<![CDATA[Andrew Sullivan, agreeing with an emailer who wrote that we were better off without a change of leadership, writes:
My main fear with a Kerry victory was that the hard right would never have given him a chance in the war, and would have savaged him as commander-in-chief in order to pave the way for a victory in 2008. Ratcheting the country back to fiscal sanity would also have been a thankless task. Now, Bush will face the consequences of his own policies and we will be able to judge him on that. He has no excuses any more.
This is arguing that because the neocons would sacrifice the country’s security for a political victory in 2008, it is better that they are in charge. That, my friends, is a form of madness. President Bush had no excuses before. He has ruled with the support of a Republican Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, not to mention a small army of neocon operatives and Republican governors, while instilling no fiscal discipline and achieving little success in the war on terrorism because of the grotesque distraction of Iraq. The idea that this president could or would introduce fiscal discipline is laughable, so why worry about the thanklessness of the task for Kerry—we don’t need another four years to judge his record on that.
The hard right never gave Bill Clinton the chance to act without first savaging him, either, so should they not be held accountable for that, as well? Mr. Bush was certainly a leader in that effort, else he would not have been the Republican nominee in 2000. If the win-at-all-costs-because-we’re-right-and-liberals-are-wrong ideology of the hard right would put the country at greater risk—in fact, did put the country at greater risk by pigeon-holing President Clinton’s efforts to fight terror and political mayhem—what possible justification is that for giving them a free pass for another round.
No, we should be fighting for what we believe is right as ferociously as the neocons or else, as Sullivan points out in another posting today, we’re in for a culture blitzkrieg that the religious far right already has planned. In that posting, Sullivan writes that “it is completely legitimate in this country for such views to be represented in public policy, however much I disagree with them. But the intensity of the passion, and the inherently totalist nature of religiously motivated politics means deep social conflict if we are not careful.”
Wrong, again. This country was founded on a principal of of church-state separation that has allowed religious movements, like the evangelical Christian movement, to flourish.
Once public policy reflects the dictates of a religious movement, the very fabric of American religious freedom is destroyed. Not threatened, not something we have to be careful about, but destroyed. The religious nonconformism which marks American history as virtually unique in history will vanish in a flurry of “traditional values” that should be chosen and followed by individuals and not imposed from the top down.
Whether the right likes it or not, America has been the best country in which to earn a trip to Hell as to earn a trip to Heaven, because no two sects has agreed on which path leads up or down and that, above all else, has been just fine with everyone. Until now.
No, we have to hold a second-term president to a higher standard, as any additional mistakes only compound and confirm the judgments the 49 percent of people that voted for Mr. Bush’s opponents. This is particularly true with regards Mr. Bush’s desire to impose a Messianic vision on the nation, which would be an extraordinarily dangerous and unAmerican direction for any president to take.]]>