Thursday, October 30, 2008
In response to Ron Coleman's post "Personal Savior", where Ron asks if a President Obama would help bridge the right - left divide:
Obama and the Democrats have no intention of bridging the ideological right-left divide. They have made it clear that their goal is to win, win, win. McCain would bridge it if he could, but elections are confrontational, zero-sum kind of things. In each political confrontation, only one team can win. Expecting the red team and the blue team to join hands, work together and sing kumbaya before (and immediately after) the big game is kind of unrealistic.
This is one reason why politics can't provide a solution to all of our problems. In contrast to politics, trade and technology are not zero-sum games. They rely on a combination of cooperation and competition. As a result, business and technology tend to provide real and lasting benefits to the population at large.
Who has done more to solve the problems of the world's poor - Adam Smith, Karl Marx or Norman Borlaug?
Politicians are bureaucrats. Their job is to maintain the infrastructure - maintain the roads, pick up the garbage, pay the bills. If we listen to the debates, we can see that McCain and Obama are both reasonably competent bureaucrats. When the press isn't looking, and when the extreme fans of both teams are busy stirring up trouble somewhere else, they are both capable of temporarily bridging the right-left divide to get some work done. That's all we should expect of them.
Americans have, historically, been pragmatic, self-reliant people who tend to avoid real visionaries like the plague. This is good, because true visionaries usually cause more problems than they solve. Historically, Americans have tended to avoid relying on the state, or messianic politicians, to solve our problems.
Since Europeans rely on the state to solve their problems, Europe embraces visionaries and extremists. The Left in Europe is more left than we have ever been, and the right is more extreme too. In America, lipstick-wearing white supremacists tend to be relegated to the sidelines, or to jail. In Europe, they become heads of state.
Old fashioned pragmatist/entrepreneurs like T. Boone Pickens avoid joining either team, but in the last decade, most of us have have declared our political alliances. This loss of individuality and independence isn't confined to individuals; comedy shows, college classes, talk shows, actors, rock bands - all feel the need to declare which political team they belong to. In the nineties, people rarely talked about politics. I didn't know what party most of my friends belonged to. I didn't care. Back in the '90's, the only dividing lines were MACs vs. Windows. Now I know where everyone stands politically. This is not a good trend.
The more we rely on our red and blue saviors, the more team spirit we have, the more European we become.
If you grant for the sake of argument that Bush is a radical ideologue, then how is electing another radical ideologue, albeit of a different stripe, change?
This is the case that McCain needs to find a way to make.
The real change we need is someone who fundamentally respects the forms of American gov't, who wants to restore the checks and balances, and who is temperate by nature, though not in any way a pushover. It's unfortunate, and ironic and potentially tragic, that Americans seem about to 'fix' one radical presidency with another far more radical one, when the man they'll be rejecting is probably one of the few people in the country who really could bring sanity and normalcy to the gov't.
I'm not really trying to promote any candidates, I'm just trying to say that politics (and relying on the state) isn't the only solution to our problems.
McCain is a good choice. I don't think Bush is a radical, and I don't really think Obama is a radical either. He's not a socialist and he's not a Marxist. He's just a Democrat.
Even genuine marxists and socialists aren't inherently unreasonable. Some of my favorite British bloggers are Marxists and socialists (Norm Geras and Harry's Place).
Of course, British politicians are more extreme. When people are disappointed by their standard of living and the crime situation, they tend to rely on political parties to solve their problems. If Labour and the Conservatives are both ineffective, the only solution some people see is the BNP. That's what happens when people rely on the state to solve their problems.
But Bush is a radical in the one sense that's relevant to your point, that he's increased the power and changed the tone of the executive office to a degree that we increasingly have a Leader with a cap. L rather than a president.
And Obama is even more passionately certain of himself rather than in the process as such.
So what I'm saying is that on some level people's revulsion of Bush comes from a good instinct about the issue you're raising, but that they're responding to that feeling in an ironic and tragic way.
adam d., there is an Adam B. posting on the Melanie Phillips blog.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/
Any connection despite the differing initial and case?
not me. sorry.