The Bad Germans

In his column today the newly-liberated Frank Rich calls on the "Good Germans" of modern America to confront George Bush’s policies, or be labeled by history as his enablers.

That’s just an invitation to another Democratic circular firing squad.

Instead I want to take on the more difficult task and speak kindly of the "Bad Germans."

The "Bad Germans," in this case, are those who still stand with Bush, even after Abu Ghraib, even after the torture memos, even after the thousands dead and the Blackwater scandal and the dirty tricks and all the rest of it. Some 30% of voters, tens of millions of Americans, still stand proudly in support of George Bush’s policies.

Thus the Republican Party is unable to repudiate any of Bush’s major initiatives. There is one candidate, Rudy Giuliani, who opposes something Bush failed to do, impose a Christian version of "Sharia" law. There is another, Ron Paul, who opposes the Iraq War, but that’s because he’s an isolationist whackjob who wants to drown government in a bathtub and return to the gold standard. All the others endorse Bush-ism. Some say they want to go beyond it, that he isn’t "strong enough" on torture, or "hard enough" on "illegal" aliens, or "forceful enough" on denying struggling families the help of their government.

I’m very interested in these people, with their SUVs and their "W" stickers (still), with their radios turned to Rush Limbaugh and their reading hours turned to Ann Coulter. They’re still out there. Tens of millions of them. And, assuming Democrats manage to take power in 2009, they’ll be even madder than they are now, some of them mad enough to kill.

What makes someone like that? Let’s do a case study and find out.

First, it’s important to state that their motives are good. No one really supports evil out of evil motives. Hitler was a human being, Mao was a human being, Osama bin Laden was a human being. They all believed their causes were just, and so did their followers.

This may be the hardest thing for people like Frank Rich to confront. It’s not your motives, or even your policy preferences, which marks the division between good and evil. It’s what you do, the ends you endorse, which makes the difference.

Once you accept this premise, once you grant those you consider evil their humanity, the rest becomes fairly easy.

For my case study, I’m presenting Jerry Fuhrman. Jerry writes From On High, a Virginia blog, and I choose him not because he’s bad (he’s not) but simply because he’s active, he writes a lot, and his mind works much like those of the other Bush dead-enders. He is (sadly) typical.

His problem starts with the assumption of evil in the other side. Anything remotely liberal is wrong, and once someone agrees with liberals on anything they can be discarded.

We’re good. They’re evil. Black and white, no shades of gray. This is an absolute precondition to accepting evil. Since you’re good, and they’re evil, then what you do or say can’t possibly be evil. It’s a fun house mirror of ethics. They deserve what they get. What would be tragic for you is justice for them.

This becomes easier through projection. That is, anything conservatives are accused of they project onto liberals. It’s the "I know you are but what am I" defense. Thus, any attack on their own actions is easily thwarted. If they can find the tiniest action on the part of the other side which is objectionable, then everything they do is objectionable, and nothing they say can possibly be wrong. Pure motives become proof of all actions.

The third and most important thing to do is dehumanize. They are evil, thus they are not human. They are something else, an "other," less than human. They must be destroyed to save humanity. You see that, don’t you? Thus, their actions are all to be condemned, while mine have the color of law. And since I’m making the law, anything can then be justified.

This waltz of evil can be played by anyone, no matter where their conscience begins, no matter how idealistic they may believe themselves to be. It is necessary to perform this waltz in order to go to war, and not go mad, so we routinely train our young people in it. What my father’s generation did so well, after The War, was to put this aside, to treat it as a bad dream, to hide it like a dirty secret, a locked closet.

But open the closet, idealistic one. Do the dance. Anyone can be evil. Anyone can endorse evil, support evil, do evil. It’s not "inhuman" or "sub-human" to do this. It’s the essence of humanity.

Yet it is this we must fight, in ourselves and in our fellow citizens. No wonder Frank Rich would prefer to focus on the "Good German." To look at the "Bad German" is to look in the mirror.

Pogo, of course, said it best. "We have met the enemy and he is us."