The Big Picture

Throughout this campaign season, and especially with the release of Fahrenheit 9/11, two different worldviews have emerged. One worldview says that we are engaged in a global war against a new menace, Islamist terrorism, that seeks to destroy the Western way of life. This war, which has been going on for at least 10 years but was only joined by the US after 9/11, is the result of the Islamists desire to impose their beliefs on the infidels and is to be waged until they succeed in their goal. Many have compared this to the Cold War and acknowledge that it is likely to last many years. The obvious consequence of this worldview is that we must fight back and triumph over this ideology if we want the West to survive. And in order to triumph, we must affect a wholesale change in the political and social structure of the Muslim world. This has been the worldview of the Bush Administration and its supporters and is a serious, forward-looking, and progressive ideology.

Alternatively, the other worldview that has emerged, as Mark Steyn explains, is "its Bush's fault". According to this worldview, all we need to do is get rid of Bush and everything will once again be great in the world.

Whatever the question, the answer is Bush. The message of Moore's film is: Get rid of Bush this November and all the bad stuff will go away. That's why its starting point is the 2000 election and the Florida recount. On the face of it, dimpled chads don't seem to have much to do with Afghanistan and Iraq. But, for Moore, this is where it all began, and this is where it will end: Topple Bush, and the world will once again be full of happy smiley people as it is in the slow-motion scenes of laughing children gaily flying their kites in idyllic Saddamite Iraq.
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Americans, Moore told The Daily Mirror in London, are "the dumbest people on the planet. We don't know about anything that's happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing." Yet he's the one who's come up with the hickiest, most parochial thesis imaginable: that the horrors of the age are just some screwy distraction got up by a chad-wangling moron fratboy's creepy neocon viziers.

This is the real difference – between those who see the big picture and those who insist there is no big picture to see, that Michael Moore's small hick picture is the answer to everything. In the days after September 11, the fringe Left were fond of lecturing us that we needed to address the "root causes." Well, they got tired of that. If it's a choice between some big socioeconomic geopolitical root cause or Dick Cheney, they'll take Cheney.

Which is a great pity. I look on 9/11 as the sudden revelation of the tip of a vast iceberg. It's all been there under the surface for some time, but we never grasped the size of it. At one level, it's about the mainstreaming of the fringe. I don't mean in the sense that pre-9/11 Michael Moore was regarded as a kook by the Democratic Party establishment and now he's the toast of the town.

I mean that troublesome groups on the far horizons of the superpower can now strike at its heart.
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So we're living through a period of extraordinarily rapid demographic and cultural change that broadly favors the Islamists' stated objectives, a period of rapid technological advance that greatly facilitates the Islamists' objectives, and a period of rapid nuclear dissemination that will add serious heft to the realization of their objectives. If the West – and I use the term in the widest sense to mean not just swaggering Texas cowboys but sensitive left-wing feminists in favor of gay marriage – is to survive, it will only be after a long struggle lasting many decades.

Now go back to watching Fahrenheit 9/11 and kid yourself that this will all go away if Bush, Cheney, and Rummy are thrown out this November.

This is the key issue in this election, and John Kerry and the Democrats consistently fall back to the simplistic Moore worldview. Serious times call for serious thinking, and the Democrats are simply not serious.