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Our Dreams Came True
 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.
![[Breaker quote for
Our Dreams Came True: "Our guys" in power]](2006breakers/060613.gif) 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.”
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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