The Question of Democratic Complicity

The Question of Democratic Complicity
Wednesday, 21 November 2007
by Andrew Bard Schmookler


For the past several years, the unprecentedly lawless and dishonest conduct of the Bushite regime has been the major American story. But more recently, while from the Bushites we’ve been getting more of the same, the big story of the recent past has been not the Bushite problem but the reluctance of the Democrats to confront that problem.

To me that failure has been big news partly because it was not what I expected.

When things happen differently from my expectation, I always try to pay attention. The unexpected I take as a sign that there’s something going on that I didn’t understand, and therefore a likely opportunity for me to learn something.

That’s been true lately with the failure of the Democrats to confront the Bushite evils more boldly and more consistently than they have. Whereas the first half year or so of the new Congress unfolded more or less as I thought they would, the past several months have greatly surprised –I should say disappointed– me. The cave-ins on FISA and Mukasey exemplify these disappointments.

Since the Democrats have not been acting as I thought they would –this may be shifting, but it’s not yet clear– I’ve had to take a new look at the Democrats to see how I need to revise my understanding of who they are and where they’re coming from. Among the hypotheses I’ve been reconsidering is one that I’ve steadfastly rejected when it’s been advanced by readers of mine who have asserted that the Democrats are really not different from the Bushites in any important way, that they are willingly complicit in the Bushite fascism.

That hypothesis no longer looks so flat-out wrong to me as it did. I used to reject the idea because the people who proposed it often pointed to situations where it was not clear to me that the Democrats had politically viable choices that were clearly superior to the course they took. But more recently –in ways that I have discussed in a variety of articles– the Democrats have seemed willing to give this unpopular, criminal president his way when there seem to me to be obvious courses of action that are both morally superior AND politically more advantageous.

So, faced with the puzzle of why they have continued to enable this president, I’ve found it less obvious that they’re not in some way allied with him.

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