Is Cowardice Really the Explanation for Democrats' Impotence?

Journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote an angry piece last week on his blog “RebelReports”. If you haven’t heard of Scahill you need to check out his award-winning book on military contractors, “Blackwater”. Or his recent interview on Bill Moyers Journal. He’s a serious journalist in the muckraking tradition and it’s a good article.

But it got me thinking…

Here’s what I mean. On the topic of the Iraq/ Afghanistan war supplemental funding bill, which was passed by the House this week, he opens with this attack:

“The cowardly Democrats who checked their spines at the door to Congress when they voted Tuesday try to defend their flip-flop on war funding. Frankly, it is embarrassing.”

IT FEELS GOOD TO CALL'EM YELLA, DON'T IT?

Now, for those of us citizens who are resolutely against these wars, this line of attack my feel pretty satisfying. A good visceral gnashing of the teeth and pounding of the table -- it’s an attack that’s been leveled against House Democrats by numerous journalists, bloggers, and commentators since they took back the House in 2006 (and, let’s face it, well before that). And it’s the kind of charge that tends to produce instinctive and vigorous head nodding among those that want a lot more from the Democratic Party.

But I can’t help myself in wanting to interrogate this position. It seems to me that it’s more often uttered in frustration than anything else. “Those damn cowardly Dems!!! Why don’t thy grow a pair?!!” Okay, cool, I’m down with a little populist anger, right on, but you know there sure are a lot of people in the House of Representatives. Are you telling me that every single one of those reps that fails to support progressive legislation is some form of coward? Every Blue Dog Dem, and those who fear their opposition, is a fraidy cat? Really?

Well, here’s one of those situations where outrage is all good and well, but a little step back is in order. I think odds are there are numerous explanations for why these different reps vote the way they do -- moving from position to position in seemingly sober procession, from one to the other, and different explanations offered for each. There’s just too much ridiculousness going on here, too many nonsensical gyrations, for mere cowardice to be the cause of our government’s poor decision-making in the face of a seriously critical time in history. And if you can’t feel that bitch-slap the Creator’s been serving up to this country by now, maybe you were numb before it swung, because there is enough much sad, angry, messed up shit going on all across the country right now to make you curl up in fetal position. It is a bonafide critical time.

And it’s the growingly un-refutable fact of how critical a period we’re entering that makes this kind of inquiry into motivation so important. There’s not a lot of time for the United States to start making smarter decisions before things get genuinely ugly and heartbreaking. I think the common epithet about the Democratic Party being filled with officials having no backbone is starting to look a bit glib. (to steal a phrase from Tom Crusie)

The charge of cowardice assumes that most Dem officials have some core set of beliefs about fair play, social safety nets, civil liberties, and participatory democracy. And the implication seems to be that it’s just that, in the face of big bad corporations and other powerful interests, they can’t muster the stomach to take the heat these groups will bring down on them if they don’t play ball. So they betray their own beliefs and, by extension, their constituents.

But can you safely say that most politicians want to represent their constituents, but are scared? For that matter, can you say for certain what any politician truly believes? Or, as you watch each political scandal unfold, whether it be about sex, influence, corruption, whatever, it becomes pretty difficult to hang onto the idea that Dem officials vote the way they do solely out of cowardice.

I mean, screw it. Some group of intrepid journalists should marry up with a crack private investigation firm to look at each Dem on a case-by-case basis. What makes Nancy Pelosi tick? Why is Arlen Specter switching parties? I want to know. What’s in their garbage? What do they say when nobody’s listening? What really goes on, not just behind the committee room door, but before all those folks walk into the room? Who’s whispering in their ear? Who’s filling their cookie jar? It’s only when we have much more verifiable information on the motivations of Democratic Party officials and reps that citizens groups of all stripes can formulate more effective strategies to move these officials closer to the people’s will – or vote them out of office when they don’t respond. As I said before, it is a critical time. Things are moving much too rapidly for wasted efforts. Global warming is totally indifferent to the strength of incumbents or any “political reality”. Wouldn’t you rather have a more compelling accounting of what motivates your House Rep, your Senator, your City Supervisor, or your Mayor than simply that they’re cowards? Or even the more likely reality that human beings have a lot of trouble wielding power wisely?


The fact is that real democracy is dangerous to the elites in any country. And, yes, we do have elites in this country. They want to run things. They want to be important. They are not a bunch of Jimmy Stewarts, desperately trying to raise ordinary voices above the din of elite consensus. They believe they know better. I suspect that even Obama, whose rhetoric about citizen participation in democracy is so convincing to so many, believes he knows better than his fellow citizens (and president or not, we are Obama’s fellow citizens).

Check out this great clip of Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon from back in 1964, when he vociferously opposed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the brewing up by President Lyndon Johnson of a wider war in Vietnam. How many times have you heard your Senator mention the Constitution, or the fact that democracy means the people rule? And note how even way back in 1964, an elite person from the established class (namely the journalist with whom Morse is arguing) is so quick to say that his fellow citizens aren’t equipped to chart the course of their own nation.



Scahill is an excellent reporter and he shakes his fist mightily with facts crushed between his fingers. But citizens and journalists need to dig a lot deeper if we have any real intention of renewing small d democracy in America. I’d rather see honest to goodness positive change than enjoy the fleeting satisfactions of righteousness, wouldn’t you?

Clean War?

When I was a teenager, I used to enjoy watching reruns of Star Trek. Not the new fangled remake from the 80s and 90s, but the original show from the late 1960s. I know, I know, for the non-initiated in such pastimes the cheese factor is high. But I can’t help it. Pop culture has always had an insidious way of informing my experience.

I want to tell you about this one episode (for sticklers out there, it’s an episode called “A Taste of Armageddon”) in which the crew of the Enterprise arrives on a planet where two countries have been fighting a lengthy war. The weird thing is that the crew doesn’t encounter a devastated and war-torn planet. You see, the warring groups had gone and made their war virtual. They’d set it up so that each attack and counterattack occurred via computer game. When each side lost in the game, they’d send a group of their citizens to die (for real) in a sort of sci-fi body-pulverizing gas chamber. There you go. No fuss, no muss, no mess.

Well, Captain Kirk is so upset by this he takes it upon himself to destroy this virtual war system, even though the two countries believe it’s made their war more humane. Sure, they haven’t had true peace or diplomacy for generations, but they believe they’ve been managing pretty well. But Kirk rails that this is exactly the problem: Because there’s no real physical aspect of their war, they’ll fight it forever. From Kirk’s point of view, if you decide to be enemies, you have to deal with the real-world consequences – the death and loss and hurt that war actually causes. The key takeaway of the episode: It’s irresponsible to sanitize war.

In the run-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I found myself thinking about this Star Trek episode. Why? Well, just listen to the TV and the radio, read our newspapers. How do we talk about war?

You know how it sounds. The language we use in the United States to talk about war uses a lot of technical and political terminology, words and phrases that didn’t really exist before WWII – things like “collateral damage”, “theater”, “actionable intelligence”, “non-state actors”, “unmanned drones”. Strange phrases that seem to have only vague meanings, and tend to just wash over those of us who go about our increasingly busy lives of school, work, family, community, and place of worship. Add to that the fact that we never see an actual war zone on the TV news (as people did during Vietnam), never see the bodies, the blood, the crumpled buildings, the coffins, the shell-shocked soldiers and civilians. It’s hard for people to get a real understanding of the consequences of war if they never have to come face to face with them. For better or for worse, human beings learn best by experiencing things.

I wonder sometimes if these sanitized phrases have come into existence – not just because of the media or political forces – but because it’s simply not that easy to talk about war (not even for soldiers) if you really confront it. Because confronting it involves looking at death. Not person-by-person death, say from disease, or auto accident, or old age. But mass death because of metal tearing apart flesh and buildings coming violently to pieces. It’s beyond disturbing and if you think about it too hard, if you put yourself there inside your mind, if you really use your imagination about what war is, you can quickly get overwhelmed with a whole host of unpleasant feelings.

If we, in our ostensible democracy, are going to make decisions together about stuff like war, it’s awfully hard to do what’s right for all of us if we don’t get a little more real in assessing the consequences. After all, they don’t go away just because we changed the names of some ugly things to make them sound not so bad and made sure some upsetting pictures don’t get shown in nice folks’ living rooms. You can blame the media or the politicians for our sanitized wars, but we also have ourselves to confront.

Getting back to the episode, I think what Kirk did was call out the cowardice involved in waging war while running from a reckoning with its brutality.

How do you talk about war? With whom? What do you think about how war is portrayed in the media? Does it matter?