Sultan accuses liberals of "exploiting terrorism and riots to their own advantage", and using a strategy of "security through appeasement".
With the exception of the civilian rioting angle, though, isn't this what both parties do? Is anyone seriously going to claim that conservatives don't exploit terrorism for their own political purposes and tactics? We're still hearing crap about how "terrorists want Democrats elected," and "if liberals come into power, it will lead to more terrorism," "don't switch horses in the middle of a race" and similar B.S. The two parties use terrorism as a great way of meshing foreign and domestic policy, and getting free scare tactics points, to boot. If liberals use rioters as pseudo-allies as a way of pressing their argument (vote for us or they'll be riots), I have to wonder if conservatives aren't equally guilty of using groups like Al Qaeda in a similar way.
Elections by way of the mob has been an old tactic of the progressive side. Andrew Jackson was after all elected by the mob, that proceeded to trample and trash the White House. In the French Revolution, murderous mobs were capably employed to deal with "Enemies of the Revolution", intimidating anyone who might dare speak out against them.
During the Civil War Riots in New York, touched off by the Democratic Tammany Hall in order to sabotage the War and help elect a Democrat President-- mobs targeted Republicans and Republican editors, before going off to lynch blacks and hang police officers from streetlamps. These riots were not only confined to New York either, but took place in several Northern urban centers that were Democratic party strongholds.
As demographics changed, so did the rioting. In the second half of the 20th century, American Democrats would be more likely to rely on riots by blacks, rather than riots against blacks-- a sea change for a party that had spent a good deal of time in bed with the Klan.
Here Sultan tries the old "both parties are the same now as they were 50/100/200 years ago" trick. When was the last time anyone called Andrew Jackson a progressive? He screwed Congress out of power to shore up the Executive branch, which sounds a lot like what Dubya's done during his term. Does that make HIM a progressive? Tammany Hall? Boss Tweed? Oh yeah, you can't go to any Democratic Convention without people singing his praises. Give me a break. That's like judging modern-day Republicans by using U.S. Grant and Benjamin Harrison as standards. (Or better yet, the American Republican Party- hey, it's almost the same name, that's good enough, right?) Besides, what happened to the "liberal/conservative" benchmark as opposed to Democrat and Republican?
In the age of Muslim Terror-- conservatives offer the defensive and offensive use of force-- while liberals preach that the only solution is to meet their grievances. When war efforts falter, the voices of liberals are more likely to be heard preaching appeasement. While the appeasement of course never succeeds-- it isn't meant to.
If conservatives respond to escalating violence with escalating force-- liberals respond with escalating appeasement. Violence is a condition they wish to prolong because it enables them to play 'Good Cop' warning that a failure to elect them will result in even greater violence.
See above. Conservatives play a slightly different tune ("we'll bomb Afghanistan back to the stone age") but they're playing the terror card and the "elect us or things will get worse card" just as much. "Only solution?" Yeah right. You could just as easily swing this the other way- liberals suggest a number of different responses, including force but also diplomacy, coalition-building, etc, whereas conservatives are more likely to want to go it alone, guns blazing, whether or not that's actually likely to solve the problem (see Afghanistan, Iraq). Neither approach is foolproof, and neither is fuck-up-proof. But this representation is simply dishonest. And don't think "the other guy's in bed with Bin Laden" isn't just another way of trying to come off as "Good Cop."
The essential liberal position holds that society as it is-- is evil and unjust and that violence against it, is directed by those who are oppressed by it. Violence is therefore righteous and it is the victims of violence who are at fault. This is not a condition that can be remedied by anything short of a Communist like transformation of society from one that serves individual ambitions, to a collective society that has rendered all individuality moot in favor of equality enforced by the state.
That's the "essential" liberal position? Says who? Marx, maybe, but I get the impression that most liberals are a tad more nuanced than that. Besides, conservatives also think some forms of violence are legitimate- the American Revolution, the Maccabee revolt, hell, this whole War On Terror thing. What's "collateral damage" if not blaming the victims? Oh, we dropped a bomb and flattened a village and the terrorists got away? Well, those villagers should have known better than to hang out with terrorists! Please.
The ultimate purpose of liberalism is to bring about this transformation into a totalitarian socialist state.
Go take a poll on that one and get back to me.
Violence is the means for achieving that transformation. To the progressives, violence by the disenfranchised and oppressed is the engine of social change. Only by voting for them-- can the violence be employed to bring about a real social transformation. Whether that violence is the violence of mobs ransacking the city in protest of having to fight a war on behalf of blacks or riots in the ghettoes-- whether it's suicide bombers in the London subway or rock throwers in the West Bank-- the left wing approach is to view that violence as a symptom of injustice which must be given in to in order to create a just society.
NOT necessarily. Sometimes, however, rioting is indeed symptomatic of larger social ills, such as in the French Revolution, which, despite its many flaws, was in part the result of people actually starving in the streets. This is the basic idea behind any civil disobedience- see the Orange revolution in Ukraine, the anti-Disengagement campaign in Israel, the Cedar revolution in Lebanon, Tiananmen Square, the riots to get Milosevic out of power, or the Civil Rights Movement. Just because some riots and protests are ONLY about violence doesn't mean that all riots are done for the hell of it. Furthermore, if riots are partially the result of cultural and economic alienation, then some combination of trying to address grievances with increased force is likely to be more effective in stopping them than just cracking skulls and prosecuting people, which is going to make the targets more radicalized, probably get them more support from fence-sitters, and eventually create an evolutionary process which makes them more dangerous because they know how to avoid getting caught. Force isn't always the best answer, and that's the problem with the conservative argument. No, we shouldn't give Bin Laden a foot massage, but we should understand why he's popular with Muslims and see if there's any way we can undercut that support without betraying our own values. (We can even leave Israel out of the equation for a minute: we support various totalitarian Arab and Muslim states because they're supposedly "pro-Western." If we started putting pressure on them to reform, we would probably look a lot less hypocritical to Arabs who see us blabbing about democracy as justification for nation-building while enabling so many countries to remain profoundly undemocratic.) Just because someone is an enemy doesn't preclude them from having a point.
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