Rudy can fail, if he actually believes this crap
April 25, 2007
Andrew Sullivan quotes a reader’s email:
In his speech yesterday Rudy Giuliani got one thing right: “The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us.”
Every one of my moderately liberal Democrat friends dismiss the Islamist war on the West. To them it’s “not really a war” at all, just manipulative right wing fear-mongering and jingoism…
What’s the Democrats’ big signature issue right now? Global warming. You seem to regularly underestimate the level of denial at the heart of contemporary liberalism, its need to remain comfortable with it’s own fantasies. Today’s Democratic Party today is not Truman’s. They don’t get the existential threat posed by jihadists because they don’t want to get it.
Andrew, to be fair, more or less rejects the argument, but I think it’s a pretty representative sample of a Republican foreign policy thesis.
It’s also totally insane. Today’s jihadists don’t pose an “existential threat” to us. Maybe they’d like to create some worldwide sultanate, but they live in caves and they can’t use the phone. To pretend that this is an existential threat to our country is stupid and irresponsible. (That word “existential”; I do not think it means what you think it means.) And when you start orienting real foreign policy decisions around a metaphorical conceit that isn’t justified by the facts, you’re going to end up in a lot of trouble. If you’re especially stupid and irresponsible, you’ll start wars against countries that pose no threat to you, and have no connection to the terrorists you’re so afraid of.
Terrorism is just one threat out of many. It needs to be dealt with, and it needs to be taken seriously. Even though the actuarial threat posed by terrorism is vanishingly small, too small to even bother with, we do need to keep terrorist groups from acquiring nuclear weapons. The fact that the Republican Party has spent the last six years fearmongering about the possibility doesn’t preclude the need to forestall it.
But there’s absolutely no reason to restructure our entire foreign policy around terrorism. There’s no reason to assume it’s the most important issue facing the country, or even the most important international issue.
Of course global warming is a bigger problem than terrorism. It’s a real, worldwide crisis that requires a worldwide solution. And only the United States can provide the leadership that is needed. There’s a reason why Al Gore is going to win a Nobel Peace Prize, and Dick Cheney is not.
I’m genuinely curious to see how my conservative readers (*) would answer the following thought experiment: if you could wave your hands and either (1) bring carbon emissions down to a sustainable level or (2) permanently end the threat of Islamic terrorism, which would you choose?
It’s not a perfect analogy: both goals are unattainable. But both are amenable to partial solutions; a small amount of terrorism is better than a large amount, and fewer cabon emissions are better than more.
Our inconvenient truth lacks the shock factor of violence, there aren’t any bombs, and it doesn’t make good television; but is there any doubt that global warming, and the resultant changes in climate, weather patterns, food production, sea levels, energy availability, etc., will kill more people, by several orders of magnitude, than will Islamic jihadists?
(*) At least, those reality-based conservatives who still believe in the predictive powers of liberal ideas like “science” and “empirical evidence”.
April 26th, 2007 at 4:36 am
I agree. But even if one holds the terrorist hypothesis global warming is a related threat. In the future there will be terrorism / wars because of lack of water access and other byproducts of GW. There have already been some noise over melting icecaps, and look at WI and other Midwest states getting a little more nervous about access to the Great Lakes.
Its not the Bin Laden’s but the Bush’s that keep me up at night.
April 26th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Yep. I know the “terrorism is caused by poverty” theory has taken a lot of fire recently, and it’s not sufficiently explanatory — most of the terrorists seem to be the sons of sucessful, Westernized businessmen — but it’s definitely a contributing factor.
Of course, there are always good, old-fashioned resource wars, whether over oil, or water, or lebensraum, too.
April 26th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
It’s a long read, but Namo Wolf’s essay pretty well explains the critical need to the current administration to maintain an atmosphere of terror within the citizenry. As I read this I expected to encounter typical overblown claims and tenuous connections. I was disappointed on many levels, as I found the analysis spot on and very uncomfortable.
What really worries me is how the republicans have created a situation in which the danger of future terrorist attacks is increased tenfold. The chance of another attack after 2008 is higher than I like to contemplate.
As for the poverty theory, I agree it is too simplistic the reason you give being a symptom. There is a large portion of our population that deeply resents the power of corporations over the individual. It seems terrorism comes from the very countries in which our corporations appear to run the country, and have the full backing of our military. The truth behind this perception can’t be dismissed. Additionally all the protections we cling to in the US to soften corporate agression and arrogance don’t protect citizens in foreign countries.
Countries which don’t protect their people from the depradations of foreign businesses aren’t among the wealthy countries. If we really want to deflect and fight terrorism we’d have to start by requiring our corporations to behave in ways which don’t exploit people to death. Of course that would make things more expensive, and would hurt the shareholders short term gain, so the very idea of fighting terrorism by behaving ethically will be ridiculed by the fat, dumb, and blissfully ignorant who enjoy the results of consuming the fruits of the blood of faceless stranger.
PS - I liked The Princess Bride reference.
April 26th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
I had the same response to Wolf’s essay, and although I don’t really agree with it, her points were well-taken, and far less inflammatory than the unfortunate title and introduction would suggest. (Although: is her heated rhetoric the only reason we’ve all read the essay?) And it was hilarious to watch Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism: the Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton, complain about the use of the word “fascist”.
April 27th, 2007 at 5:18 am
Well I think terrorism is an act out of fundamentalism. In that sense fundamentalism is a failure of liberalism itself. Modern liberalism is the US for example was glued together by class issues and discourse. It was not simply one of many aspects of modern liberalism but its foundation.
I think the same could more or less be said of many countries in the middle east. It is the liberal / progressive political parties inability to address class in a meaningful way that open up fundamentalism with terrorism as one of its effects.
Most people misunderstand Marx when he said Religion is the Opiate of the Masses. Fundamentalism demonstrates the wisdom of such a statement. It does not solve the class problem or poverty in any way and creates this drug induced state amongst the masses.
I really believe that it is the Dems that hold the key here. In Wisconsin and across the nation in 06, fundamentalists voted along class lines. It was those class issues that gave Dems victories in places unexpected.
April 27th, 2007 at 7:30 am
I don’t think fundamentalism has a meaningful connection to Islam. In a Christian context, it means something close to “belief in the literal truth and inerrancy of the Bible”. But I think almost all Muslims believe that about the Koran, and it’s not what distinguishes the violent, terrorism-inspiring strain of their religion.
There’s certainly a potential for more Democratic gains among blue-collar workers, who already vote more Democratic than their wealthier neighbors within every racial and religious cohort.
The victory in 2006, however, came not from huge gains among Reagan Democrats, but from a broad-based movement towards the Democrats among all demographic groups. We picked up an additional 4-6% of the conservative evangelical vote, but also an extra 4-6% of libertarians, and secular voters, and middle class whites, and so on and so forth.
More precisely, we won because we had good candidates who are representative of their respective districts, and some of those were certainly populists — Sherrod Brown, or Bernie Sanders, or any number of House Democrats.
April 27th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I disagree. I think we would agree that both religions have their extreme factions. I would even go so far as to say the US and Middle East have more in common than Europe.
Most Christians I know believe in the literal truth of the bible. Most of these Christians are not fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is an extreme. Like fascism it is not easily definable.
My point is that societies like ours and Iran that veer towards fundamentalism do so out of a failure of liberalism. More specifically a positive, progressive, economic platform will neutralize the worst of fundamentalism.
I am a firm believer that the worst of Neo Conservatism was a byproduct of Clintonomics. Look at how Democratic bloggers are trashing some of the reforms directed towards the working class in the state senate and assembly.
We have a class not cultural war in this country. Your list says you see it in cultural terms. Conservative evangelical, libertarians, secularists may or may not be in the same economic group. What class were those 4-6% working class, middle class, or capitalist class.
April 28th, 2007 at 10:28 am
I know fundamentalism is often taken to mean “far right” or “crazy”, but it actually has a specific meaning — agreement with a list of five “fundamentals” of the Chrisitan faith as promulgated by a 1910 assembly of the Presbyterian Church.
Democratic gains occured across all class boundries too. The working class votes in far higher proportions for Democrats than does the middle class, which in turn is more Democratic than the rich. But the 4-6% gain occurred in each of the income categories in 2006.
April 28th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Sorry Ben a Stalinist view of language won’t do. Words change and so do their meanings.
I’d like to see these stats. If what you say is true the working class are getting screwed. By far, most of their leaders concerns are the middle and upper classes.
The data I’ve seen splits the working class. 75k -150k veers Republican especially when employed in the private sector, 150k-300k are heavily democratic especially when in public / government sector and the filthy rich are what they are. By far most of the working class don’t waste their time on voting.
I even think the union movement is waking up and realizing money is better spent on organizing and strike funds than Democratic extortions that don’t amount to much in policy anyway.
April 28th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
CNN reports on the national exit polls for 2006, and for 2004.
Under $15,000 went from 64% Dem to 67% Dem.
$15,000-$30,000 went from 58% Dem to 61% Dem.
$30,000-$50,000 went from 51% Dem to 56% Dem.
$50,000-$75,000 went from 44% Dem to 50% Dem.
$75,000-$100,000 went from 45% Dem to 52% Dem.
$100,000-$150,000 went from 43% Dem to 47% Dem.
$150,000-$200,000 went from 42% Dem to 47% Dem.
Over $200,000 went from 36% Dem to 45% Dem.
April 30th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Nate, how many people do you think are making $300,000 working in the public sector? I can think of one, the President of the United States, who is, you know, not voting “heavily Democratic”. But don’t let that distract you from inferring trends without bothering to check the actual evidence.
May 1st, 2007 at 7:04 am
I agree that Nate’s thesis doesn’t really hold up, but to be fair, there are quite a few public sector employees who make low six-figure salaries. It’s uncommon, but not unheard of — almost all of them are unionized, long-term employees with a lot of experience who have put in a lot of hours of work to get to that point. I imagine that they tend Democratic.
They don’t account for any significant portion of the income cohort making over $100,000, though. There just aren’t that many of them.