Pulling Together, Pulling Apart

I was touched and heartened by the appeals by members of the 9/11 commission for us to all pull together against al Qaeda. Unfortunately, my optimism was dented a bit by Dennis Hastert's subsequent comments. Although he did admit that 9/11 was not Clinton's fault, this concession struck me as particularly hollow. There is very little reason to believe that it was Clinton's fault; if it was any president's fault at all it is likely that it was Bush's fault. So Hastert's "it wasn't Clinton's fault, it wasn't Bush's fault" struck me as being something like "It wasn't Truman's fault, it wasn't Bush's fault"--a cheap concession in an attempt to deflect blame from its most likely-to-be-deserving target, i.e. Bush. Hastert then went on to make claims about how much Bush had done to fight terrorism since 9/11--again, thinly-veiled partisanship.

So, before the commission's appeal for unity had even reached the ears of most Americans, the Republicans were out front spinning for their man again, albeit in a slightly more subdued manner than usual.

Democrats and their sympathizers find themselves in an awkward position with regard to the issue of the current partisan viciousness in D.C. The viciousness is real and it has to stop and Democrats are the ones who seem most concerned to stop it--but it is Republicans who are most responsible for it. This point or similar ones has/have been made by several people, most recently by Paul Glastris in "Perverse Polarity" in The Washington Monthly (now my second-favorite political mag, right behind the indispensible New Republic. Speaking of which, Michael Crowley made a similar case there in his "Oppressed Minority" in the 6/23/03 edition). So if the Democrats were honest, they'd have to stand up and say "This hyperbolic partisanship is tearing us apart and has to end--and it's mostly the Republicans' fault!" That sounds like some kind of contradiction (let's all be civil, you bastards!), but it isn't. The partisanship does have to be stopped and it is mostly the Republican's fault, and even if Republican partisans will make bogus charges of self-contradiction, the Dems have to be honest.

The extremists who are driving this partisanship--like Grover Norquist and Tom DeLay--will never be convinced, nor will mindless Yellow Dog Republicans--but those aren't the people who we need to appeal to. We need to appeal to sensible Republicans and intelligent independents. Democrats can't simply compromise with extremist Republicans since that strategy will merely encourage extremism as a political strategy. Neither can they simply suffer in silence and allow DeLay and company to continue to fan the flames of a destructive partisanship. That means that the Dems are going to have to evolve into vertibrates, call a spade a spade, and be honest with the American people about the source of this problem. This may not work, and it may even backfire, but I think it's our only hope. And, oh, yeah, there is that pesky duty to tell the truth, even when telling it is inexpedient...

But as Glastris argues, the real obligation here lies with the media. They know damn good and well who is primarily responsible for the current divisive atmosphere, but they are afraid to report the facts. For one thing, they are afraid of being beaten with the liberal media stick. For another, there is some tendency to mistakenly believe that being objective about a story about conflict means pretending that both sides are equally to blame, even when this is demonstrably untrue.

Perhaps we might help our less-well-informed fellow citizens see the light by encouraging them to reflect on an illuminating set of phenomena with which they are likely to be more familiar--the adminstration's knack for making enemies on the international stage and alienating the rest of the world. At root, the alienation of the rest of the world and polarization at home are the effects of a single cause--the Republican leadership's unwillingness to compromise, brook dissent, and admit that they might--just conceivably and in some few cases--be less than perfectly right. Their contempt for other countries is of a piece with their contempt for other parties. Ultimately a strategy based on such contempt must fail. Let us hope--or, better yet, let us work to insure--that the strategy fails at home before its failures abroad become any more pronounced.