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Objectively pro-

The lengthy and lively discussion of a recent post got me musing,in my airy, metaphysical way, about the thought processes of liberal Democrats. One thingthat struck me forcibly in the recent donnybrook was the insistence, on the pro-Democrat side, that any opposition to the Democrats was "objectively pro-Bush."

Now in one sense it's easy to see the flaw in this logic. To use my favorite analogy, it's as if you were fighting off two thugs who are trying to mug you and also trying to do each other out of the spoils. It would be silly to reproach you, every time you land a punch on one of them, by saying you're helping the other one.

But that's hardly the end of the story. What's interesting to me is why people would choose to live under conditions of such sharp intellectual confinement -- a mental walnut shell in which the entire infinite space of political possibilities reduces to a modulo-two remainder, For The Democrats or For The Republicans.

In fact the larger space is not only uninhabitable, it's un-mappable. The structural symbiosis of the two parties in keeping the rich rich and the poor poor, can't be discussed, because that might suggest that one ought to do something other than just sing one's appointed part in the Decani or Cantoris choir -- bray like a donkey or bellow like an elephant, da capo ad infinitum.

It's an end-of-history theory, in a way: there are Republicans and there are Democrats, there is nothing else and there can never be anything else. No end to this state of affairs can be envisioned, because no steps that might end it can be entertained. You can put your chips on Red or Black. You can't kick over the table or even walk away from it, and you certainly can't keep your chips in your pocket. Change is ruled out of order and historical contingency has become immanent necessity.

Now I can imagine why a person might fail to realize that things could be different than they are. But what I can't quite grasp is how a person could be uncomfortable with things as they are and yet indignantly reject the idea that they could be otherwise.


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