Video Game Politics

I don't want to make too much of a casual comment by some random right-winger I don't know anything about, but this post on redstate.org seemed to capture the mood of the disgruntled right:

The White House line [Mark Kilmer]

We might have seen what the new White House line [on Miers] will be from Senator Lindsey Graham on FOX News Sunday. Graham insisted that "the keepers of the conservative flame" might be angry now, but that they'll come around as they learn more about Miers as the nominating process plays out.

This indicates that the WH does not understand how badly some want the final showdown with the Dems.

Ah, that's it, "The Final Showdown." "At last we meet, Mr. Bond." Have some people perhaps been watching a little too much Star Wars? A few too many late nights trying to reach the "boss level" of Final Fantasy 10?

Unfortunately, Mr. Kilmer is right. That video-game attitude very much captures the dynamic behind the Right's reaction to the Miers nomination. Through all the twists and turns of the Bush era, they were promised one big thing: a Supreme Court nomination, and not for just any seat but for this one, O'Connor's. Through all the disappointments with the abandonment of conservatism in fiscal policy, irresponsibility in foreign policy, the Medicare drug bill and all the rest, both the social conservatives and the libertarians consoled themselves with the thought that the big win would come with a Supreme Court nomination. It would not just be a judge who would vote to overturn Roe or bring back the exiled constitution, but one who, unlike Roberts, would provoke the last grand battle in the culture war, a showdown with the Democrats over the most basic questions of our destination as a country, and that their side would not just win, but win profoundly and forever, leaving Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden writhing in pain. It would be profound revenge for such setbacks as the fizzling of the Clinton impeachment, the last attempt at the final showdown.

Compared to this, Karl Rove's stated vision of 30 years of Republican dominance was modest. But they are of a piece, and the vision of 30 years or the final showdown explains very much of what's happened in the last few years, especially the mystifying tendency to continually up the ante of partisanship, to put more at risk in the service of some vision of total, existential domination that exists only in video games and Tim LaHaye novels.

But there is a reason that political parties of the past have never taken the Karl Rove/Tom DeLay approach, and the reason is that it's dangerous and ultimately self-destructive. There are no "final showdowns" in democratic politics, but the moment you acknowledge that -- as with the Miers nomination -- the whole approach falls apart. Politics is always a matter of continual struggle and negotiation and refinement -- as Al Gore used to say, "it's a day to day struggle for the American people." The genius of democracy is that it is never final, and it's not even always a battle.

I'm pretty partisan (more so now than in the past) and I hope I don't put my hard-fought credentials as a "fighting Dem" at risk by saying this, but I don't look for a "final showdown" with Republicans or conservatives. Neither, I would guess, do most Democratic politicians. As to this crowd and their peculiar attitude, yes, I want them gone and their poisonous influence cleansed from our politics. But once that's done, I want to move back to a kind of politics where a healthy, passionate and wised-up conservativism, a healthy and intellectually invigorated liberalism, and various fresh alternatives in between and on the edges rejoin a serious, ongoing, messy engagement in the business of democratic politics. That may sound fanciful, but it's a hell of a lot more realistic than video game fantasies.