My Journey from Apostate to Apologist

This post could also be entitled How I Explain Myself to my Father or How I Came to Lose my Most Important Values, but I don't feel that those alternates have quite the ring of the winner. Basically, I get the following question all the time from my most astute friends and family:

"Erich, you were highly critical of the Bush Administration for running a covert program of systematic violence against those labeled, without a transparent process, 'terrorists,' and yet when the Obama Administration engages in a virtually identical program, except that instead of torturing on the ground they murder from the sky, even asserting the right to kill American citizens and their citizen minor children with impunity, a power Cheney never asserted, you not only say nothing, you express tacit approval and satisfaction? What up with that?"

I don't have a great response; merely an honest one. I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that head of the executive branch has taken it upon himself to establish a list of citizens that may be killed without due process. Beyond that, I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea of drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, sovereign countries that we are manifestly not at war with. More than both of those, I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea of a self-perpetuating permanent war, that we can continue to do all these things more than a decade after the last attack on American soil, and that there is no clear metric for when the killing is complete, and the "war" won.

I was very hard on the Bush Administration for pulling this kind of unconstitutional anti-democratic crap, and my relative lack of concern regarding the Obama Administration looks very, very bad. Yeah, I trust the motives of the guy more than I did Cheney, but the point I spent making the last decade making was that in a democracy the guy you don't like can be elected, so you probably don't want your guy doing anything you wouldn't want theirs doing. I haven't forgotten the argument.

There is almost no way I can come down on the side of the current president and retain any sort of intellectual integrity, right? Anything other than a full-throated denunciation of the man, his policies, and his re-election would be nothing more than partisan shilling, reducing the work of democracy to the loyalties and treacheries of organized sports. I only see the foul when it's the other team that commits it. And yet.

I don't have a choice between electing a president who pursues a permanent global war and one who would end it. I have a choice of voting for a candidate like that, but not one that could get elected. Not because of big money in politics, not because of the party structure that locks out independents, but because the American people do not support this kind of approach to terrorism. Check out this chart:

This is from a Pew study that broke down the Americans by party identification, finding that 74% of Republicans, 60% of Independents, and 58% of Democrats are supportive of the strikes that are highly unpopular anywhere else in the world. This has to be noted in the same context as the recent poll indicating that by an 18 point margin, Americans support the use of military action to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. It turns out that the American people are largely violent and belligerent, willing to resort to physical violence based on even the slightest provocation, and eager to assert their dominance just for the hell of it. Who knew?

And the logical extension of that thought is that America is a democracy. It's too bad my fellow citizens are morons and sycophants, brainwashed by fundamentalist religion and reality television, but it is without a doubt the scenario I find myself in. I can toss away cash and a vote to the Green Party, which holds positions I believe in but are accepted by a woefully small minority of Americans, or I can do what all good Democrats do, and constantly choose the lesser of two evils. Speaking of which, what is Mitt up to?

Turns out that Governor Romney says that he can mount a ground invasion of Iran without Congressional approval. Turns out Governor Romney would reinstate torture as state policy. In fact, Governor Romney basically accepts all of the basic premises of the Cheney foreign policy, going so far as to stock his staff with the exact same advisers. Hell, Romney has insisted that the single greatest threat to America here in the twenty-first century is, you guessed it, the Soviet Union. Seriously.

I don't think Obama wants to go down in history as the drone strike President. I don't think he really has any interest in that at all. But as a fairly astute fellow, I have to imagine that he knows were he not to wage an extremely aggressive campaign, even more brutal in some ways than his predecessor, and an attack were to slip though, which is of course inevitable on a long enough timeline, it would be Cheney times a hundred. Democrats would be out for decades, and who knows what our foreign policy, not to mention world standing, would look like then?

I don't get to choose between Ralph Nader (or even Ron Paul), Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney. Only two folks are in this game in a serious way, not because of money in politics, but because of the derangement and myopia of the average American voter. Opposing Obama because of his policies is tantamount to supporting Mitt Romney, because American politics is a zero-sum game. My choice, to the extent that I have one at all, is accepting curtailed civil rights and civilian casualties that number in the hundreds as a result of drone strikes, or far more curtailed civil rights and civilian casualties that number in the hundreds of thousands due to a land invasion of another Middle Eastern state. This is not to mention the death toll among American soldiers, not the expenses that are added to the national debt and then used as a cudgel to attack social spending.

I went from an apostate to an apologist because at the end of the day, I am a pragmatist. If someone could show me a system of dictatorship that ensured benevolent rule at all times, I'd probably select that over democracy, because I am not nearly as interested in principles as I am in results. I only need to look at the last twelve years to see the difference between Obama and Romney, and while it's not nearly as profound as I'd prefer, you'd have to be an idiot to say there is none. I wish I had a more palatable choice, but I don't. You don't either. Take that, Dad.