Self-refuting argument dept..
Posted in anger, BDS, Bush | 5 Comments »
Andrew Sullivan posts the following from a reader.
I have a hard time listening to Republicans say that the Democrats cannot transcend their anger. They use stupid catch phrases like “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to discredit people (not just Democrats, according to most pundits, you too suffer from BDS, Andrew). There is a special amount of irony in the party that spent over 200 congressional hours investigating Clinton’s Christmas card list and less than 10 investigating how we got into the Iraq war accusing the opposition of being driven by blind hatred.
I now live in a country where the president and vice president have the power to detain an American citizen off of the street, send him to a secret prison, torture him, and detain him indefinitely without him ever hearing the charges against them. We have been lied into a war that was executed with criminal incompetence, our economy has been devastated because of lax oversight of banks giving out bad loans, we have lost a major city and the list goes on and on.
My anger isn’t driven by irrational hatred. In 2000, I considered myself a Republican. But now that party stands as an affront to everything that America stands for. I have every right to be angry.
Emphasis added.
Now, I am not saying that anger at Bush isn’t justified. However, I think this letter is a good microcosm of why we shouldn’t toss the keys over to people who are acting out of anger. Almost every rant labelled “I hate X; here’s why,” would be better titled, “I hate X, which is why I blame X for the following.”
First, “our economy has been devastated because of lax oversight of banks giving out bad loans.” Now, even if you accept the premise that the subprime crisis has “devastated” the economy, which I don’t, it seems to me that the banks who made the loans and the lenders who took them out would have to get a large helping of blame for it before we moved on to Bush and the Republicans’ plates.
As for Katrina, I too was quite angry at the federal response. But that was the humanitarian crisis in the immediate afermath. When a Category 5 hurricane hits a large city that is below sea level, it’s going to cause a lot of damage, regardless of who is president. Maybe there should have been better levees in place, but again I think the line of blame for that extends for some time before you get to Republicans and the president.
Again, I’m not saying that people don’t have a right to be angry at how Bush won and has conducted his presidency. But I also think critics are right that following the counsel of those consumed by anger isn’t wise, either. And when someone makes such off-target accusations in the course of making a case that Bush hatred is rational, well, let’s just say I’m unconvinced.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:16 pm
“But I also think critics are right that following the counsel of those consumed by anger isn’t wise, either.”
Point taken. But that’s a different issue from whether or not that anger is properly placed. Okay, so you disagree with Andrew Sullivan’s reader. The fact that you consider this person to be off-base with their accusations may make their hatred misplaced, but it doesn’t make it irrational.
Personally, I suspect that a lot of people hate President Bush and the NeoCon elite for no other reason than they feel completely marginalized and illegitimate. Now, in my (not at all humble) opinion, that’s a perfectly acceptable reason to throw a politician out of office - anyone (of either party) who sees it as appropriate to demonize part of their constituency for the purpose of dividing the whole against itself isn’t a good social servant.
But it’s not publicly acceptable to say that one hates the President because he makes you feel small and unimportant in your own county - so people fall back on flimsy economic or social reasons as justification.
The Republicans gambled - and lost. Their aim in marginalizing up to 49.99% of the population was to show that they could do the job better - being able to govern without worrying about accountability to the opposition was supposed to give them a platform to demonstrate that they were clearly superior at managing things, and at steering the ship of state. But they failed to handle the sudden crises that appeared in the way that they said that they would - and worse, they often refused to acknowledge the reality that the public was being presented with.
Hurricane Katrina wasn’t the President’s fault - it’s likely that the utterly craptastic FEMA response to the disaster wasn’t the President’s fault, either. But when he said “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie,” in the middle of a catastrophe, he blew it. NOT because people saw him as out of touch with the reality on the ground - but because they saw him as very much in touch with that reality - and therefore both callous and willfully ignorant of the incompetence of a political appointee.
In the end, the Republicans have painted themselves into a corner, because they’ve made some very public mistakes in a political climate (partially of their own making) that has no tolerance for either stumbles or public admissions of weakness. And it’s a little late to sing a new tune.
January 2nd, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Whether people have cause to be angry at Bush and the Republicans is a trivially easy question.
But then what? I guess what this post illustrated to me was how anger clouds out thinking, and if we embrace it, we are embracing foolishness.
January 2nd, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Then what? Anger is energy. That’s why there are so many people invested in building it up. If we don’t want that energy to burn our houses down around our ears, we have to channel it towards something more constructive. You don’t need to embrace it to do that, but you do have to really engage with it.
You’re right to say that people who are so angry they can’t see straight aren’t good leaders - and they’re poor at articulating the reasons for their anger. So the rest of us have to be prepared to redirect that anger, and lead them - and you can’t do that without being prepared to understand what generates and sustains that anger.
I don’t mean to beat up on you about this (although I’d love to have a real-time discussion about it). I guess that I read in your posts a desire to keep the discussion on a completely rational level, which I suspect is too much to ask for, and thus seems more like a form of avoidance.
January 2nd, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Maybe. But the pitch sometimes seems to me — “Look how angry I am; I should be the leader,” rather than channeling that anger toward more productive purposes.
It seems to me that some see anger as a destination rather than a vehicle. We’re angry at Bush for how he was elected. We’re angry at Bush for the pathetic response to Katrina. W
re angry at Bush for Katrina. Now what?
For folks like the letter writer, the answer seems to be to look for more things to be angry at Bush for. The subprime crisis came during his presidency, so that must be his fault, right?
—
I don’t think my anger during the Katrina aftermath was completely rational. But I moved through it. What I’m seeing is the constant stoking and celebration of anger as an end in itself, and I don’t think we’ll like where that takes us.
I also think some of the failed policies of the past years are a result of acting from anger over 9/11.
—
I think a lot of my thoughts on this issue come from reading this book.
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:43 am
Aha! Now I follow you. I’m sorry, I think that I’ve been dim lately.
I don’t think that the political Left sees the anger at the President and his policies (and perhaps more importantly, his supporters, in government and the public) as so much as an end in itself as much as they see it as being necessary (if not sufficient) for substantive change going forward.
In effect, they see anger as the guarantor of the action required for change, and fear that without overwhelming public anger, there will be no real change. I think that this has just as much to do with blaming the public for the mess they see us in (for complacency) as it has to do with blaming Administration policy.
While I’m not sure that people view anger as a claim to leadership, they most clearly view anger as a claim to wakefulness, and tend to discount those whom they perceive as insufficiently outraged as too complacent to be invested in change.