The American presidential election
I loathe both candidates. It is not merely that they are personally unattractive, although they certainly are; Bush with his fake Texas good ole boy manners learnt at Harvard, and Kerry with a hypocrisy so profound and elaborate that people do not even notice it, as you do not pay attention to the existence of the earth beneath your feet and the air above you. Yes, both are people whom anyone would cross the road to avoid. But that is not why I feel that this election is an outrage against decency. It is that both have major features of political agenda that I regard as revolting.
The ultimate Bush domestic policy agenda has been to force a massive redistribution of wealth from the average American to the ultra-rich, and to armour-plate the latter against succession taxes and other controls on inherited wealth. Himself an inheritor who has never shown any particular ability for business, Bush is consciously or unconsciously aiming to form a hereditary American aristocracy with a stranglehold on the political and economic life of the country. A second prong of this assault against the average American is the already old and consecrated Thugcherite machinery of union-busting, destruction of the working class, lumpen-proletarization of the bottom fifth of society. Karl Marx, like the good Prussian that he was, spoke of this process in military terms: the formation of a large number of precariously employed or temporarily unemployed people amounted to forming an industrial ersatz-armee, a group always ready and willing to take up work if any other group rejected it. Mass underemployment and unemployment destroys the ability of the stratum directly above itself, the currently employed and the skilled workers, to defend themselves, since any protest or (heaven forfend) strike can be met by simply replacing them with quickly drafted members of the ersatz-armee. But not even Marx, whose imagination was definitely of the grim and pessimistic kind, managed to imagine a situation where not one but two ersatz-armees could be raised: one of the desperate and disinherited in the country itself, the kind he had envisioned, and an enormously larger other in the "developing countries" of the third world, where poverty, ridiculous exchange terms, and tyranny (especially in China) allow Mr.Bush's rising corporate aristocracy to find skilled workers for wages that would not, in American, even come up to the level of starvation.
There is a third and even viler prong of the assault upon America: it is that Bush has cut tax without cutting state expenditure. The agenda behind this is cowardly and sneaky in the extreme: it will not be Bush (who has only two terms at most to rule), but his successor, whoever s/he is, will be forced to either cut State spending savagely, or to raise taxes, or both. State spending advantages primarily the middle classes, secondarily the lower classes, and little if not at all the super-rich; an assault upon it amounts to a long-term attempt to smash down the middle classes, further down towards the already shattered and bleeding working classes. State provision for everything from education to sewage will be slashed, and taxes raised. The middle classes are already groaning now. In twenty years, God only knows what will have happened to them.
In front of the monumental, four-square, Parthenon-like criminality of this policy (a description which embraces all the main areas of Bush activity in economic legislature), the more obvious and frequently noticed features of Bush's hatred of the public good - his oilman's hatred of environmental protection; the sneaky way he has allowed an extremely moderate amount of restriction on private ownership of deadly weapons to lapse; his love of the death penalty (shared by Kerry); his imbecility in Iraq (where his policy was dim-witted whether or not you supported the original decision to go to war); his support of the useless and illegal Star Wars program; his frequent pork-barrelling; his hypocritical position with respect to abortion, where he seeks the votes of Christians and pro-lifers without ever having done anything serious about it.... all of these begin to seem like minor, though telling, misdemeanours. The fact is that Bush wants, consciously or unconsciously, to destroy equality before the law. And that is why no amount of gesturing towards Christian values can make me believe that a second Bush presidency would be a good thing for America.
Bush, however, at least cuts a more credible figure of a Christian than Kerry. His hypocrisy is of the kind that pays virtue the homage of pretence; Kerry's is the more modern kind that insists that virtue has reshaped itself according to his desires. Kerry is the kind of man who insists on publicly taking Communion at the hands of a Catholic priest (who ought himself to have been defrocked for that) at the same time as he votes for partial-birth abortion (the process of destroying a nine-month-old, perfectly viable foetus) and defies the teaching of the Church in virtually every area to do with morality and sex
(even to the extent of being in favour of the death penalty). He wants the Catholic vote, you see. And for the sake of getting the Catholic vote, he is willing to draw on a religious identity he has, in practice, denied fifty times over. No less convincing religious faith was ever put on record since Stalin, with Hitler's mailed fist at his throat, confided in the British ambassador that he too, in his own way, believed in God. (Richard Overy, Why the Allies won, London 1995, 283)
But there is more and worse than that. Kerry and his likes genuinely believe that in gutting Christian teaching on the nature of the human person, they are morally justified, religiously justified, that they are literally more Catholic than the Pope. This is the sort of person who can convince himself of anything; Bush's dominant sin, raised in Kerry to the level of a principle. With self-righteousness raised to this level, there literally is no telling what this man could do. No wonder that he, who started in politics as the leader of "Vietnam Veterans agains the war", is now promoting himself as a super-patriot to outperform Bush.
My position on abortion, gay marriage, and euthanasia, is contrary to that of the vast majority of LJers, including, I believe, everyone who is on my f-list. For this I do not apologize; this post, after all, is about why I, I myself, find both Bush and Kerry equally odious. But just to make matters perfectly clear. If you want to discuss the status of permanent gay couples, let us discuss it. (Without, please, threats, insults, or moral blackmail, or else it risks being a short discussion.) I accept, for instance, that couples who live together permanently, sharing expenses and having a common life, have a good claim to all those features of family law which relate to the married couple as a couple, excluding the prospect of children: community of property, a claim on inheritance, and so on. On the other hand, I would not agree to grant things (e.g. the extension to a partner of the health program of another, or tax breaks) which are done mainly or exclusively in view of the welfare of children. And of course, in order to enjoy such rights at all, couples ought to make it known to the law that they are couples; hence, a legal register of gay unions (with a process for separation) should be established.
Adoption is another matter, and not because I would forbid gays from adopting. Rather, I think that the adoption laws we have now are cruel and monstrous, and ought to be changed in their entirety. They are conceived from the untenable idea that a child's mind can simply be formed to accept that his/her adopted parents are truly and with no distinction his/her real parents; hence the brutal provisions against the physical parents ever coming into contact again, the fence of restrictions around the possibility to adopt, the great difficulty in finding suitable candidates. To the contrary, I would make adoption a kind of fosterage, with a limited but guaranteed part in the child's life for both blood parents, and I would make it far easier to achieve. This certainly includes single people being allowed to adopt; and that would include gays. Only I would have three provisions: 1) there would be a good character clause, designed to exclude promiscuous people, whether straight or gay; 2), gays could only adopt as single individuals, not as couples, because gay couples have statistically a far higher tendence than straight ones to break up, and the status of a child who has already suffered a certain amount of uprooting must not be exposed to more than absolutely necessary; and, 3), the risk of pederasty (which is a frequent though not inevitable feature of homosexuality) must be taken into consideration, and provision must be made for complaints and problems. Ideally, it would be better if gays saw fit to adopt children of the opposite sex - not that I think it would be a good idea to make this into a rule, since I already find current adoption laws far too constrictive.
Whatever is done about gay legal unions, however, what I reject out of hand and absolutely is that they should be regarded as marriage. Marriage is a religious, not a legal, concept, and the State is only concerned in its legal aspects; it has no more right to invent a new kind of marriage than to legislate upon the presence of God in the Eucharist, or (to speak of different religious traditions) the philosophical significance of the word jihad or the steps necessary to achieve Nirvana. Nor is it within the power of the State to alter the nature of human descent. Throughout the world, marriage is primarily about fertility and children, and only secondarily, if at all, about the partners loving each other. Even in those strange Indian tribes that were so popular among anthropologists when I was getting my degree, which have virtually institutionalized promscuity, a shell of legal marriage was preserved for the specific purpose of providing children with a legal father, a person who, whatever his real relationship to the young people concerned, should have the rights and duties of a father to them. And this shows that even where marriage has nothing to do with sexual activity, it still has to do with procreation; indeed, it has exclusively to do with procreation.
As for abortion, the death penalty, and euthanasia, I reject them all, without distinction, and without exceptions. This is my position, and the position from which I condemn Mr.Kerry. I find his position as revolting as Mr.Bush's, and not for wholly different reasons (he has been notably cautious about attacking Mr.Bush's ruthless social engineering); and I regard this election as in every sense a misfortune. If you care for social justice, you have to reject Mr.Bush, but Mr.Kerry has hardly done enough to deserve your trust; if you care about the sanctity of human life, you have to reject Mr.Kerry, but Mr.Bush has done quite enough to earn the description of hypocrite. It is not just a choice of evils, but a choice of absolute evils.
The ultimate Bush domestic policy agenda has been to force a massive redistribution of wealth from the average American to the ultra-rich, and to armour-plate the latter against succession taxes and other controls on inherited wealth. Himself an inheritor who has never shown any particular ability for business, Bush is consciously or unconsciously aiming to form a hereditary American aristocracy with a stranglehold on the political and economic life of the country. A second prong of this assault against the average American is the already old and consecrated Thugcherite machinery of union-busting, destruction of the working class, lumpen-proletarization of the bottom fifth of society. Karl Marx, like the good Prussian that he was, spoke of this process in military terms: the formation of a large number of precariously employed or temporarily unemployed people amounted to forming an industrial ersatz-armee, a group always ready and willing to take up work if any other group rejected it. Mass underemployment and unemployment destroys the ability of the stratum directly above itself, the currently employed and the skilled workers, to defend themselves, since any protest or (heaven forfend) strike can be met by simply replacing them with quickly drafted members of the ersatz-armee. But not even Marx, whose imagination was definitely of the grim and pessimistic kind, managed to imagine a situation where not one but two ersatz-armees could be raised: one of the desperate and disinherited in the country itself, the kind he had envisioned, and an enormously larger other in the "developing countries" of the third world, where poverty, ridiculous exchange terms, and tyranny (especially in China) allow Mr.Bush's rising corporate aristocracy to find skilled workers for wages that would not, in American, even come up to the level of starvation.
There is a third and even viler prong of the assault upon America: it is that Bush has cut tax without cutting state expenditure. The agenda behind this is cowardly and sneaky in the extreme: it will not be Bush (who has only two terms at most to rule), but his successor, whoever s/he is, will be forced to either cut State spending savagely, or to raise taxes, or both. State spending advantages primarily the middle classes, secondarily the lower classes, and little if not at all the super-rich; an assault upon it amounts to a long-term attempt to smash down the middle classes, further down towards the already shattered and bleeding working classes. State provision for everything from education to sewage will be slashed, and taxes raised. The middle classes are already groaning now. In twenty years, God only knows what will have happened to them.
In front of the monumental, four-square, Parthenon-like criminality of this policy (a description which embraces all the main areas of Bush activity in economic legislature), the more obvious and frequently noticed features of Bush's hatred of the public good - his oilman's hatred of environmental protection; the sneaky way he has allowed an extremely moderate amount of restriction on private ownership of deadly weapons to lapse; his love of the death penalty (shared by Kerry); his imbecility in Iraq (where his policy was dim-witted whether or not you supported the original decision to go to war); his support of the useless and illegal Star Wars program; his frequent pork-barrelling; his hypocritical position with respect to abortion, where he seeks the votes of Christians and pro-lifers without ever having done anything serious about it.... all of these begin to seem like minor, though telling, misdemeanours. The fact is that Bush wants, consciously or unconsciously, to destroy equality before the law. And that is why no amount of gesturing towards Christian values can make me believe that a second Bush presidency would be a good thing for America.
Bush, however, at least cuts a more credible figure of a Christian than Kerry. His hypocrisy is of the kind that pays virtue the homage of pretence; Kerry's is the more modern kind that insists that virtue has reshaped itself according to his desires. Kerry is the kind of man who insists on publicly taking Communion at the hands of a Catholic priest (who ought himself to have been defrocked for that) at the same time as he votes for partial-birth abortion (the process of destroying a nine-month-old, perfectly viable foetus) and defies the teaching of the Church in virtually every area to do with morality and sex
(even to the extent of being in favour of the death penalty). He wants the Catholic vote, you see. And for the sake of getting the Catholic vote, he is willing to draw on a religious identity he has, in practice, denied fifty times over. No less convincing religious faith was ever put on record since Stalin, with Hitler's mailed fist at his throat, confided in the British ambassador that he too, in his own way, believed in God. (Richard Overy, Why the Allies won, London 1995, 283)
But there is more and worse than that. Kerry and his likes genuinely believe that in gutting Christian teaching on the nature of the human person, they are morally justified, religiously justified, that they are literally more Catholic than the Pope. This is the sort of person who can convince himself of anything; Bush's dominant sin, raised in Kerry to the level of a principle. With self-righteousness raised to this level, there literally is no telling what this man could do. No wonder that he, who started in politics as the leader of "Vietnam Veterans agains the war", is now promoting himself as a super-patriot to outperform Bush.
My position on abortion, gay marriage, and euthanasia, is contrary to that of the vast majority of LJers, including, I believe, everyone who is on my f-list. For this I do not apologize; this post, after all, is about why I, I myself, find both Bush and Kerry equally odious. But just to make matters perfectly clear. If you want to discuss the status of permanent gay couples, let us discuss it. (Without, please, threats, insults, or moral blackmail, or else it risks being a short discussion.) I accept, for instance, that couples who live together permanently, sharing expenses and having a common life, have a good claim to all those features of family law which relate to the married couple as a couple, excluding the prospect of children: community of property, a claim on inheritance, and so on. On the other hand, I would not agree to grant things (e.g. the extension to a partner of the health program of another, or tax breaks) which are done mainly or exclusively in view of the welfare of children. And of course, in order to enjoy such rights at all, couples ought to make it known to the law that they are couples; hence, a legal register of gay unions (with a process for separation) should be established.
Adoption is another matter, and not because I would forbid gays from adopting. Rather, I think that the adoption laws we have now are cruel and monstrous, and ought to be changed in their entirety. They are conceived from the untenable idea that a child's mind can simply be formed to accept that his/her adopted parents are truly and with no distinction his/her real parents; hence the brutal provisions against the physical parents ever coming into contact again, the fence of restrictions around the possibility to adopt, the great difficulty in finding suitable candidates. To the contrary, I would make adoption a kind of fosterage, with a limited but guaranteed part in the child's life for both blood parents, and I would make it far easier to achieve. This certainly includes single people being allowed to adopt; and that would include gays. Only I would have three provisions: 1) there would be a good character clause, designed to exclude promiscuous people, whether straight or gay; 2), gays could only adopt as single individuals, not as couples, because gay couples have statistically a far higher tendence than straight ones to break up, and the status of a child who has already suffered a certain amount of uprooting must not be exposed to more than absolutely necessary; and, 3), the risk of pederasty (which is a frequent though not inevitable feature of homosexuality) must be taken into consideration, and provision must be made for complaints and problems. Ideally, it would be better if gays saw fit to adopt children of the opposite sex - not that I think it would be a good idea to make this into a rule, since I already find current adoption laws far too constrictive.
Whatever is done about gay legal unions, however, what I reject out of hand and absolutely is that they should be regarded as marriage. Marriage is a religious, not a legal, concept, and the State is only concerned in its legal aspects; it has no more right to invent a new kind of marriage than to legislate upon the presence of God in the Eucharist, or (to speak of different religious traditions) the philosophical significance of the word jihad or the steps necessary to achieve Nirvana. Nor is it within the power of the State to alter the nature of human descent. Throughout the world, marriage is primarily about fertility and children, and only secondarily, if at all, about the partners loving each other. Even in those strange Indian tribes that were so popular among anthropologists when I was getting my degree, which have virtually institutionalized promscuity, a shell of legal marriage was preserved for the specific purpose of providing children with a legal father, a person who, whatever his real relationship to the young people concerned, should have the rights and duties of a father to them. And this shows that even where marriage has nothing to do with sexual activity, it still has to do with procreation; indeed, it has exclusively to do with procreation.
As for abortion, the death penalty, and euthanasia, I reject them all, without distinction, and without exceptions. This is my position, and the position from which I condemn Mr.Kerry. I find his position as revolting as Mr.Bush's, and not for wholly different reasons (he has been notably cautious about attacking Mr.Bush's ruthless social engineering); and I regard this election as in every sense a misfortune. If you care for social justice, you have to reject Mr.Bush, but Mr.Kerry has hardly done enough to deserve your trust; if you care about the sanctity of human life, you have to reject Mr.Kerry, but Mr.Bush has done quite enough to earn the description of hypocrite. It is not just a choice of evils, but a choice of absolute evils.