'SUSTAINED ACT OF COLLECTIVE WILL'

Tony Blankley's editorial makes me sad for three reasons.

1) It is too convenient for Republicans to argue that criticism of the incumbent president emboldens the enemy and shows cracks in our "collective will." Republican self-interest dictates that they attempt to silence their critics. This is not acknowledged by Blankley, or by most others in the public-criticism-is-tantamount-to-treason crowd.

2) "Collective will" is built in a democracy through public means, including the processes of criticism that opposition and minority members of government employ. There is no fully top-down collective will formation in a democracy. Political systems with top-down collective will formation are called authoritarian. Subsystems in a democracy can have top-down collective will formation, but these subsystems are, for that reason, neither democratic nor liberal. The army has a top-down collective will formation. It is neither democratic nor liberal.

3) Blankley's approach to the war mirrors the imprecision in the Bush administration's own policies. For Blankley, the war on terrorism is about "break[ing] the will and pride of all those in the Islamic world who would dare to terrorize us and the international system." Good luck with that, Tony. Talk about precise and obtainable objectives. Here's a thought: how about just destroying terrorist networks, for a start? Any chance that attempts to "break the will and pride" of folks in the "Islamist world" might actually help to encourage islamicist terrorism? Or is that suggestion another betrayal of the top-down collective will formation that you'd like to see imposed on refractory Bush critics, perhaps through a renewal of sedition laws, that you now darkly hint that you will support at some future date?

Cut the silliness about "collective will," please. Democracies are what they are: political systems in which policy is formed through an interaction of diverse elites, differentiated publics, and the more diffuse category of the public as a whole. If you want to form collective will, you need to have ideas that are attractive to lots of people. The war in Afghanistan was such an idea. The war in Iraq was not. Stop trying to make it into something it's not, namely, a good idea that only partisan critics of Bush have an interest in criticizing. It's just not clear that the war in Iraq was a good idea. And no matter how many times you utter the words "collective will," you cannot change the fact that the war on Iraq is and remains controversial across a wide set of experts, elites, and interested publics. Just accept that fact, please. You can assert that the war in Iraq was necessary for national security, pure and simple, as if wars came with labels, one of which is "this war is necessary for national security." But that don't make it so, Tony. Sorry.

Link to Blankley's editorial via atrios.