Flame — HabitableZone

Flame

Polarization
TB — (archived)

Specifically, this post. I felt uncomfortable barging in with a long piece on that thread, when technically the post was not addressed to me, but I wanted to say something on it.

Robert, you have honest questions about why there is such polarization, and I'm going to try to answer them, but it's going to require dealing with preconceived notions that keep getting in the way.

I've looked over a lot of my discussions, and the main problem seems to be that nobody can get past George W. Bush.

How many people here are completely convinced that the only reason I hold the political positions I do is because Bush holds some of them? That if Bush decided that immediate surrender in Iraq was a good idea, suddenly I would think so too? How many times have I been accused of being a slavish pawn to anything Bush says or believes?

I'm fifty-three years old. Does anyone honestly think I developed my philosophies in 2001? Or even in 1980?

I am polarized against a particular philosophy that has been around as long as I've been old enough to pay attention to politics. This philosophy is difficult to label since any label I put on it is immediately rejected (one of the oldest debate techniques in the world is annihilating the language to the point where definition is no longer possible. End of argument.) When I was in college, it was mostly academics and fringe movements, but it has moved into mainstream politics. JFK would no longer recognize his party in foreign policy issues.

This philosophy has sided against the U.S. in every conflict we have been in since the middle of the Vietnam War. Back then, the Democratic Party didn't have a lot of them on board. That's no longer the case. During most of the last part of the Cold War, in almost every situation where the Soviets and the U.S. lined up against each other, these people and much of the Democratic Party took the Soviet positions. In almost every situation where the Soviets attempted to push a communist regime into a small country in the Western Hemisphere, or elsewhere, they supported the communists, and fought efforts to have the U.S. support opposing forces.

I wish I had the time to create a timeline of major events, and project what would have happened had we taken the Democratic position. No Contras. No support of anti-communist rebels in other countries.

The Korean and Vietnam War preceded the philosophical shift of the Democratic party, or no doubt those would have been swept aside, too, with the communists proceeding unchecked into Southeast Asia.

Arms control issues? Who fought for which positions? Who felt that strength and even confrontation was important, and who felt appeasement or even apathy would lead to peace?

Imagine the 1980s under Carter, Mondale, or Dukakis. Really. Imagine which decisions they would have made, and how.

I felt this way about our place in the world and how we should deal with things long before 9/11 rubbed our noses in the situation, and long before Bush was elected. I don't think Bush is a great president, but in this particular area of defending the U.S., he is still better than what we would have gotten otherwise, and given the exact same electoral choices again, knowing what I know now, I would not vote any differently. I wish I had a third choice. I don't.

In short, this isn't just about Iraq for me, or Afghanistan, or any of the other nations where we face what we face. And sure as hell it isn't about Bush. There is a bigger and older picture involving our survival, with two diametrically opposing views on what the best way to do that is, and these two sides go back in their current form for many years. It's convenient to forget it now, but exactly the same arguments, the same rhetoric, and almost the same words were all thrown around during the Reagan years. For the same reasons, with the same two sides doing the arguing. Only difference was the exact nature of the enemy.

Now, maybe this will make a dent, and maybe it won't. You can go back to the Brosz "Bush buttmonkey" meme, or "authoritarian conservative." But here it is, for what it's worth. A lot of people left some of their marbles in Florida in 2000. I don't think you're one of them, but don't let them tell you how it is, either.

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