On Hubris
With the inauguration of Barack Obama only days away and and the Eugene Weekly trumpeting that “Our Long National Nightmare is Over“, I found today’s column by Peter Beinart in the Washington Post both refreshing and instructive. In the context of a plea for Democrats to finally recognize the success of the “Surge” in Iraq, Beinart cautions liberals and progressives, especially young ones, the likes of which one frequently encounters around the University, against excessive hubris:
Because Bush has been such an unusually bad president, an entire generation of Democrats now takes it for granted that on the big questions, the right is always wrong. Older liberals remember the Persian Gulf War, which most congressional Democrats opposed and most congressional Republicans supported — and the Republicans were proven right. They also remember the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, when prominent liberals predicted disaster, and disaster didn’t happen.
Younger liberals, by contrast, have had no such chastening experiences. Watching the Bush administration flit from disaster to disaster, they have grown increasingly dismissive of conservatives in the process. They consume partisan media, where Republican malevolence is taken for granted. They laugh along with the “Colbert Report,” the whole premise of which is that conservatives are bombastic, chauvinistic and dumb. They have never had the ideologically humbling experience of watching the people whose politics they loathe be proven right.
In this way, they are a little like the Bushies themselves….
Come Tuesday, there’s likely to be a lot of celebration and triumphalism among Democrats and other liberals here in Eugene and indeed nationwide. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’d do them well, though, to keep in mind that Peter Beinart isn’t really talking about the “Surge” at all. He’s warning against the temptation to believe that, after eight years of the “national nightmare,” the return of the Democratic party to the Oval Office has vindicated the “progressive” worldview as being inherently superior to competing ideas.
The idea that the Republican party has become a “permanant minority” or little more than a “regional” Southern party might be comforting to some, but it’s more than a little reminiscent of Karl Rove’s “permanent majority” rhetoric. Conceiving of conservative thinking as a whole — from the Republicans to the Constitution Party, Libertarians, and others — as wholly discredited and fundamentally unserious (as Beinart argues the Bush Administration treated its critics) or simply viewing them as an undifferentiated mass of Bible-thumping racists might feel good on a visceral level, but it’s not really grounded in reality and it certainly isn’t good long-term thinking.
Indeed, anyone who thought Barack Obama was going to work that way has already tasted disappointment. Some have already begun to jokingly refer to the Obama Administration as the “third Bush term“. While such quips are obviously tongue-in-cheek, they do reflect “progressive” disappointment that Obama himself hasn’t shown much interest in waging an ideological crusade against Republicans and conservatives in Washington.
“Being proven right too many times is dangerous,” Beinart concludes. “It breeds intellectual arrogance and complacency.”
If Democrats and “progressives” follow the same path along which the Republican Party has trudged since 2000 (Or 1994. Or 1981.), toward arrogance and complacency, they might find themselves hunkering down and bracing for the next “national nightmare” in 2012. After all, what happened in November 2008 wasn’t a revolution. It was just a Presidential election. And these things happen.
