THE
CENTER CANNOT HOLD
So
Team Bush waited until after the election to
fall apart at the seams, but the main point was that
".
. . Dubya and his puffed-up advisors are being buffeted
about by forces they cannot understand or control. As
the candidate of the Republican center, Dubya's sputtering
campaign is proof that – in the GOP, at least – the
center cannot hold. The Republican Left, led by McCain,
is in the ascendant, and the Republican Right, led by
Buchanan, is leaving en masse. This political turmoil
is the first sign of the great realignment, a post-cold
war shift in the political landscape that augurs an
era of revolutionary change. In any seismic event of
this magnitude there are bound to be a few casualties
– and if McCain makes it out to California, then it
looks like the GOP may be the first one."
MY
CRYSTAL BALL
Okay,
okay, so I wasn't entirely correct: I was wrong
about the impact of Buchanan's campaign (even the greatest
seers sometimes confuse will be with ought
to be.) Perhaps my crystal ball was a little cloudy
that day. But from where I'm sitting, it looks like
my main prediction – an imminent split in the GOP –
was correct. Only my timing was off. Oh, McCain
is denying it, but, then again, the Washington
Post piece never really reported that he was definitely
leaving the GOP, only that he and his brain trust were
discussing it. What is fascinating, however, is how
this threat of a split almost perfectly maps the ideological
fault-lines in the GOP as described above. According
to the Post:
"McCain's
agenda, and that of a prospective McCain-led third party,
is a hawkish foreign policy, domestic reform and a call
for universal national service for young Americans.
McCain sees each party held hostage by its base – Democrats
wedded to entitlements and Republicans dominated by
corporate interests – thus leaving room for a centrist
populism."
LEADING
THE CHARGE
Of
the three elements in this proposed platform, two (conscription
and conquest) express the spirit of unabashed militarism
that defines McCain's public persona – and "reform,"
in a McCainian universe, is synonymous with centralized
power, and inevitably takes on a militaristic aspect.
The term "hawkish" does not quite do justice to the
McCainiac foreign policy agenda: Iraq, the Balkans,
Russia, the Far East – no continent, it seemed during
the primaries, was safe from his belligerent pronouncements.
McCain made a point of declaring that all "rogue states"
would feel the whiplash of American power, giving voters
the impression that he would personally lead the troops
into battle, like that blustering bully Theodore Roosevelt
(whom he often invoked) charging up San Juan hill.
CRUSHING
SKULLS
McCain
not only attacked Clinton for failing to launch the
ground war in Yugoslavia, but went so far as to appear
on the same platform with the Albanian extremist Joe
DioGuardi, whose Albanian-American Civic League
was advocating the invasion of Macedonia long before
it actually took place. DioGuardi has long represented
the radical fringe of the KLA, which is like saying
that someone belongs to the radical wing of the Mafia.
A visit to AACL's website
confirms the, uh, distinctly aggressive program
of DioGuardi & Co.: the front page consists of a
map of Albania incorporating generous portions of Serbia,
Macedonia, and Greece. It is safe to say that top McCain
advisor Bill
Kristol's infamous remark that we must "crush Serb
skulls" accurately reflects what US policy in the Balkans
will result in if President McCain ever occupies the
Oval Office – and it looks like the Macedonians and
the Greeks will suffer a few broken bones as well.
KRISTOL
AS SVENGALI
Speaking
of Kristol, he appears to be the inspiration behind
this media-driven third party boomlet. The Post piece
is mostly a recounting of a breathless lunch that took
place between the principal conspirators, including
Kristol, campaign strategist John
Weaver, legislative director Daniel
McKivergan, and the omnipresent Marshall
Wittmann of the Hudson Institute. While noting that
"a couple of McCain's advisers have convinced themselves
he could win the presidency in 2004 as a third-party
candidate," the Post avers that "others suggest
that even if he lost, he could reshape politics more
to his liking for years to come." As crystallized by
Kristol, this scenario, the Post reports, reads
as follows:
"'You
have deadlock between the parties, and the ideological
forces that drove the two parties are somewhat spent
and exhausted,' Kristol said. The conservative era that
began with Richard Nixon is waning. "It feels like we're
at the end of this period in American politics.'"
CONSERVATISM,
R.I.P.?
Kristol's
conversion to McCain's cause, you'll remember, coincided
with his widely-disdained
obituary for the conservative movement, declaring
that the Right was intellectually and politically "exhausted."
"Leaderless, rudderless and issueless, the conservative
movement, which accomplished great things over the past
quarter-century, is finished," declared this grand strategist
of the main chance, who latched on to McCain's coattails,
and, as
Bill Rusher pointed out at the time, decided that
he would found "a new ideology, one that would eventually
replace conservatism." Ever since then, Kristol and
his editorial sidekick David
Brooks, have been peddling their "national
greatness conservatism" as a panacea for the nation's
ills – and McCain is their chosen vehicle.
WAR
PARTY ON WARPATH
Aside
from building lots
of national monuments – I can just see that
obelisk topped with a marble bust of Kristol casting
its shadow on the White House lawn – the main manifestation
of this "greatness," as far as Kristol is concerned,
is war. He is, after all, the leading exponent of what
he calls a
"neo-Reaganite" foreign policy bent on nothing less
than "benevolent global hegemony": Kristol once threatened
to leave the GOP if Republicans in Congress stubbornly
opposed the Kosovo war. Now, it seems, he is getting
ready to carry out his promise, as Team Bush gets ready
to bail out of Bosnia and shows signs of desperately
wanting to do the same in Kosovo. But it isn't just
the Balkans: Colin Powell's influence has neutralized
the ultra-hawks in the administration on the China front
(and every other front), and Kristol and his warmongering
cabal are livid.
THE
DEFECTORS
McCain's
meeting
with Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle, officially
billed as a tete-a-tete between two old friends,
and the rumors that Republican Senator
Lincoln Chaffee's bolt from the GOP is considered imminent,
are, for Kristol, the culmination of a dream: teaming
up with Senator James Jeffords, the
first post-election defector, the consolidation
of a "centrist" caucus in the US Senate will provide
the heart of the Kristol Party – or, at least, its arms
and shoulders.
THE
MOOSEKETEERS
It
already has a head, not only in Kristol, but in a semi-official
thinktank, the "Project
for Conservative Reform" (PCR), the brainchild of
the ubiquitous Marshall Wittmann. How
is it that one ostensibly "conservative" pundit can
get so many citations in the Washington Post?
He even beats Kristol's previous record. This is one
"conservative" the liberals love to quote.
The PCR website is adorned with a logo that affixes
the image to Reagan to that of Teddy Roosevelt, and,
although the content manages to combine the worst of
both, clearly Wittmann identifies with the latter more
than the former. He writes a column called "The Bull
Moose" in which he excoriates the Republicans for stubbornly
resisting the call to embrace his program of big government
"national greatness," refers to himself as
"the Moose," and calls his (few but loyal) readers "Mooseketeers."
Isn't that cute?
REFORMATION
– OR DEFORMATION?
But
there is nothing particularly cute about Wittmann's
political agenda. His constant subjects are the themes
embraced by McCain: more money for the military, more
intervention abroad, more government, all presented
as part of a necessary "reformation" of conservative
ideology. Wittmann & Co. want to send conservatives
to reform school. But no one is signing up for this
transformative experience, since Kristol and the McCainites
have completely discredited themselves on the Right
– along with their Lider Maximo – and impatience
seems to have gotten the better of them. So now they're
sending up this trial balloon, hoping against hope that
it will take flight. Of course, it could be that McCain's
denials are true, and that he has no intention of setting
up his own party. While not ruling out that eventuality,
there's always the option of mounting a primary challenge
to President Bush in 2004, in which he could become
the megaphone for the media's constant complaint that
Bush ran in the center and is governing from the right.
WORSHIPPING
THE WAR GOD
In
his panegyric
to the idea of "national greatness," Weekly Standard
editor David Brooks opines that "it almost doesn't matter
what great task government sets for itself, as long
as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness,"
but clearly war is the greatest source and symbol of
greatness as far as these "reformers" are concerned.
In a less grandiloquent, more concrete piece, in which
he extols McCain as the Rooseveltian archetype that
embodies the "national greatness" ideal, the remedy
for a nation that has become "too bourgeois" and "soft,"
Brooks writes:
"These
days McCain is most famous for his foreign policy views,
especially his response to the war over Kosovo. Aside
from his apparently millions of appearances on the talk
shows, McCain has delivered two major foreign policy
addresses of late-one in Kansas just before the Kosovo
adventure got started, and one at a think tank in Washington
on April 13. Taken together, they have a clear message:
America's moral destiny is wrapped up in its status
as a superpower. If America ceases to assert itself
as the democratic superpower, promoting self-government
around the world, it will cease to be the America we
love.
THE
AMERICA WE LOVE
The
America Brooks loves is not the America of the Founding
Fathers, not the republic of his forefathers, but a
bloated empire founded on none other than Madeleine
Albright's hubristic conceit of America as "the
indispensable nation." But don't we all look
forward to being citizens of the New Rome? Brooks can
hardly believe it, but there are some dissenters: "You'd
think all Americans would want their country to remain
the world's sole superpower," he writes. "After all,
the game theorists teach us that nations always seek
to maximize their power." It is true that governments
are constantly seeking to maximize their power: to "national
greatness" conservatives, however, the nation is
the government (that is, the federal government),
and therefore this kind of power lust is a good
thing. But a few reactionaries, Brooks complains, just
don't see it that way:
"If
you look around the op-ed pages, you discover that many
are ambivalent. Many liberals believe that multilateral
power is more ethical than American power. Many on the
right believe that a superpower America means a Leviathan
state that will trample on communities. Realists don't
like mixing morality and foreign policy, whereas isolationists
see foreign policy as a one-way ratchet that can corrupt
a nation's values but never improves them."
ALL
IS VANITY
In
short, we should've launched a ground war in the Balkans
as a path to moral self-improvement. According to the
prophets of National Greatness, we can starve the children
of Iraq to death – 5,000 per month – and, instead of
being corrupted, be improved: we should make
war, not love, in order to reform our souls. This, in
a nutshell, is the "national greatness" the McCainiacs
aspire to: the greatness of the conqueror. The traditional
conservative distrust of government, the idea of subsidiarity,
the skeptical stance when it comes to remaking the world
is here discarded and replaced by out-and-out state-worship.
This is what animates Kristol, Wittmann, and their nascent
movement: the spirit of vainglory. As such, it is a
vehicle perfectly suited to McCain, whose self-regard
borders on megalomania.
THE
ROAD TO RUIN
As
to whether "national greatness" conservatism – or, at
this point, "centrism" – is an ideology that can mobilize
an organized movement, and achieve some existence outside
McCain's media amen corner and Marshall Wittmann's daydreams,
remains to be seen. As far as the future of the GOP
is concerned, what is clear is that McCain – and, standing
behind him, Kristol – seems bent on a course of rule
or ruin. As for the rest of us, a McCain victory – "Mad
John" in the White House – would mean rule and
ruin.
