Mark Phillips: The American Question

2/18/03: Ruling class disconsensus.

Liberal blogmeister Josh Marshall today posed the obvious question:

Which is more embarrassing?

1) The fact that Brent Scowcroft, the president's father's foreign policy guru, keeps on having to resort to the opinion pages to warn the president away from some new foreign policy disaster? (These public missives, of course, are widely and I think correctly seen as veiled messages from former President Bush.)

Or

2) The fact that the Democrats apparently have to rely on Scowcroft because they have no public figure of sufficient credibility and expertise who can publicly sound the alarm when the president marches off into another bout of foreign policy ridiculousness?

Here's a hint. It ain't #1.

My interest is not in Scowcroft or the Democrats per se. Rather, it's in the fact that disagreement exists within the American ruling class over the tactics and timing of war against Iraq. And, that that disagreement is deep and sustained enough to spill into public political debate.

One striking indication is the mainstream media's high-visibility coverage of the antiwar movement. Massive popular opposition to this war has existed from the beginning. Last fall, hundreds of thousands expressed it with their feet in D.C. and San Francisco, participating in monster rallies which barely registered in the national media. That mainstream coverage of last weekend's international demonstrations was so prominent, and so sympathetic, suggests a deep-rooted change of opinion within at least some sectors of the dispersed and heterogeneous American elite.

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