An election is an advance auction of stolen goods, as Ambrose Bierce put it. The bidding began many months ago and continues in the Big Apple this week, with each candidate burnishing his shield, sharpening his sword… and raising the stakes.
Republicans can tell which way the wind is blowing. They’ve come out with a flattering convention theme — "A Nation of Courage" — and an agenda at least as bellicose as their opponents.’
Kicking the scrawny butts of nearly unarmed Third World nations is not the sort of thing that epic poems and granite monuments typically celebrate. Besides, when you are the world’s only superpower, it’s not courage that you need… it’s prudence. You just don’t want to do something rash or stupid. But that seems to be what both parties are bent on.
Conservatism is dead in America. George Bush will put the crown on his own head on Thursday and announce a reign of grandiose ambition, expansionism, recklessness and self-delusion. It makes little difference whether he wins or loses. Neither party plans to cut spending, though it is debt that threatens the republic far more than terrorism. Neither party can face up to the $44 trillion "funding gap" in federal finances, nor to the current account deficit, nor to the challenge of low-wage competitors in Asia. Even Alan Greenspan is talking about the need to reform Social Security and Medicare; but which national leader is going to tell the voters that they will get less than expected? Nor does either party question the "War on Terror"; it’s a fool’s war, which is why it is so popular.
But Nature has to have her way… no matter what we think. America cannot continue to be the world’s only superpower, for Nature will not permit a monopoly for very long. And yet, no foreign nation is strong enough to offer a serious military challenge — at least not yet. So the U.S. of A. must ruin itself… and needs leadership that is up to the task. In Bush and Kerry, America seems to have found its Louis XVI… it’s Nicholas II, its Theodosius, Rome’s last emperor. In Bush and Kerry, America has found leaders worthy of a nation of happy hallucinators.
What is astonishing to us is the way both parties have become war parties. We predicted it; but we are still surprised by it.
"Last night, in Madison Square Garden, I took the stage at the Republican National Convention to speak to America about the threats we face in the world," said an e-mail message from Rudolph Giuliani…
"President Bush has been the steady hand we need in these times of uncertainty and danger. He understands the stakes… he chooses to fight terror in places like Baghdad and Kabul, rather than in New York and Kansas. It is the right way to fight this enemy, and it is a fight we must win…
"In order to take the fight to our enemies, we must have the strength of conviction and support for our Armed Forces… this is not a fight that favors sensitivity and nuance. This is a fight that requires strength, determination and resolve."
An edited version reads as follows:
"threats… danger… fight… fight… fight… fight… fight… fight… "
We cannot recall when America was in such a fighting mood.
Too bad the fight is an expansive fraud. But it is a convenient and foreseeable one. "The first panacea of a mismanaged nation is inflation," wrote Hemingway. "The second is war."
Government has proved completely inept at fighting illiteracy, poverty and drugs. Liberal activists found that they could no longer expand government spending — and their own authority — except by becoming "neo-conservatives" and focusing their do-goodism on foreign policy. Besides, who will oppose war spending when the nation is in danger?
Of course, the nation is in no danger at all. A handful of murderous fanatics represent a threat to Americans — along with muggers, rapists and reality TV — but not to America itself. Only by reacting to terrorists in an absurd and hysterical way can the nation defeat itself.
Bush and Kerry have come forward just when Nature needed them…
Spend, spend, spend… fight, fight, fight… from the comic to the tragic… America creates her own calamity…
Bill Bonner [send him mail] is the author, with Addison Wiggin, of Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of The 21st Century.
