Asymmetrical Politics

After 9/11, the Playing Field is Skewed

By: Eric Alterman

Sept. 11 was a moment and that moment has passed. We witnessed the shock of the attack, paused momentarily to mourn the dead, pay tribute to the heroes, and launch a war on the terrorists' sponsors, and then return to normal. The parameters of our politics have shifted but the psyches and characters between them have not.

It's hard to pinpoint the day the moment ended, but how else to explain the degree of shameless manipulation of the tragedy by so many people for such disparate ends? The past months have brought us:

• President Bush's decision Thursday to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to pursue a missile defense system instead. "I have concluded the ABM treaty hinders our government's ability to develop ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue-state missile attacks", Bush said, citing the Sept. 11 attacks.
  
  
• Bush also cited Sept. 11 for a push to to allow immediate drilling for oil in Alaska because: "The less dependent we are on foreign sources of crude oil, the more secure we are at home."
  
  
• U.S. Special Trade Representative Robert Zoellick's attempt to convince Congress to give George Bush the "fast-track" treaty-negotiating authority it denied President Clinton because trade "promotes the values at the heart of this protracted struggle".
  
  

• Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars gift-wrapped from the Republican majority in the House of Representatives to corporate America in the form of a "stimulus package" that lavishes riches on corporations like IBM and GM, as it ignores the war's economic victims at home. House Majority Leader Dick Armey explained the philosophy behind this decision. "The model of thought that says we need to go out and extend unemployment benefits and health insurance benefits and so forth is not, I think, one that is commensurate with the American spirit here."
  
  

Tip of the Iceberg

Of course these big-ticket items are just the tip of a proverbial iceberg that reaches into the depths of our political process. A quick perusal of newspapers covering Capitol Hill unearths one of these self-interested proposals, dressed up in patriotic, pro-war garb at every turn. They are receiving consideration at the same moment that President Bush is and the Republicans are insisting that there is no more money available to help the city of New York back on its feet despite its having borne the brunt of the terrorist attack in the first place. If the lobbyists have their way, unemployed workers and displaced businesses will receive nothing, while phone companies, airlines, the insurance industry, the travel industry - even the farm lobby - will receive lavish subsidies above and beyond what they have already been given as a result of their ability to manipulate the tragedy of terrorist attack in a means commensurate with their interests.

Playing to His Base

Why is this happening? Part of the reason is that President Bush wants it that way. Unlike his father, who risked the wrath of his party's right by agreeing to a tax hike to save his budget from busting, Bush the Younger knows quite well who brung him to this dance. He would never have received the Republican nomination, nor come close enough in Florida to receive the favor of the Supreme Court's intervention in the election, without the bedrock support of the nation's conservative activists and corporate funders currently making demands in the name of 9/11. Bush has skillfully managed to equate opposition to his political program with opposition to patriotism itself. This is true not only in the economic realm, where the power grab is most obvious, but also in the political arena, where constitutional protections and civil liberties long taken for granted are being claimed by the executive branch with barely a peep of protest from the other side.

Uncertain Democrats

Democrats, meanwhile, remain unsure of their footing. Even before September, they had trouble finding a voice to oppose Bush's most extreme measures on behalf of his conservative base, even though large majorities of the public professed to share the Democratic view. Now, the issues in which the Democratic side predominated - like patient's bill of rights, campaign finance, education, health care, and the like - have all fallen right off the agenda, to be replaced by typically Republican issues like military spending and personal security. Moreover, the whole tenor of discussion has changed. Democrats have rarely felt themselves to be on firm ground when having their patriotism questioned during wartime, even though most of the wars of this century were conducted under Democratic presidents. Their flag pins feel funny on their lapels, and their constituencies, many of whom are themselves minorities and recent immigrants, remain suspect of red-meat patriotic appeals. The language of Democratic patriotism is by definition more nuanced and less comfortable than Republican patriotism. It does not play nearly so well on TV schmoozathons.

The net result is a playing field tilted in favor of the Republican conservatives - one in which genuine victims of the September 11 attack are shunted aside by the government while the very same people who have always been able to manipulate the public trough continue to feed heartily. This may be the unalterable reality of politics, period. But that is little comfort to those afflicted by it, to whom Sept. 11 dealt a twin blow of punishment and powerlessness.