Post 9/11 politics

Megan McArdle tries to render Susan Faludi's arguments correctly: "9/11 caused women's issues to recede into the background, along with every other issue that didn't involve religious fanatics who wanted to blow up Americans."

But that's not really right. The real history of post-9/11 American politics is not that non-terrorism issues ossified, but that the Republican party captured an enormous amount of political capital. Insufficient, perhaps, to privatize social security, but certainly enough to pass Medicare Part D and other odious reforms, including, since we're talking women's issues, a partial birth abortion ban act. None of those are terrorism issues per se--except perhaps in Rudy Giuliani's mind--but they certainly bring home the obvious point that liberalism suffered badly in America after 9/11.

Comments

Humm. Let me, perhaps just to be argumentative or something, take a different tack on this statement:

The real history of post-9/11 American politics is not that non-terrorism issues ossified, but that the Republican party captured an enormous amount of political capital.

Revised: The real history of post-9/11 American politics is that the Democratic party yielded completely to the Bush agenda - trying to be part of a good American-unity response to the terrorism at home and abroad. But the Republican party used this Democratic party support to gain political capital by attacking any semblance of dissent, pursuing a rigidly partisan domestic policy and a wielding a battle ax on any deviation from Bush's so-called god-authorized foreign and military policy. The Dems yielded power to 'cooperate' and the Republicans ignored the cooperation and enacted their pre-existing agenda.

Posted by: JimPortlandOR on November 8, 2007 07:42 PM

Post A Comment

Blogroll

See entire blogroll »