An Unhappy Era Comes to an End

Whatever else Saddam Hussein may accomplish, he already has brought an unhappy era in the history of American democracy to a close.

Since the war in Vietnam, our public life has been characterized to a distressing degree by what the philosopher J. M. Cameron has called “syndrome thinking.” Victims of this condition, he argues, hold to a complex of beliefs linked by something other than logic:

One person, for example, might oppose abortion, endorse capital punishment, support an unfettered nuclear deterrent, demand a restrictive reading of the bill of rights and vigorously resist any imposition of gun control.

Another might support abortion on demand, oppose the death penalty, advocate unilateral cuts in our nuclear arsenal, take an absolutist view of the First and Fourth amendments and campaign strenuously for gun control.

There are arguments to be made for each of these positions, but it is difficult to make a single reasoned case that automatically links them. Yet, which of us has not over the last 10 years argued over issues in this fashion?

But two things now make such linkage seem suddenly implausible. One is Saddam Hussein, for, like the prospect of hanging, confrontation with a tyrant concentrates the mind wonderfully. The other is the end of the Cold War, which has alleviated the left’s lingering anxiety that America was on the wrong side of history and has deprived the right of its certainty that dissent should be made to conform to the iron discipline of anti-communism.

The simultaneous realization of these facts has lent our politics a fresh civility.

For the political scientist William Schneider all this reflects a new national perspective on the trauma of Vietnam. “What we’re seeing,” Schneider told me, “is an end, finally, to denial about our recent history. All of us now are willing to admit that we have been through that experience and it has had a chastening effect.”

As an example, he cited President Bush’s State of the Union address in which he called for tolerance of those who disagreed with his Persian Gulf policy. Bush did not argue or even suggest that those who disagreed with him were wrong as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon certainly would have.

“The public has learned something, too. Without exception,” Schneider said, “the polls reveal that while the majority of people do not agree with anti-war protesters, they resolutely defend the right to protest this war. The public is absolutely set against restrictions of any sort on protesters.”

It also is true that many Americans who might formerly have dissented from an application of military force, have staked out a position on the other side of this issue. A case in point was the way a usually cohesive part of California’s House delegation responded to President Bush’s request that Congress authorize the use of force against Iraq.

Six members of the California delegation are Jewish. All represent strikingly similar constituencies--overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, concerned about the welfare of Israel and generally opposed to a resort to war. Yet California’s six Jewish representatives split down the middle on the question. Three--Henry Waxman, Anthony Beilenson and Barbara Boxer--opposed authorization. The other three--Howard Berman, Mel Levine and Tom Lantos, all of whom opposed the war in Vietnam--voted with the President.

Berman, a committed liberal, explains his vote this way: “If we do not deal with Saddam Hussein now, the world and the United States will be facing a more heavily armed, a more powerful, more dangerous Saddam Hussein five or 10 years from now.”

Others with equally strong liberal credentials acknowledge these same facts, reach opposite conclusions and just as resolutely oppose war in the gulf. One of them is film director Jeremy Kagan. A conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, Kagan has gone on to make a series of films--among them “The Chosen” and “Descending Angel”--notable for their artful engagement of basic human values.

“I would have voted against the (congressional) resolution,” he told me. “There’s no question in my mind that the occupation of Kuwait is immoral and that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous human being. He must be stopped for security of his own people, for the security of the neighbors around him and, maybe, for the security of the world. But is war the only available means or even the most effective? I contend that it’s not.

“His aggression is certainly unjust, but we jumped the gun. I think it would be horrific if the American people saw 20,000 or 30,000 of their young people dying and said, ‘You know what, we don’t care about justice for Kuwait.’ I can imagine people saying, ‘Let him have it because I won’t stand for my son or daughter or my lover dying over there.’ Then, it really would be chaos because it is right to stop the man. But this isn’t the best way.”

Seymour Martin Lipset, the most eminent scholar of American opinion, has argued that whatever our creed or ethnic background, we Americans are heirs to a political culture forged by sectarian, which is to say, dissenting, Protestant values.

In place of an established church, Lipset contends, we have established a deep belief in the sovereignty of individual conscience. Whatever we may say from the platform, Americans do not believe “My country right or wrong,” but my conscience above all else.

Moral decisions thus taken are the soul’s poetry, the process by which the language of the spirit refines itself to an essential expressive gesture.

If this war were to have a poet as, say, Whitman was the poet to our Civil War, he or she might sing, “I hear America thinking.”