The Battle of No-Ideas

With so much discussion of how the Democrats have no ideas, and of their recent attempts to come up with some, it has been easy to ignore the ideological black-hole that is the Republican party. The most serious ideological discussion amongst the Republicans recently has been over the meaning of the word ‘amnesty,’ which resembled not so much an informed and reasoned debate as it did a Jerry Springer special about lovers arguing over the meaning of the word ‘cheating’. There was a lot of pomp and circumstance, and it was clearly made for television.

Bruce Reed’s recent piece in the Democratic Leadership Council’s Blueprint Magazine serves as a pointed, and somewhat humorous, reminder of the Republican’s active retreat from the vision thing. Riffing off the Republicans’ decision to pursue a mid-term electoral strategy of emphasizing local politics and trying to prevent them from being about national issues, Reed sardonically observes, ‘Republicans are rushing to claim the idea-free mantle for themselves.’ In fact, as Reed goes on to point out, Republicans have been washed up for a while:

‘when it comes to tired ideas, Democrats can't possibly compete with a Republican Party whose sole remaining bedrock principle is a tax-cut theory that didn't work a quarter-century ago, either.’

Reed exaggerates for emphasis, but the point is valid. The tax cut is not so much an idea as it is a redistribution of income, and it’s certainly unrelated to any broader economic program or social project. The only thing really holding the Republicans together is a shared antipathy for the Democrats and a general desire for power.

If Reed’s analysis of the Republicans is solid, he is somewhat more evasive about the Democrats. He does believe they stand for something ‘Many Democrats actually have ideas, so it has become a real burden for the party to pretend otherwise.’ But he ends his scalding critique of the Republicans with tepid fare: ‘Democrats have a good answer to the Republican charge that Democratic ideas will run the country into the ground: You ran the country into the ground first.’ This is not a good answer, and it’s certainly not a ringing call to arms. It does not even present the Democrats as a good choice, so much as the only other option besides complete and empty failure. Political competition between failures is not the same thing as partisan conflict or a battle of ideas.

In fact, the ‘ideas’ that Reed thinks the Democrats have are not really the same thing as Ideas. Reed really means the Democrats have a series of policy proposals that might win enough votes to carry an election, not that they have a coherent project for social change. In fact, it is symptomatic of limited the horizons of mainstream political imagination is, that Reed can’t think of ideas as anything more than policy proposals. It is no wonder that both parties fall back on a politics of fear. They have no other way of animating their policies, and enchanting their rule. One thing is for sure, inspiration won’t be coming from Washington.

The Long What?

Has the Pentagon lost its mind? In February, they released their 92 page Quadrennial Defense Review, which included talk of a ‘Long War on Terror,’ and laid out a 20-year defense strategy. The Joint Chiefs of Staff then released a document called ‘Fighting the Long War -- Military Strategy for the War on Terrorism,’ which discussed the main reasons for permanent global war. Now, the ‘Long War’ has become the central way the administration is trying to endow its foreign policy with a sense of purpose. The documents, and talking points, are a morass of confused analogies and precedents. In press conferences, the Joint Chiefs grimly remind us of the dangers of appeasement in the 1930s, their document itself explicitly draws parallels to the Cold War, and their spokesman actually presented ‘a map that shows the bin Laden-style caliphate conquering North and East Africa, the entire Middle East and Central and South Asia.’ Come again? Bin-Laden was barely able to organize a shadowy network of terrorists, let alone anything like a proper force capable of conquering a country. Not to mention, what organization he did have is essentially defunct. The few training bases are destroyed, and most of the leadership is dead or captured. Bin Laden, at most, is able to produce the occasional video press release, which makes headlines only because of the way the Bush administration has transformed the two-bit terrorist into a global statesman. There is no enemy. At most, there is a band of international outlaws. Of course, the Pentagon knows it has lost its mind. It consistently undermines its own case. Recall that, originally, Pentagon officials wanted to eliminate any military connotations to their operations at all, instead preferring to name their activity the ‘Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism’. While Bush killed that idea, the Pentagon has continued, in practice and theory, to reject the notion that, practically speaking, this is a war. General Kimmit, the leading figure behind the new ‘Long War’, says, “making better use of "soft power" - diplomacy, finance, trade and technology - is the key to this new ‘fourth-generational warfare.'” Soft power? Isn’t this a liberal idea? And isn’t ‘diplomacy, finance, trade and technology’ the way you deal with the mafia, not a political enemy? How has the Pentagon ended up in such a bath of confusion? Without real enemies to fight the Pentagon is creeping into the territory of Interpol and the Department of Justice. With Vietnam, successive administrations tried to dress down a war as an international police action, with the new ‘Long War’, the administration is trying to dress up an international police action as a war. The stumbling quest for a defining war metaphor is a strange kind of confusion. It does, of course, have the effect of creating a permanent global state of exception in which, in the name of wartime emergency, the administration and military claims freedom to do what they like. But there is no clarity about what they would like to do with such freedom. From the start, the use of violence in this phantom war wasn’t centrally about the pursuit of hidden interests, but rather an attempt to create a war and a sense of national purpose where none existed. Bush and his advisors seem to have thought that war could regenerate the collective energies of a decadent liberal public caught in the throes of relativistic, moral lassitude. That is why they have been long on metaphor, short on substance. Metaphor wasn’t the sign under which they were allowed to use violence for ‘other means’; violence was the means by which they hoped to make the metaphor stick. The confusion about with whom we’re supposedly at war, what kind of war this is, or where the battlefield is located, stems from the fact that, first and foremost, the administration is ‘at war’ with the political tendencies of its own society.

The Optical Illusion of George W Bush: Presidency Without a Purpose

As the immigration bill rattles around the capitol, and the House and the Senate start meeting to reconcile their competing drafts, Bush increasingly appears like an innocent bystander to the political game. Bush has made his speeches, staked out his position, and made an effort to have his bill adopted. As with most pieces of domestic legislation, however, every Senator and Representative has his own opinions, shaped around some mix of his own principles and the demands of his constituency. Having conceded ground to Bush on the foreign policy front, members of both houses guard domestic policy ever more jealously.

On top of which, pending mid-term elections create pressures to produce. Everyone wants to stake out a claim to political activity. The costs of bucking the President’s wishes, especially one with as little control over his own party as Bush, are insignificant compared to the benefits to be gained by election year posturing. The authoritarian immigration bill that came out of the House already departed significantly from Bush's plan, and caused a ruckus in the Republican Party, not to mention the Senate. Meanwhile, the Senate Majority leader and presidential hopeful, Bill Frist, has already publicly split from Bush’ plan. In fact, when it comes to the immigration bill, Bush’s opinions appear less as the authoritative desires of a party leader, and more as the ideas of another interested decision-maker to be factored in amongst all the other competing constituencies.

All of this means the immigration bill is likely to be one of those standard pieces of election year compromise legislation, in which a mix of different interests are cobbled together under the banner of ‘reform’, a few dissenting voices take a stand on principle, and everyone goes home with something to show their constituency. What it won’t possess is the imprimatur of the President’s will, except in the purely formal sense that he will have to sign the bill. This has been a general pattern for domestic legislation under Bush, other notable instances being intelligence reform, health care reform, social security reform, and the even more ignored transportation and energy bills. In each of these situations, the president’s foray into domestic politics has come up against that irritation of irritations: politics. Managing the struggle of competing interests, the painstaking work of uniting disparate groups under a common banner, and even more, the attempt to infuse a policy issue with political ideals, has been well beyond the capacities of this president. He is as bad at domestic diplomacy, as he is at international negotiations. This is not merely a matter of personal character, but a product of the fact that he has no ideas with which to enchant and to make sense of the various domestic issues he faces.

All of which points to why Bush prefers the crisis environment of the war on terror to the nitty-gritties of governing the United States. Bush wants to be a ‘war president’ because it is the only way for him to give purpose to his exercise of power, or really, to avoid having to explain his reasons for using and abusing power. Living in the eternal present forestalls any discussion of the future. Emergency becomes its own excuse for failing to possess a political vision and win arguments. When crisis becomes the model for the general conduct of politics, and the formation of policy, it is no surprise that Bush should have difficulty following through on initiatives, be they occupation of a country or seeing though an immigration bill. Bush’s appearance of strength masks a profound weakness. His grandiose, ideological gestures reflect this inability to manage the world of gritty political decisions, and his attempt to transcend politics altogether. It is no surprise that, in spite of his desire to avoid responsibility for his own decisions, Bush is driven back towards foreign policy and the war on terror. There, at the very least, there is less ambiguity over who is the center of attention, and who appears like a leader.

A Load of Kos

Yesterday, Daily Kos described another chapter in the disintegration of the conservative coalition. This time it is the well-known pundit Kevin Phillips, once a strategist for the Republican Party and author of the famous 'The Emerging Republican Majority', who has turned into a critic of the GOPs apparent departure from conservative principles. To Kos’ credit, he does not confuse this further crack-up of the Republican base with a stroke in the liberal win column. There is no substitute for a well-organized and articulated opposition.

However, Kos sounds a familiar note in echoing Phillip’s criticism:

“It can't be said enough. The modern Republican Party has abandoned all pretenses of conservatism in favor of cult of personality. But those movement conservatists are dinosaurs in an era of Bushbots. They're either old, obsolete, and dying off, or they've been corrupted beyond recognition and are being forced to lawyer up.”

In his comparison between dinosaurs and ‘Bushbots’ Kos is playing to the idea that the Bush loyalists are an clique of ideologues and adventurers, given to risky ventures and unconstrained by the realpolitik that defined conservatism in the past. It is a familiar criticism, leveled by such diverse voices as Francis Fukuyama and Pat Buchanan who believes the neocons “owe more to Leon Trotsky than to Robert Taft," and that there is "a Jacobin streak in neoconservatism that cannot be reconciled with any concept of true conservatism.”

First of all, there is nothing to Kos' claim of a contradiction between conservatism and the cult of personality. In fact, the cult of personality is always politically conservative. It speaks either to pre-modern ideas about dignity, honor, and personal integrity as the basis of legitimate rule, or to a rather more twentieth-century, but no less reactionary, politics of plebiscites and charismatic authority.

But more to the point, where does this fascination, or really obsession, with Bush’s supposed anti-conservatism come from? From liberals like Daily Kos, to former neocons to Francis Fukuyama, to conservatives like Phillips and Pat Buchanan, everyone is convinced that Bush’s project of war, deficit spending, and democracy promotion is something closer to revolutionary than conservative. We have suggested that this criticism of Bush is wide of the mark because he is actually more anti-utopian than utopian, but there’s more to the story. Why obsess about the one feature of Bush’s project that is positive? That he is not following some idealized vision of conservatism is neither here nor there (unless you really are a traditionalist). Obsessing about Bush’s lack of conservatism only leads criticism towards an even more pessimistic or ‘realist’ direction, which is hardly the way to direct critical, progressive thinking. Surely what is bad about Bush is not his apparent willingness to demand great sacrifices in the name of democracy and freedom, but that he is actually taking us in the opposite direction.

Friday Review: The Impeachment Question

Over the past year or so, the call to impeach Bush has grown increasingly mainstream and self-confident. According to this Salon article, which gives a useful recap of the movement to impeach Bush, twenty-six House Democrats, including minority leader of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, support the creation of a select committee to investigate the possibility of impeachable offenses. Bush stands accused of all kinds of high crimes and misdemeanors, such as taking the US to war on false premises, violating the constitution, and authorizing torture.

The House Judiciary Committee could probably make a pretty good case for drawing up articles of impeachment. Lying to go to war might not technically be a high crime, but unjustifiably suspending various aspects of the constitution certainly is. In certain ways, Bush has sprung his own trap. By claiming extreme times demand extraordinary powers, he indicates that he can be judged only by extraordinary measures, not normal checks and balances. Surely this is what impeachment was established for: a congressional check on executive power to be used only under the most extreme circumstances.

However, impeachment is not necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. Some liberals, like Harold Meyerson, have argued that impeachment is imprudent right now because it’s not going to be the kind of unifying national campaign slogan that will win the Democrats the mid-term elections. It would drain too many political resources away from the campaigns themselves. Yet by this logic, it is hard to see how impeachment would be a good idea even after the mid-term elections. Just from the standpoint of the Democrats themselves, surely political capital would be better spent trying to repeal the Patriot Act, demanding the closure of Guantanamo or insisting on the withdrawal of troops, than trying to take down the President.

If we take a step back from electoral politics, we can see even more serious problems with impeachment. The fundamental problem facing American democracy, which we have discussed before, is a structural crisis, in which Congress defers and the Supreme Court acquiesces to the accumulation of powers by the Presidency. Both parties have participated in this process, and there is little reason to believe either of them will sincerely address the issue. This basic problem has been shunted to the margins of public debate, while matters of personality, specific policies, inter-party differences, or moral integrity have taken center stage. It is not that certain threats to democracy, like unconstitutional wiretapping, aren’t discussed, but that they are at most identified with a specific person (Bush) or party (Republicans). The incessant debates about these issues and the demand to ‘do something’ about them ends up reproducing the climate of crisis and immediate action that forecloses more considered political debate. Politics becomes about issue-hopping and damage-control, rather than a serious interrogation of our democracy.

In this context, impeachment easily becomes a misleading proxy for real democratic change. Putting the waste of time that was Clinton’s impeachment to one side, think of Nixon. For two years the nation was consumed in a public debate about Nixon’s shenanigans – illegal wiretapping, slush funds, blackmailing, cover-up, break-in. At the end of it, Nixon stepped down, and the Congress passed a few pieces of legislation, like the War Powers Act, which erected paper barriers against presidential powers. The final outcome was public exhaustion and cynicism with politics, and a massive expenditure of energy with no real long-term improvement in American democracy. One might say we ended up worse off, as the public was left with a vision of political institutions as irredeemably corrupt, and intractable to real democratic change.

The reason impeachment is not a powerful device of democratic change is that it is a special legal proceeding. It works according to the principle of individual responsibility. As a tactic of political change, therefore, it has the tendency to transform broad social problems into matters of individual behavior and responsibility. Legal proceedings by nature cannot directly address social forces or historical trends, and at worst can occlude them. It can give the impression of symbolic victory without substantive change, or confuse deposing an individual with political transformation.

This confusion of the person and the wider problem is already in evidence. According to the Salon article, in a town hall meeting in New York about impeachment, one of the panelists said:

““We're talking about moving from a republic to tyranny," he said, "It's getting too late. If this doesn't happen now, if we can't hold him accountable now, we're not going to get our liberty back.””

The move from ‘republic to tyranny’, or at least erosion of democratic liberties, has been going on for quite some time. It was not all wine and roses before Bush, and deposing Bush would put…Cheney in the helm. Or if both went, House Speaker Dennis Hastert – not exactly a champion of democracy.

The point is not merely that impeachment won’t really change things. It might even serve to redeem the very political system that we should be criticizing. Impeachment would here serve as a piece of political theater, making Congress look like it is serving its designed checking function instead of exposing both parties’ complicity.

As the Salon article quite reasonably asks:
“But it seems almost willfully naive to talk about mustering a congressional majority for impeachment without grappling with the deformation of our democracy that must be overcome first.”

In other words, what nobody has really explained is how getting rid of Bush will address the evisceration of American democracy. Impeachment does not appear to be part of any grand strategy. A strategy presumes relative clarity about first principles and fundamental problems. But if anything, at the moment, it seems to substitute action for thinking. Impeachment would signal a rehabilitation of the totally uninspiring ‘Anybody But Bush’ slogan that dominated the 2004 electoral debate on the left. Democrats hide behind the anti-Bush slogan, hoping nobody will notice that they don’t really know what they stand for.

One might argue that impeachment could acquire a dynamic of its own by bringing to the fore issues like accountability, democracy and the separation of powers. While the Democrats focused on Bush, public debate might start taking these issues more seriously, and start holding both parties to these standards. This might give impeachment some instrumental value as a strategy for improving democracy. However, we know what the public debate will be like – Did Bush lie? Did he know he lied? Does it matter if he knew he lied? Did he violate the constitution? Did he know he violated the constitution? Who told him what? Did Congress give him the power? Was it a high crime? What is a high crime and misdemeanor?

In other words, it will be as it was with Clinton and Nixon – an emphasis on technical legal issues, and personal behavior. Any attempt to leverage the impeachment debate into a broader discussion of institutional crisis and first principles faces an uphill battle. After all, it would mean trying to focus debate on precisely the kinds of social and political trends that impeachment is ill-suited to addressing. If such discussions had any impact, they would actually point away from focusing energy on mere impeachment, and therefore seem to run at cross-purposes with what’s going on at the moment. The essential problem facing our society is its unwillingness to face the long-term evisceration of democratic liberties. It is not the presence of Bush but the absence of a democratic movement that is most problematic today. By focusing on personalities, specific policies, and particular actions, impeachment is unlikely to raise, and just as likely to lower, the level of debate. Impeachment promises to be a piece of political theater, which serves no critical function.

Bush's Crisis of "Competence"

Jim Hoagland in today's Washington Post draws the analogy between the erosion of public trust in Putin and in Bush. He reminds us that both set out to protect national security by strengthening executive power, and that each effort has resulted in brutality and general incompetence. For Hoagland, the lesson is that state power under conditions of globalization necessarily "fragments or atrophies" and that efficient leadership requires less hierarchy and greater flexibility. In calling for leadership that understands the limits of state power and can act accordingly, Hoagland virtually parrots David Ignatius's piece in the wake of Katrina called "The Party of Performance." There, Ignatius argued that the failure of the Bush Administration was also ultimately a failure of competence, and that rather than ideological bluster what Americans needed now was political efficiency. Self-consciously non-ideological, Ignatius saw himself as linking hands with none other than Newt Gingrich in calling for "performance" over rhetoric.

Yet, the emerging conventional wisdom that the Administration's incompetence is the real problem is question begging for two reasons. First, it suggests that somehow if policies were carried out with rigorous efficiency they would therefore be just. Fareed Zakaria, who has been engaged in an intellectual dance regarding the Iraq War ever since his own initial support, writes in Newsweek that Bush needs to learn from his mistakes in Iraq -- with mistake number one being that he tried to occupy a country with only 140,000 troops. You would think that rather than post-war planning, mistake number one was the occupation itself and the notion of imposing democracy from above. What this focus on competence ignores is that one can do many very bad things with a high degree of efficiency, and unless we have a sense of whether those policies are right or wrong performance will never be an adequate measure of political legitimacy.

Yet, the critique from competence also blinds Hoagland specifically to just what makes Bush and Putin so similar; namely the end of the Cold War. Both are presidents of massive security states which have lost their raison d'etre. The collapse of communism as a meaningful adversary/alternative means that each country has been forced to reassess its own political goals and objectives -- with little besides national security and terrorism filling the ideological gap. Under such circumstances, it's as if executive strength and the very assertion of power itself have been projected as stand-ins for the lack of a real national purpose.

This basic emptiness helps explain why the Administration and its Russian twin have been so incompetent. When political elites and the state institutions they run lose ideological grounding, it's very difficult to perform competently. Instead, they are left with a morass of policies that are generally self-contradictory and that, rather than guide events, simply respond to them. So, the Bush administration builds permanent bases in Iraq just as it's frantically trying to draw down troops -- or spends three years fighting a Sunni insurgency and now wonders if that very insurgency should be backed against Shia opponents. Without ideological purpose, it's hard to behave competently, and when you have neither purpose nor competence, it's even harder to find your way out of the fog.

What's Not Wrong With The War In Iraq

In a recent Reason Magazine article, Julian Sanchez seconds Francis Fukuyama's condemnation of the neoconservatives for being too optimistic, at least about foreign affairs. Sanchez makes reference to Thomas Sowell, a conservative thinker, who came up with a rather arbitrary distinction between 'unconstrained' and 'tragic' visions. The former, mainly associated with the left, is amenable to experimenting with social transformation, the latter, mostly conservative, sees life as too complex to be changed. Unsurprisingly, Sanchez then seeks to paint the neoconservatives with the optimistic-lefty brush:

"The problems Fukuyama diagnoses with the planning of the Iraq War and its aftermath are typical of the unconstrained vision as Sowell describes it."

Sanchez has, like many others, drawn an overly conservative lesson from the chaotic Iraqi occupation. Invading Iraq was hardly a grand scheme of social transformation, so much as a romantic gesture dressed up as utopianism. Sanchez's problem is that he doesn't like the riskiness of the venture per se.

As Corey Robin pointed out in our teach-in this past Saturday, there is more than one approach to risk; we might call one the conservative and the other the progressive attitude. Right-wing romanticism has historically celebrated risk-taking for its own sake, as a heroic act of individual rejection of the conformist, risk-averse mentality of capitalist society. The 'fascistic' moment here is the celebration of the will for its own sake. Progressives, however, do not celebrate risk-taking for its own sake. Rather, they take risks for the sake of achieving some ends they think are desirable, like a more equal society, or the emancipation of a particular element of society. The problem with the neoconservative gambit, such as it was, was not that it took a risk with social engineering so much as that it was never really serious about this transformation, and the theoretical basis for their intervention was flawed (imposing democracy).

As we have argued before, this social vision is deeply anti-utopian and undemocratic anyhow. But the point is that, what really mattered to the neoconservatives seemed to be the riskiness of the effort itself. The invasion was a romantic rejection of the bureaucratic mentality of Pentagon and CIA civil servants, of the perceived passivity of most American citizens, and of the creaking political machinery of Washington. What's not wrong with the war on Iraq is that it was too utopian, so much as that it was an irrational act of will with no higher purpose than its own expression.