Rules and Rulers

If you’re one of those people who thinks the Iraq war isn’t going so well, you might have gone down to one of the demonstrations against it this past Saturday, unfortunately a pale shadow of those mounted at the outset against the whole idea. Wiser heads than mine have discoursed on why that is the case.

For my part, I’m curious about the arguments you hear about what should happen in Iraq next and about what U.S. policy should be. That discussion often presumes that the people in charge of those decisions have some sort of legitimacy, and personally I don’t grant them any. Mind you, I’m not eager to get involved in acts of civil disobedience due to my current state of moral and physical laziness. But given the ongoing complicity of the so-called opposition party and the drumbeats of yet another war against Iran getting a boost from Madame Hillary, I believe the first order of business is to find new ways to challenge the legitimacy of this ruling clique to, well, rule us.

I don’t refer to the ravings of left-wing sects but rather some of the effective undermining of the consent of the governed that occurred during the 1960s and ‘70s and gummed up the gears of the war machine during the Vietnam debacle. It took a variety of forms, cultural, political, practical and unfortunately sometimes criminal as well. But beneath it all was a profound shift in attitudes, a visceral reaction against the dominant class and their logic. If you read the writings from those years by insider commentators like Joseph Kraft or David Broder, you get a sense that this widening split, this crevasse between the governing and the governed, was what finally turned the tide and convinced policymakers that the war couldn’t go on.

We’re still a long way from anything like that Slough of Alienated Despond, which tells me that this war has many more years to run.