I'm returning to writing Arms and Influence after the longest absence so far. I could cite any number of valid reasons, mostly related to work, that have interfered with blogging. However, I have to be brutally honest about another reason: disgust.
Blogging runs on hope. You have no idea who reads you, but you hope that someone does, and will take you seriously enough to respond once in a while. You'd have to be an egomaniac to think that you'll impart more than a tiny amount of momentum to the vector of current events, but you hope that you might nudge the world in a slightly more positive direction.
It's hard on the soul, therefore, to have your hopes dashed. I'm not saying that I've lapsed into complete hopelessness, but I have been plagued with a great deal of disgust.
With whom? Let's start with the Democratic Party. It's not hard to figure out why the President and the Congress both have abysmal approval ratings. In 2006, voters sent more Democrats to Washington because they expected them to take action against Administration policies that were variously bone-headed, illegal, and corrupt. The electorate expected hearings into important matters, such as the conduct of the Iraq war, that had received far less public discussion and Congressional oversight than they deserved. Voters also expected the newly-elected Democrats to impress us with history-making legislation, at a time when history seems to be making mincemeat of us.
We saw a little of these sorts of changes, but certainly not enough. There are two big problems with the Democratic Party right now. First, the leadership got immediately distracted by the 2008 presidential campaign. Apparently, Democratic legislators such as Rahm Emanuel think that the 2006 mid-term election was just the set-up for the 2008 presidential election. Here's a clip from HBO's Real Time, in which Emanuel claims that, if you want to fix the Iraq debacle, all you need to do is vote for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008. (And just listen to the audience's response to that argument.)
Given the over-long, over-expensive, and over-televised presidential campaigns, I was worried last November that exactly this sort of distraction would occur. The distraction plays to a Democratic Party tendency that is the second major problem: never playing offense. The Democrats are still letting the other part set the political agenda. While the opposition keeps its followers mobilized through aggressive action, the Democrats keep their followers de-mobilized through timidity. (Mobilization is a lot more than asking for campaign contributions.)
In short, the Democrats act as if none of them really know anything about politics. In my fantasy world, I'm sending every Democratic leader and legislator a copy of The Prince, with the section on whether it's better to be feared or loved heavily underlined. No one is afraid of the Democrats. That's no surprise, since they don't take risks that might lose them votes.
Putting Democrats into power in 2006 was not merely a question of policy. Many citizens saw their votes as individual atoms that would help rebuild Constitutional authority in US politics. Part of the outrage against the Republicans, both in the White House and in Congress, has been their eagerness to circumvent or ignore parts of the Constitution that they found inconvenient. The silly notion of the unitary executive--it's not argued or supported well enough to deserve the label of "doctrine"--is only one facet of this indifference and even hostility to the Constitution.
In 2003, Americans collectively ignored the Constitutional checks on the President's warmaking powers, which are hardly absolute. In the last several years, Americans have seen the deliberate dismantling of habeas corpus, unreasonable search and seizure, due process, and other Constitutional guarantees. For these voters--the ones who often volunteered their time, money, and passion to support Democratic candidates--the Democrats in Congress had a far bigger responsibility than rectifying bad policies. They were also responsible for reconstructing the institutions that prevented bad policies from being pursued in the first place.
Before getting sucked into the world of committee meetings, legislative compromise, filibusters, and endless fundraising, every Senator and Congressman takes the following oath of office:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the
Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and
domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that
I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or
purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the
duties of the office on which I am about to enter.
Every day on the job in Washington, these men and women pass the marble and granite manifestations of our Constitution. They frequently drive by the actual Constitution and Bill of Rights, as preserved in the National Archives. Every day, visitors to the capitol, people who have sworn no such oath, are impressed by the wisdom and gravity of the US form of government. We expect our elected representatives to share these feelings, and to be bound by the duties to "support and defend the Constitution," even if you lost a few votes in the process.
You now understand a big part of what has kept me from writing this blog for a month: it's hard to continue when you don't feel you're doing much good. Meanwhile, as we waste time on who might be the Republican or Democratic candidates for the presidency, men and women die every day in a war started in haste, waged indolently, undermining our national security, warping and breaking our form of government, and poisoning our national soul, but on which the man in the White House insists absolutely.
