Republicans have some
major advantages over Democrats due to the money showered upon them by their corporate allies and the
control of the news media and the
voting machines by those corporate allies.
Yet all that may not be enough for them to maintain control of Congress this year. In the process of sucking up to their corporate masters, Republicans have had to act against the interests of the vast majority of American citizens – and
recent polling data suggest that the cumulative effect of their many transgressions against ordinary Americans is exerting its toll. After all, why should Americans vote for a Party that continually
votes against affordable health care for the American people (including
veterans’ health care), against a
minimum wage capable of keeping people out of poverty, and against any law or policy that cuts into the profit margins of the wealthiest people on earth, no matter how important it is for everyone else.
Therefore, it looks like Republicans are going to have to go to their ace in the hole this fall – the politics of fear.
John Dean, former White House Counsel to Richard Nixon, and the man whose
testimony in the Watergate hearings did much to bring down the Nixon administration, talks about this in his new book, “
Conservatives Without Conscience”.
The gist of Dean’s book deals with what he calls “authoritarian conservatism”, which characterizes the Bush/Cheney administration, as well as most of today’s Republican Party. Dean describes research which shows authoritarian conservatives to be generally lacking in conscience, submissive to authority, mean spirited, manipulative, dishonest, dogmatic, hypocritical, moralistic, intolerant, militant, vengeful, highly religious, and having little self-awareness, as well as having several other unflattering traits that are too numerous to mention here. He describes the origin of this research:
The study of authoritarianism began during the Holocaust, as scientists could not understand why people in Germany and Italy were tolerating, if not supporting, Hitler and Mussolini. They wanted to know if that sort of blind allegiance could develop in the United States. Accordingly, they set about the task of finding out what types of people were susceptible to authoritarian leadership. After a half century, they have found answers…
In a nutshell, the answer is the type of people who belong to today’s Republican Party.
The second to the last section of the last chapter of Dean’s book deals with the politics of fear – specifically as practiced by today’s Bush/Cheney administration – or rather today’s Cheney/Bush administration, as Dean describes:
As Bush proceeds with his second term… it is abundantly clear that he is a mental lightweight…Cheney, it appears, knows how to manipulate the president like a puppet, and handles his oversized ego by making him believe ideas or decisions are his own when, in fact, they are Cheney’s… Cheney is the mind of this presidency, with Bush its salesman. Bush simply does not have the mental facility or inclination for serious critical analysis of the policies he is being pushed to adopt.
John Dean on the Politics of FearAmong the most troubling of the authoritarian and radical tactics being employed by Bush and Cheney are the politics of fear. A favorite gambit of Latin American dictators who run sham democracies, fear-mongering has generally been frowned upon in American politics…
Frightening Americans, nonetheless, has become a standard ploy for Bush, Cheney, and their surrogates. They add a fear factor to every course of action they pursue, whether it is their radical foreign policy of preemptive war, their call for tax cuts, their desire to privatize social security, or their implementation of a radical new health care scheme. This fear-mongering began with the administration’s political exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy, when it made the fight against terrorists the centerpiece of its presidency.
Unfortunately, our corporate news media aids and abets this sham, as Dean explains:
By and large Bush, Cheney, and their White House media operation have churned out fear with very few challenges from the media. Cheney regularly tells Americans that we are “up against an adversary who, with a relatively small number of people, could come together and mount a devastating attack against the United States,” adding, “The ultimate threat now would be a group of al Qaeda in the middle of one of our cities with a unclear weapon.” Did the interviewer ask how likely that might be? Or what the government was doing to prevent it or to minimize its impact? No such questions were raised. The Bush White House understands that the media will treat their fear-mongering as news…
And given the desperate straits of the Republican Party going into this fall’s elections, we should expect more of the same – as Dean continues:
There is more fear to come, for the Bush White House is relying on it in their campaign for the 2006 midterm congressional elections… Rove appreciates the value of fear, so it is not surprising that he proclaimed that the 2006 midterm elections would be won or lost based on how frightened Americans are about terrorism.
Dean describes how Al Gore has weighed in on this issueDean has this to say about Al Gore’s thoughts on this subject:
Among the few who have spoken out against the politics of fear, no one has done so more forcefully, and with less notice in the mainstream news media, than former vice president Al Gore, who was the keynote speaker at a
conference in February 2004 titled “Fear: Its Political Uses and Abuses.” Gore analyzed the administration’s continuous use of fear since 9/11 and expressed grave concern that no one was correcting the misinformation being fed to Americans by Bush and Cheney. “Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction,” Gore observed…... “In many ways, George W. Bush reminds me of Nixon more than any other president… Like Bush, Nixon understood political uses and misuses of fear. While much of the press has ignored Bush’s and Cheney’s fear-mongering, letters to the editor occasionally surface to address it… yet President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney want us to fear everything. Fear the terrorists, fear Muslims, fear gays.”
Noting that the Bush/Cheney regime are continually reminding the American people of the dangers of a terrorist attack, Dean continues:
But there is much that can be done to reduce the potential, as well as the impact, of a WMD terror attack. It would, therefore, seem logical – if the Bush administration is truly concerned about such a catastrophic terror strike in the United States – for it to focus its efforts on such measures, rather than simply frightening people.
How serious is the Bush administration about addressing the possibility of another major terror attack in the United States? Remarkably, not very. Notwithstanding the level of importance the administration purportedly places on fighting terrorism, according to the 9/11 Commission’s
2005 year-end “report card” Bush and Company were given five Fs, twelve Ds, and two incompletes in categories that included airline passenger screening and improvement of first responders’ communication systems… When the president and his cohort continue to raise the threat of terrorism but refuse to implement even the minimum measures recommended by the commission, it is clear they are playing the politics of fear… Using the issue to frighten people while not addressing the 9/11 Commission’s concerns is worse than irresponsible; it is cruel…
And with respect to our Congressional Republicans:
It appears that most Republicans are content to allow the Bush White House to engage in fear-mongering if that is what is needed to win elections.
Dean and Gore on the consequences to our country of a presidential administration that abuses the politics of fearDean summarizes the general consequences of the Cheney/Bush administration’s abuse of the politics of fear:
Bush and Cheney launched America’s first preemptive war by claiming it necessary to the fight against terrorism. Yet it is almost universally agreed that the war has actually created an incubator in Iraq for a new generation of terrorists who will seek to harm the US far into the future…
The real danger posed by terrorism for our democracy is not that they can defeat us with physical or military force, rather terrorism presents its real threat in provoking democratic regimes to embrace and employ authoritarian measures that 1) weaken the fabric of democracy; 2) discredit the government domestically as well as internationally; 3) alienate segments of the population from their government, thereby pushing more people to support the terrorist organizations and their causes; and 4) undermine the government’s claim to the moral high ground in the battle against the terrorists, while gaining legitimacy for the latter. This is precisely what is happening in America today…They have weakened the fabric of democracy, discredited the American government as never before in the eyes of the world, caused people to wonder if terrorists have a legitimate complaint, and taken the United States far from the moral high ground in refusing to abide by basic international law…
Are we on the road to fascism?... It would not take much more misguided authoritarian leadership, or thoughtless following of such leaders, to find ourselves there…
And Al Gore discussed the single most terrible consequence to date of the Bush/Cheney politics of fear at the 2004 conference:
When the president of the United States stood before the people of this nation – in the same speech in which he used the forged document – he asked the nation to ‘imagine’ how fearful it would feel if Saddam Hussein gave a nuclear weapon to terrorists who then exploded it in our country…. When our president asked us to imagine with him a new fear, it was easy enough to bypass the reasoning process, and short-circuit the normal discourse that takes place in a healthy democracy with a give-and-take among people who could say, Wait a minute, Mr. President. Where’s your evidence?
And so, our nation was led into a calamitous war because our pResident lied to us and because our corporate media didn’t have the integrity to call him on his lies.
Dean concludes:
In short, fear takes reasoning out of the decision making process, which our history has shown us often enough can have dangerous and long lasting consequences. If Americans cannot engage in analytical thinking as a result of Republicans’ using fear for their own political purposes, we are all in serious trouble.
Thoughts on the willingness of the Democratic Party to confront this issueI found Dean’s and Gore’s words on this issue to be wonderfully refreshing. In these troubled times it is very difficult to speak honestly and accurately about the Bush administration or the Republican Party without sounding like a bitter partisan and opening one’s self up to vicious attacks. The sad fact of the matter though is that anything less fails to address the situation with adequate seriousness.
Of course, DU is not hesitant to call these people what they are. But it’s great to hear it from people with the stature of John Dean or Al Gore. And Dean isn’t even a Democrat, and in fact describes himself as a “conservative”.
I find it a little depressing that we don’t hear more of this kind of blunt talk from the Democratic Party. There are exceptions of course. Jimmy Carter has been quite outspoken about the Bush administration’s repeated
violations of the Geneva Conventions – a major exception to the unspoken rule against an ex-President criticizing a sitting President. On the same subject, Richard Durbin described our abuse of prisoners in a
Senate speech. Barbara Boxer was joined by 30 House members in officially
objecting to the 2004 Presidential election. John Murtha has been outspoken in his
criticism of the Iraq war. Cynthia McKinney dared to question the actions of the Bush administration in
responding to the 9-11 attacks on our country. Russ Feingold put forth a
censure resolution (joined by only two other Senators) in response to Bush’s warantless spying program. Wes Clark has
attacked the idea of preemptive war and called for
Congressional investigations into Bush’s role in prisoner abuse. John Edwards had been outspoken about the need to do something about
poverty in our country. Robert Kennedy Jr. has described in great detail the
election fraud perpetrated on the American people in 2004. John Conyers sponsored a
report on election fraud in Ohio, and now has produced a scathing report of the
numerous crimes of the Bush administration. And the Center for Constitutional Rights has sponsored
impeachment teach-ins all over the United States, a subject which has also been considered by the legislatures of
Illinois,
Vermont and
California.
Some of these people have presidential ambitions, and some of them do not. But one thing that all of these efforts have in common is that they come from the deepest levels of the soul. Call me naïve, but I don’t believe that any of the above examples were in the least bit politically motivated. To use an old phrase coined by John Dean, there is a
cancer growing, not only on our Presidency, but on our whole country right now. And the full treatment of the cancer requires that we look at and speak of our current situation as it really is, rather than as we’d like it to be.
Yet the response of the Democratic Party has been, in general, too cautious in my opinion. One of the worst examples of this is that our House
minority leader has even gone so far as to take impeachment “off the table”. The Democrats currently have a nice lead going into this year’s Congressional elections, and perhaps they just don’t want to risk reversing that situation. Holding back on criticizing what is going on in our country for now would be worth while if it results in Democrats taking back Congress this fall. But it seems to me that throwing caution to the wind and speaking the truth like John Dean and Al Gore may be, not only the right thing to do, but a better strategy. I hope our Democratic candidates and leaders know what they’re doing.
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