Kerry, Boredom, and Revolution

Beth at Seditious Libel asks why the Democrats are always seen as the boring party. I think there are two reasons for this:

1.The parafascism of Bush and the neoconservatives may not phrase itself openly as a revolutionary ideology - although it could easily be argued that the project of remaking the middle east (and the occasionally articulated goal (by some of the more fringe elements of the right) of war on islam constitute just such an ideology, nevertheless phrases, in Huntingtonian fashion - and Samuel Huntington is quite fashionable these days, its project in terms of a cataclysmic and categorical threat to the -imagined or real- grandeur and power of the West/North and its legacy from the barbaric hordes of the antimodern periphery. Fascism though this may be, it's exciting - much like JRR Tolkien's Lord of The Rings (which, after all, operates on many of the same premises, is exciting.

2.The liberalism of Kerry and his ilk articulates itself as a progressive vision - and indeed Kerry is certainly more Progressive (whatever this means) than Bush or (if only barely) Lynn Cheney's pal Joe Lieberman. Yet liberalism (and Kerry's is a liberalism of the neo variety) has always been about a dim teleology, a progress towards a distant realization of the nation sometime in the far future while maintaining a very very slowly shifting status quo. This lacks the dynamism and ferocity of the neoconservative dream.

We call Bush and his ilk the reactionaries, but this is only partially true, and obscures the extent to which theirs is a project which seeks to melt all that is solid into blood and forge a new old world from the blasted husk of the present.