Martin Peretz, Editor-in-Chief of the New Republic has a provocative column up at TNR Online: Impolitic.
It starts off on the amusing side:
And then turns to what should be a happy fact, but for some reason isn’t acknowledged as it should be (and not because it favors Bush, but because it says a lot about how far we have come as a society):
I want to say something favorable about Bush again. It is this: He seems to me to have completely transcended the biases of gender and race in his appointments. Oh, he has his prejudices: He wants his appointees to be a certain sort of conservative. But no one can deny that he has broken the glass ceiling for women and blacks and Latinos in the executive and judicial branches. This is an embarrassment for Democrats who, like their present chairman, still attribute bigotry wholesale to Republicans.
There are numerous implications to these appointments, including the fact that Peretz is correct: it s rather difficult for the Democrats to continue to play the race card as they continue to do in the manner in which they do. Are there Republicans voters who are as racist as the day is long? Certainly (ditto, I’m afraid, for the Democratic Party as well)–but that doesn’t mitigate the fact that members of groups previously shut out of high positions have now come into those positions in significant numbers.
Setting aside any discussion of partisan politics, which clouds a more profoundly important situation, by any objective measure, minority groups which have been shut out of power for so long have broken through to new, and significant levels. Consider that the last two Secretaries of State have been African-American, and there hasn’t been a white male in that slot since Warren Christopher left the post in 1997.
The recent brouhaha over Appeals Court nominees helps underscore the situation as well: of the three most controversial nominees, two were female (one white, one black) and only one was a white male. (I will concede that the majority of the filibustered nominees were, however, white men).
I concur that on the one hand, getting overly obsessed with color, gender and the numbers of such in the government can be counter-prodcutive. But on the other hand, to ignore the strides that have been made can keep us locked in the past. Indeed, part of the problems of many activists is that they are still stuck in the late 1960s n their views of this situation.
As long-term readers of PoliBlog will note, I am far from pollyannaish on the question of race relations. There are still profound problems that need to be worked out. But just as I admonish many on the Right who may want to pretend like the past never happened, I would similarly admonish many on the Left who wish to pretend that recent developments haven’t happened.
However, the above isn’t the truly controversial part of Peretz’s column. Rather, his endorsement of John Bolton and his critique of the UN is.
First, on Bolton:
Which brings me to John Bolton. Whatever his would-be tormentors say, he is hardly being opposed because he’s a nasty man or because he delivered a speech not vetted by the State Department or because he played rough with people lower on his totem pole or because he didn’t believe some intelligence emanating from the CIA. (This last is actually a sign of his wisdom. The CIA has been peddling feeble and dangerous intelligence for decades.) Bolton’s offense is to believe that American democracy has enemies; that words alone will not hinder their weapons; and that the United Nations is an alliance of those too weak-willed to stand up and fight for the good. Bolton believes in the sovereign power of democracies because they are responsive and responsible to their peoples. The United Nations cannot even pretend to embody such legitimacy.
Indeed.
I will grant that that still begs the question of whether Bolton is the right man for the job, but like Peretz, I tend to think he may be:
The fact is that Bolton, as ambassador to the United Nations, would pick up the intellectual mantle of Pat Moynihan, who was attacked for his undiplomatic words and provocative ways on the same editorial pages, at the same high-minded conferences, and by the same kind of gauzy-eyed politicians that now revile Bolton. Moynihan once said to me, quoting Fred Ikle, that negotiating at the United Nations always betrays you into the “semantic infiltration” of deep falsification. This is something that Bolton would not do.
Again, I concur. And the Ikle reference is dead on, I would say.
He also goes on to criticize President Clinton’s appointments to the FBI and CIA and questions Mrs. Clinton’s role on the Wal-Mart board of directors. I will leave those alone, save as additional evidence as to why Peretz is going to be in trouble with his co-partisans, as if praising Bush and Bolton wasn’t enough.
