Among the half a million demonstrators peacefully thronging the streets of Manhattan on Sunday, the verdict against US President George W. Bush was instantly familiar to any visiting European. He's dumb, he's dangerous, he's divisive -- and more: he's a warmonger, a liar, a threat to liberty, a despoiler of the planet, an agent of the corporations.
Though the march was a
ILLUSTRATION: YU SHA
quintessential New York event -- extrovert, exhibitionist and (the
bit that foreigners often overlook) earnest -- it was also one that could have taken place in dozens of other great cities across the world.
In the face of such anger, it is hard not to be both awed and anxious. Awed because the numbers on the streets were simply huge. Yet anxious because it was another reminder of the ways in which this is becoming an ever more deeply divided society. I used to think angry certainty could not get any more intense than that which the American Right leveled at Clinton. But the angry certainty directed against Bush from the Left now comfortably exceeds anything from the Clinton years. That's one of the reasons this is such a vicious election.
We need, though, to be careful not to be transfixed by the polarization and to see beyond and around it. I yield to no one in my belief that it will be for the good of America and the world if Senator John Kerry defeats Bush in November. I also think that it
may happen. At the same time, however, I think that we need to be careful not to luxuriate in an image of Bush so fixedly critical and inflexibly condescending that we cannot even ask ourselves why
he might win again, let alone
see why he might be a politician
from whom others may also have
something to learn.
The most obvious reason for taking Bush more seriously is a simple one: he may be president of the US for the next four years. But we also need to ask ourselves why that may happen, if it does. If it is so blindingly obvious to the rest of the world that Bush is dumb, dangerous and the rest of it, how is it that millions of intelligent and perfectly decent people in the US see it so differently? Is it simply that they don't get it? Or that they have been brainwashed? Or that they are neither intelligent nor decent after all?
These hardly stand up as satisfactory explanations. Questions remain and they are desperately important. If Bush wins, maybe we need to be more attentive to the things that are different -- not necessarily better or worse, just different -- about America. If Bush wins, and perhaps even if he narrowly loses, we need to grasp why the center of gravity in American political life is as far to the right as it now is. At the very least, if the US is now answering to its own individual drum and not to one that we can all hear clearly, that has implications for us as well as them.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that this whole phenomenon of US exceptionalism can be explained away by Sept. 11. Writers like Seymour Martin Lipset have tried for years to prise out the truth about issues like why American men consistently vote to the right of American women, when the reverse gender gap applies in most other industrial democracies. Now, thanks in no small part to Bush's successes, a new generation of writers is making a renewed attempt to understand why America is different.
Two new books from different ends of the political spectrum combine to illustrate this point. From the Left, Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with America? -- originally published in the US as What's the Matter with Kansas? -- raises hell about US conservatism. While passing itself off as the foe
of the elite, it has managed to
enlist millions of average-income
voters, mainly white and disproportionately male, as willing foot soldiers of a movement which consistently promotes the interests of the wealthy at the expense of these self-same, average-income voters.
Meanwhile, from the other side of the tracks, in The Right Nation, Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge gaze with wonder at how American conservatism has moved from being an insurgent force under Barry Goldwater 40 years ago to become easily the most dominant and most dynamic political movement in modern America, rolling back the welfare state, entrenching gun culture, assaulting the right to abortion and, under Bush's leadership, doing all the rest of the things that so easily send a shiver down the European spine.
Yet, as the authors of The Right Nation point out, it is not good enough to dismiss Bush as an unthinking and unchanging inheritor of the anti-government traditions embodied by Goldwater and, more recently, Newt Gingrich. For, along with his revolution in foreign policy, his conservative social agenda and his tax cuts -- the things against which the protesters mostly marched in Manhattan -- Bush has also been doing something which few, including perhaps Bush himself, would have predicted back in 2000. He has been reinventing big government.
That the collapse of the socialist era would mean big changes for left-wing parties is no longer disputed, save among a dwindling band of true believers. That the collapse would necessitate a rethinking of the role of right-wing parties has been less obvious. Yet there are those who argue that Bush, without perhaps necessarily intending to, is inching towards a new "big government conservative" political model. This apparently contradictory idea is not as daft as it may seem.
Certainly the facts are impressive. No president since Lyndon Johnson has increased discretionary government spending as much. Bush has increased education spending by 75 percent, has presided over the biggest increase in the Medicare health program for the elderly since its foundation, and claims to have increased spending on police, fire and ambulance services six-fold. More people now work for the US government than at any other time in history.
Does this add up to a coherent new conservatism that could dominate US politics for the next generation and which, in some form or other, may dominate British politics, too? Not even Bush's greatest apologists quite make that claim yet. But if he wins in November they surely will. It certainly all bears study and attention. If Bush keeps on winning elections, then he may have something more durable to offer the conservatives.
We ought at least to do the millions of Bush voters the courtesy of trying to understand why they see so many things so differently. And at the same time we ought to pay Bush the respect of trying to understand what he is doing right, not just in purely vote-winning terms, but possibly even more broadly. Bush-bashing has its place. But this might be a good week for liberals and progressives to start raising their game a bit.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under