Driving Votes: Leighton's Blog - Archived Entry

When Clausewitz described war as "politics by other means," he was presumably attempting to introduce an innovative perspective on the nature of military conflict. The Bush administration's actions over the past year have degraded his famous insight to a dry statement of fact.

Republican politicians, who have spent the last 25 years singing the same tired tune of ending "big government" (or, for that matter, government of virtually any size) have predictably found themselves in the awkward position of having finally to answer the obvious question: If government is useless, then what exactly do we need YOU for? After all, under the Clinton administration, the Democrats proved themselves as adept as any fiscal conservative at hatcheting social programs desperately needed by politically powerless people (remember "welfare reform"?), with the advantage of being able simultaneously to posture as the guardians of those that most voters weren't yet prepared to see dismembered. Thus, during the 2000 campaign, when the Republican cleavers finally hit bone as Bush's audacious proposal to end Social Security as we know it was greeted by Democrats, cloth-coat Republicans and swing voters alike with dead silence, Gore was standing at the ready, lock box in hand. All of a sudden, when the meaning of "government" shifted from the local welfare office to workers' post-retirement bank account balances, the faceless bureaucracy began to lose a bit of its menace. Having spent decades annihalating nearly every last vestige of the New Deal welfare state, the Republicans, who know no other battle cry, had declared war upon one of its last quivering holdouts, only to find that it had survived precisely because it was what was most dear about "big government" to the politically potent American middle class. There was nothing left of "big government" to subdue; government was, indeed, too puny. The absurd spectacle of politicians asking for us to give them government jobs for the purpose of destroying the government had at last come face-to-face with its own inanity.

As we all know, Bush went on to lose that election, and the U.S. Supreme Court went on to put him in the Oval Office anyhow. Bush's design on workers' financial security in old age continues to rear its ugly head from time to time in front of selected audiences, and will no doubt come roaring back to life if we have the misfortune of having to suffer through another four years of Republican ascendancy. But the Republicans' strategic misfire on Social Security was an object lesson in diminishing returns. Unlike the War on Terrorism, the War on Government had specific enemies, and as those enemies grew scarce, the Republicans found voters less impressed by the party's umpteenth Ronald Reagan impersonation. Faced with the problem of having to pretend to pay attention to the interests of the vast majority of Americans at least until November 2004, the Republicans needed to come up with a more popular raison d'etre than liberating workers from their own material livelihood.

Enter September 11, 2001. If ever the nation needed a reminder of the continued relevance of government, here it was. Granted, the Republicans never included the military under the umbrella pejorative of "big government," but the firefighters and police officers who sacrificed their lives in the rescue effort in Manhattan that morning received federal subsidies for their vehicles, uniforms and paychecks from the same U.S. Treasury that had once made the AFDC possible. For the next few weeks, Bush spoke proudly of these government employees, before going on to include massive cuts in federal grants to firefighters in his FY 2002 budget proposal to Congress. Like old growth forests and school lunch programs, first responders, apparently, belong to the "wasteful government spending" that stands in the way of making tax cuts for the incredibly wealthy permanent.

But then, Bush doesn't need firefighters, ambulance drivers or police officers to compensate for the deficit of purpose suffered by aspiring Republican government functionaries in the absence of a government to destroy. They're as expendable to the Republicans as clean air and water. He has something better: unending war. Massive military adventures overseas -- well there's a government spending program the whole family can agree on.

As the September 11 Commission has begun to reveal, the White House had designs on Iraq well before Al Qaeda murdered thousands in New York City, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon. Indeed, it is likely that Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz were plotting a sequel to the first Gulf War ever since Bush the Father failed to take Bagdhad, and that serious discussions of retaliation against an enemy that had absolutely no connection to Al Qaeda took place among top officials as early as the day after the September 11 attacks. What is absolutely certain is that the war was initiated before Al Qaeda was eliminated as a serious threat to United States citizens, and that in the absence of proven links (which looks now more like the proof of absent links) between that organization and Saddam Hussein, it was at the cost of diverting U.S. attention from the actual culprits of the 9/11 attacks, during which time they were able to regroup while the Taliban, meanwhile, began its resurgence in "liberated" Afghanistan. If the bombing in Madrid proves indeed to have been the work of Al Qaeda, we will have the Bush administration to blame for affording it the time and freedom of movement and communication necessary to plan and execute the attack while the Pentagon and the CIA were burying their heads in Iraqi sand.

The war against Iraq was, at best, an especially revolting example of political opportunism. But it was something else, something more portentous. Within the bounds of political possibility, the Republican Party has spent the last two-and-a-half decades destroying nearly every social good that government has historically been capable of delivering to its citizens. The Republican project of undoing the post-Progressive era advances of social policy and reducing the scope of government responsibility for the livelihoods of its citizens to the standards of the late nineteenth century has been largely completed. The Republicans' claim of the worthlessness of government has become a self-fulfilling prophecy; they have "proved" that government cannot solve your problems by systematically undermining its capacity to do so. But the Republicans' victory in this respect has been at the same time its quandary. Thanks to them, the wrecked apparatus of government is largely incapable of doing anything positive for anyone. So they can't promise to actually provide voters with anything, and now that they've run out of programs to liquidate, they can't even pretend to "help" voters by taking away from them what's already been provided. What can you campaign on when you can deliver nothing?

The answer, of course, is that you can campaign on fear. If government can do nothing else, it can protect you from the terrorists that are lurking around every corner, real or imagined. And the way it can do so is by ignoring the will of the rest of the world and invading whatever country it chooses, provided it doesn't appear to be strong enough to put up a real fight (as well as by spying on its citizens with impunity, and detaining them illegally and indefinitely). War, then, is no longer solely a matter of international relations; it emanates from the logic of our own domestic political competition. To the Bush administration, an invasion is mere fodder for beefing up polling numbers, like kissing babies and throwing opening pitches at baseball games. With no social programs remaining to promise to destroy, and with a party opposed on principle to creating them, "national security" is the only bait left on the fish hook. What's more, it's infinitely replenishable. When all the potholes have been filled, so to speak, it's hard to campaign on filling more potholes. But to get the electorate behind yet another invasion, all you have to do is conjure up a little more fear. The Bush administration has recast the role of the Federal Government into a massive banker of fear. The formula is simple: induce anxiety, then offer the public specious solutions that promise to allay it. Then induce more anxiety. There's really no other way to understand the function of "Terrorism Threat Level" alerts accompanied by no specific details and no advice of what to do about it than as an instrument whose sole purpose is to make people nervous enough to support the Administration in whatever measures it proposes to take in response, no matter how patently disingenuous, like drilling for oil in Alaska. Or declaring war on Iraq.

Even Clausewitz could not have dreamed of such a thing. "If the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will," Clausewitz also wrote, "he will reach them in spite of all obstacles." If he was right in the first instance, he well could be so in this one. The Bush administration's ambition, audacity and strength of will are beyond question. It has proved that to be the case time and time again, in its economic policy, its foreign policy, and in its reflexive retaliation against anyone who dares to criticize it. On the other hand, its obstacles are immense. We intend to add to that immensity.

I'd like to add one more of Clausewitz's observations: "It is even better to act quickly and err than to hesitate until the time of action is past." We have put together our organization largely with this intuition in mind. This election will be determined by an incredibly slim margin of the electorate, and among the many of us who recognize what is at stake, the work that we do over the next few weeks and months is likely to decide its outcome. The time of action has not yet passed.