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Saturday, February 10, 2007
Political Centralities
Near the end of his blockbuster America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, Mark Steyn presents a bit of political analysis that's brilliant even by his high standards:
Could America wind up as just another enervated present-tense Western nation? Well, it's halfway there. I've no wish to be "partisan." Not because attacking the Democrats is, as the media say, "mean-spirited," but because the Democrats have chosen to make themselves all but irrelevant to the great questions of the age. You can understand why the Dems miss the nineties. There was nary a word about war. Okay, you'd get the odd million-man genocide in Rwanda, but you tended to hear about it afterward, usually as a late-breaking item in the Clinton teary-apology act. Instead, it was an era of micro-politics, a regulation here, an entitlement there, a bike path and a recycling program everywhere you looked. Venusian Americans assumed they'd entered an age of permanent post-Martian politics, and they resented September 11 as an intrusion on their minimalism. When you're at an event for the "anti-war" movement, you realize it's no such thing; it's an I-don't-want-to-have-to-hear-about-this-war movement. So they mock Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Co. as the real terrorists -- the ones determined to maintain America in a state of "terror." Oddly enough, this was how the Left chose to live during the Cold War, when the no-nukes crowd expected Armageddon any minute. If you believe in a two-party system, in the end even the integrity of the dominant party isn't served by the self-marginalization of the only alternative: the Democratic Party needs to get back in the game. But to do that they've got to get over the bike-path micro-politics and back on the unlovely central thruway of geopolitical reality.
The insight in the above goes well beyond Steyn's characterization of the Democrats; it captures the essence of political deterioration as it's progressed in America these past eighty years.
Politics, when practiced properly, concerns itself with those matters which affect the whole of a people, but which are too uniform for them to settle as individuals, too urgent to leave to market forces, and too weighty to allow for a divergence of attitudes and approaches. This is so even in a federal system such as ours; individual states and smaller localities can diverge even on matters that seem serious to all, if the overriding needs of public order and security are adequately met by local action.
Consider: Murder is a state, not a federal, crime. All fifty states have laws against murder, but a state cannot exercise jurisdiction over a man outside its borders. Because murder is a weighty matter indeed, all fifty states operate under a uniform extradition agreement, such that a murderer wanted by state X, if caught by state Y, will reliably be returned to face state X's justice in due course. Crimes that inherently involve flight, such as kidnapping, are addressed at the federal level, with the enforcement powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Consider also: Cities and counties routinely have their own sets of ordinances about such things as the disposal of garbage. These might be weighty matters, but they're not sufficiently uniform to demand laws of larger scope. County X, large, thinly peopled, and adequately supplied with disposal facilities, might have liberal laws and no provisions for recycling, whereas county Y, smaller, denser, and more determined to hold down costs, might mandate strict rules about source separation and conditions of disposal. Larger political units rarely intrude into such decisions, for good reasons.
(Many libertarians would protest that Washington, the states, counties, and cities make laws on many subjects that fail to meet your Curmudgeon's criteria. For example, they would argue that garbage disposal can and should be left to private market forces. While your Curmudgeon agrees with this view in the great majority of cases -- that's what he meant by the phrase "politics, when practiced properly" -- the above observations are nevertheless germane to those cases where a county or city government has municipalized waste management, whether the decision was wise or not.)
It's consistent with federalism, not to mention the unique hazards of our time, that the federal government should concern itself exclusively with matters that are nationwide in scope and too urgent to be left to private action or market forces. Plainly, that would include:
- The defense of the realm,
- The control of our borders,
- Relations with other sovereignties,
- Those few crimes that cannot logically be left to smaller political units.
But such large matters are inherently chancy; while success at them is good for a laudatory page in future history books, an unpopular stance or an outright failure can cause one to be deposed in the short term and derided in the long. Thus, officials have a natural incentive to back away from large matters and concern themselves exclusively with small ones, where success and failure are hard to determine and pleasing one's supporters has a greater impact on one's prospects. Officials without a sense of responsibility or mission will yield to that incentive, as did Bill Clinton.
Compounding the damage is this: the American people are averse to involving themselves in the troubles of the larger world. Yes, we're a very charitable bunch, and yes, we've gone forth to war a few times when the occasion seemed to demand it, but we've never liked to do these things. Anti-interventionist candidates have routinely defeated interventionists at the polls, even if it developed later on that their noninterventionism was a sham (Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt). It's pleasant to imagine, however well or poorly founded the notion might be, that the inclination to let the rest of the world find its own road to Hell derives from the genes of our ancestors, most of whom came here out of precisely that impulse.
Thus, when the major political parties lean toward a neo-isolationist posture, we happily lean along with them. When one party appears to be gaining strength by doing so, the other will shortly begin to emulate it. National figures crying of dire threats that must be met before calamity can strike aren't exactly ignored, but there's a definite tendency to regard their concerns as overstated.
In this light, it seems obvious why great matters are under-addressed until disaster strikes. Without Black Tuesday, quite likely our attitude, and our officials' attitude, toward Islamism would never have changed; the subject is large, unpleasant, and puts us in a position of acrimony toward a group of other nations. Now that more than five years have passed since that terrible day without further serious strikes against our land, our inclination is to return to our previous let-'em-go-to-Hell-in-their-own-way position of unconcern.
Politicians know that the sentiments of the American people move in this fashion: outrage at having been struck, swift wrath and furious response, and then back to sleep. A reasonable man cannot expect that prominent officials and political strategists would fail to pander to it.
It's a pity that the Constitutional definition of treason:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to the Enemies, giving the Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on confession in open Court.
...doesn't allow for a crime of treason by omission. If it were so, many officials of administrations past could be hailed into court to answer for their failures to treat Islamism with the seriousness it deserves. Depending on the developments of the next two years, the observation might one day apply equally to the current administration, whose masters appeared at first to know better but lately have been doing worse.
It's no defense of political pandering to say that the electorate wants to be pandered to, and will reward those who do it best. It's no defense of inanition in the face of a deadly threat to say that one would have had to act alone, perhaps at risk to one's tenure in office. It's no defense of our preference for minding our own business to say that we have a right to be left alone. We do have a right to be left alone; indeed, it's the only right anyone really possesses. But that will not shield us against the arrows of those who, for whatever reason, hate us and want to do us harm.
The Democrats cannot reasonably be expected to re-embrace political centralities. They believe they achieved their current majorities in Congress by decrying the Bush Administration's campaign in the Middle East, most particularly in Iraq. Having garnered success with this explicit retreat from macro-politics, we may expect them to continue with more of the same -- especially since the macro-political initiatives of prior Democrat administrations, such as the Clinton Administration's attempt to nationalize all health care products and services, have been brutally rebuffed by the electorate.
The Republicans cannot reasonably be expected to "hang tough" on their macro-political stances. The occupation of Iraq may have cost them federal hegemony; the proposed partial privatization of Social Security was roughed up badly by the special interests; internal squabbles on immigration and border security have threatened to rip the GOP apart. Except for the tax cuts, all the major initiatives of the Bush Administration have been blocked or defeated outright when raised. Republican strategists are no more courageous than their Democrat counterparts; they, too, will follow the safest road they can find, even if safety for the political class means extreme danger for the country.
Americans might well be left to defend themselves, and their nation, without the assistance of their government henceforward.
Comments
Looks to me like that’s already the case; moreover, we are having to fight off the government and NGOs while doing so.
Posted by on 02/10/2007 at 01:07 PM"Americans might well be left to defend themselves, and their nation, without the assistance of their government henceforward.”
To realize that this is already the case is simply to note the proliferation of the state’s “regulations” of law abiding citizens’ constitutional right to bear arms and that right’s corollary, self defense. The “right” to free speech is also under attack. The day will likely come when our nation and government will be the instruments used in extinguishing our traditional liberties. The question is: when will the Patrick Henry moment arrive for those of us not conditioned by the state’s “free and compulsory” indoctrination?
Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 02/10/2007 at 10:24 PMI did enjoy the read. I think much of it is spot on. It’s a pleasure to read what should be a civics lesson rather than what passes for them these days.
I did have one thing which I felt needed attention, however. The notion that we, as citizens of the US have ever truly been anything but on our own. As a principle, I think that is what our nation is based upon. Relying on the government, in other words, isn’t a part of the problem, it is the problem. We cannot rely on the bureaucrats as the government, when in fact WE are the government. It’s a thin slice, many don’t see it, but it’s the thread that binds. If we lose that thread, we might as well become all out socialists or communists. As long as that thread stays, what the brick and morter government does is of little consequence. It’s just a window dressing.
And, yes, though I don’t like who is running or winning, from what I can see, it doesn’t matter as much as some might say. Though it would be nice to see conservatives actually buck up, quit squabbling, and get back to work. Enough of that and we will end up in a true communism.
Posted by Doom on 02/11/2007 at 03:25 PM
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