During the Bush administration, people on the Left spent a great deal of time arguing that he was a quasi-dictatorial fascist, using the attacks of 9/11 as a rationale for expanding government power. The more reasoned comments suggested that he was far too cozy with Big Corporations; the less reasoned simply called him BushHitler. Looking back it is clear that he made several important mistakes in executing the war on terror, especially taking as his sole prerogative the establishment of the rules by which we would conduct the war. Consultation with Congressional Democrats early in the process might have gone a very long way toward co-opting them as partial owners of the war, and would likely have avoided some of the worst of the political opportunism of the left leaning Democrats. Such an effort might have made the government's job slightly more difficult (the jury is out on the value of the information obtained by extreme interrogation techniques, aka torture, and a more robust process for vetting FISA decision would probably have been easily incorporated into the process, among other issues) but the positive aspects of having the Democrats on board as full participants would have likely outweighed the negative effects of slight impingement on the Executive's power.
There is a real chance now that the Left and Right will both repeat the mistakes of the last 8 years but with the valences exchanged. In other words, the Obama administration is likely to over-reach without involving the Right (as it has already been doing; Obama now owns the failing auto companies) in its efforts to increase the Executive's power in the domestic arena and the Right is likely to follow the Left's past history of demonizing the party in power.
It might make for an interesting philosophical discussion as to whether such an outcome is inevitable when it comes to the question of who exercises power in a society and a good argument can be made that hyperbolic statements, ad hominem arguments, and hysterical warnings are preferable to "discussions" over politics that depend on bombs and bullets to convey their messages.
Rafique at Stubborn Facts is amazed that the Right is now behaving in a fashion similar to the Left. He comments on an article in the Washington Times yesterday by Andrew Breitbart, Online activists on the right, unite!
A Brief Trip Into The Bizarro World
You've got to be freakin' kidding me. Has he checked out any righty blogs at all? Does the right have any instinct for self-criticism at all, anymore? Never mind the blatant slandering and name-calling in his own article, a cursory review of the righty blogosphere will reveal the far-right as being just as susceptible to poisonous rhetoric, name-calling, and angry paranoia as the far-Left. Many on the Left have said mean things, just as the right has. The point is, both sides have their fringe elements, and both sides have taken things too far at times.
He [Andrew Breitbart] closes out:
The American right is in a heap of trouble in a media age that doesn't shun the goons and liars that have poisoned the political process and won the American presidency by breaking the rules of fair play. It is time to fight back, but it won't be easy. The enemy is willing to do and say anything in order to win.
Sigh. I tell you, it's like he's operating from some sort of mirror universe, where up is down, black is white, and conseravtives have never said anything bad at all about liberals. Look, I'm biased, but maybe referring to those with whom you disagree as godless, communistic, lying hooligans isn't the best way of winning the battle of ideas.
First of all, as noted by Sigmund Freud, the first man who hurled an epithet instead of a spear was the founder of civilization. Name calling, puerile and ineffective, is a time honored feature of political discourse; pretending otherwise is denial and idealizes a fantasied past.
Beyond that there is an extremely important question that has been implicitly raised by both Left and Right. The Left saw fascism in George W. Bush, the Right now sees incipient Stalinism in Barack Obama; how can we tell when we are tipping into authoritarianism?
[I thus far disagree with a great many of Barack Obama's decisions but think that if he fails it will be because his own hubris and arrogance has convinced him that the government bureaucracy is better suited to running a modern economy than the summed interests of millions of people; his failure will not because he is a Manchurian candidate, a hidden Muslim, or a Marxist.
Further, for the benefit of those most alarmed by his behavior, even if we grant that Obama is a Marxist or analogously that Bush was a closet Authoritarian, our system is such that any efforts to go too far in either direction will in short order evoke a restraining impulse in the opposite direction. In other words, if Obama moves too far left, the country will correct back to the right just as it moved back to the center in response to a perception that Bush moved too far right. Our system self corrects and does it better than any other system yet devised. Just recall that not too many years ago the dominant discussion was whether or not a new permanent majority on the Right had assured Republican dominance forever; now we are wondering if a new permanent majority on the left is doing the same for the Democrats.]
The crucial question now is whether our economic straits are causing a perturbation of the system that is beyond the limits of our ability to self-correct? Is the amplitude of the oscillation so great as to crash the system and are there any ways to tell when such a system crash is imminent?
I have written quite a bit about Societal Regression, outlining the steps that societies take when they devolve under the impact of severe stress or trauma. We have already seen some of these steps taking place and the results should be salutary.
When the AIG bonus imbroglio became an "overnight" MSM sensation, it was quite clear that the executives and workers at AIG were being scapegoated and demonized. The President jumped on board as did many Republicans and almost all the Democrats who agreed to punish them with confiscatory taxes on their "stolen" money. Yet a number of things happened shortly thereafter. Some intrepid reporters and bloggers (I repeat my went past the headlines to look at the origins and the particulars of the bonus arrangements. Within a relatively short time span, the story began to backfire on the opportunistic politicians looking to lead the lynch party. Chris Dodd, Timothy Geithner, et al, found themselves being implicated in a story that was too good for the MSM to pass up. Dodd may well lose his job, in part because of his role in the financial crisis, and Geithner is isolated and unable to get anyone to work for him. Furthermore, the Senate has essentially decided to let time cool passions and the legislation languishes. Instead of the AIG bonuses leading to increased ability of the government to manage private companies, it may well end up having the opposite effect.
On a more macro level, when the most liberal states leading the way for the Left, like New York and California, decide to raise taxes on the rich*, the most productive members of the society still have the option (being taken by more and more New Yorkers and Californians) to "vote with their feet." At the same time the growing Tea Party movement has the potential to cause a number of less ideologically inclined politicians to rethink their current borrow, tax and spend ethic; nothing concentrates a politician's mind quite so much as a threat to his sinecure.
So I am of two minds about the Right and Left reversing each other's position in the mirror. On the one hand, I would be delighted if we could raise our level of political discourse; on the other hand, recognizing how unlikely that is, I believe that continuing to argue is in our best interests as a nation. So go ahead and rail at the Obamessiah or Obama the Marxist, and good luck to the Left who attacks the Right for their intemperance; ultimately that is how we arrive at decisions in our culture and so far it has stood us in good stead. When people start being rounded up to go to re-education camps, then by all means, to arms! But until then, dueling with "nasty epithets at 20 paces" will have to do.
* I can assure you that a $300,000 income for a family with three or four children, once high taxes and the high cost of living are factored in, is hardly "rich." It is nothing more than middle class in New York City and vicinity. Such are the wages of liberalism.
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