A Pilgrim’s Digression

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

In some ways, something I said in Part Three of this series now sounds rather naïve. I said that by the end of the nineties, “what I learned about the party to which I belonged was that Republicans had no other object but obtaining power by whatever means necessary.” I admit in saying that, I sound rather like Paul Henreid from Casablanca saying that he is “Shocked! Shocked!” to find gambling going on in “this establishment” (as he pockets his winnings). However, I must again qualify my naïveté by pointing out that Democrats have the same object in mind. James Carville said as much at a recent post-election strategy meeting/therapy session here in Washington. He said that if the purpose of a party is to win elections, then the Democrat party is currently serving no purpose.

Why then do I sound so naïve in my surprising discovery that power is a motivator of the Republican party? I certainly did not consider myself naïve; I thought of myself, and still do think of myself, as cynical. Yet I had never applied my cynicism to the party to which I belonged, and this perhaps is why I felt some shock. It had always only been the Democrats whose methods and beliefs I had submitted to scrutiny and ridicule. Subjecting the Republican party to the same level of discrimination would have been an acute kind of self-scrutiny of which I was not capable.

Yet that kind of self-scrutiny is exactly what happened to me during the 2000 campaign and following. It did not result in any kind of immediate alteration; indeed “progress,” is such it can be called, was uneven.

I had come of age in the nineties believing a few simple things: that small government was better than “big government,” that individual freedoms ought to be protected and promoted to the exclusion of the common welfare—indeed that individualism was consonant with the common welfare—that taxes should be lower, almost non-existent, and the IRS should be closed down; environmentalism was largely a fraud perpetrated by tree-hugging wackos; that public education was yet another scheme to defraud the American people of more of their hard-earned money. So it was in 2001, the first year of the new century, I stood befuddled at the prospect of my party achieving the ends in which I had always believed through the election of a man I really did not like or respect all that much.

After 9/11, I really did make a go of liking President Bush, and for a time I suceeded. Or at least, I suceeded in fooling myself. Increasingly, belief in either the Republican or Democrat parties seems to me synonymous with “fooling one’s self.” But I digress, as usual. After 9/11, I briefly came back into the Republican fold, and I remained there largely right up until the Iraq war.

The Iraq war has been the nexus of a rather startling turnabout in Republican ideology little remarked on. Usually, the transition of Republicans from their nineteen-nineties viewpoint that America cannot be the policeman of the world, to their current incarnation as “Team America: World Police,” is glossed over as a “temporary” change of course in response to 9/11. I am not so sure it is temporary, however, considering how Republicans denigrated John Kerry during the election for suggesting that he would like to return to a pre-9/11 world in which terrorism was a mere nuisance. I do not believe Republicans have any intention of returning to the way things were. 9/11 has conferred great power on the United States to make its own road through the world, and I do not see Republicans willingly laying down that power, so long as they are in control. The historical equivalent might be the change in foreign policy wrought by President McKinley, who took us to war with Spain under false pretenses as a way of swinging the big stick and making sure no one doubted America’s power and presence in the world.

I have written again and again of my reasons for opposing the Iraq War; it seems hardly necessary to re-write what I have already said. But to simplify my point of view: I feel that many Americans died for reasons that have proven ephemeral. Iraq was not about weapons of mass destruction, or removing a dictator, or building democracy in the Middle East. Those rationales have been refuted one by one. For example, if the war was about removing a dictator, why are there so many other dictators in the world with whom we are content to live? If the war was about Weapons of Mass Destruction, why are there so many other countries possessing such weapons with whom we have neutral or good relations? If the war was about building a demcoracy in the Middle East, what about Afghanistan? Is it not “Middle Eastern” enough? There are answers to all these questions. They are all a variant on the excuse “we went to war because we could.” The Iraq war was a naked display of power.

If I am squeamish about that, it is because the “big stick” that George Bush swings is made up of individual men and women, many of whom are crushed when the stick strikes the target. I read about the President visiting wounded troops in the hospital, and I think to myself, “I could never be President; I could not live with the guilt of knowing that I caused this and so much more.” How does one live with such guilt? I suppose through the same techniques everyone uses, rationalization and distance. Ultimately, every one of the reasons for going to war in Iraq is just that, a rationalization, some of them blatantly after the fact.

There is no reason for violent mortality. This is a concept people—I won’t single out Conservatives—have difficulty accepting. Good war novelists, like Norman Mailer and James Jones, accept the fact that death in war is more often than not totally absurd and pointless. For this they are labeled un-patriotic and their critics shrug and say (perhaps without any trace of irony at all), “War is a terrible business. Get over it.”

There must be something better than the Democrats and Republicans are offering today. If I consider only the Republicans right now, it is because the Democrats really do not seem particularly relevant to discussions about how power ought to be used. There is an anarchic part of me that doesn’t believe it should be used at all, but I can’t reconcile that part of me with reality, so I suppress it.

Republicans alone now wear the ring of power. If power is the means to achieving ideological ends, and for many years I accepted the ideology of the Republican party, why then should I now feel unease at the means to those ends? Ends, such as the war in Iraq; the tax cuts I supposedly believed in; the triumph of conservative morality?

Maybe I do not believe in the ends any longer, either, now that the means have been proven so suspect. Conservatism has at its core the belief that the individual is superior to the collective. Every policy decision must be read in light of that one belief; Republicans are not nearly as consistent in this regard as they would like to be, but they are perceived as consistent, which is what is most important in politics.

For example, cutting taxes is a Republican concern because they believe that individuals should keep more of their income. That’s an oversimplification, but not by much. This kind of reduction to basic principles is what Republicans excell at, while Democrats fail miserably. On matters of personal morality, Republicans are far less obedient to the tenets of individualism, but this is a contradiction rarely pointed out. It is a basic contradiction between economic conservatism, which has at its heart laissez faire capitalism, and Christian Conservatism, which has at its core a narrow, restrictive, prudish morality the goal of which is to restrain, not empower the sinful individual. This is a contradiction Republican party opponents have consistently failed to exploit. To oversimplify in the same way “they” oversimplify when talking about liberalism, what Republicans want is a theocratic America in which capitalism and the pursuit of wealth is unrestrained. They want government but they don’t want Government.

If that makes no sense, it is because Conservatism makes no sense. It is a failed attempt to reconcile two disparate points of view. Capitalism holds that the individual is ultimately good, and if left to pursue his own ends, good will result for everyone. Christian Conservatism holds that the individual is ultimately evil, and if left to pursue his own ends, evil will result. One can be a Capitalist, which is what Ayn Rand (an atheist) called herself; and one can be a Christian Conservative. Can one be both? Not without some mutual corruption. The corruption mostly occurs to the Christians, who become reliant on the Capitalists to achieve their social goals.

In some ways, my own personal growth has been an attempt to balance these two sides of the equation. Instead, I’ve just decided to give up; there is no balance possible. I will be a Christian, without the Conservatism and without the Republican party. Will I join the Democrats then? No.

Taken for what it is worth, here at the end of this long, rambling discourse, this is a pretty sorry Testimony. I can’t even conclude with the rousing climacteric expression, “And then he changed his party affiliation to ‘Democrat,’ went on to join Baring Witness, and lived Happily Ever After.” Given how I feel burned by the Republican party, I doubt I will ever join another party, let alone a peace organization. I am changing my party affiliation to Independent, whether or not I am consequently not allowed to vote in a primary election.

I am not a Democrat. I may be a Liberal, as defined by the dictionary; but no, again it does me no good to exchange one label for another, Liberal for Conservative. I certainly would never call myself a “Progressive,” for example. I’ve been wary of using that term, though I know there are a significant number of people with whom I feel affinity who want to encourage its substitution for the dirty word “Liberal.” However, I had Professors in college, “liberal” professors, for whom the term “progressive” meant something less positive. They taught that the term “progressive” signified someone who held a certain naïve view of history as a narrative of progress from darkness to light, barbarism to civilization.

Thus I have never been able to dissociate the word “progressive” from its root in “progress,” as in “We’re making good progress.” We’re not making progress, if there is such a thing. The world is winding down towards apocalypse, and you don’t have to ask Jerry B. Jenkins to confirm that. Ask any climatologist or geologist or historian. The sun is burning out. States, governments, cultures all come to the same fate, that is, dust. Progress is a myth. Even holding on to what we got, to badly mangle the lyrics to an old song, is a false hope. Holding on, or “conserving,” is the myth perpetrated by Republicans.

So I am not a Progressive. Way I see it, a person in power who calls themselves a Progressive probably has a government order to “progress” me out of my home to a tent in Indian Territory. That’s just another way of saying, one person’s progress is another person’s pogrom.

So I guess I may be an old-fashioned liberal. I believe in a free Republic, not a theocracy. In no specific order, I believe the following: I believe prostitution should be legal. There should be no seat belt laws, except for children. A better society, if not a good society, is best achieved through cooperation rather than individualism. The wealthy should pay more taxes than anyone else. I no longer have a knee-jerk reaction against the twin bogeymen of the Republicans: the IRS and welfare. Former felons ought to have the right to vote. Abortion should be legal and rarely performed. Capital punishment ought to be illegal. Gun control is mostly ineffective at preventing crime; it would have to be enforced far too strictly for my taste for it to have any effect. Homosexuals should be allowed to marry. Polygamy was OK for Abraham, and it’s OK by me.

When the choice is between freedom and the law, I choose freedom.

This is where I stand today. Perhaps there is a Libertine party I can join.