I've argued for the supplemental, and I'm glad it's going to pass today. It's actually rather remarkable that it's going to pass today, as the larger context for the fight is actually not favorable to progressives. Recognize that this is one step, not just directed at ending the war in Iraq, or at stopping Bush, but at ending a long-term trend towards an authoritarian national security state. Many of our media, economic, cultural, and political institutions have been directed towards such a state, and this is very much a bipartisan trend - it's not a coincidence that the 1984 ad had such resonance for IBM in the early 1980s and with Hillary Clinton today (I'm not arguing she's big brother, that's absurd, only that the ad resonates).
The roots of this state are traceable directly to an authoritarian South, a one-party unique region in America that has held the balance of power since the 1930s and that was and is dedicated above all to a race-based hierarchical society. Through shaping even progressive legislation, like the Wagner Act, Dixiecrats ensured that broad-based class movements failed. It's not widely-understood, but the reason the South flipped to an anti-labor stance in the 1940s is because the CIO had tremendous success in organizing multi-racial unions as World War II labor markets tightened. This was a direct threat to Jim Crow, and so Southern Democrats cooperated with Republicans to pass Taft-Hartley, a piece of legislation which basically made labor organizing impossible and turned unions into groups that can only advocate for their own survival. At the same time, there were massive pre-McCarthy purges of leftists and decertifications of leftists unions, leaving unions open to infiltration by the CIA, FBI, organized crime, and bureaucratic inertia. The biggest movement for social justice in American history - the labor movement of the 1930s - ran up against the South, and the South turned it into a pro-Vietnam reactionary force that rejected the New Left in the 1960s.
In 1945, there were more strikes than there had ever been in American history. From 1946-1948, the purges happened. And then the 1950s somehow placidly came, and women were no longer in the factories and African-American soldiers were somehow living back in segregated neighborhoods. It's funny, how history is written by the winners. It's funny how the history of the post-WWII reaction, the women in factories in WWII being forced out of work and the returning African-American soldiers and population migrants being forced into racist structures, is just kind of glossed over. It shouldn't be. That's when the national security state, the seeds of the authoritarianism that sprouted into Vietnam, Iraq, and a radically unfair media and economy, were fertilized.
And where were the liberals? Well, the liberals were going along with it, helping to cooperate with the Southern autocrats to destroy what they perceived as the existential communist threat (and eliminate their Henry Wallace-ite rivals within the Democratic party). The people that Peter Beinart fetishized destroyed the left from 1946-1948, and so the Cold War took the path it did, and television became the king's telescope into every American home. We adopted the constitution of television, which was sketched out in the 1930s but not adopted until they got rid of the first set of dirty fucking hippies, the radical organizers of the 1930s who kept bothering everyone about class and race and social justice and ending the draft and the like.
Like an organism, American adapted to this constitutional order. Highways sprawled outward, suburbs ate the landscape, cities died and were reborn, and American dotted the world with military bases. Education turned into a competition for credentials, a cultural war where the winners turned to legal drugs and the losers turned to illegal drugs upon which there was apparently a war. Wars on concepts actually became quite popular, often initiated by those from Texas. Democrats became the party of the status quo, Nixon criminalized politics, David Broder-esque pundit middle-managers infected discourse, TV became Geraldo-ified and the civil rights movement detached from its class-based origins and moved to a rights-based model even as black nationalists convulsed from within. The culture became lost in dreams and pain, addiction mainstreamed itself, a superwealthy class helped itself to everything, and young boys and girls adopted the role model of 'more'. The religion of America turned to anticommunism, which morphed nicely into anti-enlightenment and anti-reason. America today is full of promise, but this last fifty years has been ugly and full of spite. Better living through chemistry, baby.
And then, of course, came George W. Bush, a stupid man full of evil, lethargic weakness, and spite. In a tragic election, he beat Al Gore, a man who knew all that was wrong but could not bring himself to believe that the public wanted it fixed. Bush grew up in one of these artificial suburbs, helped himself to drugs, to superwealth, to educational connections. He dreamed of nothing but 'more', and he believed in wars on concepts. Bush was a man who epitomizes all that is wrong with America, but he was chosen by a Republican Party that reveres him and beat a Democratic Party that could not reject the hatred and authoritarian system that let him happen.
In running through this narrative, I'm trying to sketch out why we have to understand Iraq not just as a stupid war, but as a metaphor for a stained American soul that needs to be cleansed through genuine introspection. Global warming, resource depletion, pandemics, nuclear terrorism - this is the strategic rationale for a needed shift. But the moral rationale is that in order to keep America, we must start with where we are, and we are deep in the hole of a national security apparatus and population whose first instincts are to hide everything, use fear, and militarize.
2006, like the election of 1930, was not a mandate for constitutional change on the order required to reverse the national security state. You don't hear, for instance, a call to end the war on drugs. It's not a war, and it's not working. It's immoral, and evil. But you don't hear anyone in the political mainstream saying that it should end. You don't hear anyone discussing health care reform in the context of the millions of people who die so executives can get rich. You don't hear anyone discussing the reality that an $800B military budget to build weapons to fight a defunct USSR is unsustainable and immoral. You don't, because 60 years of elections and media say that these topics are not to be discussed in polite company. Iraq falls into this category of not-to-be-discussed, so even as progressives rail against Bush we tolerate Hillary Clinton saying that she will keep troops in Iraq, peppering her discussion of the topic with 'vital national security interest' like it's the MOST delicious seasoning.
Now, the far left didn't entirely go away, but it did largely refuse to participate in a de-industrializing mainstream civic culture. It went off and invented Hip-Hop, the internet, skate-boarding, and punk music, all of which have become as global as the American military presence. A protest industry developed, made up of those who decided that participation in the system was immoral, because participation in the system was immoral. This is the John Stauber-types, those who can't stomach voting for more money for the military to continue a war that represents everything they hate, those who have seen 'compromise' many times before and think they know where it leads.
And then there is the new progressive movement, those who are willing to engage in the system, freshly stripped of our illusions but not our perhaps unwarranted confidence that the American political system can respond to public pressure through the electoral process. These people - Wes Clark, Chris Bowers, Donna Edwards, a million for Barack - are not uniformly young or old, but they represent a new non strip mall-based American direction that has yet to take hold.
The legislative strategy by the Democrats has been opaque, and allies such as Moveon have not sufficiently opened up the process to allow a genuine peak inside. But that is inherent to a legislative strategy in today's America, and this bill is only one step out of many that can take America away from our wars on concepts. Pelosi has detached the Democratic Party from its bipartisan consensus towards a national security state. The electoral landscape has as its governing party a coalition that has cut out the authoritarian South. And long-term, the authoritarian South can now be tamed, since its dependence on Federal subsidies has grown to become a serious addiction.
But reversing 60 years of a top-down national security state based political system doesn't happen with one election, nor should it. The public chose to be here. Now it's time that all of us, and all of us do have blood on our hands, choose to work to go in a different direction. It is messy. There is no one magic bullet, and in fact, the magic bullet concept comes from the top-down Hollywood consumer dream so prevalent in the national security state. No, this is one step at a time, let's force the Democratic Party to hear us, to be us, and let's make sure that the Democratic and Republican nominees in 2008, in our great debate about the future of the country, hear that the public wants an end to the tyranny, and that means that keeping troops in Iraq for 'vital national security interests' is not ok.
There is a lot of work to do, more than can be done by any one group. And if you don't agree or like the strategy of this fight, well don't worry, there will be another one. And another. And another. And another. And another. That's what it means to end the national security state, and to build a new America.
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