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Political Sociology Red Team, Blue Team by Clark Stooksbury American
politics is a sport, and being absolutely certain of the essential righteousness
of your team simplifies life enormously.
How can Rush Limbaugh, in the face of massive deficits and
rapidly growing government under the Bush Administration, proclaim with a
straight face that a victory by the Democrats this fall will lead to a return of
big government? The answer is that he believes in the GOP narrative with a
religious fervor. Believing this narrative is different from simply being a
conservative or a Republican. The GOP narrative is a Manichean worldview in which
Republicans and conservatives are beacons of light and holiness, while Democrats
and liberals are the essence of evil. In other words, their view of Bush is the
inverse of the popular leftist view of Bush.
| | Clark
Stooksbury has written for Chronicles, The American Conservative, and Metro
Pulse in Knoxville, Tenn. |
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While it greatly simplifies life, believing in a political narrative makes
one's political affiliation the equivalent of one's favorite sports team. I am
from Knoxville, the home of the Vols (short for Volunteers), the football team of
the University of Tennessee (UT). "Vol Fever," as it is sometimes called,
saturates the air starting in late summer, as palpable as an August heat wave.
The blistering heat and humidity of east Tennessee usually subside sometime in
September, but Vol Fever lasts until January. As a UT fan, I "know" that when a
Volunteer linebacker is flagged for a late hit, he is a the victim of a bad call
— no, an egregious call. I also know that when a UT receiver bobbles the
ball in the end zone, he definitely held it long enough to score a touchdown. The
fans on the other side — cheering for a hated rival such as Florida or
Alabama — are just as convinced of the opposite reality. I have come to
believe the narrative of the Vols, and fans of rival teams have learned to
believe their own teams' narratives, by cultural osmosis.
I used to be the same way in politics. In the 1980s I believed in the
narrative of the Republican party. I "knew," before I even knew what the issue
was, that President Reagan was right and the Democrats were wrong. My belief in
this narrative began to erode after the revelations that the president was
selling arms to the Iranian regime in order to secure the release of American
hostages in the Middle East and to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. Former New
Republic editor Michael Kinsley compared the plight of Reaganites to that of
American Communists at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, when "a sudden policy
reversal put devoted ideologues to such a severe test of their devotion. A party
line of stark moral simplicity — no dealing with terrorist states — has
suddenly gone all gooey and geopolitical. . . . As in 1939, many are falling off
the train as it rounds this sharp bend. But a tenacious few hold on." I
eventually fell off.
The release of Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies" provides a textbook
example of pundits approaching a political issue as if they were spin artists, as
opposed to opinion journalists. There are legitimate questions about the
credibility of some of Clarke's accusations such as his claims about the handling
of the threat of terrorism in the Clinton years and some statements he made
previously that appear to contradict what he is saying now. But his central
charge that the Bush administration has been obsessed with Iraq should be
blindingly obvious, even and especially to neocon pundits who have been beating
the drums for an invasion of Iraq for years.
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| While it greatly
simplifies life, believing in a political narrative makes one's political
affiliation the equivalent of one's favorite sports team.
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With near unanimity, the right side of the punditocracy went into
damage-control mode on the day "Against All Enemies" came out. Rush Limbaugh
brought Vice President Cheney on for an interview, which was a little like
Charlie McCarthy interviewing Edgar Bergen. Limbaugh's questions were far more
revealing than the vice president's answers. One peculiar question was, "What do
[the president's opponents] hope to achieve by continually attacking Condoleezza
Rice?" Limbaugh felt no need to offer evidence for the bizarre belief that the
national security advisor is being attacked to a greater extent than say, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, or Perle. He also brought up the recalcitrant Senators Hagel
and McCain, whom he denigrated as "Republicans of a sort" who are "not totally on
board that struggle [for the future of the country]." Cheney predictably praised
Rice's ability to defend herself and absolved Hagel and McCain of the treasonous
charges with which Limbaugh was saddling them. The vice president also stated
that Clarke was "out of the loop" in the Bush Administration's discussions of
terrorism. That claim is disputed not only by Clarke, but by Condoleezza Rice
— but not by Limbaugh. At no point in the interview did either Limbaugh or
Cheney feel compelled to act as if Clarke had any credibility.
That Rush Limbaugh follows the GOP narrative with a religious fervor should
surprise nobody. The purpose of his program is to validate the prejudices of his
audience in the same way so much of popular culture and the news media do for the
Left. When his show began, there existed a much narrower media world. There was
no Internet or Fox News. There wasn't even a Weekly Standard. The traditional big
media had much less competition and much more power.
It is disturbing, however, that so much of the conservative movement, led by
its intellectual flagships National Review and The Weekly Standard, appear to
read from a script prepared by Karl Rove. They sometimes criticize the Bush
administration's policies on the budget and immigration. But on fundamental
matters, such as the president's character, they line up with absolute
loyalty.
National Review editor Rich Lowry took up the burden of discrediting Clarke in
a histrionic New York Post column inveighing against Clarke and his book. Lowry's
primary tool was an anonymous press background briefing from 2002, which the
White House gave Fox News permission to publicize, about the Bush
administration's terrorism policy. Lowry said Clarke portrayed the president in
the press briefing as an "antiterror stalwart."
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| In the 1980s I believed
in the narrative of the Republican party. I "knew," before I even knew what the
issue was, that President Reagan was right and the Democrats were wrong.
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I suppose "stalwartness" is in the eye of the beholder. In the briefing,
Clarke said that the Bush administration had "decided to initiate a process to
look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years." To
accomplish that, the "deputies then tasked the development of the implementation
details. . . ." The briefing temporarily broke down because of semantic confusion
over Clarke's statements that the Clinton administration had no "plan" for
dealing with al Qaeda, but that it had a "strategy." Score one for Lowry's side
for observing that Clarke should have discussed the vast increase in the CIA's
budget that the Bush administration approved. One should keep in mind, however,
that a pledge to spend more money — one of the few things Bush does really
well — does not necessarily translate into a more effective policy.
In Lowry's zeal to establish that Richard Clarke is fit only to be a
"Dishonesty Czar" in future administrations, he brought out several other areas
of supposed inconsistency, including a peculiar statement about Clarke's view of
the Clinton administration's priorities: "In his testimony yesterday, Clarke said
that the Clinton administration had 'no higher priority' than fighting terror.
No. In his own book, he says trying to force a Middle East peace agreement
was more important to Clinton than retaliating for the attack against USS
Cole" (emphasis in original). I have not read "Against All Enemies," but
it took about one minute of trolling through the index to discover that in
Clarke's view, a Middle East peace would greatly reduce the risk of terror
against the United States. Referring to the period shortly after the Cole
bombing, he states:
"Time was running out on the Clinton administration. There was going to be one
last major national security initiative and it was going to be a final try to
achieve an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. It really looked like that long-sought
goal was possible. . . I would have liked to have tried both, Camp David and
blowing up al Qaeda camps. Nonetheless, I understood. If we could achieve a
Middle East peace much of the popular support for al Qaeda and much of the
hatred for America would evaporate overnight." (emphasis added)
Below the loftier precincts of "Doctor of Democracy" Limbaugh and National
Review's editor, pundits attached themselves to any perceived chink in Clarke's
armor and slashed away. Radio talker Hugh Hewitt and columnist Cal Thomas noted
Clarke's friendship with Rand Beers, a Kerry foreign policy advisor. In her
column, Ann Coulter eschewed stodgy analysis and went straight to schoolyard
insults. Clarke is "some loser no one has ever heard of" and a "chair-warmer" who
thinks that the "black chick is a dummy." Likewise, Wesley Pruden of the
Washington Times denounced Clarke as exhibiting a "public tantrum" of "foaming
resentment," and as a "geek" with "nothing to offer but goofiness and a familiar
face."
Being absolutely certain of President Bush's essential righteousness sure
simplifies life for someone who regularly expresess opinions in print or over the
airwaves. But thinking for oneself is better. Consider the case of Charlie Reese,
a columnist who has been around long enough that no one would think it unseemly
if his views were set in concrete, yet who still manages to think. Two columns he
wrote, one in late 2000 and the other just recently, illustrate this. In October
of 2000, a Reese column stressed the importance of electing Bush and removing the
Clinton crowd, for, among other reasons, Reese's disgust at the "lies, evasions,
character assassination, extreme partisanship and outright corruption" of the
Clinton years. In his recent column, the headline says it all: "Clinton
Better."
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