The Blood of the Infidel

In Islam, there are two states of being: the World of Islam, and the World of Jihad (meaning Struggle, not "Holy War" in this case).

Moslems see the World of Islam as a world of peace, faith, and joy.

They see the World of Jihad as a place of confusion, unease, unfulfillment, ruled by the infidel. It's the true Moslem's mission to annex as much of the World of Jihad into the World of Islam as possible.

Those who resist the World of Islam - infidels - are not subject to the niceties reserved for the good Moslem. Few indignities are spared them.

Islam packages this idea more neatly than most faiths - but the orthodox wings of most major religions share the separation between the world of the believer and the world of the infidel. No indignity in this world, no torture in the next, is spared them by those faiths.

Which brings us to Jonathan Chait's rhetorical fatwa against George Bush.

In the New Republic, Jonathan Chait starts his article "Mad About You: The Case For Hating Bush" with this:

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.

With this tossing off of one of Western Civilization's great moral laws - the Judeo/Christian/Lennon-McCartney injunction to "Love they Neighbor" no matter what - and the granting of leave to wallow in hatred, that most otherwise-reviled of human weaknesses, Chait sums up the great theme of liberalism since 9/11.

Because it's not about terrorists, or prescription drug benefits, or even hanging chads and stained dresses anymore.

George W. Bush has put an enormous clinker in the left's sense of exceptionalism - maybe even the sense that their worldview, their politics, is the one true faith. And boy, are they angry.

True believers are like that when it comes to infidels.

---

I'm not someone who uses religious comparisons lightly. I think they're appropriate here.

Driving around in Minnesota, you see the little green bumper stickers on the backs of rattling old Subarus and sedate Volvo wagons: "What Would Wellstone Do", the late Senator replacing Jesus in the popular trope in a way that is more than casually symbolic. Paul Wellstone was a messiah to the left in Minnesota: his death was explained by innumerable conspiracy theories (saints and prophets and Messiahs must always die for a higher cause, often martyred; there's a reason none of the saints died by choking on a sandwich); the infamous Paulapalooza resembled an old-time revival meeting, complete with Rick Kahn's call for the Republicans present to repent and give themselves over to the spirit of Wellstone.

This was echoed, after the elections, by Democrats' churlish sniping at the Republican winners and the people that had supported them, like Garrison Keillor's vituperative rants against not only Norm Coleman, but everyone that voted for him; political points took a back seat to an attack on the beliefs, even morals, of Coleman's voters.

The guy is a Brooklyn boy who became a left-wing student radical at Hofstra University with hair down to his shoulders, organized antiwar marches, said vile things about Richard Nixon, etc. Then he came west, went to law school, changed his look, went to work in the attorney general's office in Minnesota. Was elected mayor of St. Paul as a moderate Democrat, then swung comfortably over to the Republican side.

A true believer, y'see - who went and rejected the faith!

Now - if one true believer can reject the One True Faith, that's bad enough. How about when a whole nation shows signs of rejecting the faith?

---

Now, one of the great defining features of modern Liberalism is its belief that "if we bring enough of our brilliance to bear on a problem, we can solve any human malady". The New Deal Liberals thought they could abolish the business cycle; the postwar left thought they could conquer human nature with the UN; the Great Society liberals thought they could spend human frailty into submission; today's left believes...

...well, that's a good question. What is their key belief? Never mind; the one that matters today is the one that underlay all the other forms of exceptionalistic liberalism: that those who believe, those who refuse to "park the bus", are noble and worthy. Those who resist, on the other hand, are beneath contempt; none of the indignities and tortures permitted in civil society are spared them.

We've seen signs of this, of course, continuously ever since the rise of modern conservatism; the left's schizophrenic treatment of Ronald Reagan (ping-ponging between portraying him as a doddering old fool and a slavering warmonger) was the mark of a movement that couldn't quite comprehend disbelief, rather like a congregation of Keillor's stereotypical Lutherans nonplussed to notice a bunch of Moonies sitting in the choir.

After Bush's election, of course, it was about denial; it was an aberration of a rogue court that stifled the voices of the nation's better 48.1%, by their logic.

But since 9/11, and especially since the mid-term elections, it's been more serious. A huge part of the population has actively rejected the gospel. To the mainstream left, this is beyond a crisis; it's a major heresy. And major heresies must be stamped out, their ringleaders punished, their beliefs either hidden or made the targets of abject revulsion, the sinners made to repent and come back to the fold - for the very good of their souls.

Fighting the heretics - it's the one great call for the True Believer.

---

Oh, yeah - Jonathan Chait's article. How does one actually attack something so long-winded and rambling?

In alphabetical order? The article is:

• Blinkered: "Certainly Clinton had his defenders and admirers, but no similar cult of personality. Liberal Hollywood fantasies--"The West Wing," The American President--all depict imaginary presidents who pointedly lack Clinton's personal flaws or penchant for compromise." Forget for a moment the Barbra Streisands and Chers and Alec Baldwins and the myriad other sycophantic paeans to the Clinton Magic that plagued this nation for so long. The "West Wing" and The American President aren't about Bill Clinton; they're about the Liberal idealization of themselves. And remember - the left forgave Clinton for all the ways he'd fallen short of Josh Bartlett's monklike example even before they knew what the sins were.
• Conveniently Ignorant: "Bush crusaded for an enormous supply-side tax cut that was anathema to liberals. But, where Reagan followed his cuts with subsequent measures to reduce revenue loss and restore some progressivity to the tax code, Bush proceeded to execute two additional regressive tax cuts. " Reagan didn't have simultaneous hot wars and recessions, either.
• Extraterrestrially Wrong: "Bush's legislative strategy has revolved around...applying relentless pressure to GOP moderates--in one case, to the point of driving Vermont's James Jeffords out of the party." Jeffords jumped ship before any real legislating got under way. It was a Jeffords power grab, not symptom of a Bush power play.
• Immature: "He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it." Jon - it was high school. Get over it.
• Ludicously Selective: "It's certainly true that there is a left-wing fringe of Bush haters whose lurid conspiracy-mongering neatly parallels that of the Clinton haters. York cites various left-wing websites that compare Bush to Hitler and accuse him of murder. The trouble with this parallel is, first, that this sort of Bush-hating is entirely confined to the political fringe...Mainstream Democrats have avoided delving into Bush's economic ties with the bin Laden family or suggesting that Bush invaded Iraq primarily to benefit Halliburton." But this is two issues, isn't it? One needn't be a conspiracy theorist - a fringe player - to hate Bush. And indeed, Bush hatred is mainstream; it explains the popularity of Howard Dean, not only its Bush-bashing rhetoric and lily-white constituency, but the sincerest flattery - the scuttling of eight of the other Dwarves to the Bush-Bashing gospel.
• Muddled: "During the 2000 election, liberals evinced far less disdain for Bush than conservatives did for Al Gore. As The New York Times reported on the eve of the election, "The gap in intensity between Democrats and Republicans has been apparent all year." This "passion gap" manifested itself in the willingness of many liberals and leftists to vote for Ralph Nader, even in swing states. " But the voting for Nader was a symptom leftist passion - indeed, leftist fundamentalism; the ultraorthadox liberals flocked to their own sect, to get away from the less-fervent believers.
• Paranoid: "There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche. " Someone needs to get some perspective, here.
• Self-Servingly Myopic: "Bush's personal life is just as deep an affront to the values of the liberal meritocracy. How can they teach their children that they must get straight A's if the president slid through with C's--and brags about it!--and then, rather than truly earning his living, amasses a fortune through crony capitalism? " George Bush's grades were no worse than the "meritocratic" Algore's, and his SAT verbals were better than Bill Bradley's. Let's forget the bitter irony of the whole "liberal meritocracy", whose dumbing-down of schools and piddling on merit throughout society, especially in education, is such constant fodder for the Blogosphere and Joe Soucheray alike - it's not germane (although anyone who can say "meritocracy" with a straight face about a movement that includes Ted Kennedy deserves a rhetorical wedgie).
• Superficial: "I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang." Better that we all walk, talk, look...think the same, I guess.

You get the point.

Other writers tackle the gist of Chait's article: Powerline exposes many of its errors as well as illuminating more of the results of this hatred, Exultate Justi capably deconstructs the motivations of the hatred, and the Commissioner himself turns a hot light on some of Chait's claims. Read them all - and there will no doubt be more.

But Chait's article is just a symptom. The left today is awash in symptoms. They all tie back to the same illness.

---

Chait sums it up with this passage:

The persistence of an absurdly heroic view of Bush is what makes his dullness so maddening. To be a liberal today is to feel as though you've been transported into some alternative universe in which a transparently mediocre man is revered as a moral and strategic giant. You ask yourself why Bush is considered a great, or even a likeable, man. You wonder what it is you have been missing.

It's been said by many that to the real liberal, politics is the true religion. The religion mustn't be sullied by the mundane any more than by the profane.

Note in this, the story's ultimate paragraph, the climax of Chait's thesis: That Liberals hate Bush because he's "mediocre", not "great", that it's "absurd" to consider him a "hero" - as if the President must be "better" than the people whose government he leads. The leader must be a "hero", like the sainted Kennedy or the "martyred" Wellstone (there's a lot of perversely wishful thinking among the conspiracy theorists), or an...Al Gore? The leader must not merely lead the followers - he or she must redeem them.

That a "mediocre" man can have had such success in stymying the left's exceptionalistic, messianic mission? To be beaten at every turn is one thing. To be beaten repeatedly and consistently, and badly, by one you consider your "mediocre", hated inferior? Unconscionable. To the true believer, it's as if the barbarians (short, dumb ones) are breaking through the gates.

No - it's worse than that; like a pious Moslem would say of the World of Jihad encroaching on the World of Islam, it's an attack, not on your temporal here and now, but on the true believer's chance of eternal redemption.

And you know how true believers are about that sort of thing.

Posted by Mitch at September 24, 2003 06:03 AM