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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Politics of Cowardice5/03/2008 16:05:51 Twice in recent weeks I've heard the distinguished civil rights historian Taylor Branch talk (once in person, once in a radio interview, and both times he told a moving story about Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson. In the last years of his life, King came out more and more vocally against the Vietnam War that, in effect, was Johnson's. Now Johnson also happened to be the political engine behind the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which his more likable predecessor, John Kennedy, had failed to get through). It could have been political suicide for a man who had been first elected to Congress as a Texan segregationist. The Johnson and King had many conversations about the question, among other things. Branch, quite amazingly, claims that Johnson basically didn't disagree with King on the war or, for that matter, with the movement that opposed it. He believed their arguments. But he felt helpless. A perplexingly ambitious man obsessed with winning elections, Johnson felt stuck. The American people, he believed, would never forgive him if he withdrew from Vietnam. They can forgive even civil rights, but they will never forgive cowardice.A similar picture of his administration emerges in the recent reenactment of the Eichmann trial and the "banality of evil" in the Errol Morris documentary with Robert McNamara, The Fog of War. They were stuck. Now today. The opinion polls say the public is sick of the war in Iraq, our reenactment of Vietnam. In the last congressional elections, many claimed that the Democrats were given their majority in order to end it (they claim they couldn't). And as the Democratic candidates slowly dismember each other, John McCain freely traverses the country, in effect, calling us cowards. It is the same politics of cowardice again. "A greater commitment is necessary if we are to achieve long term success in Iraq," says McCain's website. He has risked his campaign on this belief. In February, he said that if he fails to convince Americans that the war can be won, he will lose the election. Given our old politics of cowardice, this shouldn't be hard. If Johnson was right (and few knew an electorate better than he), there is no higher ground in American politics than the guts to keep fighting. Richard Nixon went on to win on guts in 1968 - the "silent majority" was heard. When most Americans have finally come around to recognizing the madness of the Iraq War, McCain's optimism is basically catching us with our pants down, in our cowardice. Not to be called cowards, we will send him to the White House to prove our guts without wondering if we might have been right when we paused to question the horrible war and the hubris of the policies that made it. If the politics of cowardice is really what Johnson thought, McCain will doubtless win, and the war will continue. A Democratic victory in November, though, will not solve the problem either. As goes the "Vulcan proverb" quoted by Spock in Star Trek VI: "Only Nixon could go to China." That is, a Democratic president will be even more constrained by the politics of cowardice, because she or he, coming from the wimpier party, will have more to prove than a Republican. The only way out is a new politics and a new rhetoric that can answer the politics of cowardice. Opposition to imperialistic adventurism must be braver and bolder than the rush to war.
re: Politics of Cowardice - 5/03/2008 22:34:26
re: Politics of Cowardice - 5/04/2008 19:41:22
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