Say hello to Che Ron, the scourge of a corrupted American system. Liberals, having grown as leery of the morality of Big Government as libertarians, are now openly flirting with support for Ron Paul, even though he is opposed heart and soul to their central belief: using government to promote social equity. Republicans appear to be holding their noses and edging closer to Mitt Romney, though he is the embodiment of political expedience (even as they consider, and will just as quickly dump, their latest Great Red Hope in Iowa, Rick Santorum). Democrats will indulge in the usual harrumphing and self-hating before pulling the lever for their own false savior, Barack Obama. Around the world, skeptics of U.S. power in Europe and Asia never tire of pointing to American political paralysis and hubris-- yet they find they too find that, holding their noses, they must hew even closer to it. That's because the Europeans are proving to be even more economically dysfunctional than we are, which is why U.S. sovereign debt is still so sought after, and the Asians are more desirous of American protection than ever in the face of an aggressive China and an unpredictable Russia.
There are just no champions left, folks. We're not just compromising our True Beliefs, we're settling for a world in which there can no longer be True Beliefs. A world without true political heroes or viable ideologies. The only ideology left to us is the Least Worst Option. There's no liberalism; there's no conservatism; there's only Least-Worstism. Domestically, both progressives and right-wingers are equally disgusted with their political options, which lie only in the corrupted political center. Obama, who came into office promising a new era of postpartisanship, fell victim naively to the worst partisan gridlock in memory. And he never opened up a true new national debate. Globally, we have entered an era in which the Last Superpower is no longer trusted or capable, but where there is no one to replace it. So we are adrift in a leaderless world.
Perhaps I -- we all-- are overstating things. True, I have been pretty hard on Obama myself. But Ron Paul is the falsest savior of all. He is plainly a wackjob who not only has no chance of being president, but whom it is hard to imagine anyone on either side of the aisle ever entrusting with a senior federal job. Santorum was once considered one of America's dumbest senators by his own colleagues and appears to have learned nothing from a decade of neocon disasters. And Romney, well, he's played ideological whack-a-mole for so long there's no telling what he would really do as president. Which brings us back to ... Obama.
Still, I think we can learn something from the Liberals-for-Paul boomlet. Both the Left and Right need to shed some of their mythology. Glenn Greenwald, in a powerful broadside, observes that progressives are flirting with Paul for the simple reason that Obama "has done heinous things with the power he has been vested," including covert wars with both Islamist extremists and with Iran. Greenwald accuses progressives of not conducting an honest debate with themselves in which they admit the real tradeoffs of this Democratic administration: i.e., we'll accept unchecked executive power in which Muslim children are killed as collateral damage and bankers are secretly bailed out, as long as we can have fewer cuts to entitlements and a more progressive Supreme Court. Says Greenwald: "It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are “evil”: meaning it is not a Good v. Evil contest but a More Evil v. Less Evil contest."
Yeah, that's about right. It's Least-Worstism, as I said. There is evidence, of course, that Obama's policies, as costly as they sometimes are, have been effective, at least against Public Enemy No. 1 of the last decade, Al Qaeda. But that's going to do little to appease liberals, or win over anti-government conservatives. Clearly we need not just a new politics but a new set of ideas to fill the vacuum, as I've tried to argue economically. If liberals are now pining for a guy at the opposite end of the spectrum -- Che Ron -- then we have reached the End of the Old Divide. The failure of the ideologies of both Left and Right has come full circle. The only question is whether we will continue to go around in circles...
(Picture credit: http://thesamerowdycrowd.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/ron-paul-liberal.jpg?w=236&h=300)
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