Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/03/01/crazy_little_man_visits_campus_runs.php
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Last presidential election, Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) was best known as “that short guy” who stood on one side of the set during the democratic primary, occasionally spouting a couple lines of leftist rhetoric that the other candidates onstage largely ignored. Even though Kucinich only garnered a measly one percent of the votes in the 2004 New Hampshire primary, he is running again, and this time, Kucinich believes he has something up his sleeve to help him win the democratic nomination.
Despite being a career politician, Kucinich’s political resume is lacking when compared to other Democratic candidates running for the Presidency. His years as mayor of Cleveland received mixed reviews, and while he can write down “Congressional Representative” on his list of credentials, he does not possess the world-famous last name of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), the media-darling status of Sen. Barry Obama (D-IL), the foreign policy experience of Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM), or even the long-term senatorial career of Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT). However, unlike the other democratic candidates, Kucinich has a consistent voting record against war, and he is loud and proud about his pacifism.
Scuttling in half-an-hour late (no doubt a political ploy to make it seem that he is busier than he actually is), Kucinich took hold of the microphone and began to illustrate his unorthodox plans for this country’s future in front of a sizable audience in Rockefeller center. Dressed in a brown corduroy jacket and blue tie, the five-foot nothing Kucinich did not lack energy. Kucinich’s delivery paralleled the talk-show antics of Phil Donahue; he paced up and down the rows of people, making eye contact with anyone who glanced at his face, overzealously attaching himself to individuals as if he intended to personally champion any small or petty cause they had.
A practicing Roman Catholic, Kucinich introduced his anti-war speech by tying, of all things, evolutionary biology to spirituality as a precedent for ending violence. According to Kucinich, “Our capacities to self consciously evolve, to become more than we are and better than we are come from...exploring the human heart.” In his theory, it is the natural progression of human evolution that will take us towards a peace, and only because “we have a culture that approves of war” do we continue to engage in war. If we somehow change our collective mentality to reject the concept of war and transform our country into a peace-loving nation, then violence will cease to exist.
Unfortunately for Kucinich, history is not on his side when it comes to executing this plan; every culture since the beginning of time has approved of violence in one form of another. To try and change this natural human inclination among the American populace, let alone among the populaces in each country who wish to see America’s violent downfall, is a daunting task. But that is not to say that Kucinich is not going to try.
One of his main proposals to end war is to establish the Department of Peace and Nonviolence. This cabinet-level position would be responsible for policing domestic and international issues, primarily to “intervene before violence is becoming out of control.” This bureaucracy of tolerance would effectively launch pre-emptive strikes against those aspects of society seen as potentially harmful. What does this entail exactly? According to Kucinich, this department would take the teachings of Gandhi, Christ, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and put them into “practical” use. In reality, this department would compromise our liberties by relocating and actively coercing people labeled as “high-risk” and indoctrinate many more through “peace education.” Make no mistake: Kucinich wants to alter our culture - forcefully - through coercion and forced reeducation.
Kucinich is not going to enfeeble this country with esoteric cultural alterations alone. Indeed, he is aggressive in his proposals to lessen the capabilities of America’s military might. While in Congress, Kucinich introduced a bill proposing a ban on all nuclear weapons. Now he wants to cut funding to all troops in Iraq. And he wants a fifteen percent cut in Pentagon funding to pay for his overarching domestic agenda. By weakening the United States’ military, Kucinich believes that other nations will simultaneously disarm through this show of good will alone.
Kucinich’s disregard for the role of the American military carries over into his contempt for the intelligence community. He believes that classified meetings with the American intelligence agencies are only a “con game,” mainly because he could not discuss classified information held therein with the press. After one of the few classified briefings Kucinich attended, he thought that he “could get more information from looking at Google for ten seconds.” Apparently, Kucinich sees the efforts of our intelligence agencies as irrelevant. With the amount of criticism leveled at the Bush Administration for allegedly ignoring important pieces of intelligence, this kind of flippant disregard for the intelligence community should be considered equally egregious, particularly from someone who wishes to be the next Commander-in-Chief.
Kucinich’s policies in regard to Iraq’s future are also highly suspect. Kucinich believes the only way to solve the Iraq quagmire is to cut funding to the troops, thereby forcing withdrawal. After US troops leave the area, Kucinich places all the responsibility on the U.N. to “build political consensus, to craft a political agreement, to prepare the ground for the peacekeeping mission, to implement the bases of an agreement that will end the occupation and begin the transition to international peacekeepers.” He also proposes that half of the peacekeeping forces must come from nations with “large Muslim populations.” However, to expect this foreign policy magic from a legislative body that failed to quell the violence in the Bosnia, Darfur, and Rwanda seems highly unrealistic.
As for his domestic agenda, Kucinich supports a socialist system. He believes that free higher education, guaranteed social security, universal healthcare, and pre-kindergarten supervision programs are rights of the American people, and should be fully funded by the government. When asked about how he plans to pay for these costly programs, he does not supply an answer, but retorts with, “How are we going to pay for it? No one asks that about Iraq.” Kucinich is under the impression he will free up enough funds to pay for these domestic programs. But while Kucinich may save billions of dollars by sapping the budgets of our military, he will undoubtedly spend trillions of dollars trying to support his socialist agenda.
Adding to Kucinich’s bloated domestic agenda would be a Works Progress Administration-type program, one not seen since the Great Depression, where the “government would spend money into the economy.” Also included in Kucinich’s great domestic overhaul would be increased corporate regulations, withdrawal from NAFTA and the WTO, and a return to the “family farm,” wherein he would disband corporate farms to return to a small-farm agricultural economy.
However, not all of Kucinich’s proposals fall just right of the Green Party. Kucinich acknowledges what few on his side of the aisle publicly state - that the populations of the poor white need government assistance as much as the poor minorities. Kucinich’s pro-gay marriage stance (or, as he puts it, his “pro-human” stance), will appeal to libertarians, and his anti-foreign involvement platform has much in common with libertarian candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX). Still, Kucinich should be classified as being rooted firmly in the Left, and will have the most allure for those still stuck in the leftist ideology of the 1960s.
What are Kucinich’s chances in winning the New Hampshire primary this time around? Bleak. But he will do better than the previous go-around. The recent election of peacenik liberal Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH) in New Hampshire’s first congressional district shows that there is a considerable amount of potential support for a pacifist like Kucinich. Also, Kucinich is experienced in the primary process, and has started his campaign earlier than his last attempt, and now has a staunch anti-war platform that will differentiate him from the more moderate democrats in the field. He will certainly get more votes than his forgettable one percent performance last time, but he will finish behind the other better-financed and better-known candidates in the field.
This is something that all Americans should breathe a sigh of relief for. The Department of Peace and Nonviolence is a well-intentioned, ill-fated exercise in collectivist paternalism. The assumption is twofold. First, it assumes that hatred, violence, and prejudice are unacceptable political attitudes. While it is certainly true that these political gestures are neither civil nor gentlemanly, there is no way to know that they are never legitimate means of political action. Second, the goal of the program is to take pre-emptive action against violence. The logical end of this reasoning is that individuals who are considered high-risk for violent behavior, whether it be political in nature or not, can simply be put in halfway houses or be forced to somehow change their mindset. Even if this extreme prediction does not play out, the very notion of constructing a mold for the ideal citizen is a terrifying prospect, and contains within it the seeds of coercive state action in the name of the collective for the sake of us all.
Kucinich’s theme for this campaign is to fight the material problems of the status quo through critical thinking and deconstruction. Not only is this philosophy doomed to failure, but it is also extraordinarily dangerous. To engage Kucinich on a philosophical level is to take the Burkean counter-enlightenment position against the philosophes: if Rep. Kucinich succeeds in his attempt to tear down the dominant power structures that paralyze us in the status quo, what will he supplant in its place to fill the social vacuum? Near history tells us that the strategy that he will adopt will probably be one of re-education, in an attempt to create the model citizen, the individual who is free of hatred, prejudice, violent tendencies, delusions of grandeur, and all the other politically incorrect qualities that exist in our day. Not-so-near history warns us that perhaps he will simply leave the vacuum as it is, unable to reconstruct a new anchor for society. Just as the Jacobins tore down religion and found that neither Nature or Reason could sufficiently re-order society, so we have to fear that perhaps a world without social constructs will not be the utopia that the this long shot candidate envisions, but a violent, coercive anarchy wherein life is “nasty, brutish, and short.”