This is an interesting concept. I read a good essay in the paper over the weekend by a local college director of an "Ethics Across the Curriculum" program (Dan Malotky of Greensboro College). Without taking sides in the realm of specific party politics (as FA believes all of them engage in witchhunts), ponder the following thoughts which use political references just to make its point:

Quote:
William Safire recently provided us with an object lesson in what is usually wrong with our approach to our enemies. His column ("Clintons lay plans for restoration";) strongly suggests that they would rather see their party loose the next election than have their hopes for their own eventual "restoration" dashed.

We might puzzle about the peculiar fixation that conservatives have on the Clintons. Bill Clinton was like the buck who kept on running after being shot. Conservatives are frustrated about this prey that got away, and they are genuinely worried that he will return to taunt and torture them again.

They both underestimate and overestimate the Clintons because they cannot see them in anything but the meanest light. They only see selfish ambition. Consequently, they were non-plussed when they subjected the couple to abject humiliarion in the impeachment process and neither was crushed.

The fact that the Clintons did not crawl into a hole indicates that the two were, and are, motivated by something other than selfish ambition. But conservatives will not allow that generous assessment of their enemy to enter their calculations. As a result, they can only understand such survival by thinking that the Clintons entered into a pact of a Faustian nature. That then leads columists such as Safire to start speculating that the Clintons are orchestrating the entire presidential nomination process from the wings, and that others are mere puppets in their evil plans to dominate the country.

Of course this tendency to both underestimate and then overestimate one's enemy is not unique to conservatives. A few months ago, President Bush was quoted in an Israeli newspaper as claming that God told him to go into Afghanistan and Iraq. Whether we find that claim comforting or alarming, we should admit its implications. The president, for one, did not go into Iraq for the oil alone. Rightly or wrongly, he believes in a higher purpose for his actions. He is not simply throwing a lot of business to Halliburton as a part of some evil collaboration with the unquenchable fires of big business.

Even as we strenuously disagree with our enemies, in other words, we would be better served by giving them some credit.

We might still question the connections between Halliburton and the administration's policy torward Iraq, and we might still question the apparant ambitions of the Clintons. But if we reduce our enemies, at home or abroad, to stilted stereotypes, we will never be able to confront them effectively. They will always appear to us as a trifle to be dismissed or as an unstoppable diabolical force.


Re-humanizing isn't exactly like trust, but it seems to me like it is a preliminary step. As it applies to democracy, if you don't trust your fellow voters to elect someone who is at least human, you will be forced to "dismiss" the common man/woman, also.

There is another essay just below the one I quoted which analyzed the Schwartzenegger win. Arnold may have been dismissed as a muscleman (much as Reagan was for being a cowboy/actor) but the Elephant is at a fork in the road. The Schwartzenegger/Guliani/McCaine ideology looks an awful lot like Bill Clinton in his second term. Not just because Clinton balanced the budget while Bush has resumed deficit spending, but because of Schwartzenegger's seedy past. Only a few years ago, Clinton represented everything wrong with America in the minds of conservatives. He was admittedly and indefensibly immoral in his private life. The country as a whole forgave him because the economy was good; conservatives did not. Now, the most prominent Republican governor in the country is a man who led a sometimes "rowdy" life. Of course he may behave in office, but if he doesn't, FA suspects the plain ol' average voter will be more consistent about what really counts -job performance- than the selective and enemy-villifying party members.

(Telling us again whose instincts we really should place more trust in, seems to me.)
:guinea