Fear The Opposition
But is this perception even close to the truth? On the subject of abortion, alas, it probably is, and certainly reasonable people can find other individual policies on which the conservative and liberal positions are so far apart as to seem catastrophic to the losers. But abortion is a divisive issue even within the broad conservative community and, abortion aside, in its extremity the version of ‘a conservative agenda’ proffered by such ‘liberals’ is a fantasy born of fear and zealotry, a parody of the worst excesses of the least principled self-proclaimed ‘conservatives’. At best it is pessimism run amok; at worst it is demagoguery. And the claim that they have been somehow disenfranchised, and their accompanying refusal to acknowledge not only the legitimacy but even the reality of the Bush Presidency, would be pathetic if it weren’t so potentially damaging.
The election was indisputably controversial, and there are reasonable grounds for claiming that Al Gore might have been the moral winner. But the election was also excruciatingly close, closer than identifiable margins of error, and sure knowledge of such a moral certainty is simply unobtainable. Never mind the fact that George Bush received more votes than the Democratic darling and two-term President Bill Clinton ever did. Even under the most optimistic assumptions supporting a Gore Presidency the margin of victory cited is about 1% of the ballots cast and a much smaller percentage of the total electorate: under the most favorable scenarios more than half the voters, and about three-quarters of the electorate, didn’t vote for him. To claim that ‘the voters’ — meaning, of course, only the ones who voted for Gore — have been ‘disenfranchised’ by Bush’s Presidency is no more rational or justifiable than claiming that ‘the voters’ would have been ‘disenfranchised’ by Gore’s Presidency, or were ‘disenfranchised’ by Clinton’s. That’s the way elections work — a large number of people don’t get their way. It is not disenfranchisement, and it is not a justification for undermining the authority of the Presidency itself by refusing to accept it.
Alas, we have seen this before. At the start of Bill Clinton’s administration, conservatives — particularly those identified with the religious right — promulgated the same kinds of exaggerations about his ‘liberal agenda’, and attached the same kind of moral outrage and true belief to their arguments. While it is indisputable that Bill Clinton bought himself much of the trouble he endured during his presidency, it is also true that ‘conservative’ zealotry operated the factory in which it was made, and that proud and defiant self-described ‘conservatives’ packaged and marketed it with reckless abandon. Liberals who deplored the spectacle and waste of a Presidency under siege, take note: the besiegers were the faithful sustained by moral, not political, conviction.
Remember that Bill Clinton — like both George W. Bush and Al Gore — campaigned for the Presidency as a ‘centrist’. He publicly eschewed the old liberal socialism, promising to recreate a “new Democratic party” which would integrate traditionally ‘conservative’ themes like personal responsibility and fiscal restraint with the core liberal ideals of compassion and justice. George W. Bush claimed to be a “compassionate conservative”; one can imagine Clinton claiming to stand for “conservative compassion”. Why, then, do all three evoke such animosity? Because notwithstanding the sincerity and credulity of their disciples all three lack both the consistency and the moral authority to make their claims credible. We assume their centrist pronouncements are mere camouflage for more radical intentions, and we are terrified the camouflage will be confounding enough to let those intentions win out.