John Kerry for President

Part 1: The Case Against George W. Bush

This is the first in a series of posts in which I state and briefly discuss my reasons for endorsing John Kerry for President of the United States and voting against George W. Bush. First I will discuss my reasons for voting against Bush. I will discuss these reasons in roughly decreasing order of what I take to be their importance. Currently I anticipate discussing the problem of polarization (below), the conduct of the war against Islamofascism, the role of truth and reason in a democracy, the election of 2000 and the penumbra of issues surrounding it, ruthlessness and demagoguery, Mr. Bush's character, and the problem of plutocracy in America. I believe that the anti-Bush case alone constitutes sufficient grounds for voting for Mr. Kerry, but I will then offer a positive case for Mr. Kerry as well.

1. The problem of polarization

I am inclined to think--though am far from certain--that the most pressing problem facing us is that of polarization. This should not be construed as proof that I am insufficiently serious about the war against Islamofascism. On the contrary, it is a sign of how seriously I take the problem of polarization. Politics should be the art of compromise when such compromise is practicable and morally permissible, and the strength of the liberal democracies of the West lies, in great part, in their ability to build just polities on an overlapping consensus among their populations.

President Bush has been the most polarizing American president of (the conscious part) of my lifetime. He ran as "a uniter not a divider," but this was one of many untruths he would tell during his first term in office. Having failed to win the popular vote, Bush had at least some obligation to govern somewhere near the center, but he has made no effort to do so. He has in four years managed to alienate most of the world, and almost all of our foreign allies, most of the Democratic party, and a fair part of his own. As it stands, most of the world (civilized and uncivilized) now stands loosely united against a hard core of conservative ideologues in the Republican party, backed by voters who are in large part misinformed about the policies of the candidate they support. Now, sometimes a small minority is right and the large majority is wrong, but it is more often the other way around. Consequently, a minimally wise man will double check his reasoning when he finds himself in disagreement with most everyone else, including men far wiser than himself. Mr. Bush and his cohort have refused, however, to even consider the possibility that they might be wrong. Such dogmatism and contempt for the opinions of others is not only irrational in itself (the subject of a future installment in this series), but a further cause of polarization.