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I already posted this piece to CCN and kos, but now that DU has a Jounal feature, I also wanted to add this to my Journal here, and I can only do so by posting it. Sorry, it's long. Here goes:
Can the American Center Hold?
The more ideologically oriented among us, using "us" in the largest sense possible here so that it includes both rightists and leftists, have always had an ambivalent relationship with the Center in American politics. America has always had radicals, but their power typically was marginal at best. So while the Left of course will always want it's way, as will the Right, the center traditionally keeps each side from excessively tearing at the other's throats in the throes of a political death match.
In the vast Center sit the compromisers, the appeasers, the practical and the pragmatic, the consensus builders or the sell outs, depending on how you view them. In other words, moderates of every shape and color.
When pundits of politics old (meaning the 1970's or earlier) spoke about the great wisdom of the American Public, those were the folks they meant to describe. Middle of the road America, middle class America, and more often than not, folks with roots somewhere in the middle of America. These people, it was said, comprised the center of gravity in American politics, and they brought with them the cohesion that kept America united as one people.
Like all great folk lore, there was always more than a little myth sprinkled onto that old chest nut, but it wasn't just smoke and mirrors. America is a colorful nation with a colorful history, and wild episodes of contrary and dissident thinking have always been part of our collective sociological landscape. The McCarthy period was a rock the boat flare up, so was the mid to late 60's. Even so, through it all, the most powerful voice in America was thought to belong to the silent majority (back before that phrase became a partisan term). The Center still held sway.
Ever since the end of the second World War at least, whenever the cussing and fussing died down, most of us at least secretly assumed the great American Center would prevail, to carry on business more or less as usual, with the occasional lean to the left or lean to the right, sort of like a sail boat tacking across a headwind, while constantly moving toward a fixed destination.
America trumpeted itself as an oasis of stability in a turbulent world, with orderly transitions of power, and a bi-partisan political system that claimed to somehow legitimately represent Americans of almost all persuasions, remarkably without excessive rancor. And for a very long time the picture of America that it presented to the world more or less fit with that soundtrack. Call it grand theater, or call it a self fulfilling truth, Americans also largely embraced that image of ourselves.
Images, as any marketing guru can tell you, are powerful. Images effect reality. And inside America, our basic two party system in times of great need and at times of great stress, would almost miraculously transform itself into an image of bipartisanship, never completely so of course, but always just enough to prevent the splintering of the great American center. Affirmative action gained bi-partisan support after the urban riots of the late 1960's. Presidents Ford and Carter restored openness to government after Watergate and Nixon's forced resignation.
More recently the image of an America held together by a strong gravitational force, came close to dissolution. President Clinton's impeachment, and the protracted controversy over the 2000 Elections, both severely tested the American center. But Bill Clinton kept right on gainfully governing, George W. Bush ran as a "Uniter, not a Divider" in 2000, and Al Gore pledged support to George W. Bush as America's duly elected next President, helping settle the dust of a disputed election. And then out of the literal ashes of 9/11, America woke up more united as a people on September the 12th 2001, than it had been since Pearl Harbor.
9/12 feels like ancient history now, or perhaps more like a dream, for if that moment was real, how to explain the utter tearing apart of the American consensus that followed? Did Terror from the Middle East do this to America, or was it something closer to home? For now there is indeed a war being fought on our homeland, but it isn't against Terrorists, not yet anyway.
We continue to watch Iraq on the evening news, with both increasing sadness and alarm, but America is slipping toward it's own next Civil War. It is a civil war waged through civil laws on civil issues, being fought on constitutional grounds. And now the American Center is splintering. Our Middle is melting like the global icecaps, the waters are rising along with the temperature of political debate, and the question now needs to be asked; Has the political atmosphere in America been polluted beyond the tipping point? Or can leaders of varied stripes yet emerge who can make the American people, and the constitutional system we inherited from our ancestors, whole again?
The rhetoric of harmony from the 2000 Presidential campaign has long since been discarded. The Bush Administration cultivates power in America by cleaving divisions between Americans, and can anyone really be surprised? This is the American President who declared to the entire world; you are either with me or you are against us.
This is the American President who declares himself "The Decider", as if no other power exists in our Democracy that can stand up to his authority. This is the American President whose Justice Department unilaterally chooses which parts of the Bill of Rights are relevant in today's world, and what parts of the Geneva Convention the United States, a full signatory to it, is legally bound to uphold. And finally this is the American President who determines for himself which parts of legislation passed by Congress he accepts as binding on his authority. There are few real checks or balances on the authority of the Presidency willingly accepted by this "Decider". George W. Bush is sure he knows what is best for America, and believes his mission now is to act unwaveringly in accordance with that certainty.
The most non-partisan of American institutions, the American military, is already showing cracks in the face of the powerful centrifugal forces that Bush's unyielding solitary exercise of power has unleashed. Either current and retired military leaders must offer quiet uncritical allegiance to the Commander in Chief and his Secretary of Defense, after repeatedly and recklessly having the expertise of their combined lifetimes of service to America disregarded, or they must speak out in public to share with the American people what they know in their hearts is true: This Administration has a rigid fixed agenda that leaves no room for questioning voices to the plans it holds for America in the world, no matter how expert, how distinguished, or how deeply patriotic the source of concerns raised may be.
Congress has the power to assert a countervailing check on the unbridled assertion of narrow partisan authority that is the hall mark of the Bush Administration, but Congress has Republican majorities in both houses, and rightly or wrongly most Republicans in the past tied their fate to that of George W. Bush. The 2006 Elections are approaching, and some previously thought of as "moderate Republicans" are running for reelection. They face a stark choice, and they face that stark choice now, before the campaign season inevitably lurches into full scale partisan attack and counter attack mode.
Will they run by fixing full blame on Democrats for the deep crisis our nation faces, one of ever increasing danger as we sit at the edge of the next Middle Eastern war? Or will Republican moderates, and those Conservatives interested in conserving the Constitutional Checks and Balances inherent in and essential to our Democracy, reach across the partisan aisle in search of the American Center, the one that always pulled together previously whenever America was in danger?
Because now it feels increasingly like the opening lines of "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeates:
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"
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