Arianna is right that "It wasn't elected officials who led the struggle for civil rights or the drive for women's rights or the fight to end the war in Vietnam or the war in Iraq - it was the people." More specifically, it was the people making politicians more scared to support the status quo than to support change.

Yes, we're back to the concept of fear - and how to make it work for positive ends.

Read more »

In response to an earlier post, several respondents suggested that elaboration on a formula of security based on national self-confidence rather than based on fear would be helpful. This has been the task of years and several books. But the essence is this: Whereas the perceived Cold War threat was based on the fear of Soviet encroachment into Europe and the threat of a nuclear exchange, threats to security and stability in the 21st century include the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, viral pandemics, failed states, climate change, mass migrations, jobs lost to globalization, and a host of similar new realities. These threats cannot be solved by military means and they cannot be solved by a single nation alone. Thus, we are led to the need for a new era of internationalism, the creation of new cooperative alliances similar to that of 1945-48, and a more inclusive understanding of what it takes to make us secure.

Read more »

David is absolutely right. The question in not whether the Democrats can make the case that their version of strength is superior to the fear-based one propagated by the GOP, the question is whether they will. Indeed, it's 2008's $3,000,000,000 question (see the price tag for the unnecessary war in Iraq, which would rise even higher since McCain thinks bringing our troops home is "not too important").

As Gary Hart said: The current success of the Republicans' "be afraid, be very afraid" ethos "will continue until a new Democratic administration gives security a new definition, one that is based on national self-confidence rather than fear."

But what will it take for Democratic leaders, who again and again over the last decade became enablers behaving more like loyal lackeys than the loyal opposition, to make that happen? What will allow them to stop being so easily cowed by attacks on their patriotism and by the cynical exploitation of fear and the now ritual waving of the banner of national security? What will cure the rot afflicting our politics?

In one word: character.

Read more »

I think one part of the debate about "national security" as an issue should be about how much of our economy (and of the wealth of the wealthiest) depends on military expenditures. Holding up the taxpayer for the money to pay for all sorts of weapons systems, new technology, and innovative equipment seems to be the drug of choice for the military industrial complex. Can or will the Congress, under the Democrats, staunch the flood? Given how lopsided our economy is, I don't really think so. I think that the MIC has been the engine driving the economy for several decades now, and the effect has been "if we've got the weapons, let's use them (and make more)." As a result, everyone loses except the equipment manufacturers.

At the same time, it is always a sign of decadence when a nation or an empire begins seeing its "national security" as solely dependent on weapons and aggression, but if the weapons manufacturers are siphoning off all the funds, then other essential contributors to national security--healthcare, infrastructure building and maintenance, education, agricultural productivity, etc--fall by the wayside, and all we've got is weapons. Oh, and fear. Military aggression becomes a self-perpetuating operation--the more countries you attack, then the more insecure you are, and so the more countries you attack, and so the wealthier the weapons manufacturing corporations are, and the more insecure you are.

Read more »

Arianna is one of the great provocateurs of the digital age, but her first question in this discussion is actually less provocative than we need to be at this historic moment. She asks, "Will Democrats be able to make the case that the war in Iraq - a war McCain is passionately, almost perversely, committed to continuing - has made us less safe by taking our eye off the real terrorist threats?"

But of course they will be able to make that case. Polls, after all, show the American people already believes it and further, that they are waiting for a party to articulate a whole new national security strategy that redefines the very concept of "strength." For more than a generation, politicians and pundits have defined "strength" as fat white old men sitting in Washington's air conditioned offices ordering other Americans' kids into combat and phoning in air strikes against dark skinned foreigners. But the Iraq War has shown that such a definition of "strong" national security policy is, in fact, the definition of "weak" national security policy - one that makes us less safe.

The question, then, is not whether Democrats could make the case that "strength" includes better diplomacy, limiting military engagements, and defeating the ideas, ideologies and pathologies that actually fuel terrorism. The question is will they - and why haven't they already?

Read more »

Hi, Everyone. Thanks for letting in a non-specialist. I appreciate Arianna's dauntless efforts--both their courage and their energy. She is an inspiration!

So, let's look at all the cards that the Republicans normally have in their electability hand--the race card, the fear card, the patriotism card, the money card, the morality card, the lying and cheating card, and the party loyalty card. In the last eight years, all of these have been more or less devalued, but the Republicans haven't got anything else. Given the present state of the economy and the past state of John McCain's morality, I think the two M cards are losers. All the Democrats have to do is tie McCain to the Bush economy over and over, and plant audience questions about McCain's history of womanizing.

Read more »

"Fear itself," an authentic American president remarkably said, is what we have to fear most. Seven decades later, the incumbent president said, in effect, "be afraid, be very afraid." Years from now historians will wonder, without resolution, how George W. Bush might have governed absent 9/11. It is at best an academic question but one that focuses on the catastrophe that gave his presidency whatever meaning it might have.

Without 9/11, what justification would the Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Addingtons, Yoos, and others have found for the toxic and unconstitutional theory of the "unitary executive," a theory used to consolidate power in the White House, ratified by a compliant partisan Congress, and unquestioned by a complacent ideological Supreme Court? Nixonian at its roots, it was used to justify torture, massive wiretap surveillance, outing of covert agents, repeated deception of the American people, manipulation of intelligence, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, unlawful detention, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the wholesale violation of whatever remains of the Constitution.

Read more »

Thanks much to Arianna Huffington for inviting me to respond to her posts this week.

First, let me say that Right is Wrong is an important and enlightening read. Many of us are already there in terms of the book's main message (see title), but what I'm finding indispensable is its collection of pointed examples of just how out of touch the right has been for lo these many years. My latest favorite--somehow I missed this one in real time--was Bush's erstwhile Treasury Sec'y, John Snow, saying that the best remedy for the damage from Katrina was to make the Bush tax cuts permanent (see pg. 253).

That's some real chutzpah. It's also mindless, callous, and infuriating.

Now, on to Arianna's first post re the role of the fear card in 2008.

Read more »

Greetings. I am delighted to be a part of the TPMCafe Book Club -- it's one of my favorite bookmarked sites. And I am grateful to Jared Bernstein, Gary Hart, George Lakoff, David Sirota, and Jane Smiley for joining the discussion.

Fear -- specifically the right wing's masterful manipulation of it -- has come to dominate our politics.

In Right is Wrong, I document how, since 9/11, the Right's fear-mongering has been relentless and revolting. It bottomed out during the 2004 presidential campaign with a sewer-level attack ad against John Kerry put together by a 527 group largely financed by a pair of longtime Bush-backers. The TV spot showed pictures of Osama bin Laden, 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, the Chechen school murderers, and the Madrid train bombings and asked: "These people want to kill us. Would you trust Kerry up against these fanatic killers?" Somewhere -- and I don't think it's heaven -- Karl Rove's mentor Lee Atwater was smiling.

Read more »