Already it’s clear that the Presidential election of 2004 is
shaping up to be a referendum — of Americans — on the legitimacy
of American power. When you look at the position staked out by the
Democratic candidates, even that of the more hawkish among them,
you notice the curious fact that they are unanimous that the
exercise of that power — with which, after all, they themselves
are asking to be entrusted — is ipso facto illegitimate
when it has not been subjected to the restraints that other
countries would impose on it, no matter what their reason for
opposing it. Not only are they saying that President Bush can’t be
trusted with it, they are saying they can’t be trusted
with it. You’ve got to wonder how appealing a statement like that
is going to be with the general public.
Put like that, it does seem curious, does it not? Yet it can be
explained by a look at the core constituency of the Democratic
Party since George McGovern turned it into the mistrust-America
party 32 years ago. Just as the late-twentieth-century Republicans
were never able to live down the Goldwater legacy but only to find
standard-bearers who could broaden the party’s appeal without
repudiating that legacy, so the Democrats have never to this day
overcome their identification as the anti-war party they were in
1972. Like Nixon and Reagan, Carter and Clinton were able to
overcome the effects of such branding only to the extent of making
it seem briefly tolerable given the public’s sense of national
priorities when they were elected. But Clinton was still
McGovernite au fond. No one can imagine someone in the
administration of John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson saying: “I don’t
talk to the military.” Now it’s hard to imagine any Democratic
administration that wouldn’t be crawling with such people.
There are certain core constituencies that any political party
must avoid offending at almost any cost. The Democrats have more of
them than the Republicans. They include blacks, activist women and
public sector unions, for example — which is why none of the
Democratic candidates will so much as hint that he might have
doubts about affirmative action or abortion or opposing educational
vouchers. One of these Democratic constituencies is the anti-war
left, those whose political consciousness was formed during the
Vietnam war. Sometimes called the “Blame America First” crowd, they
are as implacable and as necessary as any of the other Democrat
constituencies, and they are by nature deeply suspicious not only
of the Pentagon and the projection of American power abroad but of
all forms of behavior that they would describe as
“militaristic.”
I wouldn’t dream of denying that Democratic fury over the 2000
election is a lot of the reason for their visceral hatred of George
W. Bush. But there is another reason for that hatred too. It is
that Bush never learned the lessons of Vietnam, first and foremost
of which in their view was that America had no “right” to impose
her will on the rest of the world. We were the global bad citizen
during the Vietnam era, and we can never have done atoning for it.
Now not only are we doing it again, as they see it, but our
President is utterly unashamed of doing it. That’s why the charge
of “cockiness” from those on the left has become so routine (see
coverage of the State of the Union address passim) — and
why nothing since the wars of 9/11 began has infuriated them more
than President Bush’s saying to the al-Qaeda terrorists: “Bring it
on!”
It may seem curious, then, that this kind of masculine vaunting,
left over from the days of unashamed “militarism” before Vietnam,
has excited no more comment than it has in the mouth of Senator
John Kerry. Again and again he has echoed the President’s words,
but turned them on the President himself. Why do the crowds at
Kerry’s rallies find such macho posturing abhorrent when Bush does
it, while at the same time eating it up from their man? The left
seems to want to have it both ways. The very dare-and-counterdare
characteristic of masculine honor-talk is on the one hand
illegitimate, and a relic of outmoded ways of thought. But where it
is convenient, these things may be brought back and indulged in
with relish, if it is the “right-wing” honor culture they are
daring and vaunting against.
It’s the paradox pointed to by George Will when he writes that “Democrats who are serious about the
candidates’ electability understand that seriousness requires a
retreat from the feminization of politics.” On the one hand, that
is, we know that the Democrats are the mommy party, and they hate
and loathe all the masculine and military values that the
Republicans are not sorry to try to make their own. On the other
hand, at some level they know that to be electable they have to
show a masculine willingness to get tough if necessary …
That may be why Democrats seem at times to be even more willing
than the Republicans to swoon over guys like Kerry who have a
fist-full of medals. Of course Kerry threw away his medals. Except
that he didn’t. He pretended to throw them away during a Vietnam
War protest but secretly kept them and, after it was once again
popular to have served in Vietnam, mounted them on his wall. In
Kerry’s ambivalence about his own service in Vietnam, we see the
ambivalence of his party towards American power. Unless he, or
whoever the Democrats nominate, gets better about hiding that
ambivalence, I can’t see the American people entrusting him with
that power.
