The Reactionary Utopian
                      June 13, 2006


OUR DREAMS CAME TRUE
by Joe Sobran

     Why don't intelligent people give up on politics? 
Maybe for the same reason drunks don't give up on 
drinking.

     Power is seductive. In a democracy, everyone thinks 
he can have a share of it. The conservative movement got 
rolling a generation ago when people like me saw our 
chance to rule through the Republican Party, with leaders 
like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, who would know 
what to do with government power -- namely, limit it to 
its proper functions. If "our guys" won, there would be 
less government. Sounded reasonable.

     And our guys won. Our dreams came true. Sort of. But 
the results we'd hoped for didn't follow. Government not 
only remained what it had always been, but kept growing. 
As one wise and witty conservative put it, "Why do our 
guys go bad when they get into power? Because when they 
get into power, they're no longer our guys."

     Some thought our guys had betrayed us, but they'd 
done only what men in power do. As we should have known. 
But we were dreaming the seductive dream democracy always 
inspires: that if the right men, "our" men, men who share 
our principles, get into power, power will be changed, 
not the men wielding it.

     Liberals have the same experience as conservatives, 
starting in dreams and ending in disillusionment and the 
sense of betrayal. But power doesn't really betray. It 
just does what comes naturally to it: taxing and making 
war, suitably disguised as public benefits.

     Still, we can't give it up. The drunk doesn't really 
think his next drink will do him any real good; but he 
knows it will make him feel better briefly, so he goes on 
drinking, and destroying himself, unless and until he 
resolves to stop. This is apparently what George W. Bush 
did before he became president. He conquered his 
addiction to liquor, but not his illusions about power, 
which seem just as addictive.

     If democracy seemed to work for him, Bush figures it 
must work for everyone, starting with Iraq. So he is 
determined not to withdraw from Iraq until it is a 
successful democracy, and he interprets everything as 
evidence of success. You wonder what, if anything, such 
dogged optimism would ever recognize as failure.

     No empirical test can change Bush's mind, not even 
the tests he himself has proposed. You or I may think the 
Iraq war is unwinnable, but he thinks it's unlosable. Yet 
he faces the frustrating fact that he can't convince most 
Americans that the war is being won, so it's quite in 
character for him to make a surprise visit to Iraq to 
celebrate the death of a single insurgent, Abu Musab 
al-Zarqawi, as proof of success.

     What kind of proof is that? The resistance doesn't 
depend on Zarqawi. In fact he may have been a liability 
to al-Qaeda, sowing sectarian hatred among Muslims 
instead of keeping his eye on the ball of anti-American 
resistance.

     But Bush has taken his eye off the ball too. Four 
years ago he was predicting a happy picture of what would 
happen by now, more nearly a cakewalk than a quagmire, 
the toppling of Saddam Hussein leading to the rapid 
spread of democracy in Iraq, throughout the Arab world, 
then around the world. A "global democratic revolution," 
in his words. Nothing of the kind is happening, and 
nobody in his right mind thinks it will.

     Today Bush is reduced to claiming the death of one 
man as an emblem of victory. Even at that, he has changed 
his tune from the days of "mission accomplished" and 
"bring it on." His moral triumphalism remains, but his 
military confidence is clearly shaken.

     Few conservatives now think of Bush as "our" man, 
and many of them have given up on the Republican Party. 
Nobody ever thought Bush was perfect, but who predicted 
his presidency would prove to be such a bitter 
experience? With more than two years to go, the worst may 
be yet to come. Long-latent disasters, not all of them 
Bush's doing, may finally be coming to a head.

     But that's the real point. Democratic politics is 
approaching its real terminus, catastrophe, and whether 
it happens to arrive while Bush is still in the White 
House is incidental. All of us who ever believed in 
government have done our part to "bring it on."

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