Alienation and its costs

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Bill Bennett last week on his radio show in an interview focused on Bennett's new book, "America: The Last Best Hope." Towards the end of the interview, Bennett and Hewitt get into a discussion of appeasement where they Hewitt asks about similarities to the 1930s in which people today are ignoring the threats from Jihadism plainly visible. Bennett responds by pointing out another similarity which I will call that of the "Useful Idiots." Bennett compares Jimmy Carter to Charles Lindbergh, Joe Kennedy, etc. Excerpt:

BB: ...I think there’s another parallel to the Vietnam situation, withdrawal from Vietnam, and the temptation to withdraw from Iraq, I think is one parallel. The other is the 30’s in Europe. And you know, it’s quite the extraordinary story, and a lot of people don’t know about Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh, a great American hero who flirted with the Nazis. I spend more time than I probably should have on the ’36 Olympics. I could have spent fifty pages on it. It’s a fascinating period, and the opposition by some to the Olympics, based on what Hitler was doing, you know, there were concentration camps that had started. They were forty miles, fifty miles away from the Olympics site. But people didn’t want to hear it. They just didn’t believe it. What does he mean, they said, the Cliveden Set said over there, you know, over tea in England with Lindbergh and Joe Kennedy. If there’s a bad dude in this book…

HH: Yeah, you give him his due, and I’m glad.

BB: Yeah, well he is just…he deserves it. I mean, he and Jimmy Carter, I’ll tell you, I mean, over there, just trying to just...selling…not selling out, but underselling and undervaluing the Brits, and just saying the Germans will just whip their butts, and who’s side here was he on, in terms of the Allies? It was a very bad time for…again, people, very smart people being blind to very clear and obvious things, just like today. When Zawahiri says we want to reestablish the caliphate from Spain to Iran, people say what does he mean?

HH: Right.

BB: What does he mean? Well, I think he means exactly that. When Hitler says we will exterminate the Jews, we’ll rid the world of the Jews, what does he mean? That’s exactly what he meant.

HH: There’s an uncomfortable parallel as well for Republicans in your chapter on the Great War.

BB: Yeah.

HH: At home, Wilson alienated the Republicans utterly. He could not cooperate with the bitter enders. Now I’m not sure that Bush intentionally set out to do this, in fact, I’m sure he didn’t. But that’s where we are now, a completely alienated partisan divide.

This "alienated partisan divide" has now become, as I noted in an early post, a threat larger than any Weapon of Mass Destruction. Part of the problem this generates can be seen in the questions that are asked as part of polls. Bennett get to the impact of poll questions after Hewitt's comments above:

HH: [...] How does the country get around that [partisan divide], Bill Bennett? Or is it impossible to do so until the next presidential election?

BB: I don’t know. I mean, I think everybody has to pull the oar here. We all have to do what we can. I think lots of small things, for the people who are not presidents, so there’s…everyone has a job to do. Radio talk show hosts have a job to do. Columnists have a job to do. Citizens and teachers have a job to do. Pollsters have a job to do. I want a question, Hugh, I want a poll question. Would you be in favor of withdrawal from Iraq if you knew the following things: that instead of hundreds of people a month dying, there will be thousands a week, that Zawahiri and bin Laden, and whoever’s in charge of al Qaeda at the moment will be dancing, saying we defeated them, we said they were not a strong horse, we said the U.S. was a paper tiger, we said they would run, and we were right, that the world’s second largest, now it turns out, reserve of oil is in Iraq, and that will be controlled by who? Al Qaeda? Iran? Both of them? All of them? If you know all of that is going to happen, and the rest of the world draws the same conclusions that people started to draw after Vietnam, that the U.S. cannot be trusted, when it says it will be there, its word is not good, would you still be in favor? You
know, these ridiculous interviews that these Democrats are doing, thank God, goodness that people are at least asking these questions. Are you prepared for genocide? Are you prepared for massive slaughter?

HH: Right.

BB: A couple of the ones with intellectual honesty have said yes, we are, but that’s why we’ve got to keep the troops close, so we can send them back in. Well, what the heck does that mean? What kind of a policy is that? Some have said well, that’s what we’ve got now is genocide. No, you don’t. That’s not what you have. You have something a good deal short of that. What you have is ugly and it’s brutal, but it’s not genocide. You know, Shakespeare’s Lear says it’s not the worst as long as we can say this is the worst. This is not the worst. Things can get worse than this, and they did in Vietnam, and they did in Cambodia.

HH: And it could very quickly do so.

So, in 2007, here we are in a place where winning the political argument is more important than either the national interest or the national defense.

Writing in the WSJ, in his fittingly-titled column called "Wonderland," Daniel Henninger writes, after an analysis of Spain's current political impasse created by The Socialist Premier Zapateros' desire to pin the entire blame for the Spanish Civil War on supporters of General Franco, in an article titled "Dancing With Ghosts" that:

I want to suggest that American politics today is talking and fighting its way toward a similar impasse. How did it come to this?

It has been argued in this column before that the origins of our European-like polarization can be found in the Florida legal contest at the end of the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential campaign. That was a mini civil war. With the popular vote split 50-50, we spent weeks in a tragicomic pitched battle over contested votes in a few Florida counties. The American political system, by historical tradition flexible and accommodative, was unable to turn off the lawyers and forced nine unelected judges to settle it. So they did, splitting 5-4. In retrospect, a more judicious Supreme Court minority would have seen the danger in that vote (as Nixon did in 1960) and made the inevitable result unanimous to avoid recrimination. A pacto. Instead, we got recrimination.

From that day, American politics has been a pitched battle, waged mainly by Democrats against the "illegitimate" Republican presidency. Some Democrats might say the origins of this polarization races to the 1998 House impeachment of Bill Clinton. After that the goal was payback. To lose as the Democrats did in 2000 was, and remains, unendurable (as likely it would have for Republicans if they'd lost 5 to 4).

Politics of its nature is about polar competition. Opposed ideas should compete for public support. Withdraw all possibility of contact or crossover, however, and "politics" becomes just a word that euphemizes national alienation. That, effectively, is what we have now.

Exhibit A through Z is the Iraq war, a major military undertaking by the United States fought, after the 2002 resolution, with little or no support by one of the nation's two political parties. When one Democratic Senator persisted in support, his dissent was not allowed, as normal in our politics, but punished with ostracism. Feel free to call this take-no-prisoners opposition "principle," but it's also
uncharacteristic for our politics.

As we head to the summer, with all of Iran's machinations in play in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, the Gulf, God help us...