{"id":89,"date":"2003-05-28T02:55:09","date_gmt":"2003-05-28T02:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:07:45","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:07:45","slug":"why_am_i_a_democrat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=89","title":{"rendered":"Why Am I A Democrat?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roger Simon has a pretty bloody-minded (in the British sense) reply<\/a> to my earlier question “Why Are You a Democrat?<\/a>” His reply: <\/p>\n

I don’t know. And more amazingly, I don’t care. In fact, I haven’t even thought about it much at all since 9\/11. Party politics, as I have experienced them all my life, just don’t seem relevant to me now.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He goes on:<\/p>\n

I admit it’s ironic when what we have before us is what appears to be the beginning of an epic struggle between religious fundamentalism and secular democracy and, as a militant democrat (small d), I can’t begin to concentrate on the internal affairs of my own political party. But I think there’s a reason for that: this same conflagration … this giant philosophical debate that engulfs our planet … is creating new alliances none of us had anticipated.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, I’ll agree to that…after all, while I think that before 9\/11 I’d have enjoyed a drink and a chat with Joe, Trent, Celeste and the crew here, I doubt that I would have chosen to stand (or better, sit) and write with them.<\/p>\n

But we’re together because we see the conflict in which we are now engaged, and have been for some years – without realizing it – as the central event of our era.<\/p>\n

But while Roger (and Trent, and to an extent Joe) see it primarily as “an epic struggle between religious fundamentalism and secular democracy<\/i>,” I see it in a somewhat more complicated way. So bear with me while I try and explain.
\nI’ll admit that the Islamist soldiers that we face – and let’s not call them anything but that – are the broadest part of the spearpoint. But the reality is that even the most militant forms of Islam don’t present a credible military threat to the West. If we have to fight them, we can and we will, and we will win.<\/p>\n

The Islamist enemy – and since they call themselves my enemy, I will do them the courtesy of recognizing them as one – has roots both specific to the cultural and material history of the Muslim world, and generally applicable to almost every culture, including our own.<\/p>\n

Those roots are in large part philosophical<\/a>; they go to the question of how people have come to believe and understand the world around them.<\/p>\n

I’ve talked<\/a> about them at length, and have been thinking and reading primarily about these issues for a year now (Good Grief!! It’s been over a year!! It’s my blogoversary, and I want some damn cake…)<\/b>. Nothing has come close to changing my mind. This is not a question of the Muslim world vs. the West, although the current phase of the conflict involves combatants from the Muslim world.<\/p>\n

This is a war of philosophies<\/a>; of an alienated, frustrated, band of would-be warriors who are frustrated by what modernity means to them and mean to respond by pulling down the pillars of the temple.<\/p>\n

They are in Europe, and here in the U.S. <\/p>\n

Celeste wrote<\/a> about one group, environmental terrorists slowly escalating their level of violence; she could just as easily have written about the right-wing anti-abortion forces who have already murdered in the name of their cause. Tim McVeigh may or may not have been connected to Islamist terrorists as some claim; the fact remains that this child of “fly-over country” either led or participated in the second-largest terrorist action ever in the U.S. <\/p>\n

Richard Reid became a terrorist in the U. K., not in the West Bank. Ted Kaczynski became one in Montana.<\/p>\n

And while jailing or killing active terrorists is and must be the immediate goal, the ultimate goal must be to stop growing them before the disease – “mad human disease” – infects our own communities.<\/p>\n

And to do that we need something that each party has to offer. We need tradition and license, regulations and freedom, a safety net and responsibility. We need a dialog – not always a friendly, neighborly chat, but a sometimes muscular disagreement with raised voices – on any number of issues domestic and foreign.<\/p>\n

We’re trapped between venal corporations, bloated government bureaucracies, corrupt politicians, and radicals who, frustrated with their own lives, are perfectly willing to take yours.<\/p>\n

We have problems local and global far beyond our resources to easily solve them.<\/p>\n

So we’re going to muddle, as humans always have. <\/p>\n

So why am I a Democrat? Because I don’t believe the GOP can solve these problems by itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Armed Liberal explains why he’s a Democrat – and offers an excellent summation of both the War on Terror and the intra-civilizational war that provides its larger context: “This is a war of philosophies; of an alienated, frustrated, band of would-be warriors who are frustrated by what modernity means to them and mean to respond by pulling down the pillars of the temple.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}