Against polarisation

A friend says that if Bush wins, she’ll leave the country. She writes a letter to our small–town paper arguing that Bush is doing the same things Hitler did. She isn’t exactly equating Bush with Hitler, but close enough. She gets fiercely criticised by other letter–writers who say she is trivialising the holocaust and exaggerating Bush. I love my friend, who is a kind and discerning person, but I agree with these critics. Then a wise and witty speaker at our church equates the Bush crew with the Nazis and I complain to my fellow congregants afterwards. I am shocked that old friends around me at the coffee urn agree with the speaker.

Why do many perfectly sane people on the left feel this way? Are they prescient, the canaries who keel over at the first whiff of fascist gas? Or are they paranoid, the leftwing equivalent of all those conservatives who fear communism in every social–welfare proposal? Is it intellectually lazy to use the word fascist, as John Berger argues, but only because this is a “new tyranny” of a new kind?

If Bush wins, just how afraid should liberals be? If Kerry wins, how afraid of a Bush return in 2008?

There is an argument that it would be best for Bush to win so that he faces the consequences of his own incompetence and false ideas: only with the world in flames of hatred against America will sensible conservatives be able to take back control of the Republican party.

I get little comfort from this idea.

A re–elected Bush will be God’s gift to the hardline Islamists, their ultimate recruiter. He is already unintentionally setting back moderate, democratic hopes in Islam and could do so across the world.

So I deeply desire a Bush defeat, and since Kerry is the best we have on offer, my wife and I will be traveling to a nearby swing state on election day to campaign for him. I have never taken a day off to campaign for a candidate before. That’s where I stand.

All the same, I think that those who equate Bush with Hitler are suffering from liberal paranoia. Exaggerating what is already bad enough makes it harder to win over the middle people. This is a public–relations problem the left has in spades. When it decries only the ills of capitalism, it alienates the masses who are benefiting from it. When it sees Hitler in Bush, it loses contact with the fence–sitters who at least know better than that.

This liberal paranoia echoes that of conservatives who equate Kerry or any other “far left” politician with communism. There is a long tradition in America of conservatives calling any new social welfare measure, from the New Deal to Medicare, “socialist” or “communist”. People on the left know how silly this is. Franklin Roosevelt said that by passing the New Deal, he was saving capitalism. The left, for him or against him, knew he was right.

In the same way conservatives today know that Bush is not trying to create a fascist or totalitarian state.

I agree. I see deeply disturbing trends and wrong ideas, but not fascism. Corporate cronyism, warmongering, erosion of civil liberties, attempts to prevent or discourage opponents voting: these are the kinds of tactics that fascists use on the way to totalitarian rule. But I think that Bush genuinely believes these things are necessary to meet the threats of terrorism, and, more cynically, to win elections. I do not believe he dreams of doing away with elections.

Democrats have hardly been guilt–free of the same kinds of high–handed erosions of liberty through American history. All such attacks on liberty have to be fought, but exaggeration doesn’t win over the centre to join that fight. Let Bush do the polarising, let us gather the centre.

There was indeed a 20th century hard left that wanted revolution, and communism. It discounted existing democracy and had little idea how to create wealth. It was obsessed with the ills of capitalism and drunk with the potential power of the state. These horrific blindnesses created the Gulag and China’s “cultural revolution”. Conservatives in the United States were not wrong to fear that kind of tyranny. They were only wrong to see every move domestically towards trade–union power, social welfare and redistributive taxes as a step towards it.

It is equally not wrong to fear a new tyranny of the right in America today. There are genuine theocrats who would like to create a Christian equivalent of the Taliban. There are corporate lobbyists who are true enemies of democracy. The militias train in the wings. But not every step towards school choice, privatised social security, corporate welfare or preemptive war is a step towards tyranny.

Bush suffers from some of the same blindnesses as the hard left. The latter is obsessed with the evils of capitalism, Bush with the evils of Islamist terrorism. It’s a part of human nature to welcome a big enemy. It focuses everything. All the complexities can become simplicities. Just read Paul Kingsnorth’s account of London’s European Social Forum if you want to see people demonising their enemy and oversimplifying everything.

The Stalinist left was drunk with the power and violence of the state. It is hard to credit that the same has happened to Bush, who campaigned last time against the power of government. But 9/11 happened, and he couldn’t wait to use the strongest military in history to sweep away his enemies. That is stupid. It is dangerous. It has killed tens of thousands of people. It has turned friends or neutrals into enemies. But it isn’t – yet – totalitarian; it is overzealousness and incompetence in the defense of freedom.

Whether a majority of Americans now agree may become clear on Tuesday 2 November 2004. If Bush is indeed re–elected, the judgment itself will be tested over the next four years.