Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (18 page)

This generation’s neoconservatives are protected, sheltered recipients of endless nepotistic, parental largesse who never tire of sermonizing to the world about the necessities of self-sufficiency and meritocracy. Further, they insist that their war advocacy demonstrates how resolute and willful they are—self-glorifying announcements they make from positions arranged for them by their mommies and daddies.

Contrast the reality of these playacting men—virtually all of them, at one point or another, contributors to
National Review
or
The Weekly Standard—
with the image the right wing promotes of itself. From a 2004
National Review
essay on the defining attributes of political conservatism, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge:

The heroes of modern American conservatism are
rugged individualists who don’t know their place:
entrepreneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right—unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort or another.

Rugged individualists. Frontier spirit. The cowboy. These are the fantasies our right-wing leaders try to project, precisely because these cartoons mask the ugly reality of what they are and how they lead their coddled, risk-avoiding lives.

Over and over again, those who simply advocate a war in which the lives and limbs of other people will be risked label themselves strong and courageous.
National Review
’s Cliff May—who has never served in the military yet devotes his life to urging more American wars—has actually argued that those who advocate wars by writing and speaking in favor of them (such as himself) are courageous “warriors” every bit as much as those who actually risk their lives in combat.

In 2006, May’s colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote that she had seen Oliver Stone’s film
World Trade Center
and it reminded her “about why we fight,” prompting an e-mailer to remind Lopez: “You do not fight—you never have and, hopefully, never will have to. You are not a member of any of the branches of the armed forces, nor a reservist.” In response, May defended Lopez’s status as warrior despite steadfastly avoiding anything actually resembling war:

There is a war of arms. And there is a war of ideas.

They are not just inter-related, they are interdependent. They are equally consequential….

So yes, Kathryn, you are fighting a war. And your e-mailer is ignorant about how wars are fought, about how wars are won and lost, and about the way the world actually works.

One of the nation’s most relentless war cheerleaders, Christopher Hitchens, authored a column in the
Boston Globe
celebrating the joys—the “exhilaration”—of watching wars that he cheers on (but does not fight):

In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder.

But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time.
I will never become tired of waging it,
because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so
interesting.

In Hitchens’s mind, he is not merely writing about war. He is not merely cheering it on. He is not merely speaking endlessly about it. No. He himself is “waging it.” He is a warrior. He is brave, resolute, and strong. In today’s pro-war faction in America, war is not merely a means of defending the nation. Zealously advocating for them is the means by which those who lack any acts of real courage in their own lives purport to be warriors, too.

This dynamic demands exposure and criticism because it is so pervasive in the right-wing faction—and so irrational, false, and manipulative. There is nothing courageous or strong about wanting to send other people to war or to keep them in wars that have already been started. And there is nothing weak or cowardly about opposing the commencement of a war in which others will bear the risks. Indeed, to the extent courage and cowardice play any role in war advocacy, one could argue that those who would blithely send other people off to war in order to protect themselves against every potential risk
are driven by fear and weakness.
By the same token, those who are less fearful will require a much higher level of personal threat before finding it just to send fellow citizens off to risk their lives.

It is certainly true that whether someone has fought previously in a war neither proves nor disproves the wisdom of their foreign policy views, nor is prior military service a prerequisite for participating in debates over whether the United States should go to war. But one’s views about whether the United States should fight a war that will bring little or no risk to the advocate has nothing to do with personal courage or strength. The phrase “101st Keyboard Brigade”—a term invented to describe the throngs of right-wing bloggers and pro-war pundits who relentlessly cheered on the Iraq War and talked about their resolve and courage as though they themselves were combatants—mocks
not
merely those who support wars but those who strut around as though their support for war means that they are fighting it, and who consequently apply the warrior attributes to themselves.

Clearly, those who will actually incur the risks of war are more likely to think carefully and soberly about whether to start one than are those who urge on wars without any personal interests at stake. It is, for instance, much more difficult for Israelis to urge war with Lebanon than it is for Americans sitting comfortably out of reach of Hezbollah rockets to do so. And it was much more difficult for European monarchs to choose war when their own children would fight on the front lines than it is for American senators and administration officials whose family members won’t be doing the fighting to make the same choice. Indeed, the Founders mandated in the Constitution that
only Congress
could declare war because they knew war would be less likely if those who bore the burden (which they assumed would be the nation’s citizens) were required to approve of any wars.

One of the most destructive diseases of our political culture is how insulated American war cheerleaders and pundits are from the consequences of the wars they unleash. A remarkably prescient warning of precisely this disease came from Adam Smith in his 1776
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
It really is striking how perfectly Smith described our right-wing culture and their war-cheering, establishment media comrades:

The ordinary expense of the greater part of modern governments in time of peace being equal or nearly equal to their ordinary revenue, when war comes they are both unwilling and unable to increase their revenue in proportion to the increase of their expense. They are unwilling for fear of offending the people, who, by so great and so sudden an increase of taxes, would soon be disgusted with the war; and they are unable from not well knowing what taxes would be sufficient to produce the revenue wanted.

The facility of borrowing delivers them from the embarrassment which this fear and inability would otherwise occasion. By means of borrowing they are enabled, with a very moderate increase of taxes, to raise, from year to year, money sufficient for carrying on the war, and by the practice of perpetually funding they are enabled, with the smallest possible increase of taxes, to raise annually the largest possible sum of money.

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

The right-wing–dominated Republican Party today is even worse than the sickly culture about which Smith warns, since they will not even tolerate mild increases in taxes to fund their war amusements. This is a critical disease in our culture: that all appendages of our political class (other than the military itself ) bear no sacrifice whatsoever for the wars they advocate, and hence are “dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.”

More than sixty years ago, George Orwell described this lowly and dangerous mentality perfectly, writing in
Homage to Catalonia:

The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting.
It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and
no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench,
except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.

Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aero-plane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

That
is what the Republican Party is filled with, what that party is defined by—a whole slew of John Wayne–like chicken hawks whose lives are devoid of acts of physical courage and warrior virtues pretending to be the soldiers whom they send off to fight. Actual bravery and courageous service to one’s country are irrelevant. In their worldview, combat heroes and military veterans such as Carter, McGovern, Wesley Clark, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, and Jack Murtha are surrender-happy, appeasing, American-hating cowards.

It is the
playacting
that matters, the cheerleading for wars that makes one a Republican “tough guy.” Hence, the right-wing “brave warriors” are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, Rudy Giuliani, and Norm and John Podhoretz—people whose lives are devoid of those virtues in reality but who wear the costumes and read the scripts, thus convincing themselves—and their followers in the establishment press—that they embody true warrior virtue.

Shock and Awfulness

Most critically, these tough-guy costumes go beyond mere playacting. This twisted need to prance around as faux courageous warriors has very real—and very destructive—effects in the real world. For our right-wing tough guys and their media fans, it is entirely unfulfilling simply to beat their chests and feel powerful by excitedly threatening war. They want to cheer on the invasions, feel and hear the glorious bombs dropping, behold the devastation that results from their warmongering, wallow in the pulsating sensations of strength and power that it vicariously provides. Starting and cheering for wars becomes the way—the only way—they can maintain the role they are so desperate to play.

The American political press and the right-wing political movement have joined in creating and entrenching a destructive theme that predominates American political discourse—that a politician must prove his leadership and manliness by advocating war. No longer does an American male become a warrior by fighting in a war. Far more important for demonstrating toughness is the willingness to send others off to fight.

Shortly after he took office in 1989, the first President George Bush, plagued by whispers that he was a “wimp” despite his combat heroism during World War II, sent the U.S. military to invade Panama—a country that could not and did not remotely threaten America—and remove its president, Manuel Noriega. On the day of the invasion, writing on the front page of the
New York Times,
political reporter R. W. Apple illustrated how vital war is for an American political leader to prove his “courage” and “strength”:

For George Bush, the United States invasion of Panama early this morning constituted a Presidential initiation rite as well as an attempt to achieve specific goals.

For better or for worse, most American leaders since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood to protect or advance what they construe as the national interest. John F. Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon in South Vietnam, Gerald R. Ford in the Mayaguez affair, Ronald Reagan in Grenada and Lebanon, and now Mr. Bush in Panama—all of them acted in the belief that the American political culture required them to show the world promptly that they carried big sticks.

Jimmy Carter did not do it until he sought unsuccessfully to rescue American hostages in Iran late in his term, and politicians of both parties still believe that it cost him dear.

For President Bush—a man widely criticized as recently as a month ago for his purported timidity, a man assailed on Capitol Hill and elsewhere for failing to fully support an attempted coup against General Noriega only in October, a man still portrayed in the Doonesbury comic strip as the invisible President—showing his steel had a particular significance.

Whatever the other results of this roll of the dice in Panama, it has shown him as a man capable of bold action, especially coming, as it did, on the heels of his Malta summit talks with Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his surprise initiative toward China.