Is the political left just a bus ticket away from a trip to the
funny farm? I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill Democrat,
but rather the anti-war, activist left. Case in point is a piece by
Charlie Brooker in the Guardian that ended:
On November 2, the entire civilised world will be
praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod’s law dictates he’ll probably
win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The
world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and
unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and
save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley
Jr-where are you now that we need you?
The Guardian is now trying to lamely explain it away as humor,
“an ironic joke.” I know that the first time I read it I found it
rip-roaring, knee-slapping hilarious, didn’t you? I never realized
that advocating the assassination of a sitting president was part
of the comedy of “civilised” world. It makes me realize that,
compared to Europhiles, how completely unsophisticated I am.
By contrast, The Nation magazine was quite serious
when, in its endorsement of John Kerry, it wrote that Bush
“has pandered to a ‘base’ of religious fanatics, many of whom are
looking forward to a day of ‘rapture’ when Jesus returns to earth
and kills everyone but them [italics added].” That is
The Nation’s slightly more subtle way of calling
evangelicals the “Taliban Wing” of the Republican Party. The more
nefarious implication is that a second Bush Administration will see
many residents of Dupont Circle being strung up in RFK Stadium.
Is the political left really that paranoid? Well, to the extent
that The Nation is any indication, the answer is a clear
“yes.” The Nation worries that the ” gift of a true
electoral mandate now to this previously unelected President would
give fresh legitimacy and momentum to all his disastrous policies.”
And that “could in turn place our constitutional system itself at
risk.”
The Nation is a bit vague about how our constitutional
system would be undone in a second Bush term. This is the best they
can do:
No one can know when or how the decisive test of
democracy might arrive. It could come quickly, perhaps in a
crackdown following another terrorist attack on American soil, this
time conceivably on a far greater scale than September 11, or it
could come slowly, in a protraction of the process, already well
under way, of gradual strangulation of independent institutions,
amounting to a coup in slow-motion—a hardening of an informal
monopoly of power into a formal monopoly—leaving the institutions
of democracy technically intact but corrupted and hollowed out from
within, helpless to resist a central authority that has drawn all
real power into its own hands.
A “coup in slow-motion”? Apparently, the editors of The
Nation have no idea how that sounds.
I can only venture a guess at what they mean by the “gradual
strangulation of independent institutions,” which is “already well
under way.” One such institution is the probably the press. Earlier
in the piece they bemoan the corporate chieftains
…who swell Bush’s campaign coffers while at the
same time helping to bring the news media, now owned mostly by
large companies, to heel. It is the media that amplify his
Administration’s war propaganda while failing to expose the
deceptions put forward as justification for war and puffing up the
bubble of illusion whose creation is perhaps the Administration’s
top priority.
Apparently The Nation’s editors can’t see the reality
right in front of their own noses. Have they not noticed the
media’s coverage of the 9/11 hearings, of Richard Clarke, and of
Abu Ghraib? Then there was the Dan “Fake, But Accurate” memo
scandal, and the memo from the political director of ABCNews, Mark
Halperin, urging reporters to not “hold both sides equally
accountable.” It doesn’t seem like Rove and Co. are doing a very
good job of bringing the big media dogs to heel.
And who is behind the slow-motion coup? Well, it is
…in fact a culmination of a long, deliberate (if
not conspiratorial) campaign of politicization of the judiciary,
pushed by right-wing legislators as well as such groups as the
Federalist Society. In a series of reapportionment battles, notably
the one waged by House majority leader Tom DeLay in Texas, the
party used legislative power to entrench itself in that same
legislature. Meanwhile, a web of think tanks and other
institutions, supposedly independent but actually de facto
instruments of the Republican Party, was created. They cooperated
in vetting political loyalists for government posts and in flooding
the news media with apologists for the party and its policies.
Under DeLay’s leadership, the Congressional Republicans, leaving no
stone unturned, have sought to take over even the lobbying
establishment of Washington by threatening firms that hire former
Democrats to work for them.
Sorry, but appointing like-minded judges, waging reapportionment
battles, funding sympathetic think-tanks, spreading your message in
the media, and getting your ideological soul-mates in government
posts and hired by influential lobbying firms are all legitimate
parts of something called democracy. In fact, the Democrats do this
too, when they hold power. But in the normal workings of a free
society, The Nation sees a near conspiracy to turn this
nation into a de facto authoritarian regime. “They’re coming to
take me away!” you can almost hear Victor Navasky saying.
To understand the cause of this conniption fit, one must know
what animates . For that, look at where The Nationexplains
its disagreements with John Kerry:
We believe the United States should withdraw from Iraq;
he wants to “win” the war there. We think the military budget
should be cut; he plans to increase it, adding 40,000 troops. (For
what, exactly? to fight another wrong war, at the wrong place, at
the wrong time?) We reject pre-emptive war; he embraces it. We
oppose the wall that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is
building on Palestinian lands; he supports it. We believe in the
elimination of all nuclear weapons; he wants only to stop their
spread. He calls for significant expansion of healthcare; we call
for a single-payer system that would cover everyone. He opposes gay
marriage; we back it.
Name one policy proposal they advocate that is either supported
by a majority of Americans or is likely to be in the near future.
The Nation’s version of the “good society” is one that
most Americans no longer share, if they ever did. Yet it’s
inconceivable to them that their ideas no longer hold sway over a
majority of this country, so they desperately invent reasons why
they are losing. It’s coup plotters. It’s those corporate moguls.
It’s those damn maniacal wide-eyed true-believing Christians. If we
could just defeat this vast right-wing conspiracy, then Americans
would vote their true interests and the left-wing nirvana would be
upon us.
The fact of the matter is that America is changing in ways that
a far-left magazine can no longer stomach. It increasingly rejects
government solutions, wants an aggressive foreign policy against
terrorism, and admires individualism. President Bush’s reelection
will only accelerate these trends.
No wonder The Nation is on the verge of losing it.
