History often comes back in the form of parody.
The impeachment of Bill Clinton was, in many ways, a parody of the far more-serious impeachment of Richard Nixon a quarter-century earlier. It was necessary because many Republicans grew up, politically, believing that Nixon got a raw deal, that he was hounded from office for partisan reasons. This became an integral part of their political thesis, and it took the embarrassment of the Clinton trial to get this out of their system.
This whole War on Terror is, in many ways, a parody of the far more-serious Cold War, which began almost immediately after World War II. Those liberals writing about how "unprecedented" the "abuse of power" is by the Bush Administration would learn just how much a parody it is reading the otherwise-hysterically funny Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson.
Bryson interrupts his 1950s memoir for a chapter describing true horrors from that age. Nuclear tests that killed thousands, without notice. The Red Scare, with its loyalty oaths, black lists, and silly laws, deportations, and humiliations, coups and lynchings. There is nothing in the whole pantheon of Bush’s alleged crimes that wasn’t common practice during the Eisenhower Era.
The Anti-Thesis to the Roosevelt Thesis of Unity was
ultra-nationalism, McCarthyism a kind of fascism that did indeed call
itself Americanism. And this was an integral part of the Nixon Thesis
of Conflict, which overthrew the Roosevelt Thesis in 1968.
At the heart of that thesis was the idea that the Soviets somehow had more internal unity than we did, more discipline, that they were capable of winning unless we copied that unity. History shows that to have been the wrong lesson. It was our freedom, our cultural liberalism, and capitalism that won the day, but the Thesis did not believe this in 1989, and it does not believe it today.
I’ve said before that Bush is not stupid, that he’s merely a product
of his history. Well, the Cold War is the history he’s a product of.
History claims that the Cold War was ended by Bush’s father, but that
was only on the Soviet side. On the American side, on the winning side,
the Cold War continued, with groups like the Project for a New American Century, to which all the leaders of the present war enlisted, charged with immediately finding a new enemy for the old tactics.
Which they did. Somehow, thanks to 9-11, a small group of fanatics
living in caves became the full equivalent of the mighty Soviet Union,
with its massive armies and a nuclear arsenal capable of blowing up the
world. And anyone who questioned this would be dealt with, just as in
the first Cold War, only now they had learned that journalists,
singers, actors and academics — the people who’d exposed the excesses
of the 1950s — would have to be made to toe the line.
That’s what this whole Administration has been about. We’re fighting Al Qaeda the way we fought the Soviet Union.
We’re losing for precisely this reason. Al Qaeda is not the Soviet
Union. Anyone who claims it — from the President on down — is
being tactically obtuse.
Note how gentle that sentence was. Note the word tactically. I’m not
impugning anyone’s motives. I’m not calling anyone names. I’m saying
that the present tactics are wrong.
This should be, and must be, the first task of the Internet Thesis,
to create a new set of tactics which can overcome terror, which can win the war our present tactics are losing.
Through this blog I have suggested several alternate tactics:
- The War Against Oil, which will cut oil-producing Arab states off at the economic knees.
- Internet Expansion, spreading the world of knowledge, and of wealth, as an alternative to religious culture.
- Economic Engagement, working to produce solutions in competition with China and India, creating a struggle where there are no losers.
- Cultural Development, engaging all thinkers around the world, using all our media, to build a consensus for peace, liberty and fairness.
These are all planks on which Democrats have a common consensus, and on
which Republicans currently disagree. They should not only be an
integral part of the 2008 Platform, but they can become the centerpiece
of a movement that will eventually reform Republicanism, bringing out
its reformist impulses and pushing its troglodytes into the dustbin of
history.
If we can end the Cold War, as it was in the 1950s, we can win the War On Terror, the growing battle against fear itself, which now
threatens to consume us, in the fire of global warming and the ice of
the world’s ire.
That means ending the fear, destroying the fear, eradicating the fear, and sending those who sell fear, who push fear, into the place they most fear, political oblivion.
