Partridge: Liberal Fantasies
Earnest Partridge at The Crisis Papers has written a pair of essays that offer divergent views of the next few years in this country. One is extemely pessimistic: America at mid-century. The other is much more optimistic: A new birth of freedom. Both are informed by an unapologetically liberal point of view.
To my mind they’re each pretty remarkable, but not necessarily because they’re particularly credible. They’re remarkable because of what they reveal about the perceptual map of reality their author uses.
Here’s an excerpt from the pessimistic piece:
Soon after the re-election of George Bush in 2004, and the “uncovering” by the CIA and FBI of an alleged plot by al Qaeda to set off a nuclear device in New York Harbor, “Patriot Act II” was enacted by the Republican Congress. With this, habeas corpus, and the constitutional rights of citizens to open trials by juries, access to counsel, were all suspended. On the assumption that “you are either for us or against us,” as articulated by George Bush soon after the September 2001 attacks, critics of the government were regarded as “traitors.” Mere hours before their intended arrests, dissenters Noam Chomsky and Paul Krugman escaped to Canada and thence to the faculties of Oxford and Cambridge. Democratic presidential aspirants Howard Dean, John Kerry and Dennis Kucinich were not so lucky, and have not been heard from since their disappearance in the summer of 2004.
Here’s a chunk from the optimistic piece:
Bush’s approval ratings plunged until, by early August, they finally dropped for the first time below 50%, as more than 50% of those polled reported that they were not inclined to vote for Bush’s re-election in 2004.
Facing this loss of public support, Bush reached into his trusty bag of tricks for the device that had previously bloated his ratings: In October, he ordered the invasion of Syria which, he said, was hiding the Weapons of Mass Destruction that the US Military had failed to discover in Iraq.
With that, the iron discipline of the Congressional Republicans collapsed. Four Republican Senators, Chaffee, Snowe, Collins and Voinevich, unwilling to be “fooled twice,” declared themselves as Independents, joining Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont. The control of the Senate reverted back to the Democrats, who promptly rescinded the war resolution of 2002 and adopted a resolution calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops in Syria. The Senate then ordered a series of investigations of alleged abuses of power by the Bush Administration.
Soon thereafter, fifteen moderate House Republicans fled the GOP fold and declared themselves independents. The House of Representatives, reorganized under a Democratic-Independent coalition, set up a parallel series of Select Investigation committees, and drew up Articles of Impeachment against both President Bush and Vice President Cheney.
Now, despite being basically in agreement with Partridge’s values, I can’t read either of those scenarios without smiling at how ludicrous they are. And at the same time, I’m grateful to Partridge for putting them out there. Each of us carries around a mental map of reality; each of us embellishes the white spaces representing terra incognita with extrapolations based on what we know, and what we think we know about the extent of what we don’t know.
To the timid mapmaker, the unknown is assumed to look more or less like the known. The white spaces on the map get filled in by little islands and cities and coastlines that look more or less familiar. But the person with imagination fills in those spaces with fantasic things: sea montsters and unicorns.
Both maps are right. Both have something important to teach us about the true nature of the unknown. Creating the fantastic version requires more courage, though. I’m grateful to Partridge for that.
