Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Too Frank Franks
Thomas Franks, author of What's the Matter with Kansas, revisits the topic of his book in the New York Review of Books, "What's the Matter with Liberals?"
Franks' thesis is that Republicans are confusing people about their true agenda by intentionally misleading voters. "National Security" is for Franks not the name of a essential condition for America which both parties should seek but a political tactic no more worthy than any other:
What makes national security such a winner for Republicans is that is dramatizes the same negative qualities of liberalism that we see in the so-called "values" issues, only much more forcefully. War casts in sharp relief the inauthenticity of the liberals, the insincerity of their patriotism, and their intellectual distance (always trying to "understand" the terrorists' motives) from the raw emotions felt by ordinary Americans?each quality an expression of the deracinated upper-classness that is thought to be the defining characteristic of liberalism.
It is precisely because of this attitude that many people, both Republicans and Democrats, had genuine fears regarding the foreign policy of a President John Kerry.
Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and John Wayne taught the American people that wars, once entered, are to be won. Kerry Democrats were suspected as treating the war against terrorism as merely another excuse to raise taxes at home and increase foreign aid abroad:
[B]y raising foreign aid by just one-tenth of one percent of GNP - a move that would yield about $10 billion - the US would "start having an adequate strategy for fighting terrorism at its roots."
What hindered candidate John Kerry in the 2004 election was not the words he used, but the actual policies he espoused.
|posted by Jim on 6:45 PM|
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