s3...the entire article was an interesting POV...You found a piece that spoke your thoughts, and there are a couple in the middle that spoke to mine, but here is the end ... I find it interesting that someone in Scotland could write such an interesting piece about the US, and we have such dunderheads in some of the mainstream media, one wonders how they get up in the AM and tie their own shoelaces...
Here's the link again. newamerica.net
>>>>>>>Beginning in the 1970s, the Republican Party obtained an enduring presidential majority, interrupted only by Jimmy Carter, because voters trusted them with defence at a time when the Soviet Union was a superpower with troops in half of Europe and nuclear submarines prowling American coastlines. The era of great-power peace following 1989 made possible Clinton's two terms. By calling the war on terrorism "World War IV" and prolonging post-9/11 anxiety, the Republican right hopes to marginalise liberal Democrats once again.
In doing so, they find unwitting allies among American liberals. The deep strain of pacifism and anti-militarism on today's American left comes out of Puritanism and Quaker religious culture, rather than out of the Marxist left. For a generation, American progressives have made the strategic mistake of opposing not merely particular wars but the military itself. In the 1970s, anti-Vietnam fervour led liberal Ivy League schools to ban the Reserve Officer Training Corps from campuses; and in the 1990s, the exclusion of openly gay citizens from the military led them to renew the ban. We have seen the result: there are twice as many conservative Republican soldiers as liberal Democrat ones. In the north-east and Pacific coast, environmentalists and anti-military activists on the left have successfully discouraged armaments production and military bases. Result: those institutions are located mostly in the southern and western "gun belt", where the hawkish predilections of voters are reinforced by economic self-interest. To make matters worse, in the two and a half years since al-Qaeda attacked the US, no leading Democrat has come up with a convincing, detailed military strategy as an alternative to Bush's. Democratic calls for more "multilateralism" are easily caricatured by Republicans as the claim that foreign countries should be given a veto over America's national defence.
If the American public re-elects Bush and entrusts the White House to Republican commanders-in-chief, part of the reason will be the unilateral disarmament of the American left.
Copyright: 2004 New Statesman (UK) <<<<<<<< |
