only the cause or actors in question can be just or unjust. Despite wishful thinking to the contrary, these international strategic lessons are true across partisan lines and throughout history. The influence of the anti-war coalition on the current presidential campaign offers rhetoric that only obscures this fact, leaving the Democratic platform an uncertain blend of hawkish and dovish ideas. By retrospectively wavering in his support for the Iraq War, pleading ignorance about President Bush’s confrontational intentions, Senator John Kerry provides little clear vision of national security policy. Ideology, even a composite of ideologies, cannot unmake the responsibilities of the commander in chief of the world’s foremost superpower. It can, however, surely confuse and delay the inevitable recognition of the need for a militarily active United States.

Contrary to the opposition cry that the Bush Doctrine is unprecedented, pre-emptive strategies in warfare are as old as the hills. Decisive early military action has been employed from Ancient Greece to the 1962 blockade of Cuba, the Six Day War and the invasion of Grenada. In each of these cases, a democracy challenged a despotic opponent's sovereign territory where enemy actions had been allowed to escalate unchecked for some time. In that sense, calling them "pre-emptive" is something of a misnomer or misconception: it ignores earlier events of a menacing nature in an artificial scenario that acknowledges only the present and future, not the past.

We need to dispel not just the mythology of pre-emptive actions, but also the crude equivalence of multilateralism and progress. When the Americans and other once and future Allies signed a 1928 treaty outlawing all war (along with temporarily democratic Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan) they just prepared to be unprepared in the event of trouble. Retiring Fresno State Professor Victor Davis Hanson, citing Hitler’s legions of non-German authoritarian allies, made the salient point that some of the most multilateral causes are bad ones. On the other hand, many times liberal democracies have had to stand—and therefore act—alone, as the United Kingdom did in 1940. Unilateralism proved indispensable, though fortunately only temporary.

The various anti-war critics are looking backward. A powerless cause is now, in addition, terribly dated. The United States will be involved in pacifying and rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan for some time, as it will surely do elsewhere. Activist whining will not achieve victory in or withdrawal from Iraq. Instead, it merely deepens the fantasy that the world can be gently turned back to the deceptively calm 1990s, when al-Qaeda and the Palestinian Authority, the axis of evil and the illicit arms market, all flourished while being overlooked.

Democrats began to shy away from assertive superpower strategies during the Vietnam War, yet both recent Democrat presidents have used force overseas on behalf of improving political order despite the Vietnam Syndrome. Since the Nixon administration, Republicans have often taken the lead on essential foreign and military policy despite surviving vestiges of isolationism in the party. In the last generation, the Democrats’ elusive consensus has become increasingly hesitant in the international arena; the hawkish Democrats are often seen, by default, as imitating the Republican Party.

That continuity across party lines is an achievement to applaud, not condemn: Islamic radicalism and Arab fascism will not disappear with the inauguration of a left-liberal Bostonian president. Kerry, if elected, will have to prove an outstanding wartime leader lest he be turned out after one term. If he abdicates or shortchanges the prosecution of the war on terror and the new cold war against the rogue states, a neo-Reaganite/neo-Bushian Republican will easily and justifiably win the White House in 2008.

As such, it is time to start thinking again of this many-faceted war as a bipartisan effort and not the hated property of one administration. It is bigger than Bush and Kerry, bigger than Blair and Chirac, and even bigger than conventional divisions of the Left and Right. The war on terror is a war on behalf of democratic consensus (progressive, conservative and centrist alike) against anti-liberal dictators and movements. Even if one side or another decides to ignore this fact out of spite toward an elected leader, the larger struggle remains unchanged.

So get ready for a hawkish Kerry presidency, if it shall be anything but a failure. Whatever the electoral outcome, America's current crop of enemies will be the same, and the new term begun in January of 2005 (and possibly the one in January of 2009) will be for a war president. Democrats must embrace this during the campaign; Kerry may not want to lose the anti-war voters like failed candidate Lieberman did, but he will have to govern like Lieberman would have.

When do the Democrats want to break the bad news?

A Tale of Two Vigils

2004-06-29T17:09:00.000-07:00

I have only attended two candlelight vigils held in public places. The first was on Tuesday September 11, 2001 in Oberlin, Ohio, where I had attended college. The second was on Thursday, June 10, 2004 outside San Francisco’s city hall. Both were commemorating events felt nationwide: the al-Qaeda attacks on America and the death of epochal former President Ronald Reagan.

If the terrorism in New York and Washington caught America off guard, it literally caught much of Oberlin asleep three years ago, myself included. By afternoon, the political reactions to the destructive assault were emerging more clearly after the initial shock of the news. One friend informed me that she would be leading a candlelight vigil, adding some unfortunate but predictable blather about peace. I replied that peace was long gone already, and last seen on four crashed airplanes and at their sites of impact. This was not an entirely new disagreement: I had become a “Bosnia hawk” (pro-war liberal) some years before, and the college had no shortage of anti-capitalist, anti-military and anti-modern politics. Nonetheless, she entreated me to attend for the mere sake of paying my respects to the victims of massacre, making an offer I could not refuse.

The vigil she led that night was a radical disgrace. After a few rounds of “Amazing Grace”—the leader was a vocal performance major at Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music—my friend called the attackers insane, then sermonized lamely about how a nuclear armed America, should it declare war on rogue states and their terrorist clients, would inescapably destroy the entire world in the very near future. Al-Qaeda murdered thousands in America, Palestinians danced in the streets, and she worried about Bush’s trigger finger rather than acknowledging that others had launched a war on us. She admonished our government while ignorantly refusing to consider the objectives of the terrorists, imagined as some apolitical lunatics. The shame of twenty-something leftism was made plain that day: a demonstration in every sense of the term, indeed.

The crowd in Oberlin was with her. The next person to speak up prayed for the souls of the terrorists, since the victims were already in heaven. Having left Christianity some years ago—don’t ask—I politely declined to obey his solemn request. Those hijacker monsters thought they were going to heaven, and didn’t need any kind words from anyone else, religious or otherwise. Others bleated about world justice and their fear of America’s power. It made me ill. My friend had, however, given the attackers a (token) negative description, so I took that as an opening. At my next chance in the Great Sharing, I exhorted the crowd to never let its profound sympathy for the downtrodden become an excuse for extremism and a fellow traveler’s blind eye turned to terror. Considering that religiously radical Third Worldists had just destroyed the World Trade Center and buried a jet in the Pentagon, it was the best insight of the evening, if I do say so myself.

Not that the Marxoid and pacifist crowd of liberal arts college students noticed. Immediately after my plea for a moral response to deranged revolutionaries, another vigil attendee asked the crowd to sing a sentimental folk song, “The Mary Ellen Carter.” It is a memorial to a beloved boat that has sunk after surviving many storms, and will “rise again,” with advice that the listeners do the same. I had had enough of song circles punctuated by mostly leftist and self-help discourse. America was at war, and I had more on my mind than this children’s crusade could ever comprehend: self-esteem and pacifism had nothing to do with the confidence and peace that come through strength. I bitterly put out my candle and walked away from the vigil.

Three summers later, I was living in San Francisco when Ronald Reagan died. A man who achieved a bigger peace through strength—including the prosecution of several small wars against Soviet proxies—and led the transformation of the economy, Reagan was a giant among modern statesmen. As a former socialist who later saw the American light, I had a great admiration for the victor against the USSR and cofounder of the Third Way. Local political domination by rich, inaccessible New Democrats and demagogic New Leftists had sparked my interest in the California Republicans, and the San Francisco Republican County Central Committee notified me that there would be a candlelight vigil for Reagan.

I had only been in touch with SFGOP Communication Vice-Chair and commentator Leo Lacayo for a few months. Since my disappointment after voting in the March Democratic primary—which was uncompetitive at federal, state, local and ideological levels—I had begun to consider my alternatives. The modest SF Republicans do not have the militancy, organization, funding or head count to strike one as part of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy.” That said, the small vigil included a broad span of the party: local officials, the California GOP Chairman George “Duf” Sundheim, and an articulate Congressional candidate named Claudia Bermudez.

She is a Nicaraguan immigrant to America and daughter of Contra leader Enrique Bermudez, now running against radical East Bay Congresswoman Barbara Lee. Her father united former Sandinistas, conservative exiles and especially peasants dispossessed by socialist land confiscation, fighting the Marxist party-state to a draw. Shortly after the historic landslide defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections—despite persistence in the police and army ranks, they have not returned to power since—Enrique “Commandante 380” Bermudez was murdered by an appartchik in a Managua parking lot. Lacayo had worked with Enrique when Claudia was a child, living in Nicaragua for several years in the 1980s. He told the assembled the story of Sandinista land mines planted in the northern territories, which killed innocents more frequently than Contras. The international Left invariably portrayed this as collateral damage caused by the anti-communists instead of an atrocity of the revolution. Despite these barriers, Reagan aided both Bermudez father and daughter to triumph. Orphaned by Marxism and naturalized by the Great Communicator, Claudia shed tears for her father and her mentoring president.

Compared to the huge, vitriolic marches of the Left, we several dozen gathered in honor of Reagan were a minor non-spectacle. A dozen or so protesters did their best to cause a disturbance. Some parroted their pseudo-knowledge with the mythical assertion that Reagan never mentioned AIDS, others shouted “death to imperialism” and “I wish Ronald Reagan could die twice!” A few radical bicycle messengers circled the block, uttering antipathy with each lap.

Their behavior made me think of the obnoxious leftist vigil I had attended on September 11, 2001, with the mourners of my past and hecklers of the present representing two sides of the same proverbial coin. Oberlin’s traditionalist rural townspeople, for the record, had not turned out to protest the softheaded anti-Americanism of the outsider college students in their midst. No, “open-minded” San Franciscans had to set the example of intolerance toward a memorial.

A former Republican campaigner remarked that Reagan’s struggle against totalitarianism was on behalf of us all, including leftist trash. True, but the late, great Albert J. Nock wrote that some matters cannot be governed by law or even morality, so much as by good taste, and I felt inspired.

In a crowd of mostly middle aged or senior activists who knew Reagan, I was one of very few youths. I recounted my memories of the 1984 presidential campaign, during which some of those gathered had worked directly for the president’s re-election. As a child in the ‘80s, I grew up under both the Reagan administration and the warming glow of television. The Mondale/Ferraro ticket had an overwhelming majority of the broadcast campaign advertisements, and endless set of apocalyptic warnings against re-electing the Republicans. Some of the most commonly repeated spots were just footage of missile launches followed by the Democrats names. With its preponderance of televisual power, my seven year-old mind naturally assumed that Mondale’s campaign would win. Instead, Reagan—whose campaign only ran a few TV spots late in the race—ended up winning over 54 million votes, more than any democratically elected official in human history, leading the Democrats by over eighteen percentage points, winning forty-nine states and losing only Minnesota and Washington, D.C. If anyone says that advertising time and money is the essence of modern democracy, I offer the landslide disproof of the 1984 elections and its nearly seventeen million ballot deficit.

The 1980s and 1990s were fickle times, and I pursued a mostly leftward course for years after the end of the Cold War. As I told the assembled mourners, I was for a time an ignorant Marxist savage, although more polite than the churlish Red rebels assailing the Reagan memorial gathering. Then I was stunned. I looked over at Claudia Bermudez and Leo Lacayo. Studying the sacrifices of the Contras had long ago ended my romance with Latin American Marxism. Now I was in the presence of veterans of the struggle. Yes, I continued, I had become an ignorant Marxist savage, but thanks to men like Claudia’s father Enrique Bermudez and Ronald Reagan I had not only seen the light, but there had still been a light for me to see. One-party systems in the developing world were nothing but a reddish darkness, and the counterrevolutionary 1980s showed that liberalism could indeed triumph over the novelty of socialism. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Commandante 380. Viva la contrarevolución democrática.

I had been uncertain about attending the vigil, in part for fear of leftist harassment. The latter turned out to be lowly, but business as usual in San Francisco; the former was inspirational and tasteful. The memorial also reminded me about what had been so empty about Oberlin on September 11, 2001, when elitism and utopianism repeated their old slogans rather than admitting reality. Of course, 1980s politics were just as divisive, and the New Left of twenty years ago deserved to get bent as much as its counterparts before and since that time. Thanks for the negative examples, sentimental leftists. I’ll send you a postcard for each military and economic victory of Western capitalist democracy. Oberlin and San Francisco will be spared, but mocked.

All's Well With Orwell, Hitchens is "Bitchin'", But Show the Door to Chomsky, Said and Moore

2004-06-25T12:39:00.000-07:00

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair today in 1903. You can peruse some of his fine work both here and at the Literature Network cited below. Any ten sentences of Orwell show what a dwarf Noam Chomsky is in comparison. Remember: the author of "Animal Farm" and "1984" died young, and the anti-American MIT psycholinguist has had a much longer life to reach some supposed potential as a thinker. It so happens that a former Chomsky collaborator, Washington D.C. correspondent and former British radical Christopher Hitchens, has written an outstanding book on George Orwell and is a better heir to his generous legacy.

Chomsky has not taken a brave stand since the generation of 1968 enthroned him as some sort of irrational genius. Even during my Marxist days, I could tell from attending a 1995 Chomsky lecture that he was a real bastard with a shallow intellect, abusive tendencies toward his own audience, and a creepy fondness for terrorists like Peru's Maoist Sendero Luminoso (a.k.a. the Shining Path), whose many fellow travellers were raising funds at the event. In hip and higher educated circles, though, Chomsky is exceedingly welcome. Anti-capitalists and anti-militarists who do not like to read about history and politics can pull one of his prefabricated screeds about why everything under the sun is the Fault of the United States and No One Else. Some of them turn out to be transcripts of five or six nearly identical interviews, like the feeble instant book "9/11."

The mature Orwell, a wounded veteran of the Spanish Civil War, would have had no patience for Chomsky's crypto-Stalinist cant. Neither does the mature Hitchens, an irascible ex-Trotskyist who famously began to debate his way out of "The Nation" starting when the magazine and Chomsky in particular trivialized the war with al-Qaeda and Islamofascist rogue states. Having traded his Minority Report column for "Slate"'s Fighting Words, Hitchens later offered this critical postmortem on another former intellectual partner, literary critic and Palestinian nationalist Edward Said. He may still be a bit naive on democratic radicals who defy the jihadist elite of the West Bank and Gaza, but is remarkable how far Hitchens had come from his days of co-editing a primer on Palestine with Chomsky and Said.

Last but not least, Christopher Hitchens has just confronted the paranoid hypocrite Michael Moore, whom "The New Republic" aptly called "Chomsky for children." Before giving any money to this wealthy propagandist by purchasing a ticket to "Fahrenheit 9/11," give it a read. ("Fahrenheit 451" author Ray Bradbury is not pleased that Moore is ripping-off his novel's title, either.) There is no worse or more visible pop Marxist out there today than Moore--whoever says he and the "anti-war" radicals are not influential has not been paying attention--and perhaps no finer adversary than Hitchens. Lock and load, indeed.

Flashback--Historians Duel Over the Problems of Perfect Peace

2004-06-25T11:57:00.000-07:00

These "open letters" were written almost exactly one year and a half ago to Professor Ruth Rosen, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and historian of American women at University of California, Davis. She had speculated in this piece that someday the world could abolish war much like it had abolished slavery. It was the sort of sentimental meditation that was very common in the months preceding Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Immediately, my spidey senses were tingling at the presence of a pernicious error. Not only do many forms of slavery persist, like in a trans-Pacific brothel trade that reaches the Bay Area, but Rosen has even published a book on prostitution in early 20th century America and just should have known better. New Left pieties are so silly, and yet so widely held by Baby Boomer left-liberals of varying militancy and by my contemporaries, their usually insufferable children.

Anyhow, your knight in shining armor rode in both to rescue human chattel from discursive obscuirty and to defend wars (like those that end slavery) from comparison with human bondage. During a visit to my parents in a Chicago suburb I composed the following:

Professor Ruth Rosen,
Though you and I differ in worldviews, I have enjoyed reading your columns thus far.

I must begin with a remark on a factual error in this one, "World Without War?" (The San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, December 26, 2002). Slavery (by whatever definition) is not, as you assert, banned worldwide: the People's Republic of China is a glaring offender, as your colleague Debra Saunders recently noted--and as the Rainbow Co-op grocery store in San Francisco prefers to ignore while choosing to boycott Israeli goods. The chattel enslavement and sale of Africans still continues in Mali and Sudan, though only the occasional public commentator cares to mention it. One sometimes hears shadowy tales of brothel slavery in Southeast Asian cities, catering to wealthy entrepreneurs and their functionaries. We know these human traffic lines reach brothels in San Francisco. Then there are the various states of quasi-slavery in the leftover Leninist states, for what is freedom in a nation run like a giant prison camp, as in Cuba and in North Korea? Let us not forget the unfree labor conditions of sweatshops and agrarian peonage in many of the less developed market economies. The latter might be a semantic stretch of "slavery," but you get the idea.

The point being: illiberal portions of human society are the sanctuary of such atrocities; the liberal democracies like the U.S., Britain and others merely subtracted themselves from the chattel slavery clientele. Worth noting: they destroyed the slave economy through war, liberty brought on the bayonets of progressive empires. The pan-African sales apparatus did not disappear as a result. It took the Arabian Peninsula much longer to quit buying, and the legacy there is eerie: their African slaves tended to die off rather than survive into emancipation and posterity. I hope you would agree with the spirit of the preceding criticisms, even if your article lacked mention of the horrors that provoked them. It is a disservice, however, to leave them unsaid. Your pedigree is in the New Left, but do not forget one incontrovertible grain of truth from the Old Right: this world is imperfect, and by all evidence, it is imperfectible.

On our troubled planet, I expect people will always fight, some early and for self-interest, some latecomers and out of sympathy, some because they were dragooned. Unfortunately, the downtrodden, the righteously indignant, can be unsavory as well, complicating our ideas of just causes and fair fights. The medieval French Jacquerie descended into rape and massacre of noncombatants, later the Nat Turner revolt and the guerrilla movement in Belgian Congo did roughly the same. Too often, the black Sudanese are defended against their would-be captors by pubescent paramilitaries, and too often, the underage soldier is an immature war criminal in the making. There are countless other similar examples.

Political unification, so long thought to be the mechanism that would end war, has proven unreliable as well. Just look at the Basques/Euzkadi and at Northern Ireland (hardly out of the woods) in the entrails of the European Union, and many more in the multiethnic failed states (and failing states) of the post-colonial and post-communist worlds. Would a more unified future world be free of its Ulsters, its Lebanons, its Kashmirs, its Balkans? Even under improved social conditions, a few malcontents can spearhead what they themselves consider war, albeit war writ small. (Remember Thomas Friedman's recent column on the "Arab/Muslim basement," the extremist and active few, as more dangerous than the "Arab/Muslim street," the displeased but inactive many?)

What of the militiamen dotting the rural United States? Or their opposite numbers on the Left, like C. Clark Kissinger's Refuse and Resist umbrella organization, conceived by way of a union between his Maoism and the calamity of the 1992 L.A. riots? Of Klansmen and neo-Nazis? Of neo-Panthers and of what remains of the armed wing of the American Indian Movement? Or the riot-prone anti-globalization and “anti-war” activists whom I knew from Oberlin College and their colleagues elsewhere?

Will the voice clamoring for peace--usually the voice of the private citizen and/or the Left, and not the state--be the most effective counterforce to these phenomena? So often the voices of peace shudder to criticize the violent Left, much less rein it in. Paul Berman has described this tragedy of the Baby Boom Left rather well (while still identifying with it). Anti-imperialism gave (and gives still) excuses to Third Worldist and Communist violence, while merely demanding surrender or appeasement by the other side. The religious pacifist Right is little better: remember the paradox of the Bethlehem Catholic clergy sheltering Palestinian mujahedin while bemoaning the Israeli Defense Forces. The isolationist Right lacks the compassion to work for large-scale peace, but merely withdrawal: peace for the few and the Self by ignoring the many and the Other.

Or is a well-prepared regime (or alliance of regimes) striving for security and ordered liberty a better bet for achieving peace in practice? After all, real peace in a world of latent (and not so latent) hostility will begin with either a unilateral defeat or a wary detente, not as an entente. On the contrary, an all-too-easy coexistence can renew hostility for those displeased with social peace. Comfortable societies were no safeguard against brutally great expectations. What else could explain the Weathermen, the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and others like them? They themselves had suffered no contemporary police abuses like the Northern Irish Catholics or African Americans, and thus could not attempt to justify their motives as communal vengeance or as collective self-interest. They chose violence because they chose millenarian idealism, solidarity through conviction. As such, shouldn't we beware the utopian conscience a little more often?

Montesquieu said that no kingdom had shed so much blood as that of Christ. Imagine what he could have said two centuries later about the kingdom of Karl Marx. Either way, it's the same verdict. Equality of condition, like the realm of God, is not of this world, and never will be. Expecting or demanding too much of either, however, can have a hefty body count. The struggle continues, surely, but is it too much for us to subject ideologies and their practice to cost-benefit analysis? Sanctimony kills, both through commission and negligence, but more modest sanctimonies kill fewer people than other, more immodest ones. William Blake said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The self-consciously best intentions, like premature world peace or heaven on earth, are the express lane to global inferno. At least, all of the lessons of history would seem to teach us so.

On September 11, 2001, a mob of xenophobes in a Chicago suburb marched toward a mosque with hopes of destroying it. They were not stopped by peace, love, or conscience in any appreciable sense, for those are intangibles. They were stopped tangibly by a uniformed police force, and one that I suspect was not motivated by deeply held multiconfessional ideals, but by duty and by fear of impending disaster. Motive without means, however, is nothing. Peace can only come through order, and order through a governmental monopoly on the legitimate deployment of violence. World peace would only arrive through world order. World order will only come--if at all--through existing (if evolving) power structures rather than through an attempt to overturn them or perfect them. Whether right or wrong in their aims, whether violent or not in their chosen means, all rebellions are an act of challenge to the status quo, the consummation of disorder, the opposite of peace. The avowed final goal of most ideologies is peace (and not catastrophe), whether libertarian, theocratic, Bismarckian, socialist, or otherwise. That imagined destination, however, does not make peace, and in and of itself, never will. It can, however, make catastrophe, and often does. We should know better by now. Until everyone knows better, peace will remain elusive.

Sincerely,

Adam William Balling
History major and former idealist
Oberlin College, Class of 2001
Dissident newcomer to San Francisco
********************************

Ruth Rosen wrote back a couple of sentences, saying that she appreciated my sophisticated letter and was (of course!) aware of enduring slavery, but had not felt like mentioning it. Besides, she pointed out, all of the "civilized" nations had overcome slavery. Yes, I thought, but what of the densely populated other ones, tenured idiot? Feeling my adversary's argument crumble like dry poundcake, I sent this:

Professor Rosen,
Thank you for writing back, first of all. I appreciate it very much.

I did not doubt your knowledge of current slavery. It struck me that in "World Without War?" you referred to its existence as past, without implying its contemporary persistence. Forgive me for overlooking any references in your previous output. The analogy of previously disappeared slavery to the latent disappearance of war seemed false, as the former triumph is an illusion, suggesting we should not remotely expect the latter. It seemed like a poor occasion for your congratulation of humans in general, and a weak foundation for optimism.

If nothing else, consider the further blood and treasure, whether indigenous, "multilateral" or "neo-imperial," that would be required to shut down slavery in Africa; hands-off neutralism will never do it. The People's Republic of China, with a UN veto and (as of the Clinton era) long-range nuclear missiles, cannot be touched by forceful outside intervention. The wait for free and fair labor in the world's most populous state will be prolonged and agonizing, and its course unknowable.

My historical knowledge has, I confess, led me to a severe pessimism about the capacity of humanity as a whole. The idealism of Addams, King, Rankin, Gandhi, Einstein, however moving to the conscientious imagination, can be outright harmful if it is naively unrealistic.

Take Gandhi: to many, he is the model of moral nobility, even sanctity. George Orwell's critical assessment of him resonated with me far more. Sainthood and lofty ideals can be too divorced from reality, and are doubly problematic when they originate in the inability to accept the necessary inconsistencies of human life. Otherworldiness does no social good if it is principally and ultimately escapist, and most people cannot live by the dictates of inspiring fantasy. It is foolish to believe they ever will. Orwell continues: Gandhi's advice that Europe's Jews allow themselves to die so that the world might look with peaceful, pressuring outrage on the Third Reich. Gandhi was well-meaning and utterly wrong, morally as well as practically.

Only coercion could be used, and alas, coercive means are an essential ingredient of all organized human life: ergo war stays. Satyagraha and European withdrawal are two (of many) noble-sounding means for the pursuit of peace in our time, but if you seek their monument, look around.

Europe was only integrated as an expensive American protectorate; the European peace should not be attributed anachronistically to a revolution in character. (If our own government should spend more on public healthcare, it couldn't hurt for the "new and improved" Europe--if its stability is not just a pleasing myth or political fad--to pick up more of the tab for our military spending on their behalf and free up our surplus money. Such a change would improve upon the habit of expecting a U.S. peackeeping substitute and then bemoaning its deployment in lieu of continental self-sufficiency.)

South Asian independence instantly let slip the dogs of war, with effects worse than all of the British imperial years combined. Doesn't Gandhi's anti-war naivete deserve some blame for helping to unleash a state of strife on the subcontinent that has not ended? His ascetic ideology was not considerate of his actual society, but only a bastardized and imaginary alternative one. A more unsentimental politics would not have been lying to and endangering itself on the basis of transcendental platitudes. Burke was correct in claiming that politics is the art of the possible, and conversely denial "ain't just a river in Egypt."

Wishing for what we cannot have, and acting in vain upon those desires, is perilous. Wishing away war is sometimes the best guarantee that it will return with a vengeance. Isn't that even worse than conventional realpolitik? Realism (in the sense of both policy and temperament) creates a better climate for peace than idealism, which often spawns the exact opposite of what it seeks. That is why the goal of "an end to wars" is such a heinously tragic flaw.

Anyway, I've managed to repeat the first letter, so I might as well be merciful and end this one.

Is it a shameful thing to believe that the human race entire cannot improve itself very well or very quickly? Because it seems more accurate than the belief that it can improve itself rapidly and thoroughly; accuracy is what gets results.

thank you again for corresponding,
Adam William Balling

P.S. On a different note, you are a specialist in American history, yes? Might I inquire what period(s), theme(s), topic(s), region(s)? If you had not guessed, I love to talk shop. History first enchanted me at age seven, the "age of reason," and I have never lost my passion for that subject.
********************************

I even tried to be friendly at the end, but Professor Ruth Rosen left our correspondence unrequited thereafter.

But hey, Michael Moore never wrote back when I asked him his opinion of "Mother Jones" magazine and Ralph Nader, both of which fired him. I also inquired about his falling out with labor organizer Harlan Jacobson during the interview published in the November/December 1989 issue of "Film Comment." Trade union leftist Jacobson did not take kindly to the histrionic lies of Moore's "Roger and Me," despite their shared dislike of big capitalism. Fifteen years ago, Moore did not like being questioned. Apparently he still does not.

Ruth deserves credit for at least playing ball with yours truly in a game with lots of intellectual name dropping.

Thank you, Professor Rosen, for teaching me that academically accredited opinion journalists are not so tough. If I'm ever in Davis, let's do lunch.

"Deep Links" Missed by San Francisco's Newspaper of Record, Fudged by Associated Press

2004-06-18T12:56:00.001-07:00

Zachary Colie's story in yesterday's "San Francisco Chronicle" (linked in my previous post) is one of many that misrepresents the September 11 Commission, claiming that body found "'no credible evidence' of deep links" between Ba'athist Iraq and al-Qaeda. The paper underscored the point with Thursday's Chronicle News Service summary (inexplicably not available online) and Wednesday's Associated Press newswire reports (which are hither, thither, and yon).

The AP dispatches luridly assert as fact (in the third person) that the Bush administration's entire stated rationale for invading Iraq was Saddam Hussein's alleged cooperation with al-Qaeda on the 2001 attacks. Not quite: the White House and British PM Tony Blair maintained that rogue states and international terrorism were like oily rags that could ignite at any future time--and hence their very existence an unacceptable hazard--as well as pointing to other previous links. At least the AP reporters will (perhaps grudgingly) allow parts of this actual rhetoric in an effort to dismissively cite the politicians' views (as mere quotes).

Colie and the Chronicle will not even do that much. Erroneously, they have ignored the Commission's proceedings and public comments like these from its chairman and vice chairman. Mohammed Atta's suspected meeting with Iraqi intelligence in Prague is a controversial allegation officially doubted by their report, but not other connections, like the Kurdish militia Ansar al-Islam, a widely known Ba'athist-jihadist joint venture against American allies. For whatever reasons, the AP dropped the ball on these Islamic fascist terrorists of Iraqi Kurdistan as well.

I can forgive a forthright "biased liberal media," but not a pretentious and slow-witted one. Of course, it could also have been a willful deception, with journalistic sloganeering about "deep links" to excite a gullible election year readership, particularly in the Bay Area. A soft press partly explains the vicious hesperophobia (fear or hatred of the West) in our leftist local yokels.

Either way: bad newsroom, no liquor for you tonight.

Say, Do You Remember/Lying in September?

2004-06-17T11:01:00.000-07:00

The September 11 Commission has reported that al-Qaeda envisioned a ten airplane assault, that Iraq and this terrorist network had plenty of contacts (although not on the 2001 attacks), and that Osama bin Laden had wanted to launch it earlier, during the last year of Clinton's administration, to coordinate with the al-Aqsa intifada agasinst Israel.

Will any of these revelations undercut "Fahrenheit 9/11," the latest round of fraudulent conspiracy-theory crockumentary from disgraced former "Mother Jones" editor Michael Moore? (He was fired from that radical journal in 1986 for refusing to publish a Paul Berman article that criticized the Sandinistas as well as the Contras. Avoiding arteriosclerosis, he then cobbled together the unnecessarily dishonest rust-belt postcard "Roger and Me.") One can only hope that he will now be seen as the portly, caucasian counterpart of "New York Times" anti-hero Jayson Blair that he truly is.

Or that Moore finally gets that coronary that he deserves. Super size it, Michael.

"Anti-War," Anti-Semitic, Anti-Liberal: the Malign Movement

2004-06-16T12:10:00.003-07:00

For two days I have been embroiled in a spirited debate with my good friend Andrew Fisher about these photos of "anti-war" protesters in San Francisco earlier this month. After Reagan's death, Andrew had sent me a barrage of critical left-of-center articles, asking how I could defend such a president. The HIV/AIDS post is one result; others on unsavory Third World allies will follow.

I decided to return the favor with a polemic about how the mainstream Left has not told the anti-American and ethnic-cleansing advocates to go stuff themselves. Their message is insanely anti-Israeli: comparing the Middle East's only electoral democracy to Nazi Germany and positing that Zionists cause anti-Semitism themselves. Their final solution is to "smash the Jewish state"--talk about blaming the victim--handing ownership to that lovely Mr. Arafat and whoever runs Hamas until the next targeted elimination. International "Act Now, Stop War, End Racism" is a perverse misnomer: they support "all intifadas everywhere," a pro-violence position that makes Republican hawks look like Mahatma Gandhi. Their bizarre (largely self-)hatred of all Western societies seems like a racist fantasy of redemption through the swarthy Other.

Crackpots will always exist, but a responsible movement divorces itself from its lunatic elements, in much the way that American conservatism's modern cofounder William F. Buckley spurned the John Birch Society. Before that a nativist and isolationist 1930s-1940s American Right eventually marginalized its fascist sympathizers, in part under Buckley's leadership. Birch-leader Bob Welch (who accused President Eisenhower of being a communist) and author Ezra Pound (who did wartime broadcasts for Mussolini) were no longer welcome in respectable traditionalist circles or the Republican party, and with good reason.

Calmer opponents of involvement in World War II soon found themselves in a lonely dilemma: adapt or perish. Like publisher Henry Regnery, they quickly entered new debates on communism and the containment or rollback of the Soviet empire: their idea that America's fight in Europe could have been avoided was rendered irrelevant.

It is very sad that "we have come a long way since the 1940s," so far that now the mostly leftist war resisters are not even democratic proponents of averting our national eyes, but repellent Jew-baiters willing to strut through a cosmopolitan and progressive San Francisco (and other cities and college towns) with their heads held high and their vicarious intifada wishes. The major Marxist organizations have parroted anti-Zionism ever since Stalin, and International ANSWER is no exception. A popular front for the Maoist and pro-North Korea, Workers World Party, and ANSWER have the same office spaces in most cities. Their dual San Francisco one is three blocks away from my apartment.

The popular front technique--engineered by Lenin, perfected by Stalin--is to piggyback on other progressive causes: collective bargaining, opposition to the death penalty or to war, and so forth. Then they can guide the movements. The demostrations' only remaining organizers now are crypto-communists like ANSWER, Not In Our Name, Refuse and Resist, and United for Peace and Justice.

This pre-World War II trick is working, and none of my more progressive friends seem to care as much about it as they do about tired "anyone but Bush" platitudes. More importantly, where are the good liberal Democrat officials instructing these more radical movements to go to hell? Are their votes so important that in an election year John Kerry will not denounce them vocally?

Ah, but as my friend claims, most of these communist yahoos will vote Green or more radically, should they vote at all. If that's the case, then the entire Democrat party can reject them tomorrow. Hypothetically, so can the two Green parties: anti-military ecological socialists should have standards, too.

Unfortunately, Senator Kerry owes his entire public career to an identical movement against the United States and its allies on behalf of Stalinist North Vietnam: once they made him famous thirty years ago, then he could settle into the Massachusetts Democrat establishment. Kerry probably does not dream about Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, but the candidate is such a sleaze that he lacks the courage to challenge the worst reincarnations of the New Left. Perhaps he imagines that he owes them a debt, or that he might still pick up their ballots.

Either way, silence equals death. Remember that Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 6, 1968 (another anniversary I missed this month) by a radical Palestinian nationalist. The New Left killed the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later that summer, handing the fall election to Nixon. Four years later, WWII veteran George NcGovern led the anti-war movement and the Democrats to a landslide defeat. A pretentious pro-withdrawal Ted Kennedy undercut his party by running against President Carter in the 1980 primaries. A neo-isolationist Pat Buchanan did the same to the elder President Bush in 1992.

What is so odd is that now the Winter Soldier who witnessed nothing but war crimes is running as the Hero of the Band of Brothers. Call it self-reinvention or sleight of hand, but the Senator is campaigning on war Democrat machismo without having explained the fate of his former radical loyalties.

As the son of a Vietnman War veteran, I have no patience for public figures who court both patriots and anti-Americans simultaneously through murky references to their past in Indochina. Pick a side and make me proud. Denounce your veteran friends as war criminals all, just like you did before Congress in the 1970s, or tell all of the other veterans you never met that you are very sorry for what you said about your band of brothers under oath. I might add the million or more refugees from Stalinist-conquered South Vietnam, many of them here in California, who also deserve an apology for America's abandonment of their defense. They know intimately that Hanoi terrorized the whole country, rather than championing or liberating "the people."

Until Kerry comes clean on this "ancient history" and its relation to his current self-profile in courage, I doubt he will upbraid the ANSWER-ite Judeophobes.

If the Democrat elite and the liberal rank-and-file cannot stand up to the totalitarian leaders of the domestic "anti-war" movement, how can they ever confront extremism and terrorism in the world? Think globally, act locally?

Voters like myself have good reason to believe that Kerry and many other Baby Boomer Democrat do not know what they are doing. They are apparently unable to choose between hegemonic Harry Truman and fellow travellers of "world revolution," preferring to straddle both positions in the name of marketing.

I will not vote for a party that cannot decide between superpower liberalism and anti-American policies, and I will not respect a progressive movement that cannot protest its own illiberal members.

At least Rudolph Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger loudly opposed Bush's heterosexual marriage amendment at the risk of "splitting the Republicans." I entreat my liberal readers to follow their example instead of politely ignoring enemies further to the Left. Picket the offices of International ANSWER/WWP and the other Marxoid organizations. You do not need them in your coalition. Their presence explains my absence.

This discussion has only begun. The Bay Area Democrats especially have not taken out the garbage in quite some time, and the stench is crippling me with nausea. There are too many problems with leftist political culture to blame them all on rural and suburban conservatives or big corporations. Admitting so is the first step on the road to recovery.

Oberlin Right Rides Again

2004-06-15T19:49:00.000-07:00

David Yeagley is another right-leaning Oberlin pundit worth mention. A direct descendant of Comanche warrior Bad Eagle (also the name of the site), he is the first conservative Native American in the media. A graduate of Oberlin's Conservatory of Music who now teaches Humanities and Psychology at the University of Oklahoma, the many-talented Yeagley is a cheeky commentator as well.

Think one person can change the world?

New Conservative Oberlin Alumna Blog

2004-06-15T19:33:00.000-07:00

Conservative author Michelle Malkin, graduate of Oberlin College like yours truly, has recently started a weblog. Who (that knows me) says I never support the other alumni? Even I have moments of school spirit.

True, I have never met the lady. She's to the Right of your humble servant, but then I am a politically unusual fellow. When it comes to pro-war "Obies," I must take what little I can get.

Give 'em hell, Michelle.

Ein, Zwei, Drei!

2004-06-15T18:43:00.000-07:00

Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men.
For though the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.
-Bertolt Brecht,
translation courtesy of Sam Peckinpah's outstanding 1977 film adaptation of Willi Heinrich's "Cross of Iron"

Let the tyrants tremble, for the world that stopped that bastard is now standing up to his clones. Ruled by military dictators since the 1940s, the Marxist-fascist hybrid Ba'ath since the 1960s and the Asad dynasty of that party since 1970; revanchist toward Israel, Jordan and Palestine and already occupier of Lebanon; cosponsor of the the Iraqi insurgency, of the communist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, of Hizbollah, of Hamas, of Islamic Jihad--Syria truly deserves to be next. Shoot straight, America, on the road to Damascus.

It's time for the Middle East to enter the age following the Second World War, sixty years behind schedule. Someone wake up the Allies' creation known as the United Nations; it has been slacking off in the Muslim societies for too long, and might go the way of the League in the 1930s if it is not careful. Appeasement kills, every time. Thank heavens for cowboy unilateralist democracies that lead the way.

June Celebrations of Liberty Update

2004-06-13T01:01:00.000-07:00

How on earth did I let myself neglect to mention that June is also Queer Pride Month, celebrated on different weekends in different locations? Last year was my first in San Francisco, ruined by a homophobic heathen family that was visiting with my girlfriend's relatives. Narrow minded bastards proved the reason that it's a mighty crucial event just by being there, unaware and hostile. In our local parade, the San Francisco Republicans were of course generously represented alongside the hyper-majority Democrats and minority Greens. Tripartisan or non-partisan, a loud and proud consensus. It's the welcome wave of the future, and remember it this month. Warmongers can (and should) be allies, too. Any "suggestions" short of full legal and public parity are completely unacceptable, and too few on the Left are even ready to recognize it, much less on the other side of the aisle. In a few decades, they will all be remembered in shame. Ride the Tide of Pride.

Rhetoric and the Dear Price of Freedom

2004-06-11T19:58:00.000-07:00

Inspiring words from an old issue of "The Atlantic Monthly." Reflecting its time, the language is heavy on the biblical imagery; without a doubt the cause was among our nation's most noble, even if our predecessors truly demonized their adversaries. Our more secular republic is still the world's only great power liberator today.

Reagan and HIV/AIDS: the Worst of Times or Better than Alleged?

2004-06-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

President Reagan's actions regarding HIV/AIDS are among his least understood. ACT UP founder Larry Kramer is preparing a piece called "Adolf Reagan" for an upcoming issue of The Advocate. This title alone is a perfect example of the absolute hysteria that ruins much of the discussion, rather than a reasoned, measured judgment one might also find in their pages. If you can be called Hitlerian for alleged negligence, what does that make unprotected sexual activity? Would Kramer or someone sharing his opinion of Reagan dare to call that Nazi-like as well? Yet that phenomenon is directly responsible for disease transmission, far more culpable than a "closet tolerant" presidential administration that was slow to care publicly. Are you comfortable thinking of it as the sexual revolution's "radical holocaust" or "autogenocide by promiscuity"? (We'll get to more details of Reagan's record shortly.)

In high school, I was an early member and later co-leader of a small student group that promoted, among other things, condom distribution, a frank sex education curriculum, women's rights and queer rights. Despite my rightward lurch, I still support these things, although my confidence in the efficacy of preventive education has slipped. You can imagine my horror as a true believer when I later discovered that many of my peers (even in similarly chartered activist groups) at prestigious safe(r)-sex-aware colleges and in cosmopolitan cities, well, did not buy what they sold. No need to name names or infections, but my demographic does not have the excuse that the age of AIDS caught us off guard. Reagan is not to blame for post-1982 self-destructiveness, which can undermine the most ostensibly prepared and educated in a generation that has been watching the fallout for its entire maturing life. Will "The Advocate" and ACT UP be stamping the swastika upon swingers with bad judgment any time soon? Would your sense of proportion feel ill if they did? Would you at least want to qualify it as mass killing by mass self-neglect, like the late San Francisco Chronicle reporter, "And the Band Played On" author and gay AIDS patient Randy Shilts and his ex-Marxist fellow writers Peter Collier and David Horowitz did?

Several websites have observed the disgusting callousness of Reagan administration press secretary Larry Speakes regarding HIV/AIDS, concluding that at best, counteracting a lethal disease that at first afflicted mostly gays was a low presidential priority, and at worst, that a bemused and homophobic leadership was glad to see gay men die in large numbers. Look at the three press conference excerpts in question, with questions by an unidentified journalist named "Lester," possibly Baltimore radio's only Washington correspondent, Lester Kinsolving. (Thanks to cryptically-named "537 Votes" at this americablog posting's comment section for the possible identification.)

First off, the persistent questions from the reporter were not out of concern for the gay community but paranoia, fearing that the infected men might soon contaminate the larger population very easily. (Not quite what happened: serious bodily fluids, not just proximity, are required.) In the first conference, "Les" worried that the Reagan himself may have contracted "gay plague." The third and final selection, from 1984, demonstrates the reporter's assumption that HIV is transmitted by saliva, as repellent a myth as ever circulated about the AIDS crisis. Speakes was not just tuning out the plight of the gay community, but also the histrionics of germophobia-cum-homophobia, a multiplication of ignorance on the part of a veteran member of the credentialed national press.

Secondly, in the 1982 press conference especially, it is clear that the whole room is laughing at the expense of gay HIV/AIDS patients. At one point, even the terrified "Lester" cracks a poor taste joke addressed to Larry Speakes: "Because I love you, Larry, that's why," to which Speakes responded "Oh, I see. Just don't put it in those terms, Lester." In the second conference, from 1983, "Les" wondered if a message from the president would have discouraged "cruising," a word whose mention drew laughter so loud that it drowned out the room. Speakes answered with a jerk's mixture of chuckles and platitudes about government research on the disease, before the reporter closed with a dreadful pun on "fairy tales." The illiberal attitude toward homosexuality appears to be the common opinion of the age in these excerpts, and attitudes toward gay suffering effectively barbaric.

In my June 5 Reagan obituary, I provided a link to a Deroy Murdock article that pointed out in the same dismal year of 1982 the administration spent $8 million on AIDS research, $44 million in 1983, over $100 million in 1984, eventually spending over $1.6 billion and $2.3 billion during Reagan's final two years as president, and a total of $5.7 billion since the disease was identified in '82. Andrew Sullivan, who is a gay, HIV positive Reaganite, also cited this horrifying Speakes' transcript, but alternates between credit and blame for the administration's mixed record through several posts this week.

Among Sullivan's many insights: activists like ACT UP's Kramer blame the Reagan administration for not developing a cure. A new virus that repeals immunity was a formidable challenge. Cancer has not been cured either. Remedies do not just fall from the sky, to be kept at UFO facilities by a hostile and secretive presidency. The dollar figures are a testament to prompt research, to the tune of millions the year the disease was definitively classified in 1982 when only a few thousand were infected, and a 450% increase in research funds during the first year after that, and so on. After twenty-two years, we still lack a cure. Is that Clinton's fault or nobody's?

Another Andrew, blogless comrade A. Fisher, has protested to me that the administration was derelict in funding AIDS treatment. Prior to AZT, which was experimental until the end of the decade, what treatments were there? None. (In the interests of full disclosure, Andrew Fisher is the son of one of Rhode Island's earliest and foremost HIV/AIDS physicians. I am the child of less prestigious doctors who also spent the 1980s knee-deep in the hopeless treatment of HIV/AIDS cases. His distinguished father recommends the work of Reagan's principled Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop. Neither Andrew F. nor I have read it yet.)

Back to Sullivan: the only useful thing the administration could have done was AIDS prevention education. Let's be honest with ourselves: would a seventy-something conservative president's entreaties for protected sex have been followed by the target audience at risk? (Sure, ex-governor Reagan had campaigned against a failed homophobic 1978 California ballot initiative, but what had the wrinkled Goldwaterite done for the gay community lately in '82?) Based on what I have seen among today's young sexual cognoscentti (straights typically worse than gays), many at risk have not learned a damned thing in the decades since, to their own detriment.

One ignorant myth believed by many Educated Acquaintances of Mine is that Reagan either never mentioned AIDS, never mentioned it until his last year in office, and/or kept the federal government from fighting it. Reagan mentioned AIDS several times in his 1986 state of the union address. The latest he first mentioned it was September, 1985: perhaps unforgivably late, but empirically true. Look it up if you don't believe Sullivan, Murdock and myself. Now that you know the "no mention!" tale is a lie, it is Your Responsibility to correct it whenever it comes up around you. Should you neglect this duty, you have Neither Mental Nor Political Integrity. If the intelligentsia cannot look after its own ideas' credibility, it devalues itself completely.

HIV/AIDS caught everyone by surprise, from bathhouses that resisted inspection or shutdown to a White House (and Washington press corps) that looked on the gay community as alien, contemptible and laughable; to a medical community that did not screen hemophiliacs' transfusions until tragedy struck far too many. As the administration increasingly discussed and funded the fight against HIV-AIDS during the '80s, they never apologized for their snide public attitude toward citizens they would at first help only quietly and reluctantly.

The paradox, that the federal government would have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research before its chief executive leadership would discuss it, is rather telling. It speaks volumes about the gap between political style and rhetoric, on the one hand, and the astonishingly large number of activities and sums of money that an otherwise hostile administration might sign into law. It reminds us that none of our elected governments can remain an intractable monolith.

A sincere apology for cruel attitudes by some still-living figure from the administration would be in order. Sullivan nominates Larry Speakes, and I second the motion. Elder George Bush, as far as I can tell, did his penance by funding research and education as the next president of the AIDS age; these were my sixth through tenth grade years, and the times had clearly begun to change. Koop was an honorable man who did what he could, then added a Cabinet-level mea culpa on the public record, according to Dr. Fisher. Reagan's foreign policy staff was probably not involved in this health discussion; now the younger George Bush lists halting the ruinous advance of HIV/AIDS in the developing world as a pressing priority, even as he rattles the saber of a heterosexual marriage amendment (that much of his own party opposes). We have come a long way, even if we have farther to go. We don't need to misunderstand the past in order to make ourselves feel more enlightened, either: quite the opposite.

Ray Charles, 1930-2004, RIP

2004-06-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

Ray Charles, Grammy-winning master of music who combined blues, gospel, country, dies at 73. In some circles, that blend he helped to invent was called "soul music." Your local radio stations might have some nice, long tributes. Whether they do or not, go purchase some of this man's fine, fine songs. As The Chicago Tribune [free registration required, also interchangeable with LA Times access] popular music critic Greg Kot said years ago, Ray Charles could sing the telephone directory and make people weep for joy. I was fortunate enough to see him once in concert ten years ago. We'll miss him.

Andy, You Came and You Gave Without Taking

2004-06-10T14:47:00.000-07:00

Sinophilic dreamer Andy Bayer, also a friend of Rachel Wortman and myself, was the second soul to post a comment on Loyal Opposition. After Reagan's death and the ensuing post-mortem controversy about his life, I began debating him about the notion that Clinton was the better president. Selected further correspondence will be posted soon. Like me, he is disgusted by the liberal democracies' blindness regarding the totalitarian People's Republic of China. The bigger they come, the harder they fall. The dream is alive, Andy.

Springtime for Rachel and New Jersey

2004-06-10T14:27:00.000-07:00

My friend Rachel "Various Nicknames" Wortman was kind enough to be the first commentator on my fledgling site, and has now linked to me twice. The least I could do is return the favor.

She's fabulous, and has beaten your humble servant to the punch in this post about her personality's likeness to the classic screwball comedy heroines of Katherine Hepburn. Peanut, it makes me want to watch "The Philadelphia Story" right now.

Does she want a man like Spencer Tracy? Let's hope hers drinks less. (I know, I know, Hepburn plays opposite Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart in that particular film, but I couldn't resist.)

California Scheming

2004-06-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

For those of you interested in this year's Californian U.S. Senate race, the San Francisco Chronicle rejected a much shorter version of this before I sent the expanded one to their local nemesis. I disagree with Fresno County rancher-politician Bill Jones on several issues, but Marin Country aristocrat Barbara Boxer is not even a good liberal Senator when it counts (or if you prefer, on the issues where I would like her to be).

Both she and her Republican opponent have, respectively, said nothing about same sex marriage and nothing in four months. One gets the impression that they believe the dictum of The Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot that homosexuality is the third rail of contemporary politics, and whoever mentions it first or most, for whichever side, is cruising for losing. For my money, I think that same sex marriages will continue to be vindicated by the courts, state by state, until a few cases go federal and one finally goes Supreme. Voters are too hostile, legislators too weak, and there aren't enough imitators of San Francisco and New Paltz for the "municipal disobedience" option to succeed. God bless America, and its activist judiciary.

Given two imperfect candidates, I am extremely annoyed at Boxer, an incumbent who chaired a pre-September 11 Senate subcommittee on Terrorism but "didn't even know we had an enemy." She is exactly the kind of domestic politics national narcissist who made such attacks possible by hitting the snooze button every time an American (or other) target abroad was attacked in the 1990s. President Bush, ex-CIA director Tenet, and even the somnabulistic Clinton administration were all more alert than that. Boxer's idea that a bunch of inspectors at shipyards (and California has many, meaning $$$ for her home state) and elsewhere will be the most effective counterterrorists is in stark contrast to her reluctance to give a dime to the military, or even to fund her cherished Homeland Security jobs.

It also worries me that my state could become a Democrat ghetto with races that are completely uncompetitive, and each (for either party, generally safe) district quits paying attention to the major opposition. My city already has, except during races where the Green Party accused Democrat Mayor Gavin "Same Sex Marriage Licenses" Newsom of being a right-winger equivalent to both neoliberal Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger and to evangelical President Bush. They must all look the same from the perspective of dwarves with Marxist fantasies.

It's true: Matt Gonzalez, who narrowly lost to the rich and enormously funded Newsom, wrote the poem "My Green Manifesto," a list that includes: "I read The Communist Manifesto and I liked it." (So did I, but I was fifteen and later outgrew it.) That document, of course, rejects electoral democracy and "bourgeois socialist" reforms short of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." I'm not McCarthyist; he's proud of it. The bookshop where his worshippers ("he's like a male, tan swan....mythical[!], and stubborn and independent") gathered is only a few blocks from my home, in a neighborhood that boasts at least nine competing socialist parties in the span of fifteen blocks and where Gonzalez fits in like "a regular guy." In Germany the Greens sometimes nickname themselves "watermelons" for being "Red on the inside."

No enemies to the Left? It's enough to make you want to vote Republican, especially in the state that founded the Log Cabin clubs of the party.

Tiananmen Protest Anniversary, Part One: Left Out

2004-06-07T01:09:00.000-07:00

It is so unfortunate that none of the major left-wing sites noted the anniversary of China's crackdown on the 1989 protests in Beijing: CounterPunch, The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, Z Magazine and even the mainstream liberal The American Prospect all failed. AlterNet buried a two-paragraph blurbette under MediaCulture about continued repression, but nothing about the new, enormous protests in Hong Kong. For partial credit, Salon.com reposted links to older articles at the end of May, but with no new pieces. Civil society is struggling against one party's totalitarian exploitation of one fifth of the earth's people, and these publications are missing the story.

Only the New York Review of Books chimed in, by way of New York Times' columnist Nicholas D. Kristof assessing Bruce Gilley's "China's Democratic Future: How it Will Happen and Where it Will Lead." Of course, they did not choose to make this article free on their website, preferring to grant that privilege to current affairs (understandably), but also to discussions of the late novelist John Gregory Dunne, neuroscience, and an analysis of Pinocchio's ethical metamorphosis. No offense to the erudition of the NYRB contributors featured online, but these choices suggest unfortunate editorial priorities.

Not long ago, The Nation praised "The Rebirth of the NYRB" as a determined political combatant. One wonders if it is bravely activist to demand a paid subscription to learn about the future of oppression in the world's largest country. They could have just as easily made the reader shell out for the fiction esoterica, giving the China story to the public gratis.

Of course, NYRB also could have ignored the People's Republic entirely, like the other progressive and radical journals. Is their collective ignorance expressing the faults of unilateral decisions by individual editors or an unplanned multilateral consensus of the American Left's major print and online magazines, and hence of the intelligentsia generally?

In a stroke of significant and accidental irony, AlterNet's homepage is currently plugging "Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America into a One-Party State" by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, having previously published this. Stauber and Rampton also wrote last year's "Weapons of Mass Deception," a screed against the war that toppled Iraq's one-party state, which AlterNet also excerpted.
They have the gall to call a bicameral majority plus Republican control of the White House effectively authoritarian, while substantial foreign tyranny warrants very little mention.

Consider that the Democrats dominated both legislatures and the presidency for most of 1933-1969, interrupted briefly for parts of the 1950s. The New Deal, Truman's Fair Deal, Kennedy's New Frontier and Johnson's Great Society were popular and Republicans overwhelmed. Even the Eisenhower administration was anathema to many conservatives, often judged as compromised and statist. Would AlterNet, Stauber and Rampton like to deride the Democrats' midcentury hegemony as well, in the name of political parity? To call a generation of elected successes a "one-party state" while ignoring genuine dictatorships robs the (rightly accusing) phrase of any context, meaning or value.

How many of these magazines (and their readers) would know a one-party state if they saw one? More importantly, having made the positive identification would they then care enough to publish much about it? Such national self-obsession is a parochial self-deception, to say the least. Our new world disorder is largely the work of despots in underdeveloped nations and their captive subjects, who eventually must rebel as the Chinese have begun to do. Progressives ignore these conditions at their own peril.

President Ronald W. Reagan, 1911-2004, RIP

2004-06-05T15:03:00.000-07:00

So, I broke my promise and got sleepy while researching Tiananmen '89. This is big, though. After many years of being lost to Alzheimer's, President Ronald Wilson Reagan is dead at age 93, America's oldest-when-elected and longest-living chief executive, and I am saluting him.

Once I discoverd the news I began with a commemoration of his Ulster Scotch Irish heritage: a recording of "Amazing Grace" on the bagpipes and a Bushmill's on the rocks. A friend and fellow Illinoian once asked me if I would eventually toast Reagan's coming death, but I don't think he had this quite in mind. Anyway, I have already raised my whiskey glass to Dutch, the lifeguard from Dixon, Illinois, two-term governor of my current home and our largest state, two-term guarantor of the free world who all but conquered the Soviet Union.

His films were terrible, but back in 1940s Hollywood the young Truman Democrat was subject to constant death threats for defying Communists while he was head of the Screen Actors Guild, ruining his career and scaring off his first wife, actress Jane Wyman. (Yes, they were trying to subvert that union and others, they were hardened Stalinists, and they used violence in California just like they did elsewhere. The heavy-handed and demagogic Red hunters were not the only guilty parties of the era.)

The greatest problem of his presidential legacy was the ease with which he let the Christian Right minority bandwagon onto his movement, and help influence the general Reaganite agenda with aspects of their extremism. Of course, Franklin Roosevelt had the same problem, lowering the guard of the Democrats to Socialists and Communists (and eventually, to Stalin's USSR itself) at the height of his New Deal popularity: Reagan learned that early and spent his life retaliating. At the same time, both presidents helmed the nation through immense economic and strategic crises, leading them to victory in each: against the Great Depression and fascism, stagflation and Marxism. Besides attracting extremists, each of them attracted some from the opposing party: FDR's many progressive Republican allies and the electorally decisive Reagan Democrats.

Andrew Sullivan, extraordinary gay center-right commentator, noted three years ago that aside from cultural politics, "Reagan was right about almost everything."

Deroy Murdock noted during last year's controversy over the miniseries "The Reagans" that the president had done a great deal more about AIDS than his detractors on the Left usually claim.

The Great Communicator at his most controversial gave this famous speech to evangelicals in 1983. After religiously inveighing against abortion and secularism he then turned unexpectedly to attacking the evil of right-wing hate groups, before he no less accurately called the USSR an "evil empire."

The author of that speech, Hoover Institution fellow Peter M. Robinson, hosts PBS' finest weekly in-depth show, "Uncommon Knowledge." Last year they had a panel on Reagan's long, victorious struggle against Leninism.

America lost its Winston Churchill today, another flawed but brilliant modern conservative and leader of the empire of liberty. As Andrew Sullivan said, we now all live in the First World Reagan made, with a liberal Third Way now ascendant over the statism of the 1970s and one democratic superpower instead of totalitarian expansion.

The present war is largely against the leftovers of the Soviet alliance, from Colombia to the PLO, Ba'athism in Syria and Iraq, to North Korea. Indeed, most of the world's current conflicts are Cold War orphans. It is a shame that neither Regan's successor, the elder Bush, nor Clinton was able to build upon the triumph enough to forestall the current crisis. Nonetheless, consider that in 1980, few ever thought that the Soviet Union would disappear, or even stop winning new allies in developing nations. Through blood, sweat and tears, that disaster was averted, and without a nuclear winter. Bravo, Gipper. Descansa en paz.

Getting Started

2004-06-04T19:40:00.000-07:00

The last few days have been very hectic. I promise to get a new post up later tonight.

Just to get you thinking, this weekend has many of historical anniversaries that a guy like me would like to discuss. Fifteen years ago today, the Communists crushed the protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Sunday is not just the anniversary of D-Day, being celebrated in France as Freedom Week, but Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon as well. Later in the month comes Juneteenth. There might be more.

Plus, with the resignation of CIA Director George Tenet and the naming of a new Iraqi government, and the march of time in general, there is always news worth reading. I'll do what I can.

Now, however, is supper time.

Welcome to Loyal Opposition

2004-06-02T04:34:00.000-07:00

Greetings.

I am a twenty six year-old living in San Francisco, California. I have been a history buff since I was seven, and long-obsessed with public affairs and personal worries. Many times a convert and always a dissident, I have been a Catholic, a libertarian and a Marxist, as well as variations of mere conservative or progressive. None quite fit me, but I'm the kind of guy who moved around several times in only nine years.

Nowadays I am an odd centrist, usually in loyal opposition to much of the mainstream Left and Right.

How many people do you know who support both same sex marriage and escalating the war on terrorists and rogue states? Who think Bush is botching the occupation of Iraq but would support doing it all again, more lethally next time? Who oppose the death penalty but support covert operations? Who are pro-choice but think that it's a crime that liberals don't stand up to the radical Left more often? Who believe in gun control but also know that Michael Moore is a fraud? Who love hippie music but know the United States and South Vietnam were winning before the Democrats cut off funding? Who love veterans and the educated but cannot stomach Senator John Kerry? Who despise reactionary faith but might vote for George W. Bush anyway? Now you know one, Adam William Balling. Nice to meet you. Forgive me if I didn't catch your name.

With two anxious parties going through an identity crisis, now is a shaky time in our liberal democracy. For a moderate, it's morose. The anti-modern movement has warped many, many planks in the platform of the party of Lincoln. Now a heavily southernized behemoth, GOP religious fanatics have prevented a lot of compromises that sensible conservatives might have made, and launched insane crusades the latter would not have begun.

Drunk on Robertson more than on Reagan, many are ready to restore prohibtionism and puritanical censorship. Republicans interested in limited government regularly go soft on a committed, retrograde minority. The party of liberty is hypocritical and cowardly about this internal rift. As our culture grows more cosmopolitan, Republican excesses run self-destructive risks.

Lucky us, the Democrats are doing no better, never having disgorged the worst of its New Left vomit. The revived "ant-globalization" and "anti-war" movements have really brought out the worst extremists behind popular fronts. Its effects trickle down in the rhetoric: apocalyptic cowardice, isolationist sanctimony, narcissistic anti-Westernism, anti-capitalist delusions and--thanks the new popular front of Palestinian radicalism--anti-Semitism as well.
The Baby Boomer McGovernites never weeded out the VietCong true believers from the merely war-averse, and neither have my contemporaries. To the untrained eye, militants blur with sympathetic fellow travellers, and in turn these useful idiots with center-leftists. Just look at AlterNet or MoveOn.org, bizarre hybrids of drab establishment Democrats and rabid Marxists. The Left cannot claim the highground, for it too has failed to guard its own ranks.

Perhaps the sudden fall of the Soviet empire is to blame, making the United States generally overconfident. Progressives who averted their gaze could pretend that communists were no longer a problem, perhaps never a even problem in the first place, not even after the 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle. Conservatives prepared themselves for the wrong struggles, attacking sexual mores while assuming an easy peace dividend allowed for a global withdrawal. Ribald pop culture and homosexuality were targeted for elimination rather than integration, despite the self-defeating intolerance of the quest. Federal finances were not properly reformed, awaiting calamity with the downturn of the business cycle.

Neither party took an adequately interventionist approach to the post-Cold War international order, ignoring decades of terrorism, through al-Qaeda's USS Cole bombings in October, 2000 all the way until the World Trade Center was gone. Instead they pursued vouchers and subsidies, cuts of each other's favored projects rather than the public interests. They were acting like a bunch of federal Europeans, as witless toward Mexico as the EU was toward the breakup of Yugoslavia. The third parties were even worse, narrow-minded grab bags of a few extreme positions on domestic issues, all strangely isolationist in the globalized age: Libertarian, Socialist, Reform, Green, Constitution and Natural Law.

As of today, June 2, 2004, they have not stopped. The major parties disappoint, playing a sorry game of catch up in the new millenneum. So I must confess to my sincere and mutual loyal opposition. Until someone expels their extremist wing, it is the best they and I can do. They will please me selectively, and my vote will swing accordingly. Deep down, I hope they both clean house, sending the fanatics off to rot with Nader and Buchanan in their little fiefdoms of purity. Otherwise, our system would skew hard into the worst of the electoral Left or Right. Imagine one coast-to-coast overpriced, homeless-infested, underpoliced San Francisco in depths of fiscal crisis, or if you prefer, a sprawling low wage Bible Belt where social conditions stagnate from cultural repression. I desire neither, and am willing to hand out a lot of criticism. Eager, too. And not very happy in this election year.

On the bright side, you never know when we and our two glorious major parties might begin to collectively evolve beyond our current revolutionaries and reactionaries. I don't expect it any time soon, and it will come only gradually.

And along the way, I'll write about it here. I hope you enjoy it.