Dominoes
In the course of belittling this weekend’s anti-war rally in DC, Andrew Sullivan makes outrageous allegations about the size of the crowd, and then, quickly, corrects. Sullivan is a proto-conservative, and so his views are largely antithetical to mine, but he’s also one of my favorite bloggers, because he writes well and seems to build his opinions out of actual facts and a careful, reasoned sort of morality. So what’s with the kneejerk reaction to the march? He supported the war at the outset, but soon grew disenchanted with the way it was executed and has become, to my mind, one of its most vociferous and effective critics. He probably doesn’t agree with the political views of most of the march’s participants, but he must agree, to some extent, with their reason for being there.
I think there are two things going on here: one, the protesters arrived at their opposition from completely different avenues than he did, paths that Sullivan likely abhors; second, I think conservatives just dislike big marches like this, on principle. By and large, people don’t mass spontaneously in support of Republican priorities: you’ll never see huge crowds getting together in front of cameras to support a massive tax cut for the very rich, or an environmentally disastrous repeal of mercury standards, or a prescription drug bill that forbids the government from bargaining for better prices, or an initiative to eliminate personal bankruptcy. The rallies that live on in our minds were pro-worker, pro-civil rights, anti-Vietnam (Johnson was the prime malefactor in the Vietnam war, of course, but I’d argue that his actions with regard to that war were largely anti-Democratic).
Large bodies of citizenry massed in one placed must scare the shit out the jackals who run this administration, in particular, because most of their policies do not bear scrutiny. They are conceived and fostered in the shadows, where their details and their implications are hard to see, unless you look very hard. BushCo relies on people not looking too hard, and a good deal of its political machinery is devoted to distracting its audience with props and platitudes and huge, sunny lies that are repeated so often and so ubiquitously that they become a kind of folk truth.
Rallies like this, then, tens of thousands of people in protest motley marching on the Whitehouse, drawing attention to the lies that got us into this war, the criminal incompetence that’s sinking us into is muck, shine an unwelcome light on what is arguably this administration’s greatest policy failure. But it’s just one failure of many; and if this domino falls, all of the others — the fiscal mismanagement, the rampant cronyism, the entrenched corruption, the pervasive kowtowing to the priorities of big business — will fall too, and this administration will be exposed for the unnatural disaster that it is.
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