Containment (Domestic Version)
George F. Kennan turned 101 years old this week. Now more or less retired in (I think) New Jersey, the legendary geostrategic thinker and intellectual architect of the Cold War is long departed from the news, if not this mortal world. But it occurred to me today that Kennan's greatest conceptual breakthrough--containment--by default has become the operative philosophy of all Americans fearful of the excesses of the Bush administration and the right-wing ideologues who power its actions.

Considering Grover Norquist's transparent admiration for V.I. Lenin, the father of the Bolshevik Revolution, I don't think this comparison is as far-fetched or hysterical as it might appear at first blush. Consider how Kennan characterized the USSR--certain that enemies besieged it on all sides, clinging to dogma as a "fig leaf" to cover its true identity as a militarized despotism, but ultimately more opportunistic than fanatical in the pursuit of its ambitions. Similarly, we see the Bush administration, certain of the implacable hostility it faces in the media, academe, Hollywood and the cities, in a permanent fighting crouch; promoting its "conservatism" at every turn despite unprecedented fiscal profligacy and its obvious comfort with purveyors of cultural garbage like Rupert Murdoch; and ceaselessly looking for vacuums into which its power can expand.

But like the West in the Cold War, a show of resolve in the face of opportunistic aggression might be sufficient as deterrence. In this vein, the General Accounting Office and comptroller general David Walker today warned the administration to cut out its long-standing practice of branding propaganda as news. We see bloggers pushing relentlessly to get to the bottom of the Gannon/Guckert scandal, in which a hardcore partisan organization planted a "reporter" with a hardcore background of his own within the White House press corps. And even David Brooks, in his own hacktastic way, is calling BS on the administration's stunningly irresponsible budget politics. More broadly, the generally united Democratic resistance to the right-wing's effort to phase out and ultimately destroy Social Security could be said to a certain NATO-ish quality to it.

Like most analogies, this one can be pushed too far. There are probably some fights the administration won't back down from--judicial appointments, for instance--and others that we simply don't have the weaponry or manpower to win, like the "tort reform" and other reward-the-rich initiatives in which the president need only hold his congressional majorities together. The U.S. couldn't save the pro-democracy uprisings in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslavakia in '68. But by pushing back with resolve and persistence, by keeping the pressure on, and by presenting a Democratic counter-example that offers more to the people, we can make it far more likely that the right-wing coalition, like Soviet Communism, will eventually collapse under its own weight and hypocrisies.