Even before Senator John Kerry's sweep of primaries on March 2 -- Super Tuesday -- made him the presumptive Democratic nominee, US President George W. Bush trailed him in every national poll. Faltering on the economic and national security fronts, Bush opened another war: the culture war.
Bush had campaigned in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative," softening his edges and separating himself from the hard right. As it was, he lost the popular vote by more than half a million. Now he has decided he has no choice but to chase his base.
The launch of his Kulturkampf has been a blitzkrieg. Bush proposed a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. He dismissed two scientists who dissented on his bioethics board, which he has used to ban forms of stem cell research, replacing them with adherents of the religious right. Bush made a recess appointment of William Pryor of Alabama as a federal judge, blocked in the Senate for his extremism. Pryor had said that "abortion is murder" and supported the building of an altar of the 10 commandments in a courthouse.
Then the attorney general, John Ashcroft, subpoenaed the medical records of women who have had abortions at planned parenthood clinics.
Bush followed by supporting the unborn victims of violence act, creating a new federal crime of fetal homicide that passed the Republican-dominated House of Representatives on Feb. 26. At Bush's order, the Senate is being transformed into a battlefield of the culture war.
But Bush's instigation of religious wars in America, while it mobilizes the evangelical Protestant faithful, is also unexpectedly thwarting him. The born-again Bush, who reconstructed his self-image after Sept. 11 as a messianic leader, assumed that the agendas of the neo-cons and the theo-cons were one and the same. However, Bush outsourced his foreign policy on the Middle East and Israel to the neo-cons in part for an electoral purpose, capturing the Jewish vote, which will not be fulfilled because of his anxious devotion to the theo-cons.
The neo-cons and the theo-cons were bound together in reaction against the 1960s for different reasons: the neo-cons by foreign policy, the theo-cons by their continuing fundamentalist revolt against modernity. Under former president Ronald Reagan, this coalition was held together in the crusade against godless communism. But Bush is haunted by what happened next to his father.
The elder Bush won 35 percent of the Jewish vote in 1988, but only 11 percent in 1992. He had paid the price for his toughness in forcing the Likud government of Israel into the peace process that was continued by President Bill Clinton. In 2000, the younger Bush won 19 percent of the Jewish vote. Fearful of repeating his father's fall, he immediately abandoned the peace process.
After Sept. 11, Bush began extensive polling of Jews.
"We have a figurehead at the top of the ticket who has the potential to catalyze a realignment," said Matthew Brooks, head of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Visions of carrying the entire east coast, including New York and California, and holding Florida forever, danced in Bush's head.
Just as Bush stokes the culture war, Mel Gibson enters, sprinkling holy gasoline on the fires. Only in the combustible atmosphere Bush has fostered could Gibson's grand guignol version of an anti-Semitic medieval passion play, The Passion of the Christ, become the number one box-office hit.
This is the ultimate Mad Max escapade: blowing up the cultural contradictions of American conservatism.
With his culture war the son is echoing another political error of the father, who alienated Jews and Catholics by permitting his 1992 convention to be used as a platform for the religious evangelical right. This latest revival is frightening Jews, cautioning American Catholics (overwhelmingly of the liberal John XXIII/Vatican II persuasion, and holding the same view on abortion as other Americans), and scourging mainline Protestants. The more Bush supplicates his base, the more he repels the others. Moreover, Bush is running against a Democrat who's a modern Catholic, with lineage to the oldest mainline Protestant families of New England and Jewish ancestry.
This political miscalculation at home is far outweighed by the disastrous consequences in the Middle East. With increasing desperation, Bush is campaigning on behalf of his various fundamentalisms in a crusade against modernity in America, his greatest war of all.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to president Bill Clinton, is author of The Clinton Wars.
The gutting of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) by US President Donald Trump’s administration poses a serious threat to the global voice of freedom, particularly for those living under authoritarian regimes such as China. The US — hailed as the model of liberal democracy — has the moral responsibility to uphold the values it champions. In undermining these institutions, the US risks diminishing its “soft power,” a pivotal pillar of its global influence. VOA Tibetan and RFA Tibetan played an enormous role in promoting the strong image of the US in and outside Tibet. On VOA Tibetan,
Sung Chien-liang (宋建樑), the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) efforts to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lee Kun-cheng (李坤城), caused a national outrage and drew diplomatic condemnation on Tuesday after he arrived at the New Taipei City District Prosecutors’ Office dressed in a Nazi uniform. Sung performed a Nazi salute and carried a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as he arrived to be questioned over allegations of signature forgery in the recall petition. The KMT’s response to the incident has shown a striking lack of contrition and decency. Rather than apologizing and distancing itself from Sung’s actions,
US President Trump weighed into the state of America’s semiconductor manufacturing when he declared, “They [Taiwan] stole it from us. They took it from us, and I don’t blame them. I give them credit.” At a prior White House event President Trump hosted TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家), head of the world’s largest and most advanced chip manufacturer, to announce a commitment to invest US$100 billion in America. The president then shifted his previously critical rhetoric on Taiwan and put off tariffs on its chips. Now we learn that the Trump Administration is conducting a “trade investigation” on semiconductors which
By now, most of Taiwan has heard Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an’s (蔣萬安) threats to initiate a vote of no confidence against the Cabinet. His rationale is that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)-led government’s investigation into alleged signature forgery in the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) recall campaign constitutes “political persecution.” I sincerely hope he goes through with it. The opposition currently holds a majority in the Legislative Yuan, so the initiation of a no-confidence motion and its passage should be entirely within reach. If Chiang truly believes that the government is overreaching, abusing its power and targeting political opponents — then
RSS