Kerry Endorsement from THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
Kerry's the One
By Scott McConnell
The American Conservative
November 8, 2004 Issue
Unfortunately, this election does not offer traditional conservatives an
easy or natural choice and has left our editors as split as our readership.
In an effort to deepen our readers' and our own understanding of the
options before us, we've asked several of our editors and contributors to
make the conservative case for their favored candidate. Their pieces, plus
Taki's column closing out this issue, constitute TAC's endorsement.
- The American Conservative Editors
There is little in John Kerry's persona or platform that appeals to
conservatives. The flip-flopper charge - the centerpiece of the Republican
campaign against Kerry - seems overdone, as Kerry's contrasting votes are
the sort of baggage any senator of long service is likely to pick up. (Bob
Dole could tell you all about it.) But Kerry is plainly a conventional
liberal and no candidate for a future edition of Profiles in Courage. In my
view, he will always deserve censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War
in 2002.
But this election is not about John Kerry. If he were to win, his dearth of
charisma would likely ensure him a single term. He would face challenges
from within his own party and a thwarting of his most expensive initiatives
by a Republican Congress. Much of his presidency would be absorbed by
trying to clean up the mess left to him in Iraq. He would be constrained by
the swollen deficits and a ripe target for the next Republican nominee.
It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W. Bush. To the
surprise of virtually everyone, Bush has turned into an important
president, and in many ways the most radical America has had since the 19th
century. Because he is the leader of America's conservative party, he has
become the Left's perfect foil - its dream candidate. The libertarian
writer Lew Rockwell has mischievously noted parallels between Bush and
Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II: both gained office as a result of family
connections, both initiated an unnecessary war that shattered their
countries' budgets. Lenin needed the calamitous reign of Nicholas II to
create an opening for the Bolsheviks.
Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is
supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of
conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a
country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and
concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war
by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation's children, the
ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working
poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing
cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy.
Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal - Bush has laid out a
mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low
that an American can't be found to do it - and you have a presidency that
combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious
cocktail.
During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush
presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world. Of
course there has always been "anti-Americanism." After the Second World War
many European intellectuals argued for a "Third Way" between American-style
capitalism and Soviet communism, and a generation later Europe's radicals
embraced every ragged "anti-imperialist" cause that came along. In South
America, defiance of "the Yanqui" always draws a crowd. But Bush has
somehow managed to take all these sentiments and turbo-charge them. In
Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States
despised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the
middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never before have
democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington
to their own electorates in order to survive in office.
The poll numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France,
and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt,
recipient of huge piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98
percent have an unfavorable view of the United States. It's the same
throughout the Middle East.
Bush has accomplished this by giving the U.S. a novel foreign-policy
doctrine under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any country
it wants if it feels threatened. It is an American version of the Brezhnev
Doctrine, but the latter was at least confined to Eastern Europe. If the
analogy seems extreme, what is an appropriate comparison when a country
manufactures falsehoods about a foreign government, disseminates them
widely, and invades the country on the basis of those falsehoods? It is not
an action that any American president has ever taken before. It is not
something that "good" countries do. It is the main reason that people all
over the world who used to consider the United States a reliable and
necessary bulwark of world stability now see us as a menace to their own
peace and security.
These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real
allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire.
More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the
United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only
think of the American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of
Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American armed forces. The hatred Bush
has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American
terrorists - indeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on
giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may
eventually take their own revenge. Only the seriously deluded could fail to
see that a policy so central to America's survival as a free country as
getting hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling nuclear
proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries to provide
full, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the world's most hated
country is not an obvious way to secure that help.
I've heard people who have known George W. Bush for decades and served
prominently in his father's administration say that he could not possibly
have conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself, that he was
essentially taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing agenda to
overturn Saddam Hussein. Bush's public performances plainly show him to be
a man who has never read or thought much about foreign policy. So the
inevitable questions are: who makes the key foreign-policy decisions in the
Bush presidency, who controls the information flow to the president, how
are various options are presented?
The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting,
is one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real
decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great
pains to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State
Department and the U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios
about easy victory. Much has been written about the neoconservative hand
guiding the Bush presidency - and it is peculiar that one who was fired
from the National Security Council in the Reagan administration for
suspicion of passing classified material to the Israeli embassy and another
who has written position papers for an Israeli Likud Party leader have
become key players in the making of American foreign policy.
But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed
intellectuals and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs on
deep currents within the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified
support of Israel as part of a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the
future kingdom of Christ. These two strands of Jewish and Christian
extremism build on one another in the Bush presidency - and President Bush
has given not the slightest indication he would restrain either in a second
term. With Colin Powell's departure from the State Department looming, Bush
is more than ever the "neoconian candidate." The only way Americans will
have a presidency in which neoconservatives and the Christian Armageddon
set are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry is elected. If Kerry
wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward.
But the most important battles will take place within the Republican Party
and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will ignite a huge
soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find
out how and where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then that more
traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism
informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of
continuity with the American past - and to make that case without a
powerful White House pulling in the opposite direction.
George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost
any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been
based on the hopelessly naive belief that foreign peoples are eager to be
liberated by American armies - a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky's
concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft. His
immigration policies - temporarily put on hold while he runs for
re-election - are just as extreme. A re-elected President Bush would be
committed to bringing in millions of low-wage immigrants to do jobs
Americans "won't do." This election is all about George W. Bush, and those
issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support. |
