Redstate

By AaronVB Posted in User Blogs — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The LA times exit poll showed that Bush voters were more concerned than Kerry voters on only three issues: moral values, terrorism, and taxes. Pre-election Zogby polls showed Kerry winning on nearly every single issue, except terrorism, where he was slaughtered.  The problem is not, like many hawks would have us believe, that we are not taking national security and the "war on terrorism" seriously. The problem is not that we failed to successfully separate Iraq from the war on terrorism in the minds of the voters. The problem is not that we failed to produce a compelling counter-argument as to how the war on terror should be conducted. The problem is that we are gleefully going along with the conservative frame "war on terror." This is a battle we can never win, because it evokes inherently conservative ideas. Complicity with this frame will only serve to make the country more conservative, no matter what contortions and forms of hyper-cognition we engage in, and thus reduce our own chances of victory.

--Chris Bowers, myDD

The Memorial Day weekend marked a great amount of reflection on soldiers and the sacrifices they make, as well the current war our nation has called them to fight.  These reflections have ranged from the patriotic to the seemingly inane, an example being the Chris Bowers quote above from December 2004, echoed this weekend by Pachacutec at FireDogLake.  The reawakening of the Left's claim that the War on Terror is merely an idea and not an actual condition of current events allows us an opportunity to reexamine the fundamental problems of today's Leftist movement.

The modern Left has tapped into a long and ultimately dangerous intellectual movement that traces its roots back to the idea of nominalism, a concept introduced to us by the Greeks, most notably Plato.  Nominalism, in brief, states that there are no absolute concepts.  For example, there is no such thing as "redness," there are just many examples of red things.  The arguments for this position are many and often subtle, and I won't delve into them here for the sake of brevity, but suffice it to say that nominalism has had a substantial impact outside of its original context as a theory of language and cognition.  It is, in fact, behind the idea that the War on Terror is merely a "frame," a false absolute and a construct of language invented by politicians to influence behavior in a certain way - in this case to make the country more conservative.  In the Leftist's mind, there is no "War on Terror."  There is only a series of wars launched sometimes by America's enemies, and sometimes by America, with no true unifying purpose except for the furtherance of whatever transient political goals the two opposing entities have at the time.

This nominalist outlook is also behind the political strategy of the modern Left: protest.  It is thought that since overarching conditions like the War on Terror or the Cold War are simply words, they can be changed merely by using other words.  In the 20th Century, this approach to politics came to be identified as French in character owing to what seemed to be the weekly protests there most years.  The American Left adopted this approach to politics starting with Vietnam and continuing to today's protests against everything from the war in Iraq to immigration reform.  The first evidence of the foolishness of this approach is that the words of protesters have so far failed to overturn the conditions of the times.  Decades of resistance in the form of protests and writings failed to end the Cold War, a feat that was accomplished by realist means: increased military spending and, indirectly, economic growth.  So far, protest has also failed to change the nature of the defining conflict of the early 21st Century: the developed world vs. terrorism.  

In other words, the reason Democrat politicians (with a few exceptions) won't abandon the War on Terror frame is not because Leftists in the academy and the blogosphere haven't protested enough to make them; it's because the War on Terror is more significant than a rhetorical trope, and does in fact describe something about the world we live in.  We haven't been attacked in nearly 5 years not because President Bush waged a series of only loosely related wars and Osama bin Laden coincidentally decided his political interests had changed overnight at the same time, but because approaching the problem from the unifying framework of a War on Terror is having an appreciable effect on reality.  This is in fact the simplest explanation, and therefore probably the best one.  The further one thinks about the problem, the more one begins to see just how poisonous the nominalist approach to policy is.

The second element of the Left unwittingly exposed by bloggers like Chris Bowers is its quasi-isolationism.  I say quasi, because it's not as if people like Bowers hate intervention under any circumstance.  Bowers himself points out that he supports intervention for genocide prevention or to prevent the invasion of one country by another, and would support aid to democratic groups working to overthrow totalitarian regimes from within.  These are not the positions of a true isolationist.  What is isolationist about this position is how it views peripheral interests relative to vital interests: the former is elevated above the latter.  In essence, the United States would isolate itself from influencing precisely those parts of the world that are most crucial to its security and prosperity: the Middle East, Europe, and Northeastern Asia, influence that in all cases has a military component whether or not we are actually invading countries in the region.  Instead, it would take that military component and focus it primarily on Africa and Latin America, the current sites of most genocides, cross-border invasions, and emerging totalitarian regimes.  It's not that we would be morally wrong to do that, we would just be foolish.  Isolation from our major interests has cost us before, and it will cost us again if we follow that path.

Interestingly enough, Bowers-style "liberal interventionism" falls into the same nominalist trap that I criticized above: without a unifying framework, it soon falls apart.  There is nothing in liberal interventionist thinking to connect stopping a genocide in central Africa to preventing a Balkan country from invading another to funding democratic opposition to a dictatorship in Latin America besides vague moral idealism.  That is why critics of liberal interventionists usually accuse them of wanting to put the country in a position where it must continually move its army to remote parts of the world until it drains away its capabilities from sheer fatigue.  If one's objectives are at best vaguely connected, and more likely unconnected completely, confusion and overreach become the rule and the nation's resources will not be put to efficient use, leaving it vulnerable to the major threats it thought it could isolate itself from by focusing on more trivial matters.  

Finally, the Left continues to reveal its abandonment of liberalism and the necessity to start separating those terms in our discourse.  This is evidenced by Bowers' notion that the War on Terror invokes mostly "conservative ideas."  If one stops to think about what ideas actually fall under President Bush's War on Terror policy, democracy promotion, preemption and prevention, and national greatness, one notices how much these ideas fall under the classical liberalism exemplified by John F. Kennedy.  Isolationism from threats is actually the far more conservative idea, in that it attempts to maintain the status quo.  The Left's slide away from liberalism has been much documented, but it can't be emphasized enough: the Left is no longer synonymous with liberalism.  The Right is much more in synch with classical liberal ideas, especially in the world of foreign policy, and if you're attracted to Fukuyama's end of history hypothesis as I am, then the rise of the Right in the last few decades can be attributed to the fact that it has latched onto many of the ideas of liberalism as the Left has abandoned them and so has caught the wave of the march of liberalism that has defined history since the American Revolution.  This effect is especially potent when foreign policy is the main issue because it is the arena where the Left has most abandoned liberal ideas.

All of these fundamental views of the modern Left are why it must continue to be opposed with both words and votes.  The ideas of the Left have seeped in and terribly damaged the formerly liberal Democrat party, which is why we must continue to vote against it at every opportunity.  The price we will pay for adopting the nominalist, quasi-isolationist view of world will be too high.