Leftist Democrats have long claimed that the United States creates its own enemies. They believe that conservative Republicans have constructed a “military-industrial complex”to support a twisted psychological need for an enemy towards which to direct their primitive, immature anger and to satiate their blind greed . In contrast, conservative Republicans properly assert that the leftist ideas most Democrats support - relativism in foreign policy and socialism in domestic policy- have been so thoroughly discredited, that it is a wonder how Democrats still get away with advocating such false ideas in broad daylight.
In recent years, we have seen many conservatives write about the philosophical collapse of the Democratic party: of how its ideas are bankrupt, and of how its only initiatives are negative - as typified by left-wing conspiracy theory types, like Michael Moore, whose primary motivation is an overwhelming hatred of President Bush. These conservative writers have correctly identified the irrationality of Democratic proposals for retreating before the threat of radical Islam and for destroying the American economy by imposing more socialist-environmentalist regulations on the American people. Such observations about the Democratic Party are sadly correct: one of the two great parties of the American political system is committing suicide.
And yet, somehow, something is keeping it alive.
This week, less than seven days after President Bush’s State of the Union speech, in which his primary task was to rally the American people to support a surge in American forces in Iraq, the Democrats now stand overwhelmingly confident in their ability to successfully attack the President’s conduct of the war via a non-binding congressional resolution of no confidence, and thereby offer a stunning victory to the morale of our Islamist enemies.
The question is how? How does a political party that is nearly intellectually dead advocate ideas that are widely recognized as false and still continue to exist as a prominent, viable institution? To answer this question, it is ironically helpful to borrow the analytical approach offered by the Democrats themselves, and consider that, if there were no Democratic enemies, the Republicans would create them.
To understand this analysis, consider why the Democrats won such an overwhelming public mandate in the last election. The American people unambiguously asserted their disapproved of how Republicans were running the country, primarily in regards to the war in Iraq (but also in regards to many domestic policies, e.g., profligate spending by the Republican-led Congress and stem cell research, to name two). Yet, President Bush had initially and successfully sold the American people on the idea that the war in Iraq was part of the wider war against Islamo-fascism. The President’s poll numbers where in the stratosphere when, soon after 9/11, he asserted that in order to win the war America would make no distinctions between the terrorists and the regimes that gave them refuge. It is almost forgotten that, in March 2003, when American troops and tanks first rolled into Iraq, the vast majority of the American people agreed with the President that this war was necessary for American self-preservation and security.
However, as the war in Iraq has worn on for the past four years, and President Bush has focused his efforts almost exclusively on this front, the other primary state sponsors of Islamic terrorism, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and especially Iran, have all been largely ignored or pragmatically treated as allies by the Bush Administration. As a result, the Saudi Arabian government has continued to provide monetary support to mosques and schools that support the violent Sunni version of radical Islam. Syria, which had been nearly forced out of Lebanon after decades of fomenting sectarian violence and sponsoring the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister, has been allowed by the Bush administration and its Israeli allies to once again assert its malevolent influence in Lebanon via its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, which is now on the verge of instigating a new Lebanese civil war. Worst of all, Iran, the world’s number one state sponsor of terrorism for nine out of the past ten years (according to the U.S. State Department) has been virtually ignored by the Bush Administration, while this evil, theocratic regime has continued to develop a nuclear program that no serious analyst doubts is meant to build nuclear weapons. Additionally, the Iranian government has grown ever more aggressive in financing the various Iraqi Shiite militias wreaking havoc in Iraq, and quite possibly even the Sunni insurgency (via its Syrian proxy), which continues attacking American troops . There is little doubt, given its statements and its official Islamo-fascist ideology, that Iran desires the United States to fail in establishing a republican form of government in Iraq. Towards this end, it is logical to assume that the Iranians intend to foment civil war in Iraq in order to break the American people’s morale in supporting the war. Iran’s impudent actions towards the United States, which would be considered as acts of war to an earlier generation of American leaders, have gone glaringly unpunished by the Bush Administration.
Thus, have the American people seen President Bush back away from his initially bold assertion of American self-interest in this war. Instead, he has acquiesced to the institution of a partially theocratic Iraqi constitution and the election of a theocratic majority in Iraq, lead by a party called the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is closely tied to Iran. Quoting President Bush on this last item: “Democracy is democracy.”
President Bush has increasingly promoted the war in Iraq not as a means to secure American victory in the wider war against Islamo-fascism (a term he continues to shy away from), but rather as a means of achieving the self-sacrificial goal of bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. In the end, this was the reason why the American people turned against the war in Iraq:
Americans do not want their fighting men and woman sacrificed for the sake of giving the Iraqi people the right to elect another theocratic regime in the Middle East, while at the same time ignoring other growing Islamist threats to American security . But this, in effect, is what President Bush has been asking them to support by his inaction against the other larger fronts in the war against Islamo-facism.
So, why? Why have the president’s actions failed to be consistent with his initially tough rhetoric? Why has the objective of the war changed from the self-interested goal of defeating the evil ideology that spawns terrorism to the narrowly focused goal of bringing democracy to Iraq?
To answer this question, consider that Republican and Democratic politicians frequently claim they share the same goals, and that they differ only in how they propose to go about achieving those goals. Many Americans dismiss this assertion as an empty political bromide. However, it is true. Republicans and Democrats do share the same goals. And what are those goals? To find out, one must look beneath the incessant political blathering and identify the fundamental ideas motivating the politicians of each party. The ideas that set the goals of political parties lie in their their abstract political philosophies. Further, underlying political philosophy is moral philosophy. Morality asks man the general question “what is right and good?”; whereas political philosophy asks man the narrower question, “what is right and good in regards to society?”. In morality, both Republicans and Democrats answer the first of these questions from the basis of the Judeo-Christian religion they share. And their answer is: self-sacrifice to a higher purpose. According to common Judeo-Christian doctrine, the highest moral good is to sacrifice your self-interest for something “greater than yourself” Acting in one’s own interest, seeking to fulfill one’s highest potential, and achieving one’s personal happiness in this life is not the primary goal in Judeo-Christian morality. Rather, the primary moral goal of the Judeo-Christian theology, which both Democrats and Republican support, is “helping others” regardless of the consequences to one’s self-interest.
In their political ideologies, Republicans and Democrats differ, but only in regards to which specific higher purpose the self-sacrifice should be made. For conservatives, clinging to the remnants of supernatural mysticism, the higher purpose is the undefinable“will of God”. For leftist Democrats, who have become the more secular of the two parties over the years, yet who have been unable or unwilling to provide a rational, scientific alternative to religion as a basis for their ideas, the higher purpose has become the equally undefinable“will of society.” This explains the political left’s cultural relativism and moral cowardliness, since they believe that whatever the will of any society’s majority is, no one has the moral authority to challenge that will. This is consistent with President Bush’s statement that “Democracy is democracy.”
Thus, fundamentally, both parties share the same morality and differ only in regards to what higher purpose they want to sacrifice themselves and their fellow man. Neither party questions the morality of self-sacrifice. Neither party upholds the idea that it is right and moral and good for each individual to not sacrifice himself, but rather to pursue his own life, his own liberty and his own personal happiness.
As a result, we see Republicans constantly criticizing Democrats for the practical failure of their relativist, pacifist, and socialist policies. Yet, whenever Republicans are in office, they act with equal relish in instituting self-sacrificial policies completely consistent with left-wing ideology, although in different areas of the political/social arena, or with superficial differences in implementation. In foreign policy, we find President Bush unable to consistently support American self-interest in the war against Islamo-fascism. Instead, we see him justifying the war in Iraq on self-sacrificial grounds, on a foundation that leaves him intellectually unable to prosecute the wider regional war against the more dangerous state sponsors of Islamo-fascism, i.e., Iran and Syria.
In domestic policy, we have seen President Bush and his Republican Congress pass an enormous increase in Medicare benefits - the greatest expansion of federal government domestic spending since the Great Society programs of the 1960's. Consider also President Bush’s and the Republican’s religious social welfare scheme - equivalent to the Democrats social welfare schemes - with a dangerous religious element that degrades the separation of church and state.(which is interesting, given the President’s refusal to interfere with the wedding of mosque and state in Iraq).
So while the Democratic Party would have died as a major political party at least two years ago, President Bush and the Republicans, by their reliance on and consequent sanction of the same corrupt morality of self-sacrifice, are keeping their adversaries, the Democrats, alive.
Thus, it is not difficult to see the reason why the Democratic Party is still alive is that the President Bush and the Republicans sanction the same underlying philosophical ideas the Democrats hold. And, with Republican friends like these, who needs the Democrats?
