George F. Will charges Dems with Manicheism

In a Washington Post op-ed piece entitled "Waiting for Straight Talk" (Sun., Jan 20) George F. Will writes "There are decent, intelligent people who believe that equity and efficiency or both are often served by government setting prices. In America, such people are called Democrats." Putting aside Will's obvious condescension -- those of us who believe in evolution and human-induced global climate change subtly deride the nation's Evangelical science-deniers with the same language -- we should look instead at his criticism of Democratic over-reliance on Government regulation of markets. Such a charge is hard to deny. Dems tend to expect a bit too much from the government when it comes to making sure everyone gets paid the wage they want and not the wage they deserve, or the wage "the market" can sustain. "Living Wage" campaigns across the nation over the past decade illustrate the power of misplaced hope to motivate the masses.

During my first year in Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia students mounted a large and long-lasting protest/propaganda campaign for a "Living Wage" for University employees. With the backing of the University Democrats, the "Living Wage" folks, decked out in t-shirts and buttons, flooded the school with flyers and posters demanding $10.72/hr for all entry-level employees. The "movement" culminated in a round-the-clock occupation of the President's office building, with students camping out on the front lawn and encouraging passersby to "Honk for a Living Wage!" University employees were conspicuously absent from the demonstrations, and, as it turned out, from the Living Wage Campaign's meetings as well. Perhaps they did not want to lose their jobs, or perhaps they weren't as outraged as the students themselves.

I remember being approached by one student organizer who asked me, "hey, would you be willing to get arrested?" The question struck me as odd, so odd that I actually listened to what the kid had to say. He and some of the more hardcore Living Wagers were going to sit-in until the cops came to arrest them, he told me, and their arrests would surely cause enough public outrage that President Casteen would have to compromise. "Well, no, actually I'm not willing to get arrested," I told him, "at least not for this." And, sure enough, about a dozen of the stalwart protesters wound up in the Charlottesville City Jail for a few hours one night in late spring. I've always wondered how much their protest cost the city courts. As for the "Living Wage" itself, it died away without the President's approval. Where did the number $10.72 come from, many students wanted to know. Turns out the Living Wagers borrowed the amount from a similar protest that took place in Washington DC. President Casteen praised the students' commitment to social justice, lamented their unfortunate decision to take their protest too far, and encouraged future protesters to remember that a "Living Wage" in DC and a "Living Wage" in Charlottesville are two different things. UVa employees, Casteen reminded us, begin several dollars above the state's minimum wage.

The "Living Wage" hoopla was one of my first experiences of political organizing -- if we might call it that -- on the local level. I was impressed by the entire event, especially by the students' ability to get the entire city fired up about the issue, on one side or the other. But the most powerful lesson I took away from the debacle was a bit less inspirational: it was the first time I was ever embarrassed by the confluence of idealism and over-zealousness. Well, maybe not.

Later in the article, in which Will accuses McCain of attempting to control political speech and markets (especially the pharmaceutical market) in non-Republican ways, Will recounts, "In the New Hampshire debate, McCain asserted that corruption is the reason drugs cannot be reimported from Canada. The reason is 'the power of the pharmaceutical companies.' When Mitt Romney interjected, 'Don't turn the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys,' McCain replied, 'Well, they are.'" Again Will throws the apostate McCain to the Dems, but this time with less simple scorn and a bit more vitriol, one might even say unselfconscious over-zealousness: "There is a place in American politics for moralizers who think in such Manichean simplicities. That place is the Democratic Party, where people who talk like McCain are considered not mavericks but mainstream."

Will's charge is laughable at best. In recent years our Republican President has presided over an expansion of Manichean American rhetoric not seen since the days of J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy. I doubt that even Richard Nixon would sling words like "evil" and "bad" around as recklessly as Bush has. Childish, over-simplifying phrases like "Axis of Evil" and "bad men" belong in comic books, not State of the Union Addresses. Worst of all, such rhetoric proves that the Bush administration holds the American public in very low esteem; only an idiot could swallow that kind of Manichean mumbo-jumbo without retching. Bush has presided over intellectual regression on a national level, refusing to engage in the sort of international diplomatic dialogue that acknowledges world leaders -- even enemies -- as sovereign heads of states that represent complex viewpoints and are woven into a complicated fabric of global issues, dilemmas, and geopolitical forces. Were we to follow George Bush with unblinking allegiance, we would have to agree that the world is made up of "good" people and nations and "bad" people and nations, and we would have to acknowledge "evil" as a real, unitary force in world politics. Manichean theology rests on a notion of an eternal struggle on Earth between "good" and "evil." When it comes to espousing such absurdly over-simplified notions of the world -- notions which, unfortunately, gain ground with seemingly intellectual work like Sam Huntington's Clash of Civilizations -- it's Republicans, not Dems, who have anointed themselves Masters of the Universe.