Thank you Mr Brooks. Now we know what Bush is for.
Thu Dec 01, 2005 at 07:12:01 PM PDT
Trust in government has fallen back to about half of where it was in 2001. More Americans believe that government is almost always wasteful and inefficient, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center.
There has been a sharp decline in support for the United Nations. There has been a sharp rise in the number of people who say the U.S. should mind its own business when it comes to world affairs. Isolationist sentiment is about where it was just after Vietnam.
Thank you Mr Brooks (Times Select). I had been wondering why republicans would put up with the antics of the most simian president and you have answered my queries. The previous president, despite problems with a nearly prehensile appendage, had come perilously close to restoring people's faith in the power of various institutions, including the US, its' government, armed forces, diplomatic corps as well as other bodies such as the UN.
In this atmosphere of general weariness, the political pendulum is no longer swinging on a left-to-right axis. As Christopher Caldwell noted recently in The Financial Times, the same phenomenon is striking country after country: the governing party is sinking, but the opposition party is not rising. Problems on the right do not lead to a resurgence on the left, or vice versa. In other words, the Democrats may win elections in 2006 or 2008, but that doesn't mean they will have the public's confidence or a mandate for change.
So when the dem candidate finally wins in '08 by ten million votes, that won't be a mandate. Bush showed us what a man date is and it cannot be topped. Oh no the current mood (not the crimes of those in power and the lies of their apologists) will be skeptical and Americans will retreat from the grand adventure of remaking the world in their image.
The chief cultural effect of the Iraq war is that we are now entering a period of skepticism. Many Americans are going to be skeptical that their government can know enough to accomplish large tasks or be competent enough to execute ambitious policies. More people are going to be skeptical of plans to mold reality according to our designs or to solve the deep problems that are rooted in history and culture. They are going to be skeptical of our ability to engage with or understand faraway societies in the Middle East or Africa or elsewhere.
In theory, skepticism leads to prudence, not a bad trait. But when it is tinged with cynicism, as it is now, skepticism turns into passivity. In skeptical ages, people are quick to decide that longstanding problems, like poverty and despotism, are intractable and not really worth taking on. They find it easy to delay taking any action on the distant but overwhelming problems, like the deficits, that do not impose immediate pain. They find it easy to dawdle on foreign problems, like Iran's nuclear ambitions, rather than confronting them.
This is really the whole point. Bush's job was to so destroy faith in government that we would all become anarchists, er... republicans. The fewer people think that the baby is useful, the easier it is to drown it in a bathtub or a puddle of muddy flood water.
[Yes I know that pretty much every word is a lie, including "the" and "and" but that is not my point this time. This time my point is that Brooks has inadvertently let the cat out of the bag]
What's at stake in Iraq is not only the future of that country, but the future of American self-confidence. We may have to endure a cycle of skepticism before we can enjoy another cycle of hope.
Until we as Americans face up to 'big lies' aided and abetted by people like Mr Brooks and do not realize that something fundamental changed on the first Tuesday of November of the year 2000 it is going to be hard to have the right perspective and to realize that the purpose of the Bush administration is to set the explosive charges on the foundations of the American Republic.
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