The Republican carnival strived to look benign, but the quality of their oratory was strained, and the mask kept slipping.
The party had come to New York as if to liberate it, as if it were fetid, sordid Baghdad, both sinned against and sinning. In return, the Republicans would ask that New York not the living city of Democrats and demonstrators, but its wounds of recent memory save them. They would press its suffering into service, and make it serve their power.
The Republicans tried not to notice that they had enemies in New York, and kept their smiles plastered on their faces. They might have borrowed the ruling BJPs slogan from the spring election campaign in India: India Shining. For two evenings before the partys patience wore thin, only good cops climbed onto the platform of Madison Square Garden. What they promised was war.
Dont miss the weekly reports and analysis of the war on terror by Todd Gitlins openDemocracy fellow-columnist, Paul Rogers.
The nation is indeed embroiled in a sort-of war several of them, in fact but there is nothing sort-of about the war that the Republicans dream of. It is a war of will and a war of wish. The will expresses the wish that the world be tamed so that Americans can once again retreat behind their oceans and celebrate their godliness and all-around excellence. The Republicans believe in will. They believe that America is the incarnation of will, and that their own successes are its very emblems.
They are not second-guessers of national history, they are positive fatalists, so they are not aware that todays Republican party of Christian fanaticism and plutocratic disingenuousness brings to mind the ruinous smugness of an earlier era.
Without knowing it, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was not a political man and not easily given to straight-up moralism, shrewdly identified the Republican version of America in his summary description of reckless characters who were transfixed by their images reflected in the bubble in which they lived: They were careless people, Tom and Daisy they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made .
The war that has rescued George W Bush from the emptiness of his ambition and given him a purpose he believes divine is, in the Republican dream, an endless war. In an interview on the first day, Bush, with his usual maladroitness, slipped up by declaring, with his usual air of firmness on a subject to which he has given no serious thought, that the war against terror could not be won. Awkwardly he hastened over to Rush Limbaughs radio tirade show to explain that what he had said was not what he had meant. Of course we would win! But there was an inadvertent truth in the gaffe. The war is everything, the victory nothing.
For all the occasional talk about compassionate conservatism, for all the rhapsodies to the Statue of Liberty and the unborn child, the oaths of hostility to activist judges and to Hollywood, the chief Republican theme is embattlement. Embattlement for the party in power is not only a fact but a purpose and an excuse from reason. Theirs is a war against an enemy barely acknowledged, let alone comprehended. The war against this enemy is tantamount to a war against all enemies whom the president declares to be enemies. The relationship between the killers of 9/11 and the Iraq that the US now occupies is nil, but one speaker after another arose to affirm, in almost indistinguishable words, that war against one was war against the other.
The party speakers who were touted as moderates former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Senator John McCain, Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and George Pataki of New York expressed not the slightest qualm about the way their leader justified war in Iraq and pursued it. Nothing about it was explicitly problematic for them: not the false justifications, not the farce that passed for diplomacy, not the ill-preparation that resulted in massive looting and mayhem, not the massive rejection of American troops today.
As for the issues where these men distinguish themselves from their leader so-called cultural issues like abortion, gay marriage, and stem-cell research they spoke not a word. Their moderation was in their reputation. Their will is to be willing front-men.
It was left to the convention keynoter, the barely Democratic ex-Senator from Georgia, Zell Miller, to speak for the collective unconscious and fire the delegates up with hatred. Like the McCarthyite Johnny Iselin character in The Manchurian Candidate, Miller snarled through his entire speech. He snarled about the Democrats manic obsession to bring down the commander-in-chief. He trashed Kerry for opposing weapons systems that Dick Cheney, as secretary of defense, had also opposed (a point that one CNN interviewer did make in an interview afterwards). Miller, a born-again Christian, seems to have hastened past the Sermon on the Mount during his Bible study. As Joe Conason writes in Salon,
Last February, along with his Senate colleagues and religious right favorites James Inhofe, R-Okla., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan., Miller signed on as an original sponsor of the Constitution Restoration Act. That bill...would forbid federal judges from hearing any case that challenges the public acknowledgment of God.
Miller ushered in another guest appearance by the obligatory canard spread by the perversely named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: As a war protestor, Kerry blamed our military. In an apotheosis of militarism, he declared: It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest.
He proclaimed: Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. He spat out the phrase twenty years of votes (Kerry, against weapons) with a ferocity suggesting that what he deeply wanted to bark out was twenty years of treason. If all this werent enough, Miller challenged an interviewer later that night to a duel. Somebody must have asked Senator Miller beforehand if he wouldnt like to pass the time by playing a game of solitaire.
The presidents words on Thursday night were mainly anticlimactic boilerplate. We will extend the frontiers of freedom, that sort of thing. I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes. Striking terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home. We are working to advance liberty in the broader Middle East. Democracy is coming to the broader Middle East. We have led, many have joined, and America and the world are safer. This is a calling from beyond the stars. When Bush finally got to the subject of Iraq, he galloped over the mystery of those non-appearing weapons of mass destruction.
There were a few new wrinkles in the presidents speech a promise of tax simplification, rural health centers, lower insurance rates for small business, affordable homes, private accounts under social security, childrens health plans. He had the gall to say he would cut federal spending without raising taxes. He declared that he would reduce dependence on foreign sources of energy. He denounced frivolous lawsuits. He stumped for a simpler tax code. Cheers were routine.
Hand it to the Republicans: they know how to be disciplined with exceptions. After a Virginia delegate was seen passing out band-aids adorned with Purple Hearts on the floor the first night, signaling the superficiality of Kerrys Vietnam wounds (so it was said by ex-presidential candidate Bob Dole, who was then defended by ex-president George HW Bush), the official Republican leadership asked them to demur. Apparently they did. But they left their mark. The bad cops faded from the screen, leaving the kinder, gentler Bush.
But the Bush of compassionate conservatism is not the most deeply beloved. To his defenders, the most beloved Bush is the warrior king without a scratch. No wonder they acclaim his martial sonorities the terrorists should be afraid, because freedom is on the march. The language is democracy but its body-language is force. The defenders are right. Endless war is the ticket.
