There is always a danger that we can overestimate the problems of our era. For as along as I can remember there have been doomsday prophets writing books and appearing on the talk shows predicting everything from the next great economic crash to population explosions that will have us all living in conditions like a New York subway car during rush hour.
The pundits seem to call every presidential election the “most important election of our lifetimes.” We are not the first generation of Americans that has had to struggle to make ends meet, deal with civil strife and confront an enemy abroad — but it can feel like it when things are in turmoil.
So perhaps all the anger directed at George W. Bush is no different from what F.D.R., Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan went through. Emotions rise to the surface during political campaigns. It is par for the course. Maybe the hatred for Bush seems uniquely intense to us only because we are nearing the election, and that it will all be forgotten a few months from now when the country is wrapped up in things like the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards.
Then again, maybe not. In all honesty, I can’t remember anything like what we are seeing of late. In early October, the Wall Street Journal reported on AFL-CIO-coordinated protests at Bush-Cheney election campaign headquarters around the country. In Orlando, FLoriday, approximately 60 union protestors ransacked the Bush-Cheney headquarters, breaking the wrist of one campaign staffer. In Miami, 100 union protestors stormed the Bush-Cheney offices, pushing volunteers aside as they took control of the facility. In Tampa, 35 protestors took over the Republican office and intimidated the elderly volunteers working there.
Similar demonstrations took place at Republican headquarters in Independence, Missouri; Kansas City, Missouri; Dearborn, Michigan; St. Paul, Minnesota; and West Allis, Wisconsin. The Bush-Cheney headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee had its plate-glass windows shattered by gunfire. A Republican office in Seattle was broken into and its computer files were stolen; a similar incident took place in Spokane. These are not routine occurrences during a presidential election.
The rhetoric has grown in intensity as well. The actress Jessica Lange told reporters, “I hate Bush. I despise him and his entire administration.” The actor Woody Harrelson said, “The warmongers who stole the White House are waging a perpetual war on any non-white country they choose to describe as terrorist.” It is the same spirit that motivated Julia Roberts to state a few years ago that “'Republican' comes in the dictionary just after reptile and just above repugnant.”
Jonathan Chait, a writer for the New Republic magazine, elaborated on the theme in a column entitled “The Case for Bush Hatred.” He wrote, “I hate President George W. Bush. There I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in US history. And, while I’m tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons too… I hate the way he walks — shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks — blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang… I despise him with the white-hot intensity of a thousand guns.”
Chait tells us that he has “friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche. Nor is this phenomenon limited to my personal experience: Pollster Geoff Garin, speaking to the New York Times, called Bush hatred “as strong as anything I’ve experienced in 25 years now of polling.” Columnist Robert Novak described it as a “hatred…that I have never seen in 44 years of campaign watching.”
Chait closes his column with the following: “Bush is a dullard lacking any moral constraints in his pursuit of partisan gain, loyal to no principle save the comfort of the very rich, unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national interest, and a man who, on those occasions when he actually does make a correct decision, does so almost by accident… For this president, defeat is too kind a fate.” (I wonder what Chait has in mind.)
Well? Are the above comments nothing that should concern us? Are they expressions of routine election-year passions, modern-day versions of the shouts of glee from liberal circles when Richard Nixon was forced to resign and the gloating that filled the air on conservative talk shows when the evidence surfaced about Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress? Could it be that the intensity of the animosity against Bush is nothing more than an expression of a not surprising bitterness on the part of Democrats over the memories of the Florida recounts and how Bush lost the popular vote in the 2000 election? No doubt Republicans would still be chafing if Al Gore had emerged triumphant from that brouhaha.
Or might it be that something unique is taking place? Might the anger against Bush be indicative of a growing ideological divide in the country, the tip of an iceberg that should concern us greatly? Let us return to Jonathan Chait’s column. He informs us that his anger against Bush is heightened because Bush’s election came “at a time when most Americans approved of Clinton’s policies.” I submit that these are revealing words.
The Left was convinced that Clinton’s victories at the polls represented the defeat of the Reagan years; that the tide had turned in their favor and that we were on our way toward a European-style welfare state and an ascendancy of the values of the 1960s’ counterculture. Bush’s victory in 2000 put a damper on those hopes. His re-election could dash them. The Left hates Bush because he represents to them the cultural values of “red-state” America. (Whether Bush deserves to be seen as the champion of traditional values is another matter. The point just now is only that the Left sees him that way.) Thus the explosion of anger against Bush and the phenomenon of seemingly rational people making excuses for Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11, even while conceding it is intellectually dishonest and a cheap shot.
We must keep in mind that a democracy cannot work unless the side that loses an election is willing to work within the system and bide its time as the “loyal opposition” until the next election. Might we be moving beyond that state of affairs in the United States? People are not likely to be the loyal opposition to those they “hate,” “despise,” and consider “repugnant.” There are historical models for what can happen when the citizens of a country see each other in these stark terms. I am thinking of Spain in the 1930s.
Spain is a country far more homogeneous than our own, both ethnically and culturally. Yet we know what happened. George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway have given us a vivid picture of this country divided against itself, with a populace split into factions unable to view each other as anything resembling a loyal opposition. Priests were rounded up and shot and nuns were raped and killed by left-wing radicals. The Nationalists bombed Guernica and put Madrid under siege.
The scene of demonstrators rampaging through opposition party headquarters at the bequest of their union’s leadership and celebrities proudly exclaiming their hatred for the political opposition could have been lifted from the pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at [email protected].
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
