Funferal

What if Bush wins?

Zwichenzug at The Bellman has pointed to Jeff Harrell’s piece on the possibility of a ‘hung electoral college’ – one with Bush and Kerry each getting 269 votes. It appears that Bush would resoundingly win the resulting ‘one state, one vote’ ballot of the House of Representatives. Harrell sees this as making governance difficult; Zwichenzug goes further and talks of a failure in legitimacy (more so even than 2000) that ‘would make governance impossible.’
I’m reminded of an Irish friend’s push for a Bush victory, on the grounds that it would result in pretty much exactly this scenario. The argument – admittedly somewhat arcane and involved – is that a Bush win would cause a more accelerated decline of the American Empire (with a Kerry win slowing the process by a decade or more). Here’s where things get complicated (and controversial). My friend posits that a more rapid decline, while bad for individual Americans, would be better for the world as a whole.
Obviously, the truth of this conjecture relies on a rather complex matrix of geo-political factors. And admittedly, my friend is, so far, relying in large part on intuition – arguing that the removal of the U.S. as a dominant force expands the space for action, opening up new possibilities. On the flip side, a rapidly declining United States, with the military power and economic weight that it has, might be expected to lash out – turning to the nuclear option, for example, earlier and more often than might otherwise be the case.
Most people reject the conjecture – which is, in large part, based on a Trotskyist-type logic. However, one of the more striking things when I returned home this summer – apart from a general anger at America – was the extent to which people are willing to engage with the idea. Where people might once have dismissed the suggestion out of hand, they now weigh it, and reject it because they don’t believe that the benefits outweigh the costs (to the world – not to America).
I don’t think even my anti-war friends here in the United States really understand the extent to which the U.S. has been damaged by the last four years, and by Abu Ghraib in particular. An NYT op-ed piece by Nuala O’Faolain recently talked of Ireland as the most pro-American country in the world (outside of the U.S. itself) and I think she may be right. But the sea-change – even since March, when I last visited, just before Abu Ghraib broke – is huge. People often stress that so-called ‘anti-American sentiment’ is aimed at the administration, not at the American people. That used to be true, I’m not sure it still is. And as someone with personal ties in both countries, that’s something that’s profoundly disturbing.