War Weariness and MoveOn
Dean
I've been on MoveOn.org's mailing list for some time now. Every time I get a new mailing from those folks, I get depressed. Especially when some wag forwards a copy of their latest mailing to me and suggests that there's stuff in there that "more people need to see" and urging me to share it with my readers. I usually don't have the heart to tell them that I've seen it already.
Here's something I've noticed about the so-called "left/right divide." Now maybe this is myopia on my part, but every single person I know who supports the liberation of Iraq, who favors the abandonment of the "status quo" policies of past administrations and acting openly to promote democracy and human rights by a carrot-and-stick approach, is abundantly familiar with the arguments and factoids that those on the other side bring forth. In the last year and a half there has been, literally, not a single thing that those on the other side have been able to tell me that I have not heard many times before. I've all but given up looking, although I do keep looking ("Have they changed yet? No, guess not. [Heavy sigh.])
Last year one of them badgered me incessantly to see Fahrenheit 9/11 thinking, I suppose, there'd be something in there that I hadn't heard before (there wasn't) or that something about the "humor" of it would make me see it as anything other than fascist hate-propaganda. While in general it's not good practice to judge something before you've seen it, when enough honorable people from all parts of the political spectrum and from all walks of life condemn something and say all the same things, you know you don't have to see it. I don't have to read The Turner Diaries or The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to know what they are, and I certainly didn't need to see that movie. But I finally let myself be badgered into it, and found not a single surprise except that it was even more mendacious and vicious than I'd expected.
Mind you, there are some on the other side who I can respect. Why? Because they've taken the time to grasp the issues and positions, understand where the other side is coming from, and have come to different conclusions. They have specific and exact things they want to see done differently, and they can tell you exactly what those would be. No pussyfooting, no armwaving, no generalizations: they can tell you "We're doing X, we should be doing Y instead." That I can respect and understand.
I just wish it were more common. It would lead to things like dialogue and fruitful discussions and maybe even shared strategies.
Yet for the majority on the other side, the assumption seems to be that if you disagree with their position, it must be that you just haven't heard or read the information. When I tell them I have, they just don't believe me, or they assume I'm lying.
Never once does it seem to occur to most of them to ask whether it is they who have not really heard or tried to understand the other side. Never once does it seem to occur to most of them that there may be something they don't know. It never seems to have occurred to them that someone could just plain disagree with them and not be "shills for the Bush administration."
Me? I have spent endless amounts of time reading and examining the arguments of those on the other side. I could, if challenged, write ten or fifteen lengthy essays on why America provoked the 9/11 attacks, about how the Bush administration is stupid and incompetent and evil and greedy and malicious, about why we're causing the world to be a more dangerous place, about how we're descending into right-wing extremism and madness, and so on.
I could write it, and write it well. Without even being sarcastic. I could probably even have people cheering me on and lapping up every bit of it. It'd just require me to be, y'know, a shameless whore since I wouldn't believe a word of it.
Anyway, tonight I had yet another well-meaning person--one who obviously rarely looks at my weblog--forward me another mailing from the people at MoveOn.org. This time, it was the stupid petition about the absurd "Downing street memo." When I didn't react with enthusiasm, my erstwhile correspondent proceeded to tell me a dozen things I'd already heard about why I should take this absurd document and the paranoid fantasies it supports seriously.
So I was just polite and said we probably wouldn't agree much on politics and let it go. I'm certain my friend thought, "well those 'right wingers' sure are closed-minded." Whatever.
I just didn't have it in me to tell them that I'm not interested in helping to spread these people's stupid, paranoid, anti-humanist, anti-progressive, crypto-fascist bullcrap, or in helping them in their desperate, clawing attempt to find anything that remotely whifs of scandal so they can vindicate their hate-centered, Bush-obsessed worldview.
By coincidence, shortly afterward I read this piece by Neo-neocon, and it cheered me immensely.
Related Posts (on one page):
- War Weariness and MoveOn
- Iraq Report
Far from being put off by this, it was a great exercise, and it was surprisingly easy to do.
Someone somewhere in the blogosphere said that conservatives are fully versed in the language of liberals, but liberals do not have a clue as to conservative language. When they try to 'mimic' a conservative it is usually pretty thin and obvious - they don't even know what the arguments really are, so they have nothing to go on.
They will find it eventually. And they'll turn out to be right about some things, and wrong about others. But for now, they are completely out of intellectual gas, and it leads them to a place that's pretty ugly to watch. The great liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill would say that they don't have ideas so much as irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas. It seems about right.
This causes much right-wing triumphalism--some of it deserved, some of it not. Many on the right haven't noticed how many ideas of the left they have taken on as their own. But that's okay too, because in the end it's the ideas that matter most, eh?
The Left has been beaten by its antithesis sort of, and you are right almost a victim of its own success. It has spun out of ideas because so much of what they have stood for has been enacted.
And of course so much of it is genuinely worthwhile - workplace conditions and hours, civil rights and their two big triumphs, and rightly so.
And now, if they develop more faith in free markets and the positive uses of force, they might climb back into this thing.
Maybe some kind of libertarian-ish center (contradiction?) will emerge.
Problem: the populace, most particularly the younger couple of generations, are now educated enough and affluent enough that they no longer want jobs where they do the same thing for the next 40 years of their lives or expect absolute security. Nor, for that matter, do most of them envy or resent "the rich" all that much. Yet they dislike authoritarian corporations, being tied down, hate the draconian intellectual property laws (which have really gone far beyond common sense and only look to get worse before they get better), would love insurance portability and greater freedom and more access to training and opportunities to do new things, have no great love for strict religious views although they are not unpious, and like things like free choice in where to go to (or send their kids to) school.
Honestly, that's your real new-left in the making. The right is answering only a few of their desires, while the left is answering none of them.
I guess they're what they call the "South Park Republicans" for the moment. Although I haven't read that book, everything I've read about it rings true. Including the fact that they could bolt for the Democrats at any time--if only the Democrats would ever stop their crazed firing in all directions, get their heads out of the 1960s and 1970s, and actually come up with a coherent vision for the future.
Me? I give 'em another 10 years. By some estimates that's probably pessimistic, but by others it's waaay generous.
God I tell you sometimes I feel like joining the democratic party to tell them 'look, you need to do this, this and this . . . '
It really is a shame what the Democratic party has turned into, and it needn't be so.
I realize you all may not be Rush fans - I placed the link because it was relative to the discussion.
Please forgive the multiple posts
(I say this as one who volunteered for them up through the election... hell I even had a precient (sp?).)
The only people we connected with were already pissed off and going to vote for Kerry anyways. (Though I did have a number of good (reasonable) debates with Bush supporters on various front lawns.)
That being said, Dean, in what way are you dismissing the Downing Street Memo? (and btw calling it "absurd" is the VRWC talking point ;-) ) Regardles, calling it "absurd" doesn't address it's points.
Are you saying it's a forgery? Are you saying the author was totally incorrect (or lying)? Who was the author and what was his exposure/access to the people he wrote about?
Powell did say "We were going to the UN at the time this memo was written" . However, since we went ahead and invaded, despite not getting UN authorization, it actually _supports_ what the memo was saying.
;-) of course, full disclosure on this one, that last point is an LO (liberaloasis) talking point... so I guess it comes from the VLWC. But regardless, it is a point I agree with.
Ken McCracken wrote:
"Someone somewhere in the blogosphere said that conservatives are fully versed in the language of liberals, but liberals do not have a clue as to conservative language. When they try to 'mimic' a conservative it is usually pretty thin and obvious - they don't even know what the arguments really are, so they have nothing to go on."
That is very true. One reason for that is those so many of us Rightists started out as Leftists. I was a socialist in my boyhood, my whole family is and has always been Left-liberal in orientation, and, up till 9/11/2001, I was still respecting and reading some of the old Leftists such as the Industrial Workers of the World (integrating their syndicalism with a Chestertonian-style economics). Seeing an anti-American screed on their site, though, disgusted me and I have broken with the Left altogether. The only man of the Left I still have respect for is Christopher Hitchens, an exception that proves the rule as, like Dean, it is precisely because he adheres to old liberal values that he, too, has broken with the Left. Or the Left left him. He reminds me of George Orwell and, as I recall, he wrote a book on Orwell a few years ago which Andrew Sullivan discussed. My friend Jeanine Ring is also an exception, she is the embodiment of that libertarian/libertine Left you envisioned.
E. Merrill Root, in his Collectivism on the Campus (1955), once described two parallel and opposing spectra. He mentioned the spectrum of collectivists, from International Socialism (Communism) on the Left to Fabian Socialism in the Center to National Socialism (Nazism) on the Right. He then described a parallel and opposing spectrum of individualists. He chose Henry David Thoreau to represent the Left, Thoreau's friend Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Center, and for the Right he chose Senator Robert A. Taft. I'm envisioning a similar spectrum of individualists. On the Left I see Jeanine Ring. In the Center I see Camille Paglia. And on the Right I see E. Merrill Root himself.
Spectrums, spectrums, spectrums, spectrums....
They just get the big picture, that it don't mean squat if we lose the war on terror.
Thus it amazes me that this person, who would agree with the above statements, consistently takes political positions diametrically opposed to mine, and blithely assumes that I have not been acquainted with the facts or looked at the other side. I've never figured out how to tell her that such behavior is a complete contradiction. Imagine how a liberal who doesn't know me at all must view things.
I've heard so much unsupported, hysterical, over the top, turned out later completely untrue, total bullshit coming from the same type of anti-war protestor that I can't take anything they say seriously anymore. Take the AI "gulag" crap, for example. Did you know that AI is now recommending that another country kidnap any high administration official in order to charge them with war crimes in the International Court? Feh.
This is a sad thing, because a sane and adult opposition to a war is always useful. Everyone should be challenged, just to keep them honest. But the current crowd stopped being sane or adult about five seconds after Bush first took office.
Maybe Dean read the Downing Street Memo, like I did, and thought, "What smoking gun?" It reads like a summary of the discussion going on in the blogosphere. It's tone is uncertain, and every single point it makes on both sides were points that were being made in public on news shows, talk radio and in the blogosphere at the time.
Where's the smoke in a memo by someone who clearly hasn't made up his mind?
In fact, the Downing Street Memo makes it clear that British defense analysts were very concerned about Saddam's WMD's: I will describe some actual smoking gun memos:
1. One which details the steps taken to deceive us.
2. One which details the conclusions desired, and directs a subordinate to find facts to back them up.
3. One which details the conclusions not desired, and directs a subordinate to suppress facts that back them up.
It does not include memos which disagree with a subordinate's facts or a subordinate's conclusions. Those should be common.
I haven't seen any memos like that. In fact, the Bipartisan Intelligence report explicitly said that the intelligence was neither cooked nor coerced.
The Downing Street Memo proves that Tony Blair was taking his responsibilities seriously and considering all the facts and all the arguments, including the anti-war arguments. It proves that anti-war voices in the British government were not silenced, that their concerns were heard and that a lively debate was underway.
What's not to like about that memo?
Yours,
Wince
It doesn't. Insisting that it does says more about those making the accusation than anyone else.
Timeline for anyone who gives a damn about the truth:
1) One full year of debate in the United States in the Press, the Congress, on the internet, and on dinner tables all around America in which over a dozen reasons were discussed for acting against the monster in Baghdad.
2) Vote in Congress declaring war and authorizing the President to act as he saw fit, when he saw fit, with no strings attached.
3) Decision made: before we go, we'll try to convince the UN to support us (even though we're not required to do that)
4) Decision made: the only thing those people at the UN will care about is WMDs, and that's our strongest case. So we'll assemble the best evidence we have on that and present it to them. (Little did we know that the Russians and French had multi-billion$$ under-the-table deals with Saddam and would vote to veto action no matter what evidence we brought.)
I'm often stunned by how many people act as if Powell's presentation to the UN was the deciding moment of the entire affair. I guess that if you're European that makes sense, but how someone who was in America during that year-long "rush to war" can pretend it was otherwise I have no idea.
And yeah, I was right.
I just read "the" memo. This is supposed to be a smoking gun!?
All I saw were contingency plans and discussions about the best way to establish a legal case about the war for the British voter, according to the British Attorney General.
Or was there a National Treasure-style hidden message in the memo?
Maybe I should get out the lemon juice...
"Yes it certainly sounds like you had a Hitchens/Dennis Miller type conversion after 9/11. And actually those guys have not jettisoned any of their social liberalism as far as I know . . .
They just get the big picture, that it don't mean squat if we lose the war on terror."
That last is absolutely true. Which is why I voted for Bush despite my disagreements with him on one or two other issues.
I'd better clarify. 9/11/2001 was not a "road to Damascus" conversion for me. I was already on the Right or had leaned to the Right on many spectra for some decades before, under the influence of Nietzsche, Spengler, Rand, Chesterton, Paglia, etc., opposed to Communism, socialism, and Political Correctness. 9/11/2001 only made me more unmitigatedly Right-Wing and increasingly less tolerant of Left-Wing flapdoodle. For quite a while since that date, I took a "pas d'ennemi a Droite" attitude, until L'Affaire Santorum and 6/26/2003 convinced me otherwise. Since then, I have concluded that a 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional spectrum is, for me, no longer a luxury but a necessity.
Steven, reading your comment it is clear that the reason so many in the Left are so intolerant and misunderstanding of Republicans is precisely because they have not read the Spenglers, Rands, Edmund Burkes and so on that you have.
And yet we right-ish types have all read Marx most likely, Chomsky, Zinn, Gramsci and whoever. I mark that up to intellectual curiousity - why does the right seem to have more of that these days than the Left?
Or is it just because we have had this stuff shoved down our throats in school and so forth?
It think it is a bit of both. It sounds smug to say righties are more curious types, but my own experience has borne that out.
Man it would be just boring to only read stuff I agree with all the time!
"Sorry that comment was for Casey above."
Happens all the time. I've very often posted a comment to find that somebody else posted another while I was writing it.
Anyway....: Very good. Thank you.
Yes, I have read Marx and some of his followers, feminist writings, etc., but I must confess that I read far more Rightist or non-Leftist writers than Leftist writers, simply because Rightists tend to write so much better, have more interesting ideas. I've seldom read any book that I agreed with completely, save for Ellen Marx's Optical Color &Simultaneity and a few works like that. And the Rightist authors I read don't agree with each other half the time. Many are strongly religious, but some are atheists (e.g., Rand), some are elitists (e.g., Nietzsche), while others are populists (e.g., Chesterton, etc.), etc.. Individualists, by definition, do not think alike! Even within the National Review orbit of the American Right, Frank S. Meyer took issue with Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke. Most of the time, the only thing "Rightists" have in common is that they are "anti-Left" for whatever reason.
I have found that Leftists tend more to follow a "party line", whether they realize it or not. Today, it's "hate Bush and whatever he does". Before that it was "hate Reagan", "hate Nixon", "hate Joe McCarthy (that's still going on, even though we're supposed to forgive and forget the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc..)
You are right that Leftist (Communist, socialist, etc.) propaganda is shoved down the throats of young people in today's taxpayer-supported "progressive" schools, as well as through the mass media. I was more fortunate. Back when I was in school, in Monmouth, Oregon, in the 1960s and early 1970s, many of my teachers were anti-Communist as well as anti-Nazi. But I was still a bubble-headed socialist and I had to discover Rightist thinking on my own. Then I began to realize that my conservative teachers were more right than they had dreamed!
Dean: the talking point jokes were sarcam, sorry if you didn't read them that way. (Thus the reference to the VRWC)
Ok the relevant paragraph from the memo:
Ok notes:
1) No one has argued that the debate in Britain wasn't balanced. Only that the one in the US wasn't.
2) I am not &have not argued that Bush was the only one to screw this up. Many did, in the US.
3) The problem with the invasion was that we, the US kicked the inspectors out when those inspectors were stating that Iraq probably had no weapons program and they just needed more time to confirm.
4) fix:
11. To influence the outcome or actions of by improper or unlawful means: fix a prizefight; fix a jury. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=fixed
It could be a different meaning of "fixed around policy", the author could clarify, but probably won't.
2) OK.
3) Saddam kicked out inspectors repeatedly and the inspectors kept coming back with conflicting stories over a period of 12 years--and it was always Saddam's responsibility to show he was fully cooperating, which he never did.
4) You've picked one definition of "fix," the one that happens to fit with your desire to believe there was falsification. It's not even the main definition:
FIX: 1. 1. To place securely; make stable or firm: fixed the tent poles in the ground. See Synonyms at fasten. 2. To secure to another; attach: fixing the notice to the board with tacks.
2. 1. To put into a stable or unalterable form: tried to fix the conversation in her memory. 2. To make (a chemical substance) nonvolatile or solid.
3. Biology. To convert (nitrogen) into stable, biologically assimilable compounds. 4. To kill and preserve (a specimen) intact for microscopic study. 5. To prevent discoloration of (a photographic image) by washing or coating with a chemical preservative.
3. To direct steadily: fixed her eyes on the road ahead.
4. To capture or hold: The man with the long beard fixed our attention.
5. 1. To set or place definitely; establish: fixed her residence in a coastal village. 2. To determine with accuracy; ascertain: fixed the date of the ancient artifacts. 3. To agree on; arrange: fix a time to meet.
6. To assign; attribute: fixing the blame.
7. 1. To correct or set right; adjust: fix a misspelling; fix the out-of-date accounts. 2. To restore to proper condition or working order; repair: fix a broken machine. 3. Computer Science. To convert (data) from floating-point notation to fixed-point notation.
8. To make ready; prepare: fixed the room for the guests; fix lunch for the kids; fixed himself a milkshake.
9. To spay or castrate (an animal).
10. Informal. To take revenge upon; get even with.
11. To influence the outcome or actions of by improper or unlawful means: fix a prizefight; fix a jury.
In order to believe the paranoid conspiracy theory of falsified intelligence, you have to take the most strained and informal definition of the word "fixed." Then you have to presume that this mid-level flunky knew "the real truth" while no one above him or below him has ever come forward to testify to any deliberate falsification--but THIS guy knew the truth, and casually threw it into a memo.
Get off it man. This is absurd. No, it's more than absurd: it's nasty and it's stupid.
As for whether the author will clarify: do you honestly think for even one second that if he came out and said the obvious -- "I meant they were compiling the intelligence that would best support the policy" -- it would slow down the "Bush lied!!1!!11!1!!" cretins even marginally?