As Steve Benen noted yesterday on The Carpetbagger Report, “it’s become a little too common for Republicans to use torture techniques as a litmus test for Republican fealty”. Here, for instance, is the National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, quoted in Benen’s post:
I don’t see how [John McCain] wins the Republican nomination. I’m second to none in praising him on his surge leadership. But on a whole host of issues — including water boarding, tax cuts, and the freedom of speech — he’s not one of us.
All of which raises the question – how on earth did torture become a key component of serious GOP credentials? Prior to September 11, it would have been bizarre for even heavily hawkish Republicans to come out openly in favour of torture; it would have been fundamentally at odds with the basic ‘land of the free’ frame of reference that tended to accompany such politics during the Cold War and thereafter. Sure, hard-edged hawks might tacitly have supported torture in some circumstances – but openly? Not a chance.
Nor do I think that the fact of 9/11 itself really explains why Republicans would start to support torture openly as a qualification for being ‘one of us’. Yes, the attack gave America a shock; yes, it lit the touchpaper of a politics of fear, and of retribution towards ‘America’s enemies’. But remember the widespread narrative of ‘they hate us because of our freedoms’ (questionable, but leave that aside). In that light, it’s still hard to see why even tough hawks would want to be seen to be supporting torture.
No, I think the real answer lies instead in the astonishing polarisation of US politics – the roots of which lie much further back than 9/11. My hunch is that open Republican support for torture has grown in direct proportion to open Democrat opposition to it – because if the Democrats get this fired up about it, then it must be the right thing to do.
I suspect that there’s some kind of law of political system dynamics here, whereby if a political system has moved from a centrist consensus to a bifurcated / polarised system, then a force on one wing will naturally lead to a countervailing force on the other – with an attendant risk of positive feedbacks / amplified extremism on both wings. (In this sense, the red / blue divide in the US can absolutely be compared to the ideological divide between sacred and secular worldviews – look at the Danish cartoons episode.)
In such a system, it’s easy for a few key dividing lines to become generally agreed on by both sides as an efficient tool for differentiating ‘one of us’ from ‘one of them’. In other words: how did torture become a key identification issue for Republicans? Because the Democrats championed it first as a dividing line.
Of course, I’m a hundred per cent with the Democrats (and John McCain) on the issue of torture. I just think that opposition to it would have been more effective had it come from a centrist institution, respected by both red and blue, rather than from one wing of a system at war with itself. The most worrying thing about the US is that it seems – from this side of the Atlantic, at least – to suffer from a deficit of such centrist institutions.
And that’s why John McCain is a valuable candidate. It may be pushing it to call him ‘centrist’ – but he blurs the red / blue battle lines, and he’s perceived by both sides as having integrity. In their different ways, John McCain and Barack Obama – with his language of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ – both represent an acknowledgement of the need for some kind of rapprochement between red and blue America. But out of the two, it’s John McCain who currently looks the more credible prospect for achieving that goal.
