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Bush's America: Faith and the New Political Correctness
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| Renegade |
Read this article in the paper a couple of days ago and thought some of you might find it interesting:
The battle of faith and reason
I'm not going to post out the whole thing (although I'd encourage you to read it) but I did want to discuss a couple of things from it. Firstly:
| quote: | | America's centre of gravity has moved rightward, creating a set of shibboleths that cannot be challenged. If liberals established a few forbidden zones in the past 20 years or so under the rubric of so-called political correctness - making it off-limits to demean women, gays and ethnic minorities - then the right has now erected some barriers of its own. |
I think one of the lasting legacies of Geroge Bush's (or, should I say, Karl Rove's?) tenure in the Whitehouse will be the suppression of genuine political debate throughout his term, especially in the two years after September 11th. While I've never really been able to explain it particularly well before, the analogy made here between the current political mantra and the emergence of Politcal Correctness in the 70s and 80s is a good one. In both cases, we have seen the aggressive prescription of simplistic moralisms to the point at which they are suitably engrained in the public psyche, when they are then defended not by rational discourse but by howling down opposition and stifling genuine debate. Anyone who dares challenge the tennets of Political Correctness is a "biggot", anyone who dares challenge the the tennets of Bush's America is "unpatriotic".
Of course, the atmosphere after September 11th was perfect for this sort of manipulation. Firstly, the Republicans were without political opposition for two reasons:
- The Democrats had made it perfectly clear that they were going to seek "bi-partisan" solutions to the problem after the tragedy (which basically meant that they were prepared to roll over and pass whatever was placed on the table in front of them without causing a fuss)
- The Republicans were able to institute a climate where any opposition to their solutions could be sold to the public as opposition to any sort of solution to the problem of terrorism.
As the article states:
| quote: | September 11 [...] has been all but sanctified in American discourse.
[...]
As a result, any action taken in the name of September 11 cannot be questioned. Oppose the Patriot Act, with its restrictions on civil liberties, and you are a friend of the terrorists - and, if you are a Democratic congressional candidate, Republicans will air TV ads against you placing your face alongside that of Osama bin Laden. |
All the Republicans had to do was assure the public that a piece of given legislation had been drafted in the name of anti-terrorism and political opposition would be impossible. It didn't matter that the PATRIOT Act infringed on civil liberties far more than was necessary. It didn't matter that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the terrorism that threatened America. So long as the Bush administration was able to manipulate the public into thinking that that these measures were being taken in the name of anti-terrorism, political oppoisition would be impossible. Any dissent in this way could just be dismissed by calling into question the dissenter's commitment to protecting the nation and thus his patriotism, regardless of whether he was making a valid point or not. In the same way that those who criticise Political Correctness can all too easily be shouted down with the question "Why are you such a sexist/racist/homophobe?", political debate during this time could be effectively stifled with the question "Why do you hate America?".
But the suppression of political opposition wasn't the only reason that this manipulation was able to flourish so easily. In times of crisis, it is a natural human tendancy to submit ourselves to authority and the fragile state of the public psyche immediately after the attacks lent itself perfectly to the sort of ideological manipulation that the Republicans sought to apply. Under the guise of "leadership", the Bush administration was able to imprint its own ideological take on the "war on terror" into the the mallaeble public consciousness and so, from the outset, the Republicans were able to define this "conflict" on their terms. Immediately we were corralled into accepting a rubric of fear and hyperbole: that the foundations of most powerful nation in the world could seriously be threatened by small cells of poorly equipped criminals, that the world was a fundamentally different place to the one we found ourselves in on September 10th and - most importantly - that we were engaged in some on-going, quite literal "war" without any definable end-point.
Having convinced the public to accept this state of affairs through their masterful - if ill-founded - rhetoric, the Bush administration were then free to offer their own solutions to the problem without debate and without any competing alternatives. The American public were told that the GOP's own definition of terrorism could best be solved by acting swfitly and "heavy-handedly" against "evil" nations, that a multilateral approach to solving terrorism was undesirable, that the slashing of civil liberties will necessarily lead to a proportional rise in national security and that the "war" we'd been dragged into would have to be treated as "war" in the most literal sense of the word, meaning, ultimately, that it would best be solved militarily rather than as a criminal matter. (It is of course in the best interests of the GOP to preserve this last myth given that they've started two wars and yet haven't been able to prosecute a single individual, criminally, under the new anti-terrorism laws, despite having held over 600 "terrorists", ilegally, for over three years in Camp X-Ray.)
Of course, the great benefit of being able to dictate the nature of the problem (and the terms of the solution) to a credulous public is that your solution is always going to look the most desirable because it must necessarily correspond directly to what you have already defined as the ideal solution. Bush is seen as stronger on terrorism, in any poll you care to mention, not because he has had particularly great results in this area over the past 4 years (he hasn't) but becuase the public has accpeted his premises about the threat of terrorism at face value. Given the nature of syllogistic logic, his subsequent conclusion (i.e. his solution to the problem) is necessarily going to correspond better to these premises than any conclusion the Democrats can offer.
Thus the Democrats are caught between a rock and a hard place. They've found it difficult to bring into question the Republican's definition of the scope and severity of the problem of terrorism (as this would make it quite easy for the Republicans, on purely rhetorical grounds, to deride their commitment to defeating terrorism - especially given that much of the US public had already had the Republican mentality towards the nature of terrorism engrained into their psyche in the months after 9/11) but if they try to debate the Republicans on the Republicans' terms then they're always going to lose on the issue (for the reasons I gave above). Nonetheless, as the Democrats have been able to find their voice and question the previously unchallenged mantra propogated by the Republicans, people are now coming to see several incontrovertible facts for what they are.
Put simply, people have come to realise that they've surrendered civil liberties to the government yet no terrorists are being prosecuted. They supported a war in Afghanistan and then watched as the job was abandoned, half-finished. They supported a war in Iraq, a nation that posed no threat to the US, that had no connections with terrorists and that now provides a fertile ground for terrorists to target American civilians, who they now murder daily (wasn't that what we went to war to prevent?). America has lost some of its strongest allies through it's belligerent unilateralism and al Qaeda continues to flourish in the wake every ill-conceived disaster that Republicans embark on. In every case, here, the facts speak for themselves: the Republicans do not offer a legitimate solution to the problem of terrorism. Over the past few years, much of the American public has slowly had to acknowledge the legitimacy of this perspective just by letting the facts speak for themselves. Large chunks of the American public, however, contiunue to delude themselves into thinking that things are travelling smoothly, that the "war on terror" has been handled well and that Iraq was a necessary conflict that has made America safer. I call these people "Bush supporters".
It is a common trait of the unwavering Bush supporter to be unable to find fault in their president in spite of any evidence to the contrary. The article that AnotherWay83 posted last week (link) demonstrates that, statistically, this assumption is accurate. I particularly liked the following text, in the context of what I'm saying here:
| quote: | | "The roots of the Bush supporters' resistance to information," according to Steven Kull, "very likely lie in the traumatic experience of 9/11 and equally in the near pitch-perfect leadership that President Bush showed in its immediate wake. This appears to have created a powerful bond between Bush and his supporters--and an idealized image of the President that makes it difficult for his supporters to imagine that he could have made incorrect judgments before the war, that world public opinion could be critical of his policies or that the President could hold foreign policy positions that are at odds with his supporters." |
Refer back to what I was saying before about deference to authority in times of crisis. While most people have been able to overcome the unquestioning credulity they experienced in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Bush supporters - willingly or otherwise - continue to imbibe themselves with Republican rhetoric, regardless of how at odds it is with the real world. The original article offers a pretty good summary of this phenomenon:
| quote: | [Bush's] inner certainty is about more than partisan affiliation. It is a question of faith.
George Bush is a born-again Christian, one of the 42 per cent of Americans who describe themselves that way. Other presidents were religious, but Bush seems to have created something new - what even some of his allies call "the faith-based presidency".
A striking profile in last Sunday week's New York Times magazine interviewed a clutch of Republican insiders who had discovered that belief is the organising principle of the Bush White House. Advisers, even cabinet members, are simply meant to believe in the wisdom of the President, whatever countervailing evidence there may be. Bush's former environment secretary, Christine Todd Whitman, is quoted: "In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!" Senators are told not to worry about the complexities of Iraq; the President's "instincts", his "gut" tells him he's doing the right thing.
[...]
Most revealing of all is the phrase used by a Bush aide to dismiss the inquiries of the New York Times writer. The journalist is told he lives in "the reality-based community". People like him worry about observable facts, while the Bush camp lives in a different universe, a realm where belief shapes reality. |
Put simply, the perspective of Bush supporters (and Bush himself, for that matter) are at odds with reality because they hold more stock in faith than reason. Rather than acknowledging the mess in Iraq, for instance, they prefer to bury their heads in the sand, parroting Republican maxims about the "world being safer" and the "Iraqis being free now". When presented with evidence that this isn't the case, they only retreat further into their surreal faith-based world. "It's because of the Liberal media", they say, intimating that if the media - whose job it is to bring the "reality" of world to the global population - is somehow misrepresenting fact. After all, if any facts are presented that challenge the isolated world-view of the Republican then the facts must be wrong as the Bushist ideology is, of course, beyond reproach.
Of course, this view-point of the world cannot be supported by logic or evidence so the new "Politcal Correctness" I discussed before is employed to kill off traditional debate. When the perspectives of these Bush supporters are challenged, they too easily retreat back to emotionally charged moralisms and scare-tactics. Criticisms levelled at the management of the Iraq war, for instance, cannot be justified without questioning the perfection of the president, so the facts are dismissed and any attempt at a sincere response is ignored in favour of loaded questions that, like traditional PC accusations such as "So you don't think black people should be considered equal then?", are simply aimed to derail debate by making an affirmative answer - vis a vis the political costs - impossible. So, when challenegd about the lack of WMD, the question raised is "So you would have just left Saddam in power then"? When challenged about the lack of ties to al Qaeda, the question raised is "But could we have taken the risk"? As I say, these questions are raised because in the context of the political environment that the Bush administration had groomed in the months after 9/11, they cannot be answered without either looking like you're a terrorist sympathiser, soft on terrorism or supporting what the questioner is saying. They're simple, irelevent, emotionally-charged questions, of course, that can be answered fairly easily in the right environment, but in passionate discussions they can be used effectively to skirt a factual, rational debate. This rise of emotional, rhetorical argumentative techniques in public discourse can, once again, be traced back to the political manipulation engaged in by the Bush administration immediately after the 9/11 attacks.
Now, keep in mind that this doesn't merely constitute an example of traditional left vs right debate, this represents a marked detachment from any form of politcal debate at all. Supporting the Iraq war, for instance, is a stance that - originally at least - was in some way intellectually defensible, whether you supported it or not. Living under the continuing misapprehension that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction after 1996, had ties with al Qaeda or had ties to the September 11th attacks, however, is an unjustifiable and illegitmate stance by any definition you care to provide. The point is that the conservative mindset in itself is defensible and - even if I happen to disagree with it - in some way "legitimate" to the extent that is based on fact. At the stage where this ideology (or any other ideology) begins to recede from the real-world and becomes based on articles of ill-founded faith, however, then we have a problem. When the left is critical of George Bush, this isn't merely because it disagrees with his conservative agenda (although this is doubtless a sizeable part of it) it's because he ploughs through stubbornly with his agenda, even when it is clear - in the real world - that it isn't working. The left isn't so much critical of George Bush's conservativism as it is inability to admit fault and recognise where policy initiatives have failed, regardless whether they were conservative or liberal in slant. He was unable to name three mistakes he'd made during his presidency and - considering the litany of disasters he's overseen during his time in the Whitehouse - this would seem to be demonstrative of a faith-based ideology at odds with reality, that Bush considers - in the face of contradictory evidence - to be above reproach.
In this sense, then, Bush's supporters suffer from the same flaw as the man they consider themselves subordinate to. They are unable to identify fault in administrational decisions and continue - bravely yet stupidly - to defend any policy decision with dogged determination and the unquestionable assumption - in the face of any contrary evidence - that they must be correct. They cannot criticise Bush for his mishandling of Iraq even though - regardless of whether one supported the war in the first place or not - the facts would appear to warrant this, simply because they take it as an article of faith that Bush is doing the right thing. To question this ideology - to begin to doubt it in the context of new evidence - is to be viewed as a sign of weakness.
To pre-empt the inevitable backlash, I understand that this stubborn, dogmatic approach to politics is not confined to Bush supporters. It is most definitely present in elements of the Left (and it becomes more common the further to the Left you retreat). Nor am I suggesting that that conservatives - or Republican voters - are universally of this mentality. As some members on this board demonstrate, it is definitely possible to have a defensible conservative political allignment, based on facts and logic, that not even the most vehement liberal could decry as being "illegitimate". Nonetheless, the proponderence of self-enforced ignorance amongst Bush voters is too high - certainly high enough to be treated as a general universal - and it should be of genuine concern to members on both sides of the political divide. Note that I'm not attacking conservatives here at all. I'm attacking those who continue to hold fervent beliefs that do not correspond with reality, I'm attacking those who cannot find any ground upon which to vote against Bush and I'm attacking those who cannot name three mistakes that Bush has made during his presidency. Or, at least, I'm attacking those who display these symptoms.
Yet these people, sadly, form the (stereo?)typical GOP supporter base. With so much at stake over the next four years (including, potentially, two open seats on the Supreme Court bench) the fact that these people - who have proudly reced from the "reality-based community - are allowed to cast a vote and, indeed, are quite likely vote in large numbers, is highly disconcerting. For the first time in a long time, this election could genuinely be seen as a battle between faith and reason. For the sake of the future (and, indeed, for the sake of reality), we have to hope that reason (regardless of which side it emerges on) wins out. |
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| St_Andrew |
| Wow, very interesting read :) thanks :) |
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| torontotrance |
I think the USA did violate the civil rights of the so called enemy combatants, either charge them or let them go.
Most countries have a war measure act that allows them to up liberties in times of war or preceived war. We pulled that in 1970 in the FLQ crisis. |
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| Epicurus |
| Renegade, beautiful commentary. I felt that this post needed to be read by more people, both on the left and on the right, so bump :) |
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