Fear from Fear

"If Howard Dean had his way, Saddam Hussein would be in power today, not in prison, and the world would be a much more dangerous place," Mr. Lieberman said. "The American people would have a lot more to fear."

No! Not so. We have a lot more to fear now. Instead of one enemy, we now have millions of new enemies. Instead of allies who support our cause and feel sympathetic toward our motives, we have strained relationships, former friends who are skeptical of our motives, and a world that regards us with fear and distrust. We'll find no safety in a world like that.

Originally posted on December 14, 2003 - related to an article in the NYT.

Scaring Up Votes

James Goodby and Kenneth Weisbrode wrote in The Financial Times last week that the Bush crew has snuffed the optimism of F.D.R., Ronald Reagan and Bush pere: "Fear has been used as a basis for curtailing freedom of expression and for questioning legal rights long taken for granted. It has crept into political discourse and been used to discredit patriotic public servants. Ronald Reagan's favorite image, borrowed from an earlier visionary, of America as 'a shining city on a hill' has been unnecessarily dimmed by another image: a nation motivated by fear and ready to lash out at any country it defines as the source of a gathering threat."

Maureen Dowd, column of 22 November 2003.

Mid-Term Elections and TLJ's New Weblog

Hi Everyone,

The mid-term elections are over now, and we'll have a new Congress in January. Everyone wonders what will happen: recognizable steps forward, or the more things change, the more things stay the same? As always, we have something to look forward to, and the prospect for constructive action is a little less discouraging now than it was a few months ago. Let's see what the Baker-Hamilton study group and the Democratic caucus can offer us.

In the meantime, software to help people publish on the web continues to improve. Blogger's tools underwent some substantial changes recently. Of course I had to start poking around the new environment to try things out. It took some time, but it was kind of fun.

By the time I was done, TLJ on the web had a new look and much better navigation. In particular, have a look at an article I posted before the election called Mid-Term Elections and New Leadership. Many of us hold some guarded hopes about the Democrats now, but the article's rather more realistic outlook is something to keep in mind.

Here's a last item about TLJ on the web: I've separated the links and other resources from the articles for easier reading and improved organization. You can browse the links at The Last Jeffersonian Supplement. As always, please write with your ideas for articles, as well as other comments you might have. Thanks, and happy Thanksgiving!

All Out Civil War (7/10/06)

I'd like to know why we still keep seeing the phrase "all out civil war" in connection with the war in Iraq. A couple of years ago, the comment always was, there'll be a civil war if we leave. It'll be a bloodbath. The Iraqis decided to have a civil war while we were still there. So now we keep hearing that Iraq is on the brink of an all out civil war, and the government has the difficult job of preventing that. Well I'd like to know, what would an all out civil war look like?

Does an all out civil war mean that the soldiers fighting it have to wear uniforms? Do they have to use heavier weapons? What do you mean by the phrase _all out_? Does all out mean that the battle has to be like the Battle of Stalingrad? People died at a rate of roughly 400 a day during the American Civil War, the worst civil war of its century. The Iraqi body count in Baghdad has been running about fifty deaths a day. No one can keep track of the body count in the rest of Iraq, though people have tried. What does the daily death toll have to be to count as an all out civil war?

Let's try to ask the question this way. Suppose we were losing fifty soldiers a day in a war. What kind of a war would we call that? During the years we fought in Vietnam, we lost roughly twenty soldiers a day. Did that war not count as an all out war? Does it not count because we didn't use nuclear weapons, or because we didn't invade North Vietnam?

I'd like to know what is the use of the distinction between an all out civil war and a civil war that is not all out? When one of the corpses lying on a Baghdad street with hands tied behind the back and a bullet in the back of the head is your husband or father, you don't care much whether the people who did it thought they were fighting an all out civil war or not. Who cares what you call it - sectarian killings, reprisals, insurgent violence - it amounts to the same thing.

The reason the journalists keep repeating the phrase _all out civil war_ is that they want to remind us that things could get worse. Well yes, things could get worse. Things can always get worse. But that's not the point here. The thing to remember here is that things have gotten very bad now, and they're not getting better. Built into the phrase _all out civil war_ is the hope that things can get better, that the government can prevent the situation from worsening. And, one can add, the only way the Iraqi government can do that is if we stay to help them.

But remember that the Iraqi government is a fiction. Iraq does not have a government. If Iraq had a government, people would be secure. That's the definition or a government. A government has a monopoly on the use of force. Put more precisely, a government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. No one has a monopoly on the use of force in Iraq. That's the definition of a civil war. A civil war exists when no one has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Well, we can get technical here. That's anarchy. When no one has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and various sides actually use force, that's a civil war.

Iraq's so-called government is a creature of the United States. The institutions that exist in the Green Zone: the parliament, the cabinet, the presidency and the prime minister's office, the offices that administer the police and the army: these are not real institutions in the eyes of Iraqis. They exist to make America's presence in the country look legitimate. If these institutions made up a real government, they wouldn't have to hide in the Green Zone. If they made up a real government, they would be able to control the use of force in the country. Obviously they don't make up a government, and they don't have any control over anything outside of the Green Zone.

So I have a request for journalists here. Please stop referring to the Iraqi government as something that actually exists. If you were to say "American puppets," at least you'd be honest. As it is, your analysis of what's happening in Iraq sounds false as soon as you say the phrase _Iraqi government_. Who do you think you're fooling? No one in Iraq thinks Iraq has a governement. Perhaps people here do just because they have heard the phrase repeated so often.

A Generation from Now (8/20/06)

Someday, the violence in Iraq will end, and the republicans will take credit for it.

Follow Your Dream (9/6/06)

I've been seeing a lot of you've got to follow your dream movies lately. We saw Akeelah and the Bee together. I liked Laurence Fishburne in that. Talladega Nights was a film about a man who struggles hard to make a comeback. Okay, that's not your typical follow your dream movie, but it's the struggle that counts! This afternoon I saw Step Up with Emily and Molly. I will have to say that Jenna Dewan is highly sexy. I told that to Leslie, and she said I'd better watch out. Well Jenna Dewan is sexy and that's all there is to it. Also, she can dance.

But what's the relationship between a sexy dancer and wanting to be president? Nora pointedly asks Tyler, her dance partner in the move, what do you want? Just like that: what do you want? Well how can you escape the question when it is asked like that? You can't dodge it or waffle or try the usual evasive techniques. You have to answer it. So I did. I said I want to be president. If I can't be president, I want to go to Washington and make a difference. Now it gets a little complicated. I'm not sure I really want to go to Washington. So the general answer is, I want to work with the government to make a difference. That gets around all the implausibilities and impossibilities, I think. Anyway, that's what I was thinking while I was watching the movie.

Here's a simple argument about what's going to happen. Sometime in the next decade, probably in 2016, the United States will elect a president who is not nominated by one of the two major parties. Citizens will elect that president partly because he is independent of the Republicans and the Democrats, but primarily because he formulates a vision of the country that can't be found anywhere else. We certainly can't expect a new or compelling vision for the country from the Republicans or the Democrats, given the direction they are currently heading. I agree with the people who say that they are beyond saving at this point. They can't develop such a vision because they can't recruit and develop leaders who want to and are able to lead that way. The leaders they recruit aren't actually leaders.

That's another argument, though. The thought has been taking up a place in my soul, if no one else formulates this vision, then you have to do it. You don't have to understand how this vision is going to help you become president, or how it is going to help your country. You just have to know that it's up to you. You can't wait for someone else to do it. YOu are not going to save the country while your pen stays in your backpack. I don't see how I'm going to help my country by sitting here scrawling on my legal pad, but at least I'll have tried. I know I have to leave it up to God to figure out how this work will make a difference.

Now, formulating a vision for the country may seem like a big order, but we don't have to start from scratch. We can start with Ronald Reagan. He took scattered stories, ideas, and traditions, and created his vision for the country, his dreams of America. He had a lot of material to begin with, but it was truly scattered. We may feel more impoverished, intellectually and politically, in our post-9/11 weltanschauung, but we have a more integrated vision to start with. Our job is to update Reagan's vision for our own generation - to adapt it for the world as it exists after September 11.

The differences between the two worlds are big, so we have a big job ahead of us. I don't want to dwell on the size of the differences, thought, or they will daunt us. We just want to note them, and move confidently into the realm of imagination where we ask two questions: where do we want to go, and how do we want to get there? When we have answered those questions, we'll have a vision that is useful to leaders who want to lead. We'll have a vision for leaders who want to serve our republic - the whole republic and not one party. That's hard to do, but that's what motivated patriots like Jefferson, Lincoln, and Reagan. They were divisive figures, to be sure, but the vision that moved them comprehended the entire republic, not just part of it.

So, what is the most obvious difference now? We have a different enemy in 2006. Reagan identified our enemies in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, and they lived in the Soviet Union. They ruled the Soviet Union and they meant us harm. His strategy in our struggle with the Soviet Union was simple, he said: "We win and they lose." His strategy for victory had more to it than that, of course, but Reagan's vision was the first to conceive of victory as something that could happen soon, during his watch, even. He dared to think things that others were too timid to think.

We have a different enemy now, and a different set of constraints make us timid in our thinking. We say that our enemies are terrorists, and the most prominent terrorist organization is called al Qaeda. It's the most prominent because it carried out the 9/11 attacks against the United States. This organization, a network of networks, is a lot different from the Soviet Union. It's goals are different, and it's methods of operating are different. It's vision of the world should they prevail in their struggle with the West is different from the vision the Soviet Union would have imposed had they prevailed in their struggle with West. The methods we have to use to defeat this enemy are far different from the methods we had to use to defeat the Soviet Union.

Where is the George F. Kennan of our generation? Where is the person who will accurately describe our enemy, then draw from that description the proper conclusions about the best way to defeat it? We are seriously off the track now, and I don't see any wise men who can guide us back to the right road.

So let me pretend for a moment that I'm George Kennan...

The Devil Was Here (9/22/06)

I wish it were as easy to write the things I say as it is to say the things I write. Anyway, a few days ago, Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, said to the U.N. General Assembly: "Yesterday the devil was here, and the place still smells of sulfur." He referred to President Bush, who had spoken to the General Assembly the day before.

Now what do you make of a comment like that before the world body? I said to Leslie, it's sad to hear that, and know that there's not much to say against it. Here's a little more to say about it:

In the 1950s and 60s, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China used to talk about us that way. They called us the running dogs of capitalist imperialism, and other select phrases. Their rhetoric about U.S. imperialism wasn't so different from the way Chavez speaks now. The difference is that then, the communists ran concentration camps for political prisoners, used torture to extract confessions, and conquered countries when they thought it served their interests and they were able to do it. The rest of the world observed their behavior and had no doubt who the good guys were in the conflict we called the Cold War. We didn't care what they called us because we held the high ground and everyone knew it.

Now we're the ones who run concentration camps for political prisoners, use torture to extract confessions, and conquer countries when we think it serves our interests and we're able to do it. The rest of the world observes our behavior, and knows that Chavez is right. We're not the good guys anymore. We should care more than we used to, and more than we do, about what people call us, because it's true. The devil came here yesterday, and the place still smells of sulfur.

Mid-Term Elections and New Leadership

Hi Everyone,

We elect our national legislature on November 7. We also elect a number of governors and other state officials. I'm curious, how many citizens are happy with the choices they have as they look forward to election day? Do they expect good things from their representatives? Or do they think that voting is a waste of time because after all, what difference does it make?

I want to argue that we already have a huge and growing group of people who don't fit easily in either of these categories. They want to expect good things from their leaders, and they are not conventionally apathetic about politics. They know that the leaders we elect to represent us in public offices actually make a big difference. They also know that the people the Republicans and Democrats have brought into public life are, in general, not good leaders. In asking us to vote for people who don't deserve our vote, the major parties have failed in their main job: to recruit honest, competent candidates who can serve their constituents with dignity and vision.

We didn't even have political parties as such when our republic started out. We had loose associations of like-minded political types in the various states, so young that people still thought of them as former colonies. Political parties evolved out of that maelstrom, and by Jefferson's presidency we had partisanship, if not organization, that we would readily recognize today. We've had troubles before - big troubles - and always a leader has come on the scene to help us through them. The famous examples are Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and Franklin Roosevelt during the Depression and the Second World War. We have entered another period of trouble, and we need a leader of similar stature to bring us through it.

So many people recognize our need for good leadership now. So many people realize that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can supply such leadership. Why they can't supply it is a complicated argument in itself, but the simple answer is that they have lost our trust. The Republicans have proven they can't lead, and the Democrats aren't fit to lead in their stead. We don't trust our leadership anymore, and I'm not thinking of the healthy skepticism American's have always had regarding professional politicians. I mean that we know, deep in our core, that our current leaders aren't capable of doing the right thing. We know as well, based on their behavior over the last four years, that the Democrats who would like to lead us can't lay a claim to our trust either.

Systems change slowly, though, and almost all the candidates up for election in November will be Democrats or Republicans. We vote for them out of habit or because we're forced to, because we don't want to stay at home that day. Some will vote enthusiastically, with fresh hopes for victory that evening. They do believe, they are loyal to their chosen party. They believe that victory for their candidate does make a difference. The other huge group is fed up: fed up that our current leadership is so bad, and fed up that the prospects for improved leadership are so dim. Where will we find the leader who will bring us through this war?

The standard reply to a question like that comes to mind readily enough. If you aren't satisfied with the current state of things, don't stand at the sidelines to carp, criticize, and complain. Get in the arena and do what you have to do. Our country needs doers, not gripers or procrastinators.

That's a good response, but it overlooks a big problem. To get in the arena and have an effect when you are not involved in one of the major parties is not so easy. You might as well say, go out and start a new car manufacturing company, and make it successful. The barriers to entry are large and real. Yes, there are a lot of groups out there that are active in the political arena. Only two of them recruit most of our political leaders, though. Only two of them recruit most of the candidates who appear on the numerous ballots prepared for November 7.

James Stewart's character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington tells a story about his dad in the film. Mr. Smith's father was a newspaper publisher who was killed for taking up an unpopular cause in his paper. Smith recalled his dad saying, "The lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for." Well, is finding new leadership for the United States a lost cause? Would you like to fight for this or some other lost cause? This paradoxical saying has some wisdom in it, but few people would care to act on it.

The Democrats and Republicans act as if they don't realize they have lost our trust. They are not going to solve this big problem. Someone from outside the two major parties will have to come forward, rise up, or be called, whatever the correct phrase is. It'll have to be someone with courage and character. Wisdom is a good job qualification, too: if we can find someone with those qualities, we can overlook a lot of weaknesses. Don't wait for the two parties to produce a leader like that, though. The two parties have discredited themselves. We need a new source of leaders, and we can't wait long.

Remarks on Iraq, Truth, and Leadership (October 2006)

Key US Senators Offer Sober Assessment of Iraq

People keep talking about the government of Iraq. This the kind of phrase used in our public discourse that ought to make us impatient. There is no government of Iraq. The organization our leaders - such as the senators who recently travelled to Iraq - call the government of Iraq isn't a government. It can't levy taxes, it has no armed force under its own control, it can't make laws, enforce laws, protect people, or do any of the other things a government does. There are lots of reasons it can't do those things, but the main reason is that it has no legitimacy. We think that it should have legitimacy because the members of the government were elected in Western-style elections. But - again, for lots of reasons - the elections do not confer legitimacy on this government. Because it has no legitimacy at all, anywhere in Iraq, it has no chance of becoming a government.

Admitting that would be far too much for our leaders to do. That would be admitting that everything we have done there since Hussein fell has been a collossal waste. That would be to say, "We've been the perpetrators of a fiasco: what do we do now?" Bush and his team aren't the only leaders in a state of denial. Legislators in the Senate and the House, military leaders who won't stand up to Rumsfeld in private, opinion leaders who write about the war, everyone who talks about the government of Iraq stamps willful ignoramus on their forehead. They have no claim to our attention, because they've shown that they're willing to deceive themselves for the sake of what: the ability to go along with all the other people who refuse to recognize the fiasco?

They have no claim on our attention, and more importantly, they have no claim on our loyalty. Leaders are supposed to look out for the welfare of their followers, and our current leaders don't do that. They say that's what motivates them, but look at their behavior. Their behavior doesn't match their pronouncements. And their pronouncements, which really amount to propaganda, don't match reality. To call the current government of Iraq a government is just one common example. Last throes and WMD come to mind as other common - and disastrous - examples.

Many months ago, when things looked far better in Iraq than they do now, a reporter asked an Iraqi in the street a question about the government of Iraq. The young man snorted, "Government?? Iraq doesn't have a government!" What would happen if we were to recognize that simple truth? There are a lot of other simple truths we could recognize, but that's one of the simplest and most recognizable. If we saw things the way that young Iraqi saw them, we couldn't continue in our current direction. We would have to rethink our strategy and our tactics. That's not going to happen, though. Stay the course trumps all other directions. All other options amount to quitting or, just as unthinkable, pouring even more resources into an unwinnable war.

Perhaps we can define objectives that formulate clearly what we mean by winning. No one in our leadership wants to do that, either. They make a big show about having a plan for success, but everyone knows it's just more propaganda. Everyone knows that the latest speeches are no closer to reality than the earlier ones, and the earlier ones certainly had no grounding in reality. That's what happens when you lose the trust of your followers. Even if our current leaders did formulate a reasonable plan, few would have confidence in it. You can't lead people around the mulberry bush that often, with such catastrophic results, and expect that people will want to follow you again.

Bush was so much the triumphalist during his inauguration festivities in January 2005. That was less than 21 months ago. Just one day can be a lifetime in the life of a politician. What must Bush think when he sees how far he has fallen? What must he feel when he understands he's not going to get up again? What Bush thinks and feels isn't our concern, though. We have to find new leadership. We have too make the best of this catastrophe, not let it demoralize us permanently. The difficulty is that our methods for recruiting new leaders don't meet our needs now. The people who the recruitment process brings forward aren't qualified to lead. A friend said hopefully that the Democrats might offer some hope here, and I found myself responding emphatically, "The Democrats aren't fit to lead!" They think they are, but it's obvious to so many that they're not.

A generation from now - and some military leaders are talking in terms of a generation - Iraq will be a peaceful place. The war in its present form will most likely be over twenty-five years from now. The Iraqis will start to rebuild their shattered institutions. The Republicans, if their party still exists, will take credit for it. They'll say, "I told you so," no matter how long the fighting takes to end. They may try to take credit for peace in Iraq, but will anyone give them credit? Given our current willingness to accept phrases like the government of Iraq, I'm thinking that some people might be ready to accept the argument about success, too. They might be willing to say, maybe the people who started this war were right after all. By that reasoning, Mao was right to lead his people into the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. China became prosperous place after all.

We still do have a choice. We can find leaders outside of the usual channels of recruitment. Lincoln was a leader like that - a leader who came from the back country when most of our leaders still came from the East. Martin Luther King was also something of an unlikely leader. He had a leadership base in his church, but nothing in his early training would lead you to say he would be a national political leader. We do need to find people who have training in leadership. Difficult times call for leaders who are skilled, passionate, and wise. We should look for those people anywhere we can find them. They're not celebrities, and we should try to celebrate them too much. We should just try to help them. Encourage them. Show them that courage and common sense are still qualities we can call our own. Leaders draw their strength from the people who follow them. We need to find leaders who care about us, who want to serve us unselfishly. We are a long way from that now.

The people who back our current course still ask challengingly, "What would you have us do?" You know that they're not going to listen to the answer, that they're already planning their response before you've expressed even the beginning of a thought. You know that they don't care what you say in response. Of course that's the first thing a leader has to do: listen to what you say. Our current leaders don't care what we say. When you're sure you're right, you don't need to listen. In any case, what we need to do is simple. Not easy, but simple. We need to admit our mistake to the world and ask its forgiveness, and we need to find new leaders. Our current leaders certainly won't relinquish power on their own, and they certainly won't admit they were wrong when they invaded Iraq. So the two things we need to do go together. We need to find leaders who are willing to admit we were wrong, and who can plan constructively for the future they have transformed by that admission.

Where can we find people like that? We have to look harder than we're looking now. And we have to have people who are willing to bear the suffering that good leaders inevitably bear. Do we have wise people, courageous people who are tough and can bear pain? Do we have people who care passionately about the welfare of all Americans? Do we have people who can tell our story convincingly, remind us that we have good reasons to hope no matter how bad things look at the moment? Something wonderful is about to happen, Reagan used to say, along with numerous other optimistic anecdotes and sayings. He loved life and he loved America. Everyone - even his opponents - could see it. I keep asking in these essays, where will we find someone like that? Where will we find someone who has the qualities we need now?

Well I can tell you this: President Bush is the first president in my lifetime where I've said without doubt, "I can do a better job than that." I always found lots of reasons before not to think of becoming president. Not any more. Now I think about it, and fantasy or not, I'm convinced I could do a better job even though I don't have training in politics. I can't be the only one. Other people must think as well that they can do better than the total failure and incompetent who is now in office. Other people must think that they have qualities that could help their fellow citizens at a time of clear need.

That's really what we need now: someone with vision and backbone, and compassion for our citizens who need that so much. We don't need a superstar - we just need someone who can do better. Substantially better, yes, but not impossibly better. Who will step forward? Or who will we call? It doesn't matter who takes the initiative, who says the first word. Citizens have to issue the call, leaders have to respond. We have to rebuild the trusting bond that must exist between citizens and leaders. The first step in that process is to replace the people who broke the bond in the first place.

I'm sure I've written enough for tonight. Thanks for listening. Now I want to listen to you.

An Aphorism (October 2006)

Don't place the outcome of your decisions in other people's hands.

Of course you don't usually have full control of outcomes when you are engaged in conflict, negotiations, and the like. But often you can do a lot to retain a good deal of control, through planninng, sound strategy, and careful execution. The thing you can't do is create a situation where the success of your policy is entirely in the hands of another party. That is what we have done in Iraq. We have asked the Iraqis to create security where we could not, and the success of our endeavor depends entirely on their success. We have lost the initiative because we don't have a plan that gives us even some control over outcomes. No wonder we're bogged down.

When you have lost the initiative in a war, you have lost the war, unless you can get the initiative back.

2004 Presidential Election (October 2006)

Hi Everyone,

What theory best fits our observations?

Observation #1: The exit polls were terribly wrong in the 2004 presidential election. They showed that Kerry won the election, but the official vote count showed that Bush won the election.

Theory #1: The exit polls were wrong because the people who voted for Bush were less willing to talk to exit pollsters than people who voted for Kerry. Therefore the exit polls over-reported the Kerry vote.

Theory #2: The exit polls were wrong because the Republicans managed to shift votes from Kerry to Bush. That is, they tampered with the vote to make the official vote count different from the count that would have resulted from an honest election.

Question: Did Kerry not contest the vote in Ohio because he wanted to run for president again? Did he feel that contesting the vote would stir enough feeling against him that he couldn't run again?

Time to sign off for tonight!

Kerry Gaffe (October-November 2006)

Kerry Gaffe

What it all shows is none of our leaders has come close to any answers for the war in Iraq. And that should bother voters a lot more than inflammatory rhetoric or unfunny jokes.

Democracy and the 2004 Presidential Election

Hi Everyone,

Shortly after the 2004 election, I wondered whether faith in democracy was justified. Citizens of our country had just re-elected an incompetent president. Faith in democracy means you have faith in people to make sound decisions. The people - collectively - had just made an unsound decision. Democratic leaders from Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton have said, "If the people know the truth, they will make the right choice." The outcome of the 2004 election challenged that article of faith, and the foundation of democratic politics seemed both shaky and questionable.

I didn't want to entertain that thought. Some things just can't be false. Alternate explanations for the election's outcome did exist. "People are scared," some said - a special circumstance that resonated after 9/11. Our leaders lied, and voters fell victim to the distortions of propaganda. That explanation is not so convincing. Part of the democratic faith is that people can distinguish between lies and truth when they carry out the responsibilities of citizenship. A third possibility was quite practical: voters recognized Bush's weaknesses and didn't care for the job he was doing, but they regarded Kerry as weaker still. That's another version of the old saw, "The devil you know is better than the devil you don't." The argument has some plausibility, but still doesn't seem adequate in the face of Bush's demonstrated incompetence.

The possibility I truly didn't want to consider was that Kerry had won after all. If Kerry had won the election and Bush was in office, that meant the Republicans stole the election in Ohio. They might have stolen the election elsewhere, too, but Ohio was the state that mattered. If the Republicans had won by fraud, that was a challenge to our democracy even more troubling than the possibility of irresponsible, incapable voters. I don't like conspiracy theories much, and this explanation seemed to lie in that general category. The conspiratorial outlook argues that some kind of underhandedness has to explain such a disastrous - and inexplicable - outcome. But conspiracy theories grow when people are credulous, and we want an explanation of the 2004 election that relies on evidence, not credulity.

So, what evidence do we have about the outcome of the presidential election in Ohio? (To be continued.)

Thoughts in Advance of Election Day, November 2004

"Things like faith, love of country, courage and dedication - they are all part of the inner strength of America. And sometimes, they do not become self-evident until there is a time of crisis." - Ronald Reagan, September 9, 1974

"Well, I know this. I've laid down the law, though, to everyone from now on about anything that happens: no matter what time it is, wake me . . . even if it's in the middle of a cabinet meeting." - Ronald Reagan, April 13, 1984

Welcome to all of our new subscribers! You've joined a varied, vocal group, and you're going to like what you read here. Whether you're a recent subscriber or you're well acquainted with the journal, thanks for your interest! It keeps me going.

One thing that has always distinguished small d democrats from more aristocratic skeptics is a faith in the people's judgment. Jefferson, Lincoln, Reagan, and most recently, William Jefferson Clinton all believed that the people will make the right choice if they know the truth. If people have the facts they'll make a good decision, the democrats have said. That's a pretty big qualification, though, this appeal to truth and facts. We know that getting good information, and then making sound judgments about the information, is not easy work. In fact, if you have done a good job of evaluating your facts, you've already done most of what you need to do to make a good decision.

There's another qualification in there that we don't think about as much. People have to care enough about their country to do the hard work of decision making to begin with. Experts in politics analyze voter turnout, and ask questions like these:

~ What party benefits if turnout is good?

~ What does low turnout say about the state of our democracy?

~ Why should we care about voter turnout in the first place?

The key question is, what effect does turnout have on the quality of the decisions we make? In the past, people have said that high turnout with distorted or incomplete information is something we should avoid. It's better to go with low turnout, and have good information in the hands of the people who do vote. Interesting as these thoughts are, they're not so helpful when we truly want to influence the nature and the outcome of the fight.

Well, we can estimate voter turnout pretty accurately, but making judgments about the quality of information that's available isn't as easy as you might think. Let's take the swift boat ads about John Kerry as an example. The people who run the ads say that Kerry doesn't deserve his medals, and the people who served with him say that he fought with valor and courage. What are we to make of such a contradiction? How can we make a reliable judgment about his character if people can't agree about the basics of his military record?

If we look into the issue, we learn that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth aren't all that concerned about what Kerry did in Vietnam. What they really care about is what he did after he returned to the United States. They don't like it that he led a movement of veterans against the war. They don't like it that he criticized his senior officers in public, or that he publicized the atrocious things American soldiers did to Vietnamese civilians. They don't like it that he threw his medals away at an anti-war rally in Washington, and they certainly don't see him as a war hero. It rankles them that he plays up his service as a naval officer, because they see his behavior after he returned from the war as traitorous. For them he's a male Jane Fonda, and they show a picture of him sitting near Fonda at a Washington anti-war rally to prove it.

This simple example illustrates that it's not so easy to separate facts from judgments. In fact, it's not clear we should try. We have to decide what we think about active opposition to an ongoing war - what Kerry did when he came back from Vietnam - while we try to reach judgments about his character. We want to say that accurate information about the candidates will lead to a good choice on election day. More important than accuracy, though, is our ability to think clearly about the information we have. The campaigns are engaged in a great polemic, and we have to stand apart from them with good analytical tools. And then we have to vote, which means we have to participate in the fight.

So let's take up an underlying issue in the discussion of Kerry's war record: the question of whether it's unpatriotic to oppose an ongoing war. The same issue applies to the war in Iraq, of course. I didn't know what it was like to receive hate mail until I began to write about the current conflict. There's nothing insipid about the mail I receive on this issue. But what do you make of the last message I received, where someone I know well compared me to Tokyo Rose? He wrote that if I had been similarly outspoken during World War II, I would have been thrown in jail.

Does that mean that public criticism of the war just isn't permitted because it's traitorous? How patriotic can it be to support a war that has already done so much harm to our reputation and our ability to lead, not to mention our security? Doesn't everyone have an obligation to argue strongly about the merits of the case? It doesn't seem right at all to cast the people on one side of the issue as patriots, and the people on the other side as traitors. Where will that lead? To look at this phenomenon another way: the people who oppose the war might reach severe judgments about those who favor it - but they don't call them traitors.

Now we need to tie these thoughts about patriotism to the call for democratic participation. After all it's patriotism - an inbred concern for the health of our country - that leads us to become involved in its affairs in the first place. We the people have to decide who will lead the country. If we don't, other people who have their own interests at heart will decide for us. We ought to have faith that good judgment and devoted participation by people who care about their country will result in a good decision. It doesn't matter if the quality of information in the candidates' ads is contradictory, aggressive, and self-serving. Don't expect a balanced presentation of facts in campaign ads! The only way to evaluate the claims we've encountered during this election season is to use our independent judgment.

During previous election campaigns, we heard all the reasons for not voting: (1) there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties, (2) I don't like either candidate, so why should I give either one my support, (3) my vote doesn't make a difference anyway, (4) the system is corrupt and I can't do anything to change it. The close election in 2000, the September 11 attacks and the war in Iraq all make these defenses lame and irrelevant. It's not cool to be detached and indifferent anymore. When you hear people say that this is the most important election in our history, believe it. The only election of comparable importance occurred in 1864. Then the southern states indicated they would leave the Union before they would tolerate an administration opposed to slavery. The voters sent Lincoln to the White House in a three way race. Many people sense that our future as a free nation depends on the choice we make when we vote on November 2. Their instinct is correct.

I won't make an argument in this article about why you should vote one way or the other. The main purpose here is to persuade you it's worth your time to vote next week. More than that, it's worth your time to persuade other people to vote. Do what you can to remind people to participate in this great occasion - this remarkable event in our communal life. Send this article around to the people on your personal mailing list. You won't receive any hate mail for doing it!

I remember a teacher of mine in graduate school who is both good natured and serious about democratic citizenship. He asked students on election day in 1984, "Did you vote?" He didn't put people on the spot, but he sure left no doubt about what one's civic duty required. He set a good example, and it's an example we should follow now. We shouldn't wait until next Tuesday to deliver our reminders, though. We should follow the lead of both parties, get ready for the occasion, and do what we can to let people know that their participation is needed. If we all get together and vote our true beliefs, we'll have an outcome that is good for our country, and therefore good for us.

Sincerely,

Steven Greffenius

P.S. Above I referred to my writing on the war in Iraq. A week or so ago I published an expanded edition of my essay, Ugly War, which first came out in this journal last May. The new edition has maps, pictures, and a more readable format. To have a look at the new version, visit http://thelastjeffersonian.com/ugly_war.pdf. Please let me know if the file does not open for you. And please send the link for Ugly War to others who would like to read the essay, whether or not you think they agree with it.

I wrote the essay with the aim of persuading people to vote their hearts and minds on this critical issue of the war, and I do hope it does that. The more citizens who participate in this decision on November 2, the more we can live with the outcome, and the better our prospects as a free, secure, and respected nation.

Steven Greffenius is the author of The Last Jeffersonian: Ronald Reagan's Dreams of America. To learn more about the book, please visit http://thelastjeffersonian.com/.