A Lighter Touch of Evil

TO GRASP HOW much has changed in the last five years, consider this: During the Seattle WTO protests of 1999, one of the protestors' biggest nemeses in the media was a rookie New York Times columnist named Paul Krugman. Krugman's articles attacking the protestors weren't as snide as Tom Friedman's-the mustachioed one penned a piece that week called "Senseless in Seattle," in which he claimed the protestors were just out for a "1960's fix"-but they were close. The Princeton professor had no patience for the anti-corporate-globalization demonstrators who chanted, "This is what democracy looks like," and descended to inventing the Friedman-esque tag "Seattle Man" to describe people who don't know what they were talking about. Activists spat Krugman's name in disgust when they passed around his columns that week.

That was then. It isn't necessary to recount how a free-trade economist emerged as a guiding spirit of this week's RNC protest. It's enough to note that the globalization debate has been sidelined by the radical policies and undemocratic thrust of the current administration, which Krugman has heroically helped bring into crisp focus. Those who cursed Krugman in Seattle five years ago may still disagree with him about steel tariffs and the benevolence of large corporations, but most have put all that aside to join him in the Popular Front this November.

The Popular Front of 2004 is a very big tent, offering shade to everyone from ex-Treasury Sec. Paul O'Neill to Noam Chomsky. Although some Popular Front members may be genuinely inspired by John Kerry, I suspect most sympathize with the sentiment behind the web site KerryIsADoucheBagButImVotingForHimAny way.com. But they relate even more to cartoonist David Rees' exclamatory gut reaction to the Bush Administration: "Fuck! FUCK!!! Motherfuckin' fuckers fucking up every fuckin' thing they can get their fuckin' hands on! Fuckin' FUCKITY FUCK!!!"

For some on the left who shun the big tent, who refuse to participate in what they consider to be the morally bankrupt dead-end of lesser evilism, it is precisely this talent for fucking everything up that appeals to them about Bush. Among the Popular Front refuseniks who see more opportunity than danger in four more years of Bush administration recklessness is Alexander Cockburn, who makes the case against Kerry in a new collection co-edited with Jeffrey St. Clair, Dime's Worth of Difference. In an Aug. 16 Nation column that doubled as a plug for the book, Cockburn outlined the indisputable similarities between Bush and Kerry on most major issues, from the drug war to trade to Iraq. He argued that self-respecting Democratic constituencies should demand more of the party or bolt the big tent for real change down the line. But Cockburn isn't really interested in holding out for politicians that endorse same-sex marriage or a $10 minimum wage. The stakes of refusing the Popular Front in 2004 are considerably higher, the gamble much bigger, and those who choose to sit this election out know it. Cockburn ends his column with this quote from historian Gabriel Kolko:

The United States will be more prudent, and the world will be far safer, only if it is constrained by a lack of allies and isolated. And that is happening... Inadvertently, the Bush Administration has begun to destroy an alliance system that for the world's peace should have been abolished long ago. The Democrats are far less likely to continue that process... As dangerous as he is, Bush's reelection is much more likely to produce the continued destruction of the alliance system that is so crucial to American power in the long run.

Maybe we can blow up the U.N. while we're waiting for the U.S. to die of loneliness. The extent to which unrivaled American power threatens global peace and security is open to debate. Less debatable is the fact that this power can easily be maintained and wielded outside the alliance system constructed after the Second World War. At least, it can for long enough to cause all sorts of disasters. Cockburn knows as well as anyone the damage the U.S. can do-has done-with its best two friends, Israel and Micronesia. If the last four years have taught us anything, it is that Bush's foreign policy team is more than happy to take on the world alone, or bring down the house trying. In an age of rapid nuclear proliferation, nation hit lists and government manipulation of a vapid and supine American media, thinking in terms of "the long run" is a luxury we can't afford. We need some fingers in the dyke right now-to say nothing of different fingers on the button.

Cockburn, Kolko and other go-ahead-let-Bush-destroy-America advocates have read the various neocon blueprints for the New American Century. They know that allies were never part of that plan. Whether or not old NATO friends can be convinced to do Washington's bidding, the United States will still spend more than $420 billion on arms in 2005, more than the next 20 nations combined and eight times as much as China, the second-biggest spender. This bald fact looms larger than lost alliances in theorizing the future of American power.

It's easy to forget just how gigantic the U.S. war machine really is, or what kind of massive unintended consequences its use can bring. However hawkish Joe Lieberman's Democratic Party may be, its worst instincts are checked, if only a little, by its left wing. Whatever its faults, a Kerry administration would lack both the freedom and drive to pursue a global full-court press with the same mindlessness as Bush II surely will.

One major difference between an imperial Bush and an imperial Kerry administration can be seen in the realm of nuclear weapons. The push for new generations of nukes is Republican-generated. Ditto missile defense, the technological money pit that is aggravating tensions with other nuclear powers and promises to offer even less protection than the Maginot Line it is often compared with. (For a better metaphor, imagine if the Maginot Line had been 20 miles long, not 280.) The Nuclear Posture Review of 2002 is also very much a neocon document, displaying the same glib take on nuclear weapons that led major officials in Reagan's first administration to speak of "winnable" nuclear war.

It is sad and frightening that things have come to this, but the fact is, we face a choice between men who can see the humor in Dr. Strangelove, and those who can't. The right analogy for 2004 is thus not Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, but Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. After winning in 1964, it's true, Lyndon Johnson gave us the Golf of Tonkin lie, escalation in Vietnam and a toss-off invasion of the Dominican Republic. But he didn't start WWIII, which is probably what Goldwater would have done. These are the stakes that must be weighed by those who would bet on the pipe-dream of attenuated American power accomplished through diplomatic self-alienation and deficit-fueled economic self-destruction.

Cockburn's Nation colleague Naomi Klein is no more sympathetic to Kerry's politics than he is. Yet Klein has managed to find a way to justify joining the Popular Front. She argues that Bush's presidency, aside from the policies, has infantilized the opposition by providing a soft and distracting target. Better to get bad Democrats back in office to toughen up the mind again for the struggles that will remain long after Cheney & Co. die in disgrace.

Few people honestly think John Kerry represents an answer to anything that matters. He does, however, offer a chance to pull back from the cliff. Only then will Paul Krugman transform back to being just another smug free-trade economist. I for one am looking forward to hating him again. o