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President Bush is a victim of America's political civil war
Gerard Jackson
Because I am in the process of packing and moving I have had no time to write articles for this week’s edition. This is why I am posting previously published articles. However, these articles have been chosen because their content is still highly relevant. The following article was published on 19 July 2004.
Although the 2000 election brought into focus the country's political divide that has been developing for decades, the length, intensity and moral turpitude of the subsequent campaign against Bush is probably unprecedented in American history.
Nevertheless, I think the vast majority of Americans are still not fully aware of what is really going on. It's not just the attempt to deligitimise a Republican presidency — it's meant to deligitimise the Republican Party and intimidate its supporters in to silence.
On one side of the political gulf there are the fanatical win-at-all-costs Democrats whose vital ideological core does not believe in the legitimacy of the Republican Party just as abolitionists didn't believe in the legitimacy of slavery and the Southern Democrats in the legitimacy of Lincoln's presidency.
To these Democrats, the Kerrys, Clintons, Kennedy's, Edwards Streisands, etc., the Republicans are the equivalent of nineteenth century slave owners. The irony of which is completely lost on these fanatics considering that those slave owners were Democrats
These comments are not mere speculation. Curtis Cans, head of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, pointed out that hatred has been building up for some thirty years, blaming television for this phenomenon. But 1972 was the year that the radicals captured the Democratic Party. From that moment the Democrats' ruthless urge to win began to be transformed into a policy of political extermination with the GOP as the victim.
These radicals, along with their media collaborators, brought with them the disease of the crusading spirit of intolerance. Firm in the righteousness of their cause (however incoherent at times), convinced that America was built on injustice, exploitation and oppression they have waged an unconditional war against the infidel, the barbarian conservative, the enemy of all that is good and just.
That the Republican Party was formed on an anti-slavery platform is something these dangerous fanatics have tried to airbrush out of history, just as they try to suppress anything that contradicts their Orwellian view of American society.
What strikes me about the political situation in the US is its similarity to the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where the battleground was doctrine and the object the saving of souls. Heretics, on both sides, who refused to recant frequently met a fiery end at the stake. (I should point out that Martin Luther did not, unlike Alec Baldwin, favor putting to death those who disagreed with him.
But fanaticism has a price and that price is the abandonment of reason and tolerance. That is why Democrats can accuse Bush of being evil and thoroughly corrupt, of virtually wanting to reintroduce slavery.
We see the same thing in Hollywood where, for example, a huge Hollywood crowd gave a Streisand a rousing reception when she called on it to vote for Gore because he will pack the Supreme Court with 'judges' who will twist the Constitution to fit their ideological agenda. Cher also pushed the same line. (So much for the separation of the powers. It's this contempt for the Constitution that gave us the Massachusetts Supreme Court's homosexual marriage diktat).
According to deep Hollywood thinkers like Streisand the election was "a war against bigotry, against discrimination of any kind, racial, religious or sexual orientation." To her and the rest of Hollywood's celluloid intellectuals Republicans are the forces of darkness while the Democrats are the forces of good. This feeling is genuine, pervasive and dangerous and it is beginning to poison the whole of the body politic, eating away at civil political discourse.
How did these Democrats arrive at such a risible and shameful view of conservatives, or anyone else who challenges their prejudices? Having persuaded themselves that they alone are concerned with social justice and oppression, and only they care about the poor and the underprivileged it is but a short step to assume that anyone who questions their vision or so-called remedies must be stupid or malevolent.
Just as religious fanatics from centuries past could not tolerate the existence of those who questioned their theology and so could only ascribe to those critics a diabolical malevolence, neither can our "new Democrats" tolerate anyone who challenges their sacred political doctrines or frustrates their lust for power.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 7 July 2008