My confidence over the American political future is not based on the strength of the Netroots, nor on any assumption of evil on the part of the Bush Administration.
It’s about time, about the expiration of political assumptions (time wounds all heals), and of a simple observation everyone has made about this Administration.
They’re on autopilot. (No offense to this fine database administration package, at right.)
It’s the very fact that the Bush Administration refuses to change course in any way that we can be confident, not only that their course is wrong, but that people will demand a new course — not just a new pilot.
- Did Lyndon Johnson change course on Vietnam? Even when the course was obviously seen to be wrong?
- Did Herbert Hoover change his approach to the Depression? Even when Hoovervilles started springing up and one-third of families had no income?
- Did Grover Cleveland embrace any alternative to the Gold Standard? Even when it was obvious he was bankrupting the countryside?
- Did James Buchanan do anything to reduce the tensions leading to Civil War?
History tells you the answer. No, in all cases. Were these men evil? No, in all cases.
They were on autopilot.
That is, they knew only one way to govern, because they had based their lives on it.
- Buchanan was a product of Jacksonian Democracy, the balance of north and south by the west.
- Cleveland was a product of the Democratic AntiThesis, a Wall
Street party which accepted Gilded Age precepts about business knowing
best. - Hoover came from the Progressive tradition, of incremental change and private noblesse oblige taught by Theodore Roosevelt.
- Johnson began his political career under the New Deal, and remained true to its precepts to the end.
Look at who leads this Administration. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
(above) came to power cleaning up the mess of Nixon himself. In Watergate they saw weakness lead to defeat. George W. Bush leans on this, his father’s
political lessons, his father’s political advisors, like any dutiful
son, knowing no other path, seeing no other path.
The Bush Administration is on auto-pilot.
Once a political crisis comes, with an Administration on auto-pilot,
the answer can never be the old Anti-Thesis. The new Thesis may be
implemented, in the end, by someone who came out of that Anti-Thesis,
as Lincoln came from Clay’s Whigs, or Nixon from Eisenhower’s
Republicans. But the Thesis is always new, because that’s what a crisis
demands, and that’s what people demand in a crisis.
Something new. Don’t keep telling us to support what doesn’t work.
Don’t just lean into what doesn’t work. Tell us something new. Give us
a new story, give us new values, show us a completely new direction.
- We can have a new American Revolution.
- We have nothing to fear but fear itself.
- I shall not be crucified on a Cross of Gold.
- This country cannot long endure half slave and half free.
Something new, dammit. Not just someone new to hate (brown people, gay people, Bush). Not just a new twist on the same-old same-old.
Something truly new.
Want to see the future? That’s what you need to be looking for.
