Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

The common perception of Democrats is that we’re weak-willed pacifists. The reality, says Dennis Perrin, is that the Democrats are just as much a part of this country’s bloody history as any other party. They’ve been at the vanguard of U.S. imperialism since at least President Wilson.

What’s more, we’re hypocrites. We’re willing to cheer on President Clinton’s violence against, say, Yugoslavia, because that’s Democratic violence. Republicans, of course, “cheer mass murder because they’re evil and stupid.” Not us, though. Says Perrin:

Had Clinton been president after 9/11 and desired an invasion of Iraq (a natural extension of his policy of sanctions and bombing) as part of the War on Terror, chances are extremely high that a vast majority of liberals would have supported him, based on their previous allegiance.

All Americans buy into whatever the reigning orthodoxy is; usually that reigning orthodoxy involves the need to bomb a defenseless country into submission. We’ve been doing it forever, from massacres in the Philippines to Nicaraguan death squads to the Iraq War. This isn’t characteristically Republican; it’s characteristically American.

Structurally, the problem is that we have a political atmosphere that confines debate to a narrow range of admissible topics. Says Perrin of the Iran-Contra hearings: “[C]over-up, dismissal, suppression and destruction of evidence, and round-the-clock rationalizing [particularly on the part of the U.S. media] helped to squelch what, in a functioning constitutional democracy, would have been grounds for presidential impeachment and criminal prosecution.”

Which is where Perrin trips me up: what would make this country functional? His book is profoundly pessimistic about “the American talent for self-delusion,” but he’s too slash-and-burn to want to fix it. In that way, Savage Mules is a lot like A People's History of the United States: since the accepted truths about U.S. political life are so far off from the reality, Perrin needs to bang us over the head for a while until we can see things clearly; he has little time left to explain what might fix our problems. If you read Sandy Levinson on Balkinization, by contrast, you’ll identify a host of systemic problems that need to be addressed before any long-lasting change will come our way: abolishing the Electoral College; allowing the president to be removed by something akin to a no-confidence vote; stripping the vice president of any responsibility or staff. Read Hendrik Hertzberg, and you’ll get an impassioned defense of the National Popular Vote as a way to eliminate the Electoral College without a Constitutional amendment. These are bloggers looking for solutions; on the basis of his book, anyway, it’s not clear to me that Perrin cares particularly much about such things.

To a lot of us, indeed, it seems as though blogs are where the most interesting political discussion happens nowadays. Blogs should be free of the disease that Noam Chomsky pointed out so many years ago, namely that corporate media reflect the interests of their corporate masters. Granted, we are often parasitic on the corporate media, feeding off the work that they do and spitting out commentary. More than that, says Perrin, we — like all Americans — parrot back the mainstream foreign-policy line and accept whatever bloody wars our party tells us to back.

Nowhere is this clearer than at the annual Kos convention, which Perrin attends at the end of Savage Mules. The unfortunate bit about his attending the convention is that he is clearly trying to be Too Cool For The Democrats. The narrowmindedness of all the “Kossacks” (nyuk nyuk nyuk) forces Perrin to smoke a joint in the hotel bathroom and toss back a few soothing drinks. He’s like Holden Caulfield among the Democrats. That last chapter made me reconsider the rest of the book: is Savage Mules ultimately about Perrin’s own vanity?

His spearing the “American talent for self-delusion” is maybe odder, when you consider that he — like many of us, including me — voted for Nader in 2000. Are Nader voters self-deluded? If so, then Perrin is self-deluded as well. Or maybe Nader voters are among the enlightened. Maybe there’s the tiniest glimmer of hope that a few people want to fix things, and were willing to endure their friends’ ridicule to do so. Maybe not all Americans are self-deluded.

If you want hope, and you want to get to work, then Perrin’s book is not for you.