Bruce Thornton discusses how the childish opposition of the Left over the past eight years should give way to a principled and adult criticism of Barack Obama.
The last eight years have seen the political left, from the loony moveon.org fringe to Democrat Congressional leaders, engage in destructive juvenile invective and surreal fantasy rather than in the sort of useful political criticism the Founders had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment. In the next four years, conservatives will have an opportunity to show the country how adults do dissent: offering criticism based on philosophical coherence, an awareness of the lessons of history, and a respect for the world as it is rather than the world of our fantasies.
The attacks on President Bush and his policies were striking in their childish ignorance. The slogan “No blood for oil,” for example, was remarkable in its disconnect from the real-world functioning of oil markets and the mechanism of supply and demand. And even if the left had been right about oil being the prime mover of the war in Iraq, such an idea collapses before the scrutiny of mere common sense. For if insuring a supply of cheap gas for greedy Americans and their SUV’s had been the President’s aim, then cutting a deal with Hussein that relaxed the sanctions in exchange for access to oil––what France and Russia were trying to do––would have been fiscally and politically cheaper than going to war.
Indeed, sheer ignorance, as much as willful distortion of fact, typically laced the assaults on the President. And this is the key to our current political predicament: the failure of the educational system for the last forty years has finally produced a critical mass of voting-age adults who lack a basic knowledge of history and the principles of coherent thought, at the same time that their self-esteem has been inflated and stroked into blind arrogance. Hence the typical tone of the leftist commentariat: a self-righteous moral bluster accompanied by a lack of rudimentary facts and the basics of sound argument.
I don't know how many times I've seen the argument that we had no right to take out Saddam Hussein because we helped build him up in the 1980s. This bizarre logic leads to all sorts of deadly conclusions. So, if America supports a bad regime versus a worse regime, it never should support a better regime to the worse regime? How does foreign policy work under these rules? Is the federal government never supposed to go to war for ends which help the country? Or should we simply expect American soldiers to die for altruism?
Indeed, we've nearly had that in the Iraq War, where more than 4,000 soldiers have died to stabilize the region and plant the seeds of democracy. And such causes are noble, but it's just nonsense to assume that (a) we will never need to go to war unless the attack happens within our borders and that (b) no war is ever justifiable because there are always "two sides to a story."
Leftwing opposition to everything Bush has been reflexive and childish over the years. What started in principle (say, opposition to war) became recalcitrance (when it became obvious that we were winning), which, in turn, became--dare I say?--unpatriotic (the desire for defeat and to see American soldiers killed by terrorists). It's simply mind-boggling to read liberal blogs which seemed to relish the idea of American influence waning and American life becoming more difficult.
The consumption of such prefabricated opinions accounts for the astonishingly banal orthodoxy of most leftist political ideas. Liberal-leftist clichés about evil corporations and their Republican minions––those old, repressed white men secretly plotting in a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” to rule the world, plunder its resources, and enslave the Third World “other”–– are indulged and repeated without any awareness that most of these hoary stereotypes are getting on two centuries old and have been discredited by the facts of history. Worse yet, when these clichés appear in popular movies or the commentary of television pundits, the liberal establishment treats them as daring dissent and sophisticated analysis.
Two clichés of such received wisdom repeatedly lurked behind the leftist commentary of the last eight years––Vietnam and Watergate. Vietnam provided for leftists the model of the unjust war prosecuted to serve corporate interests and camouflaged by lies that preyed upon the national security anxiety of simple-minded Americans. Hence this mythic scenario––false to the facts of Vietnam, by the way––rather than reality lay behind all the “scandals” peddled by the left and the media for the last eight years. The “doctored” intelligence about Hussein’s WMD’s, the mantra “Bush lied,” the “outing” of Valerie Plame, the “profiling” of innocent Muslim dissenters, the “illegal wiretaps” and “shredded Constitution” of ACLU fantasy, the “torture” of suspects in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib––this litany of Bush’s “abuses” began in the liberal-left fairy-tales of Vietnam and Watergate, a pleasing narrative eagerly consumed by those ignorant of fact but anxious to display their moral superiority to all those bourgeois rubes who actually believe America is a force for good in the world and hence worthy of loyalty and spirited defense.
My curiosity lies with how the Left will deal with Barack Obama, the imperfect person (and deeply inexperienced), who will not reverse George Bush's doctrines in the foreign policy arena and who will probably not give them the lefty utopia they seek on the domestic front. Will he suddenly be just a DINO (Democrat in Name Only)? Will they see conspiracy after conspiracy to tie the man's hands from Doing the Right Thing?
We've had enough temper tantrum throwing and stupidity in opposition to the POTUS. I'm hopeful that Republicans will be the adults Democrats can't seem to be.
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