Better Late Than Never
Our good friends at Real Clear Politics have posted a couple of excellent pieces over the last day or two, which I've read, but not linked to. So here they are. Michael Barone writes on "The Politics of Negation":
American politics today is not just about winning elections or prevailing on issues. It's about delegitimizing, or preventing the delegitimization of, our presidents.
That is, I think, quite profound. It's consistent with what I wrote here.
It has been a habit of presidents to try to write their own history, to establish themselves as a legitimate embodiment of America's past and shaper of America's future. Franklin Roosevelt did it better than any other 20th century president, relating his actions to those of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, and his onetime boss, Woodrow Wilson.
True. Barone continues:
For decades afterward, presidents were judged by the FDR standard.Ronald Reagan wrote a different version of history. Like FDR, he showed that a strong and assertive America could advance freedom in the world. But unlike Roosevelt, he saw government at home as the problem, not the solution, and he utterly refuted the liberal elites who said that low-inflation economic growth was no longer possible and that America was on the defensive in the world. Not so. We've had low-inflation growth for most of the past 25 years, and the Soviet Union has disappeared. History doesn't always move left -- sometimes it moves right.
Yes. And that history is highly relevant to where we are today:
Bush's version of history is mostly in line with Reagan's. Since Sept. 11, he has led an aggressive policy against foreign enemies, while lowering taxes and pursuing, with considerable success despite narrow Republican majorities, mostly conservative policies at home.Democratic politicians and the mainstream media, who bridle at the Reagan version and are disappointed that it has not been displaced by Clinton's, regarded Bush's victory in the Florida controversy as illegitimate and have been trying furiously to delegitimize him ever since. So far, this has proved at least as ineffective politically as impeachment was for the Republicans, but the impulse to persist seems irresistible.
How long will this continue? Democrats were used to writing our history in most of the past century. But without a competing vision of their own, they seem no more likely to succeed than Roosevelt's or Reagan's furious opponents.
Sounds right to me. That brings us to Victor Davis Hanson, who wrote this piece exclusively for RCP, if I'm not mistaken. Hanson's thesis is that the Europeans aren't as dumb as they sometimes seem:
Nothing is quite as surreal as the Islamic world’s fury at the liberal and innocuous Danes. How could anyone wish to burn their embassies and kill their citizens, when they have always offered all the politically correct, multicultural platitudes and welcomed in any and all from the Middle East?Here is what we can probably anticipate. First will come a radical departure from past immigration practices. Islam will be praised; the Middle East assured that Europe is tolerant—but very few newcomers from across the Mediterranean let in.
There will be continued public furor over the American efforts in Iraq, but far greater secret efforts to coordinate with the United States—in everything from isolating the Assad regime in Syria to rethinking missile defense. ***
We won’t see much public condemnation of Hamas, but more likely quiet efforts to pull the plug slowly on subsidies for such terrorists. The Europeans praised Arafat, then learned that he was singularly corrupt. Nothing disturbs a European more than to be swindled and damned as immoral in the process. Subsidies to Jew-hating Hamas terrorists only ensure both.
Europe will still talk about bringing Turkey into the fold of the West, but de facto is horrified at the thought that millions of a religion that empowers so many to go berserk over a few cartoons might soon comprise the most populous nation of Europe. I doubt any European diplomat will invest any political capital at all in restarting in earnest Turkish/European Union talks.
Hanson thinks that anti-Americanism in Europe may have peaked:
Because of slated troop withdrawals from European bases, and a new American weariness with the old anti-Americanism, some Europeans are beginning to recoil at the idea that they might well be on their own—and in a war against fanatical enemies that they have appeased and without rational friends that they have estranged.In response, we may see less of the anti-American rhetoric and a return to the Cold War slogans of a “strong Atlantic Alliance” and “an essential Nato,” as nuclear jihadists replace the fear of 300 Soviet divisions.
At the end of the day, I doubt that many Europeans want to see mobs burning down shops, or lone fanatics slitting the throats of filmmakers, parliamentarians, etc., who dare to cross them. Let's hope, anyway, that that's right.
