A Cold Civil War

Interesting article about Left and Right and the lack of common ground. [link]

A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can't thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he's playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he's playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.

Americans do not agree on the basic meaning of the last seven years. If you drive around an Ivy League college town -- home to the nation's best and brightest, allegedly -- you notice a wide range of bumper stickers, from the anticipatory ("01/20/09" -- the day of liberation from the Bush tyranny) to the profane ("Buck Fush") to the myopically self-indulgent ("Regime Change Begins At Home") to the exhibitionist paranoid ("9/11 Was An Inside Job"). Let's assume, as polls suggest, that next year's presidential election is pretty open: might be a Democrat, might be a Republican. Suppose it's another 50/50 election with a narrow GOP victory dependent on the electoral college votes of one closely divided state. It's not hard to foresee those stickered Dems concluding that the system has now been entirely delegitimized.

This is one reason I think the Democrats have to win in 2008. Until they are in charge, it will remain "Bush's War", in spite of all the inconvenient facts to the contrary.

For some, 9/11 changed everything, for others, not so much.

[I]n the end even "events" require broad acknowledgement. For Republicans, 9/11 is the decisive event; for Democrats, late November 2000 in the chadlands of Florida still looms larger. And elsewhere real hot wars seem to matter less than the ersatz Beltway battles back home. "The domestic political debate has nothing to do with what we're doing here," one U.S. officer in Iraq told the National Review's Rich Lowry this week, "in a representative comment offered not in a spirit of bitterness, but of cold fact." As Lowry remarked, "This is the lonely war" -- its actual progress all but irrelevant to the pseudo combat on the home front.

I remain hopeful that we will find common ground, but then, I am an idealist.