Is there a time to fight, even if winning doesn’t look like it’s in the cards? In the classic paradigm described by the philosopher, Hegel, known as the Master Slave conflict, a bully stands in a field awaiting a challenger. When one appears, they begin to fight. There are only two outcomes. One of them is killed in a fight to the death. The winner takes the field, awaiting the next challenger. The second outcome is that one of them surrenders, and becomes the Slave. In this paradigm, the Slave is the ultimate winner. Valuing his life more than winning, the Slave learns that power is no way to be in the world and finds other, more civilized, ways to deal with people. The Master is doomed to a life of fighting, a hated conqueror who will sooner or later be toppled.
In this case, the case of a Democracy, we send our champions into the field by majority vote, and last November, we did just that. We have a government dominated by people who rely only on power. Yet, they are, to a man, cowards – people who would not fight themselves, people who avoided the call in their own youth, not out of political conviction but out of fear. Yet they now send our own soldiers off to die in a war that shouldn’t have been fought and can’t be won. Our leaders don’t know when to lose, because they’re not doing the fighting. Their fight is here and they won’t engage. They’ve locked themselves inside their Castle, afraid to even walk onto the field of battle. They’re advocating that our children fight to the death in Iraq, but won’t even sit in a room with our elected officials.
So, it’s time for a siege. The King is sending his armies off to fight a war of conquest. People are dying. The Treasury is being depleted. And the King feasts in the Castle. If our soldiers are being asked to go to Iraq and fight out of loyalty to our country, then our Congress has an obligation to do the same thing, fight the fight we elected them to undertake, whether they think they can win it or not. If Mr. Rove and Ms. Miers won’t come out of the Castle, Storm to Castle. If Bush and Cheney won’t negotiate with the us through our elected officials, tear down the walls and drag them out.
There is a time to fight even if you might lose – and this is it. It’s our field…
The issue of our times, indeed the issue for the modern Democratic Party is whether or not this group of Democratic leaders has the stomach to wage that fight even if they lose. It is not a partisan issue: legislative branch prerogatives hang in the balance here because the Congress will be eviscerated if this fight is not waged now. If the Democrats fail to force this issue now, their entire ability to oversee this administration and provide any kind of check and balance will evaporate. We will never find out what happened with the Cheney Energy Task Force; what happened with the prewar intelligence; what happened with the corruption and mismanagement of the occupation; and what happened on a host of issues where the American taxpayers deserve an accounting. But finally, failure to fight the Bush White House here would simply validate the Cheney approach to lie to Congress without consequence.
And yes, there is another issue here as well. Democrats have watched in horror these last six years as their party leaders inside the Beltway have shrunk from their obligations to their party and country to provide an effective opposition and alternative. We have lost a good deal of our Bill of Rights during this time right underneath the noses of the Congress, and our foreign policy is by decree. The Democratic leadership needs to demonstrate now that it is worthy of the support given to it by not only the party but also millions of independent voters last November.
Failure to say "enough" to this cabal now, even if it risks a loss in the courts down the road, will have severe political consequences. Independents will observe that there really is no difference between the parties after all, but worse, millions of Democrats may decide that the modern party itself has run its course and that it is time for another movement.
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