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Glorious War!
 Most observers are predicting a rout of
the Republicans in this fall’s elections. Some think the Democrats can
even recapture both houses of Congress.
I hope so.
Oh, how I hope so. May
the  Republicans
perish forever. May vultures gobble their entrails.
May their name be blotted out. In short, may they lose their shirts in
November.
Yes,
I’m disillusioned with the GOP. It was bad enough when I thought they
were unprincipled. Now, however, it’s worse, because they do have a
principle after all: war.
Two Bush
administrations have proved that. War on Panama, war on Iraq, war on
“terror,” war on Afghanistan, war on Iraq again, and war on
Iran, comin’ up. And of course the recent Israeli war on Lebanon was
waged with George W. Bush’s complicity. Am I leaving anything out? Oh
yes, his father’s war on “drugs”; but let’s not
even count that one.
Next to
the violence of war, I hate the philosophical fallout. This Bush administration
has managed to pervert the meaning of conservatism: in most
Americans’ minds, for the next generation, the word will mean, above
all, militarism.
Not that
this is wholly new. Goldwater conservatives supported the Vietnam war,
originally a liberal project, even complaining that it wasn’t being waged
with enough force. They began sneering at “peaceniks,” then
equating peace with liberalism (and war with patriotism) and automatically
favoring huge military budgets. Lyndon Johnson’s war soon became
“Nixon’s war,” and the anti-war George McGovern
redefined the Democratic Party.
By the
Reagan years the old lines were redrawn. Quite a change from the days when
Democrats wanted war on fascism and Republicans were accused of
“isolationism” for preferring peace. Does anyone remember
Robert Taft?
By
identifying the conservative cause with war, the Republicans have given
liberalism the finest gift they could possibly have bestowed on it. The
popularity of war is intense but brief. Americans will support quick and
victorious wars, but after a few months the thrill tends to wear off.
As late as
1976 grouchy Bob Dole, a bitter World War II vet, could still take a swat at
“Democrat wars,” but the phrase sounded quaint. The amnesiac
American public thought it was a contradiction in terms. When had the
Democrats ever wanted war?
![[Breaker quote for Glorious War!: Will the Republicans Ever Learn?]](2006breakers/060831.gif) Today’s
blowhard conservatives have no reservations about it. They suspect, and openly
accuse, the “liberal media” of sympathy for the enemy so
freely that you wonder why they don’t just call them the
“Islamic media.” For these right-wingers, the Iraq war —
not the Constitution, government spending, or abortion — is the
defining issue dividing liberals and conservatives.
They even
pardon liberal Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger (as
well as the liberal Democrat Joe Lieberman) for supporting abortion and
homosexual rights, as long as they support the war. That is, they count a
liberal as a conservative, provided only that he’s for this war.
Being the
most devastating of human activities, war would seem to be at the opposite
pole from conserving anything. It’s a grotesque accident of history
that it should have acquired even a verbal association with the philosophy of
conservatism.
Just what
is that philosophy? Is it a philosophy at all, or just a natural disposition to
reject radical change? These questions have been debated for centuries, and
I can only suggest an answer.
Briefly,
conservatism is a more or less articulate sense of normality, whereas
liberalism has been described (by G.K. Chesterton) as “the modern and
morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.”
Conservatism can tolerate many abnormal things that can’t be
eliminated from human society, but it doesn’t call them
“rights” or confuse them with normal things. And, after all, few
things are more abnormal than war.
So
today’s alleged conservatives (and especially the misnamed
“neoconservatives”) are aberrations. They delight in
destruction; they are full of enthusiasm for violent and radical action; they
lack the ironic and skeptical attitude of real conservatives, the prudent
sense that precipitate acts bring “unintended consequences.”
The
presidency of George W. Bush has been one long object lesson in unintended
consequences. It’s amusing to recall that his father was kidded for
using the phrase wouldn’t be prudent, an expression the son
could profitably adopt.
Until the
Republicans learn that peace is normal, they will deserve defeat and infamy.
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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