Disillusionment and Elite Discourse
Twice in my life I have been genuinely disillusioned by politics. I’ve been disappointed by politics more times than I care to count. For a progressive in a reactionary age, political disappointment becomes so omnipresent as to lose most of its intensity. Only twice, though, have political developments truly upended previously-held assumptions and revealed intense, unexpected ugliness and dysfunction.
9/11 doesn’t make the cut. It was, to be sure, a horrifying psychic punch to the jaw, but I was a pretty aware sixteen-year-old. I knew there was violence and terrorism in the world, had vaguely heard of al-Qaeda, and had read that Tom Clancy book where the guy flies a jumbo jet into Capitol Hill. I also wasn’t personally acquainted with any of the victims. So 9/11 didn’t really shatter any dearly-held preconceptions. Likewise with the run-up to the Iraq war. My still-teen-aged self didn’t think invading Iraq was a particularly good idea, and could recognize some of the “selling” of that war as overblown fear-mongering. But perhaps because I had a high school teacher who interpreted all of modern history through the lens of Machiavelli’s The Prince, or because I knew about Vietnam and remembered Monica Lewinsky, I wasn’t blown away by the notion that leaders would engage in a bit of fact-massaging in service to their own interests.
No, my first moment of disillusionment came during the summer of 2003, when it became clear that 1) Saddam Hussein had no WMD program to speak of, and 2) the Bush Administration would survive this revelation. My 2002-2003 self, cynically confident that institutional incentives would discipline the mendacious tendencies of elected officials, had assumed that Bush et al. actually had “slam dunk” evidence of Saddam’s weapons programs. I didn’t assume this because I thought they were honorable people incapable of misleading the public. I assumed it because they were willing to launch a massive, highly controversial war based on assertions about Iraqi weapons. Should those assertions prove false, I smugly believed, the indignant revulsion erupting from the American populace would be so intense as to render Watergate a sideshow in the history of executive malfeasance. There would be impeachment. There would be criminal charges. Maybe a lynching or two for good measure.* The righteous fury of a people whose sons and daughters had been sent to die over a fairy tale would, at the very least, leave a battered, discredited shell of an administration limping toward the merciful euthanasia of the 2004 elections.
Yeah....
http://fpwatch.com/?p=2320
