There’s A War On?
Byron York in the Washington Examiner reports on the strange absence of the anti-war movement since the election of President Obama. Even while the war in Iraq grinds on and the war in Afghanistan is escalating dramatically, the most militant wings of the anti-war left seem strangely quiescent.
The news that emerged is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have virtually fallen off the liberal radar screen. Kossacks (as fans of DailyKos like to call themselves) who were consumed by the Iraq war when George W. Bush was president are now, with Barack Obama in the White House, not so consumed, either with Iraq or with Obama’s escalation of the conflict in Afghanistan. In fact, they barely seem to care.
As part of a straw poll done at the convention, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg presented participants with a list of policy priorities like health care and the environment. He asked people to list the two priorities they believed “progressive activists should be focusing their attention and efforts on the most.” The winner, by far, was “passing comprehensive health care reform.” In second place was enacting “green energy policies that address environmental concerns.”
And what about “working to end our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan”? It was way down the list, in eighth place.
What could explain this dramatic shift in “progressive” priorities? Most obviously, the absence of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney as lightening rods for hatred might explain the sudden disinterest in foreign policy. More charitably, the economic downturn and struggles over health care reform might simply give “progressives” bigger policy fish to fry than rehashing debates over American interventions abroad.
It is also possible that progressives are simply biding their time, awaiting a battlefield reversal that will give them the political context to renew their attention to longstanding themes about nefarious American imperialism and the beloved “lessons of Vietnam”. After all, it is not the case that the far-left drops anti-American themes entirely during Democratic presidencies, as the anti-globalization crazes during the Clinton administration attest.
What may be more revealing is the reaction that emerges in the coming weeks to the report of the strategy review in Afghanistan. As the United States undertakes a renewed debate over whether the costs of escalating the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Central Asia are worth the limited prospect for gains, it will become more clear whether the anti-war movement was merely a special case of anti-Bushism or whether it remains a long-term project of opposition to U.S. foreign policy.
Jason, I agree with you that the selective absence of anti-war activism stems first and foremost from partisanship, but your other two explanations are also plausible and might turn out to be prescient – even if they’re coming from a more “charitable” perspective than I could muster.
A few other factors – besides immediate political concerns – that might help explain the seeming absence of anti-war activism:
1. Americans between the ages of 17 and 30 might feel less threat of being drafted into the armed services than similar age groups did 5 – 7 years ago.
2. Historically, the Left has been shockingly fickle about its support/opposition to military engagements – e.g., American communists in the late 1930s to early 1940s. Granted, the 21st century “progressive” left is only loosely connected to past manifestations of the Left, but there are interesting behavioral similarities between past and present. The same phenomenon is present on the Right (conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals) as well, but I would argue that it is less so.
3. Also more so than on the Right, the foot soliders of the Left are characterized by a follower’s mentality. Progressive activists tend to be passionately devoted not just to certain ideological viewpoints – which frankly can be quite malleable at times – but also to the movement itself, which becomes sort of a social/lifestyle network. Young activist leftists, in particular, tend to be quite conformist, maybe even cultish at times. In contrast, their JournoList/academic intellectual and political leadership tends to be more pragmatic, calculating, big picture ends-justify-the-means. When the leadership decides to turn on a dime, the followers line up like lemmings. Yes, I’m exagerating to make a point. And, yes, the Right has its own calculating elites who are leading their own blind followers as well, but the Right has ideological currents that cut more sharply against those tendencies.
In the end, though, it goes mainly back to partisanship. I thought the following paragraph from York’s article was right on: “Perhaps more tellingly, Greenberg asked activists to name the issue that ‘you, personally, spend the most time advancing currently.’ The winner, again, was health care reform. Next came ‘working to elect progressive candidates in the 2010 elections.’ Then came a bunch of other issues. At the very bottom — last place, named by just one percent of participants — came working to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Both of these priorities are very partisanship-motivated. If health care “reform” crashes and burns, the political implications could be very damaging to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Since there has been no change in the likelihood of a draft (zero) in the past 5-7 years, #1 strikes me as highly unlikely.
With #2 and #3, I again see nothing in the last 2-3 years that has changed to explain the shift either in the movement as a whole or in the leaders who are commanding the followers. Simple “fickleness” is an observation in search of an explanation, not an explanation itself.
Perhaps the leadership has chosen to direct the lemmings in the direction of health care instead of anti-war activism, but that would collapse back to the partisanship explanation because the only likely REASON for the leadership to make that shift is because they don’t want to oppose a Democratic President on a commander-in-chief issue when it is possible instead to SUPPORT the Democratic President and maintain the exact same enemies list as before by switching to health care.
I’ve written a paper about how quickly and easily leftist protest movements shift their issue focus. I’ve hypothesized that it is because the protest movement is for them a lifestyle choice (and intrinsic good) rather than a means to an end (an instrumental good) and that they therefore do not suffer from problems of demobilization that would otherwise hit during a transition between issues. Because the movement is “an end in itself”, they will focus a lot of energy in things like “building a community” which functions as a tax on the overall effectiveness of the movement, but can also be remarkably fluid in changing whatever issue-of-the-day is the current secondary purpose of the movement.
Jason, all good points. I’d like to check out your paper about leftist protest movements.
Follow-up pertaining to (partial) explanation #1 above: Wouldn’t it be possible for young adults between the ages of 17 and 30 to PERCEIVE that the liklihood of being drafted is lower (compared to 5-7 years ago) even though the actual liklihood might be the same or even higher now?
From my experiences, it seems like early in a conflict, young adults tend to jump to anxious conclusions. But as it becomes evident that the conflict(s) is not likely to set off a larger war – and therefore probably will not necessitate a major mobilization – young people then almost err in the opposite direction. They figure that there is very little chance of them being drafted, even though we continue to live in precarious times. Then, the leftist activists among them begin to criticize the war less as a perceived dangerous form of aggression that could lead to major upheaval, etc., and they start to criticize the war more as an example of the big capitalist bully picking on a defenseless adversary in an effort to deflect attention away from domestic and international capitalist exploitation. In other words, the degree to which their anti-war stance is motivated by self-preservation (getting drafted) depends on their perceptions of whether the conflct is stable, predictable, “under control.”
Possible hypothesis: when the self-preservation impulse is dominant, eligible left-leaning draftees are more likely to protest against a conflict even under a Democratic or progressive administration; however, if the draft threat is perceived to be low (even if the perception is based on false assumptions, etc.) then they will tend to protest selectively (ie. partisan motivation is dominant).
I think it’s a combination of a cycle of partisanship combined with Jason’s theory about the leadership directing the followers and Patrick’s idea about selective vs. preservation protesting.
Consider that under Bush, there was not much rumbling from the Republican side on Medicare Part D, except from Democrats and consistent fiscal conservatives (Michelle Malkin is one of these people). Now that Obama and the Democrats have their hands on healthcare, it is the Democrats not making a peep (in terms of dissent), and the Republicans and Democrats from conservative districts are causing a ruckus (in general).
It is the same with the war. Under Bush, he more or less could do no wrong by Republicans (except for moderates), but Democrats generally protested it. Now under Obama, he can do little wrong, except by the consistent anti-war Democrats.
Basically, the cycle seems to always be that the guy in charge can count on support from his base for his policies, with dissent from both extremes of the party as well as the other party.
Lets not forget that on healthcare, there are many liberals who are still harping on the Dem leaders to put single-payer in the bill.
Jason, there are some interesting, but not surprising, parallels between how the leftist activist base draws its selective – often partisan-driven – lines in the sand regarding Iraq/Afganistan versus health insurance reform. In your paper, you explored the hypothesis that leftist protest movements (or activism) tend to treat respective issues as “intrinsic goods” rather than “instrumental goods.” Also, you mentioned above that when the leadership decides to direct the activist followers in a different direction, which they think will suit their partisan purposes, they can often do so while “maintaining the exact same enemies list as before by switching to [another issue, or a new position].” So, is the public option an intrinsic good or an instrumental good? What has made the public option an “unholy grail” for the Left?
In today’s Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/18/AR2009081803655.html:
Excerpt 1: “‘I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,’ said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ‘We’ve gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don’t understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform.’”
Excerpt 2: “Kirsch [of Health Care America Now] said early criticism of the concept by conservatives and insurance industry groups helped solidify liberal support for it. ‘The right went on the attack,” he said. ‘As a result, the issue got tremendously elevated. Because the right attacked it aggressively, it became a centerpiece of the battle.’”
Consider the logic: BECAUSE the right attacked the public option, THEREFORE the public option became a critical policy priority to the left. Yet, Republican (or right-wing) opposition to a given policy approach has no rational bearing whatsoever on whether that approach would be good policy. The above report suggests that the Left’s increasing intransigence on the public option is a psychological/emotional phenomenon – and that the left’s support/opposition for policies is to some dgree or another defined/galvanized in response to their opponents (or enemies). Kirsh himself recognizes this phenomenon and yet he would like for the American people to place their faith in the progressive-dominated Democratic Party to make sensible, efficacious health care “reforms.”
Yes, Patrick. I have often noted that, for some on the left, beating the right often becomes the primary goal with whatever the specific policy question relegated to secondary status. You can see clear signs of this from writers who, for example, condemn compromise as if it were heresy and embrace doing nothing at all as better than a compromise health care reform. Kathy Kattenburg at TMV and Steve Hynd at Newshoggers are very much of this type — hating conservatives (and by extension hating anyone who doesn’t hate conservatives enough) is consistently priority number one. The specifics of whatever the issue of the day are very distinctly secondary and that is why they are so uninterested in making actual policy arguments as opposed to just name-calling. In fairness, I should point out that this equally applies to people on the far right who automatically oppose every health care/budget/whatever compromise and who throw around names like “Nazis” and “Stalin” and “socialism” as their reason or speculate darkly about Obama’s “Muslim roots” or his alleged desire to “destroy America”.
The interesting thing to me is to observe how similar ideological conflict is with ethnic conflict among such people. The conflict becomes communal rather than about issues, and the demonizing and dehumanizing tone of the conflict can become very dangerous and potentially violent quite quickly. That is why such groups are unusually prone to embrace repressive options as ways of dealing with opposition even though those options conflict directly with their proclaimed principles — they simply don’t see their opponents as having full human rights anymore, just like in ethnic conflicts. They see opponents instead as existential threats to the real core of humanity, that being their particular community built around “protester” identity.
The Scapegoat Principle in action, wingnut style.
Despite the much-confirmed fact that liberals are outnumbered in every state of the Union, the lib-left believes that they OWN the Democratic Party, just as the Religious Right claims to own the GOP. We have seen this repeatedly in the left’s demonization and cannibalistic attacks on their own elected officials whenever said officials differ or dissent from the left’s preferred approaches, much as we saw last decade on the Right with the GOP under Tom “The Hammer” Delay, and again on a smaller scale with the intraparty attacks on McCain last year.
I was talking with a local life-long Dem Party leader the other day. She was VERY upset with her party, about how it was rapidly becoming a Little Tent by driving out anyone who dared differ from the narrow doctrinal zealotry of the leftists. As a former Republican who was chased out of that party by the Religious Right, I knew exactly what she was talking about.
Right now the “progressives” who believe they own the Democratic Party and thus the entire government are forced to proclaim that opposition to their preferred health care cramdown must come from a small minority of well-organized right-wingers, the truth is that it’s an authentic grass-roots populist revolt, and the GOP is reduced to piggybacking on it.
Barak Obama and the democats made a calculated decsion back in 2003. If they didnt do something about the war they were going to be out of a job.
So they latched on to the antiwar movement and threw GWB under the bus. Those same democrats who were highly supportive of the war on terror and GWB disappeared and they used it to throw the GOP out of office.
Now that they are in charge…there is no antiwar. There is only power and corruption and the same lying SOB’s are now crying foul when the GOP are returning the favor over health care.
What goes around………yep…..comes around.
Where is Harry Reids indignation over “The war is lost” and “Im done with this Immigration bill, one more vote then we have to get back to passing resoultions on the IRAQ war.”
Or Nancy Pelosi who said
“I sort of like it when protestors show up and disrupt town hall meetings over the war. They are true Americans.” paraphrased on that one.
It is odd that all of the attention to the wars have now died off. The Obama magic seems to be if effect. It might be that it is because Bush is gone, but I believe that the promises that Obama made about ending the war quieted the masses and that they are now floating in what they perceive to be calm waters. It is amazing how health care has taken the limelight. It is not just the anti-war people that have quieted down but also the media. I don’t get it, and it worries me that the change has been so dramatic. Perhaps it will take another major incident like the Abu Ghraib scandal to bring it back to the forefront. What is going on with Guantanamo? That issue has also died. I guess we’ll see?
The History Man
http://wwwhistoryman.blogspot.com/
With a 4.5% margin of error, the poll leaves open the possibility that there is no statistically significant number of Jewish Israelis who believe that the President is pro-Israel – a stunning result in a country that is still considered an American ally. The poll also found that 51% of Israelis – an absolute majority – consider the President pro-’Palestinian,’ 35% consider him neutral and 10% had no opinion or were not sure.
This is why the press is self absorbed with the health care debate…..if this were Bush the press would have this plastered all over the world.