Notes and Premises

There are two errors at the root of so-called progressive support--tentative or full-throated, it makes no difference--for the Democratic Party. The first error is believing that the Democratic Party is a peace party, or at very least, that the Democratic Party is now institutionally committed to ending the Iraq War. They're committed insofar as Hillary Clinton, who like most of her cosectarians supported the war until its failures became entirely undeniable, says that it would be "the height of irresponsibility" for "this president" to leave the catastrophe to his successor. Or they are committed, in the now-popular euphemism, to "phased redeployment," through which American soldiers will remove themselves (mostly) from territorial Iraq, but will remain "in the region" and "as an over-the-horizon force." The Iraq War was part of a project of regional dominance articulated in its present form by none other than Democratic President Jiminy Carter, who proclaimed the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf in particular, "a vital national interest," of the United States. That, too, is a euphemism we all understand. The Democratic Party's committment to ending the War in Iraq is a committment to mitigating American losses, diminishing any perception of their own culpability, and therefore maximizing their own future political fortunes. It isn't a committment to peace in any meaningful sense, and it's even less a committment to disengagement from a failed regional policy in which the bloody stumbling of the American military and its Israeli proxies has served only to stoke the flames of religious conflict, religious extremism, and religious nationalism. The non-binding 110th has shown no inclination toward any meaningful diminishment of America's disastrous involvement in the Middle East. (But, I can already hear the plaintive progressive cries, there's nothing they can do! If true--which it ain't--that's only one more reason to stop giving them your money, your time, and your vote.) That they now wish impotently for fewer American targets in the shooting gallery they complied to create is hardly an argument for their status as peacemakers.

This first error is the inevitable outgrowth from the second, which is a serious fallacy of premise. The second error is the error of that favorite political adjective "unprecedented." You can be sure that any time that word appears in political discourse, the exact opposite is true. The War in Iraq is not an unprecedented foreign policy disaster. It's a disaster with a distinct, observable lineage. The Bush administration is not unprecedented. Its precedents are every other presidency in the years since World War II, and several, at least, before. At the very root of the error is unthinking acceptance of the P.T. Barnum-esque premise of America as "The Greatest and Most Prosperous Nation in the World," a chestunt roasted equally by both parties. That phrase, and those like it, is shorthand for a religious--I mean that as a pejorative--belief that the United States of America, being something of a civilizational (minimum: civic, political) apotheosis has an affirmative commission to interfere in the internal developments of other nations for whatever reason we see fit. The most disastrous consequence of that belief from a purely practical standpoint is that it has decoupled our plain imperialism from plain acknowledgement that imperialism is our project. Because our moral self-illusion precludes us from really identifying what it is we seek when we send off the ships and airplanes and infantry, we make colonial policy by circumlocution and euphemism, even at the very highest levels. "The forward agenda of freedom" isn't only a phrase for public consumption. Meaningless bromides are clearly just as much the lingua franca of the governing class. The far more disastrous consequence from a human perspective is that because we believe our bromides, believe in our goodness, and believe in the legitimacy of our moral pretensions, we feel as justified as any other zealot in raining blood and fire on non-belieivers, since we believe that a failure to convert is spiritual doom anyway.

That sort of exceptionalism lead us into a militarized national security state, a garrison economy, a many-trillion-dollar military complex, a series of fruitless border skirmishes with the Soviet Union that, in their worst instance, killed millions of Vietnamese. It led to the creation of a vast nuclear arsenal which we alone reserve the right to use, should it become "necessary." It led to a quarter-century of America-funded, America-supported massacres in Latin America. (These things occured under Democrats as much as under Republicans.) It lead to the modern surveillance state, the gradual slide toward national identification, the imprisonment of two million Americans, the creation of a vast intelligence apparatus with no meaningful Congressional oversight and secret budgts. It lead to our monstrous interventionist policies in the Middle East. It lead to Bill Clinton's "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act," which lead to the Patriot Act. It lead to the articulated Clinton/Gore policy of "regime change"--a Democratic euphemism. The current contention that "A Gore presidency wouldn't have taken us to war in Iraq" is not only fanciful, ahistorical projection, it's also patently false in that we were already at war with Iraq. We were bombing the country almost daily through the final years of the Clinton administration, and Al Gore was one of the staunchest Iraq hawks in the government. It was a low-intensity conflict that we simply chose to ignore domestically under the euphemistic guise of "no-fly zones" and "economic sanctions." In Susan Sontag's famously provocative post-9/11 essay, she asked, "How many Americans are aware of our ongoing bombardment of Iraq?" You know the answer.

The progressive will say that all this is a recipe for hopelessness. Only a major party can make changes, goes the argument, and if you can't get behind one then you're just a useless complainer. It's a profoundly ignorant argument. Every vote for either major party is approbation for immense crimes. It's only because their historical perspective is so myopic that these self-proclaimed progressives view political action as necessarily constrained to election cycles, votes, discrete military endeavors, etc. The project of altering the fundamental perceptions and premises underlying the American popular consciousness is a long one. Possibly it is futile. But the idea that the American electorate--the American mind, if such a thing exists--is currently capable of supporting or sustaining meaningful, essential, fundamental change is a fantasy and nothing more. The nature of our problems and the scope of our wrongdoing is entirely beyond the farthest boundaries of ordinary discussion in America today. The first step toward change is to expand the capacity of Americans to imagine something different. Slow, quixotic, and likely hopeless. But that is the task at hand.