Conventional wisdom has it that the stunning defeat of Democratic congressional candidates this month was entirely predictable, given the sluggish economy and an unemployment rate of 9.6 percent. But the conventional wisdom is misleading.
On June 7, I submitted a post describing the odd connection between victory in the World Cup and a nation’s fascist legacy. Briefly, with the exception of Great Britain in 1966, by a disputed goal in overtime against Germany, every World Cup champion since the beginning of competition in 1930 has had a fascist government at some time in its history. News you can use?
The FIFA World Cup TV spots, in the run-up to the opening events later this week, have been touting the ability of international football (what we dim Americans insist on calling soccer) to change the world for the better. A sport played on every inhabited continent, World Cup football has a universal appeal. It seems logical, then, to associate it with “internationalism” and the idea of everybody getting along famously. To further this impression, the FIFA ads show us soccer players of many ages and races engaged in sweaty sportsmanship, which we are led to believe can only lead to world peace.
As I write this, the Administration and its allies in Congress are attempting to pass their health care reform bill with a simple majority vote, through an arcane budgetary process in the Senate known as “reconciliation”. There are many details, but only one is important: a reconciliation bill cannot, under Senate rules, be filibustered, so the Democrats only need 51 votes to pass it, rather than the 60 normally required to shut down debate and take a vote. (The House does not permit a minority to prolong debate, so all the Democrats need in the lower chamber is the same 5-vote majority they won in November.)
An old high school buddy asked me to explain the election to an email list of disappointed conservatives. As a licensed political scientist, I often get questions about bad political news; trouble seems to be our business. So I’ll give it a shot.
On Sunday, November 4, the Boston Globe published an editorial entitled “A lazy, simplistic analogy,” as their way of observing “Islamofascism Awareness Week” on college campuses. The Globe found this initiative puzzling, since, as everyone knows, there is no such thing as “Islamofascism” – thus the “lazy, simplistic analogy” of the title. So why would David Horowitz, the architect of I.A.W., promote such a “blunt weapon”? Simple, according to the Globe: to bash the Left on campus, and to “discredit scholars who insist on making careful distinctions among the various movements and ideologies that are grouped under the rubric of political Islam.”
In October of 2005, I received formal notice that I was being sued for defamation by the Islamic Society of Boston. The ISB, with headquarters in Cambridge, was planning to build the largest Islamic center in the Northeast, on land that it had purchased from the Boston Redevelopment Authority for a substantial discount — despite numerous reports in the press about the links between ISB officials and militant Islamic groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as their preaching of anti-Semitism. I was part of a group – Citizens for Peace and Tolerance – that had attempted to get the city to reexamine its partnership with the ISB; my “defamation” consisted of making statements about the ISB for which there was a wealth of documentary evidence.
Democratic leaders were quick to criticize President Bush’s plan to send 20,000 more troops to Iraq, demanding instead that the troops be withdrawn (or, to use the current euphemism, “redeployed”). The withdrawal of American troops is synonymous, in the minds of the President’s critics, with “ending the war in Iraq”.
While it is generally agreed that 9/11 “changed everything”, five years after the event what seems most striking is how contested the meaning of 9/11 has become. No war since the Civil War – and this includes the highly contested War in Vietnam – has produced as much partisan bitterness as the war that began five years ago. As we memorialize that day, it is important to acknowledge the disagreements about what that war means, so that the disagreements can be better understood.
