There are two particular posts on this blog: one from last year and another from further back. Both ‘A perfectly good abstraction’ and ‘Me and American Patriotism’ are retrospectives on dialectics that have played out in my mind and my life.
Both of them also discuss ethics; distinct from philosophy. A philosophy can be a thought experiement, a belief or a way of life. Ethics are relatively simple: how we should behave toward one another. An ‘ethic’ is also a well-used way of denoting how people treat each other right now. Modes of behavior shared by large groups can denote the presence of ideas too diaphonous for meaning but thin enough to stretch far and connect much.
A widespread, unconscious attitude would match those proportions. While a given ‘ethic’ can also be an ideological commitment, they are often psychological. The mind of a given person may or may not make any connection between ideology and an unconscious attitude.
Speaking of all that: remember when I posted about Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan? I worried that I was being too critical of Biden and that I should be more willing to give points fairly.
I suspect I’ll continue writing about politics here but I don’t know that I will.
I’m not a sore loser and I don’t mind being wrong…but I may have been seriously wrong about some of the things I mentioned in those two posts.
I’m an American so I can’t help thinking about American politics and society in a provincial way. I took it for granted that Americans generally value the ethical enshrinement of the individual in the American Constitution. Consider many of the assumptions we make as we write: anyone is allowed to have any reaction to what I say but I am still allowed to say it. To call for someone to be deplatformed or for their message to be lumped into an ideological generalization is to discredit oneself. It testifies to a fear of ideas under discussion that can only be assuaged by throwing out the discussion.
Many Americans probably do value those things. But I made assumptions about scale.
My parents were politcal opposites for the entire time they were married. My mother leaned left and my father leaned right. Their beliefs had something deeper in common, though: fear of tyranny. Both of them believed (as they do now) that a person is smart but people are stupid. From this it follows that institutions are zombies animated by the collective subconscious. A zombie is dependant on the magician who raises them. If such a creature is composed of more than one being, then control gets difficult for the magician (who is only one person). If the magician is subsumed by their creation, then the leviathan is bound only by the currents and eddies in the minds of its sleeping vessels.
Another way to put it:
Institutions are not evil. They are only tools. Yet there is a conflict between the ends and the means. It makes sense to want a stronger tool to do a better job. Often, institutions become more complicated as they grow stronger. The strongest institution is therefore the best tool and the hardest to grasp.
My parents had this in common because my mother was a member of the Green Party and my father was a Libertarian. Both perspectives fear the excesses of unchecked institutions. I tried to point this out to them more than once and they never agreed with me.
According to my dad, my mom made the mistake of thinking that one rogue institution can be checked by another. According to my mom, my dad made the mistake of thinking that the dream of a better world (or, let’s say, the social imagination) itself was the path to zombie institutions.
Skip a few decades and grown-up Ailix is still puzzling over this. If there is any love in America for zombie institutions…it can’t be said out loud. To say that an institution can take care of society’s every need, like the parent of a perpetual child, is to invite the accusation of authoritarianism. I agree. A modern American self-identified socialist would not (if asked) agree that social safety net institutions should be run on a non-democratic, top-down basis, as in the former Soviet Union.
My dad, in his characterisation of the left, often quoted Hilary Clinton’s “it takes a village to raise a child” statement. No matter what Hilary Clinton believes herself, she would never win another election for as long she lived if she said, out loud, that “individual autonomy is bullshit and we need institutions to run everything.” Maybe she believes that, maybe she doesn’t, but no one would vote for her again if she said so.
For another oddity, self-proclaimed Libertarians who enter American politics typically end up as doctrinaire Republicans in all but name. For all of their rugged individualism and Ayn Rand quotes, they almost always bend the knee to the right wing corporate and religious prerogative and almost always welch on matters of individual liberty that align with the left.
Libertarianism is the closest thing that exists to a national American ethic; and a societal ethic is more subtle than a political philosophy. Americans in general believe in individual autonomy. No American who wants a political career would openly deny that the thriving individual is the ground on which democracy is built. At the same time, those who espouse individualism the most treat it like a downer of a grown-up who doesn’t understand just how cool capitalist feudalism and theocracy are.
Asking a conservative about this often produces the answer that libertarianism is a perfectly good political philosophy but it can only be the letter of the law. Social conservatives believe in a separate but equally necessary spirit of the law.
Asking a liberal about this often makes them look at you like you’re crazy…while standing on the bedrock of libertarianism to resist conservative overreach. Social liberal values, like social justice, depend on a libertarian ethic. In a world where everyone is entitled to all the happiness that they can claim for themselves without disenfranchising or abusing others, there is no reason to marginalize differences simply for existing.
Like art and architypes, the gap between the American ethic of libertarianism and the realities of American politics is huge.
As someone raised by a liberal and a conservative who both internalized the libertarian ethic, I’m frustrated by the popular wisdom that the American duopoly is permanent. Many conservatives hate the RNC and many liberals hate the DNC. Many of those same conservatives and liberals also think that the Republican and Democratic parties are unstoppable and that the lesser of two evils must always be tolerated.
To paraphrase Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables: Machievelli was not an evil genius- he was only the voice of fact divorced from truth. Hugo wrote that wisdom is the reconciliation of fact with truth. That reconciliation can only come from exposure and dialogue and the conflicts that may arise from it. It depends on contact which depends on patience, compassion and intellectual curiosity.
You probably don’t need one more person telling you that social media is dividing everyone by keeping us in our echo-chambers. But withdrawal from contact ironically makes you dependant on others. An isolated group that acts on a single unquestioned perspective will function exactly like a zombie institution. The hard edges of fact are banished completely and truth is reduced to consensus. Meanwhile: “Doesn’t it just suck that we’re stranded with this duopoloy that no one wants?”
Obviously, conspiracy theories have been pushed in recent years to irresponsible and deadly extremes.
But I can’t help but wonder if some of the pushback comes from the way equivocation has been used in power. Particularly in recent years.
I was legally able to vote for the first time in 2008. For my generation, ending the Middle Eastern wars and the national security state were essential priorities. Obama ran on a promise to close Guantanamo Bay and I believed him. Others did to. We also believed him when he said he’d make Roe v Wade the law of the land.
Then he started hemming and hawing with “maybe we shouldn’t leave the Middle East until we set up a Western-style democracy.” And then he sicc’d the Feds on Snowden, Assange and Manning when they blew the whistle on American air strikes targeting civilians and emergency first responders in Iraq. Eight years later, Trump is elected and Guantanamo Bay is still open.
Trump won populist sympathy with claims of bringing jobs back to America and courted the religious right with a promise to overturn Roe v Wade. He did neither of those things. His Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe v Wade after a few years but Trump, as President, did not enact the direct dismissal that he alluded to. What he did do was host Saudi nobility at his DC hotel chain where they dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars. Jared Kushner received two billion dollars from the Saudi crown prince for a documentary that was never made. When an American journalist was murdered by the Saudi court, he ignored it. While outsourcing even more American labor needs overseas.
Most Americans fell for one of those celebrity politicians or the other. And those who voted for either Trump or Obama were not rewarded for their trust. Both Obama and Trump stopped short of their campaign promises while claiming that their hearts were always (and remain) in the right place.
Saying one thing and doing another is hypocrisy. Saying one thing, doing another and claiming that you were serving the same ends in both instances is equivocation. Many younger people came of age under Obama or Trump. Even before then, American voters were long familiar with their values being dangled just out of reach.
If “woke” activists appear to fly off the handle over mere words and ideological nit-picks, I think it is easy to see why. It follows that a history of equivocation would engender a suspicion of vague, interpretive language. For a people who are tired of the abuse of language and good will, conspiracy theories are a ripe target. Any body of ideas in which appearance is taken for confirmation will not be treated charitably. Especially when one side of the political spectrum is more willing to weaponize conspiracy theories.
On the subjects of broken faith, double standards and recent politics, there is something else we must necessarily mention.
In 2018, on Sam Harris’s Waking Up podcast, he interviewed a guest with a compelling theory on the origins of the MeToo movement and the 2016 election.
For the sake of clarification: I’m aware that #MeToo was started by Tarana Burke as a means for victims of sexual violence to legitimize their overlooked experiences. Burke has also said that outing individual predators is a quick fix compared to the work of systematic reform. Burke writes that healing the wounded must matter more than punishing the guilty.
With that out of the way, back to the Waking Up episode: Harris’ guest theorized that the election of Trump, who has been accused of sexual assault innumerable times, was a galvanizing event. Weinstein and R.Kelly were exposed, but how much could that actually mean if someone like Donald Trump could become President?
A common rebuttal at that time was that lasting change is incremental and must take time. For recent generations of American voters, who grew up hearing “incrementalism is the only way”, this smacks of equivocation. While dissidents are being told that change must be incremental, the powerful and the privileged are free from self-restraint.
The dynamic reminds me of the ancient Peerages of France and Britain. A Peer (like nobility in general) received fortune-sized salaries. For occupying their office. For simply being a Peer of the nobility. Peers were protected from certain laws. Victor Hugo had an affair with a married woman who was convicted and imprisoned for adultery. Hugo was a Peer, and therefore could not be charged. The attention paid to the marginalization of women in his work suggests that the incident stayed with him. To say nothing of his novel l’homme qui rit, which villainized the Peerage.
These legal and social protections were afforded, presumably, for the same reason as their salaries: simply existing as Peers.
Similar privileges were common among ancient nobility in general. But the Peerage represented a particular relationship with feudal power. A Peer was a social equal of the monarchy. It was a relative distinction.
The modern day concept of a ‘celebrity’ is also a relative distinction. A Peer was a peer of a royal family and a celebrity “celebrates” something. To celebrate is to bestow legitimacy with your witness. An officiant for a ceremony is a kind of celebrant. The term has made a comeback in modern paganism for clergy who perform marriages, cleansings and other rituals. Andy Warhol’s concept of the superstar was a personality who simply embodies something. The films Warhol made with his own cohort of self-proclaimed superstars consisted of the actors doing ordinary, day-to-day activities. The project was inspired by Warhol’s obsession with the early years of Hollywood where the face of an actor, alone, was an almost archetypical embodiment. Marilyn Monroe simply existed as feminine beauty and John Wayne simply existed as rugged masculinity.
This method of embodiment is where I see the connection between the ancient European Peerages and the modern celebrity. John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe, as celebrities, are celebrants of aesthetic ideals. A less specific function is apparent in modern pop culture, though: the famous are seen by others. They are celebrated by others, whose witness gives them power, while at the same time they represent the power of being seen. Modern celebrities are celebrants of visibility. The only trait required for visibility is to be visible. Beyond this, that which is visible need only exist.
Like the European Peerage, a modern celebrity’s existence is treated with reverence. If an outsider demanding change has to carry the burden of high-minded stoicism and restraint while the powerful can get away with anything, they will feel like they are being told to stay out of the way. This can explain why privilege has drawn so much anger in recent years.
Just lately, this double standard is even harder to miss with the followers of Donald Trump making accusations of government overreach with their criminal investigations. Immediately after the 2020 election, Andrew Yang was asked in an interview whether or not Trump should face criminal prosecution for insurrection, assassination of Soleimani, emoluments or anything else. Yang said that to do so would be to join the ranks of third world dictatorships where heads roll between administrations. After the illegal, offensive wars of George Junior and Obama’s double taps and whistle-blower prosecutions, giving Trump a pass would send a clear message that an ex-President is free from prosecution simply for being an ex-President.
A gap between the restraint of outsiders and the freedom of insiders invites suspicion of vague language. When the vagueness is weaponized through conspiracy theories, it becomes even more suspect. Ironically, it becomes harder to think of that gap as anything but conspiratorial.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe Vs. Wade and Biden made his recent effort at student loan forgiveness, a few right wing arguments have caught my attention.
If you’re wondering, I’m pro-choice and I think student loan forgiveness is the right thing to do. I’m a leftist but I think that the proliferation of political echo chambers is one of the major forces of destruction at work in America and in the world. I think that all of us- my political fellow travelers included -need to be more comfortable with conversation, confrontation and the exchange of ideas. It requires relentless honesty but it also requires compassion and intellectual curiosity.
I wear my positions on my sleeve but I want to emphasize that I do not think those who disagree are necessarily bad people. But I do think that, in the wake of what has recently happened with Roe v. Wade and Biden’s proposed debt relief, some bad ideas have been aired.
One of my common touchstones among the political talking heads of YouTube is Rising which featured an opinion piece(“radar”) by Briahna Joy Gray. She made a comparison which, in my assessment, is fair: the SCOTUS ruling on abortion resembles a Christian equivalent of Sharia law. The overwhelming volume of pro-life activists who loudly express Christian religious motivations make a comparison tempting, at least.
Robby Soave, Briahna’s frequent co-host on Rising, had notes afterward: Briahna used the phrasing “Catholic Sharia law.” Soave claimed that pro-life legislation is not, by definition, inseparable from Catholicism. Assuming he wasn’t making a denominational distinction about Catholicism, he likely also takes issue with the more general comparison. Fundamentally: that the pro-life position is not endemically religious and that this SCOTUS ruling should not be seen as an incursion of the church into the state.
In the interest of covering our bases, let’s own that there is at least one non-religious movement whose cause is represented in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. A number of social media profiles posted statements that the SCOTUS decision can only effect those who have made mistakes. In the words of one detractor, this argument can be characterized as “sluts need consequences.”
What’s interesting is that I can recall adult men having similar conversations around me when I was a child. When there was news coverage of a potential vaccine against HPV, someone said “everyone should have VD once in their lives.”
If I had to speculate why this person thought that, I suspect they may have meant that getting a sexually transmitted infection is a learning experience and a rite of passage. That’s the best I can do with that. The same people might think abortion should be outlawed for the same reason. My opinion is that arguing the social benefit of unplanned pregnancies and STIs is like arguing for the social benefit of rape or poverty. It smacks of social Darwinism or accelerationism. Social Darwinism and accelerationism are often used as rhetorical proxies by fascists. Many people connect those dots. If someone openly claims “sluts need consequences”, their only ideological home would be something like inceldom.
I think there are more Evangelical Christians in the American conservative mainstream then there are social Darwinists and incels. The people who are super stoked about the overturning of Roe v. Wade are mostly Christian. Robbie Soave’s point, that the pro-life movement is not necessarily Christian, just doesn’t map onto reality. But I’ve also encountered that point outside of YouTube.
The other way this is argued is that Evangelical Christianity is an outward symptom of deeper sociological influences like patriarchy. This introduces the problem of the accuser believing that they know the hearts of their opponents better than they themselves do. In theory, this is gas-lighting. In practice, accusing Evangelical Christians of existing only to empower men over women just confuses Evangelicals- while making them look cool to incels.
This also leads to the belief in one group being intellectually or morally inferior to the other. This is ordinary chauvinism and it closes the avenues of connection that allow democracy to work. Ideas cannot prove themselves in civil discourse if they’re excluded or not taken seriously. To say nothing of how those on the receiving end of chauvinism are aggravated and possibly radicalized by their dismissal.
The search for pro-life ideologues outside of American Christianity stops at incels and social Darwinists, both of which are statistical minorities. The only other way to take religion out of the equation is to reject what the Christian majority says about itself.
So is the notion of a non-religious pro-life position a complete fraud? A number of people seem to believe that one exists, even though it contradicts the driving force of the pro-life movement itself. If the stated points of an argument are not true, it makes sense to wonder about other factors.
I think a belief lies behind it; a belief that manifested itself again when Biden stated his intention to forgive up to 10,000$ of student debt. Tucker Carlson epitomized it with a rant headed with the line “this move will not help ordinary Americans.” Do I even need to spell out how asinine those words are?
More importantly though: the best conservative arguments against student loan debt forgiveness are based on the profit motive for colleges. Massive sums spent on gyms and stuff to attract students from wealthy families. A fundamental consequence of modern tuition prices is that college freshmen must, necessarily, resign themselves to anywhere between six-thousand dollars and ten-thousand dollars of debt, up front. I suspect I’m being conservative in my assessment of the “price of admission” but last I heard that was a predictable baseline. If there is any way they can make you pay more, they will find it.
If the problem with an institution (like higher education) is that it is too privatized and too driven by profit…then it needs more outside intervention, not less. Perhaps reverence for capitalism heads off that line of reasoning. Inaction is not supportable. Loan forgiveness, on its own, frees the innocent while paying no attention to the guilty. To do right by the innocent while stopping the guilty would include the admission that American universities are dangerously unregulated. But if you can’t get to that last stage, you’re stuck moralizing about how bailing out student debt subsidizes the lenders.
The pro-life movement in America is a religious one and Biden’s student loan relief effort was a minimal reaction to a problem requiring a bigger solution. And I do not think the political right wing would necessarily suffer by conceding these things. It would forfeit some traditional conservative rallying cries but the gains would be considerable.
On August 20th, YouGov released some interesting data on shifting political attitudes. Those who have changed their positions on political issues were polled. The data was collected from August 3rd to the 5th. Out of the respondents who shifted their stance on abortion, a 50% movement toward pro-choice away from pro-life was recorded. A 68% conservative-to-liberal swing was found on gay marriage and a 38% shift to the left happened with climate change.
For context, the rightward movements on those respective issues were 34%, 13% and 31%. I’ll also add that these percentages only represented the people who responded, not America as a whole. Even with that caveat, though, these numbers strike me as significant. It has been a politically rocky summer and- evidently -the people who changed their minds favored the left. 50% of those who reported changing their minds have become closer to pro-choice than pro-life. By at least one metric, overturning Roe v. Wade has created more liberals than conservatives.
The gay marriage figure strikes me as significant because of the recent spurning of the Log Cabin Republicans. For those who don’t know: the Log Cabin Republicans are a Texas-based LGBT-inclusive Republican group. At the Texas Republican Convention this summer, they were denied the space to have a booth for the second time in a row. Numerous blogs and news outlets covered this, and dropping their anti-LGBT platforms has been discussed in confidence among members of the RNC. Obviously, it has not happened, but there are clearly some who sympathize as insiders (like the Log Cabin Republicans) who want them to. Even Caitlin Jenner has said that including the queer community would change the Republican party less than the changes she would make to the Democratic party.
If the pro-life position is necessarily religious and therefore, as a political aim, theocratic…then imagine the opportunity the RNC has, right now. They have a vocal (if small) LGBT following waiting in the wings. Imagine if the RNC said that it was time to get real about abortion bans: it is Christian theocracy, full stop. Not only does it allow the church to overreach the state- it allows the church to go straight to the physical body of the individual. The absence of this criticism within conservative thought has always baffled me. Anywhere that welcomes libertarians should have at least a few people insisting that the individual’s right to self-determination is sacrosanct. Yet this affiliation between libertarians and Republicans is the only reason I can think of as to why feminism seems so deeply alienated from libertarianism.
The values that once made me a libertarian eventually made me a feminist. I’m surprised I haven’t heard more voices saying that both feminists and libertarians share an investment in protecting the individual from tyranny. There have got to be at least some “big L” Libertarians who are female, queer, feminist or all of the above who are tired of the DNC being the only game in town.
If the RNC had some kind of “crush theocracy wherever we find it” movement, the influx of support would be considerable. Combined with some “we learned our lesson” messaging, the Republican party could reinvent and reinvigorate itself. A bold and energetic new direction with enthusiastic supporters would also enable them to take their power back from Trump’s influence. Speaking of YouGov, a more recent poll they took suggested that the majority of Americans think Trump should face criminal prosecution.
Right now, Trump’s best hope is that the “it’s all political persecution” line lands with his base and the public. The polling data indicates that it hasn’t landed with the public. If that’s true, then the RNC could gain much by simply saying it out loud: the investigation is just and we want to nominate someone else. It would go well for them if they did it in conjunction with an influx of new blood.
None of this is likely to happen, though. And I’m interested in why.
I’m convinced that the only thing stopping mainstream American conservatives from flipping on abortion and loan forgiveness is partisanship. Recently, it’s been referred to as “team sports” mentality. According to APNews, the Michigan elections board vetoed a direct ballot initiative effort that gathered its required number of signatures. The initiative was an effort to safeguard the reproductive protections afforded by Roe v. Wade.
That’s when “team sports” becomes more than just an ugly oversight. If the Republican party can’t change for the good of ordinary people or even their own political advantage, hopefully the duty of the elected to the electors can still be counted on. Just more reliably than in Michigan.
I wonder if these people would still be salivating at the thought of war if they were the ones to be deployed
Tell your friends and family that you love them. Take nothing for granted. Love unreservedly and live life uncompromisingly. Chase your passions and your dreams.
While the climate change clock ticks, Vladimir Putin has decided to take military action according to a historical, ethnic grievance. In his estimation, Ukraine is ethnically Russian and therefore Russia is entitled to seize the country. For this reason, he has targeted nuclear power plants and insinuated the possible use of nuclear weapons.
Because of a sense of ethnic possession, a whirlpool of death has quickened and may attract the currents of other ventings of insanity.
Obviously there are other factors, but in my opinion those other factors are of questionable value. Before now, the overtures the west has made toward Ukraine regarding possible inclusion of NATO was obviously a contributing factor. And I am aware that, if the west had not pursued this, than the current invasion may not have happened.
In fact, the Ukrainian President has recently stated that he agrees not to bring his country into any such group.
As of 3/17/22, the Russian advances on Kiev have tentatively halted. Yet this hasn’t stopped pontificating, warhawk voyeurs from badgering White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki about adding our fighting forces to the mix- as if global, nuclear annihilation was not possible.
Yet this perspective itself is not without it’s substance: they are asking whether the fear of a nuclear strike should allow the conflict play out as it will which evidently includes bombing nuclear power plants.
What appalls me about the recent White House press briefings, though, is the consensus among pampered, American stenographers that nuclear holocaust should be treated as a non-issue. As though the human cost was admissible.
While this happens, Saudi Arabia availed themselves to the lack of coverage of other things, having executed 81 individuals en masse on March 12- a record of recent history.
In the event of global escalation, it is difficult to overlook Iran’s remarks from January about the murder of General Soleimani. They have vowed revenge if they cannot prosecute Donald Trump. America has never turned over an ex-President for something like that and Russia has carried out joint military operations with Iran in the last few years. Do the math.
Israel has behaved similarly, with new Knesset legislation that strips citizenship from Palestinian spouses of Israelis. If that’s not the act of an apartheid ethnostate, I don’t know what is.
Be good to each other and take nothing for granted. That is all.
For the first time since I’ve been of voting age, I finally managed to support someone who got us out of at least one of the forever wars.
Not that I don’t continue to have reservations about Biden’s political record; I absolutely do. In the sixties he called mixed-race schools “racial jungles” and he worked on legislation empowering private prisons and the drug war. Considering how the enforcement of drug laws has typically been carried out, it paints a scary picture in conjunction with the “racial jungle” comment. He even co-authored a bill with Strom Thurmond that expanded civil asset forfeiture to those convicted of drug crimes. He then laundered his image by running alongside Barack Obama in 2008.
(To clarify: civil asset forfeiture is when the police are empowered to preemptively seize property or money if they think you are going to use them to commit a crime. Essentially, it’s when law enforcement takes your stuff because they think you might do something illegal)
Joe Biden’s record could reflect corruption at worst or political opportunism at best. But the withdrawal from Afghanistan has, in my opinion, proven that Joe Biden is already twice the President that either Trump or Obama was. What he has done was both necessary and profoundly brave.
Some obvious objections are the American collaborators we left behind and the return of Islamic theocracy with the Taliban. Regarding our collaborators, it is possible that there was some sort of miscommunication: before the withdrawal, Biden said that military intelligence projected months before any possibility of a Taliban incursion. Right now, though, military intelligence liaisons are telling the media that they always knew the Taliban would instantly take control.
As of this writing, it doesn’t look like the precise mechanics of what wires were crossed with what is in any way clear. But there is room for legitimate criticism there.
The resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, though, has a simpler context which I believe is causing subconscious angst in the media coverage of the withdrawal.
Put simply: it was preventable. Easily preventable. And easily preventable by the Afghans.
America spent roughly eighty-nine billion dollars training the Afghan army. An army that numbered some 300,000, armed with modern American weaponry. The Taliban had 75,000 combatants on their side, with artillery from the eighties and nineties. The Taliban was vastly outnumbered and outgunned.
Yet the stronger Afghan army instantly cleared the way for them and the Afghan head of state disappeared. The only way that could have happened is if they wanted it to.
America gave Afghanistan every means of support we could possibly offer. But all the money and weapons in the world can’t make a nation do what she does not want to.
The shallow and obtuse pearl-clutching in the mainstream media strikes me as more psychological than moral. If a western-style democracy is not the prerogative of the Afghan people, it makes it impossible to avoid the conclusion that our stated motive of benevolent statecraft was never truly about the Afghan people.
Let us be clear: our recently stated motive of benevolent statecraft.
After the death of Bin Laden, it became impossible to pretend that our military presence in the Muslim world had anything to do with 9/11. So the justification then had to be an altruistic effort on behalf of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.
This reframing took place during the administration of Barack Obama. After quarantine and the end of the Trump presidency, nostalgia is now more sacrosanct than ever. Everyone wants to get back to normal and Barack Obama is one of the symbols of life before 2016-2020.
To admit that an altruistic effort to establish western-style democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq was never the desire of those nations touches a nerve. Both Trump and Obama won droves of voters with the promise to end American intervention in the Middle East. Many (perhaps most) Americans probably voted for one President or the other. And both of them welched on their anti-war platforms. To cling to the fantasy that either Trump or Obama represent some lost state of greatness is to buy into the belief that A. we were right to support their anti-war platforms and B. they were right to welch on them.
These two articles of faith are reconciled in a narrative of maturation: we were once youthful idealists but we learned hard lessons. In this narrative, it follows that the fine points of responsibility require us to eradicate tyranny in the Muslim world and leave them with representative governments. This leads to a perpetually receding goal post and permission to chase it forever.
To let go of what Obama and Trump represented is to admit just how deeply we were lied to. And the last thing anyone wants to do as they pine for the good old days is to lose more of their illusions.
The falsehood of our altruistic claims is particularly glaring in light of the parties who have benefited from our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jon Schwarz, writing for The Intercept, reports that a 10,000$ investment in defense stocks at the beginning of the Afghan war would now be worth 100,000$. A recent tweet from Public Citizen listed the returns on defense stocks during the Afghan war:
Now that we realize that our stated aspirations could not have been realized, we are forced to ask who benefited from it all. The answer to that is a tough pill to swallow for a lot of us. We pursued a political program for those who did not want it for no better reason than the enrichment of defense contractors. We are now forced to grapple with this, and hopefully we will be more clear-eyed in our voting and political scrutiny.
Less money squandered on foreign occupations can also allow us to re-allocate resources to fight climate change. Billions to trillions of dollars every year, now freed up. You know, so there can be some humans walking around after we’re dead carrying our genetic code.
Joe Biden has claimed that he wants to bring morality back to the Presidency after the ethical abandonment of Donald Trump. He said this frequently on the campaign trail in 2020 and, during a closed-door meeting with civil rights leaders after his election, argued the point loudly.
In 2020, Biden was running against a candidate who could make the point for him simply by virtue of comparison. To his credit, Joe Biden has rolled back several pieces of anti-trans and anti-LGBT legislation imposed during the Trump administration. Perhaps naturally, the social conservative base that Trump was playing to with those policies are attempting to take stock- to find out what they are capable of under the new Presidency.
This, for a morality candidate, could be an opportunity to make good on that claim. Especially since so much of Biden’s political momentum was borrowed from Barack Obama by association. Now that Biden has profited from his comparison to Trump, however, he needs to start thinking how to build on his comparison to Obama.
This also could be a massive opportunity for Biden to validate his claims of being a moral reformer. In 2008, Obama ran and won on a negative comparison to George W. Bush. Repeatedly on the campaign trail, Obama promised to end our Middle Eastern occupation and close the Guantanamo Bay military detention center.
To Biden’s credit, he has recently made overtures toward closing Guantanamo Bay. His current plan for this involves handing over the remaining detainees to foreign governments and transferring whomever remains to American supermax prisons. While this is a relative step in the right direction, it also brings us to the moral crisis of the Democratic Party.
In a word: equivocation. Saying one thing, doing another and pretending that what you did matches or satisfies the original claim. After Obama was elected, America got interpretive about our Middle Eastern occupation. Mainstream news outlets started saying it was a bad idea to leave before establishing a Western-style democracy, which enabled us to set our own receding goal post for withdrawal. Guantanamo disappeared from the talking-head radar almost completely and warrants are issued for Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. The Feds sic’d their thugs on those three for exposing Obama-era military attacks on civilians- including the “double tap”, when a pilot or drone circled back to bomb the emergency first responders.
Even the slaughter of civilians by the American military was somehow whitewashed by upper-middle class faux-leftist popular opinion. Fortunately for Biden, even this could be amenable to reparation. The Icelandic journal Stundin recently ran a story about Sigurdur Thordarson, a key source of the sexual assault charges against Assange, who now admits to fabricating these claims. Moreover, Thordarson was once again given the formal status of a witness against Assange in 2019 by the Department of Justice under the Trump Administration. This was while Thordarson was incarcerated for multiple sexual assaults against minors.
Alexandersson and Jonsson, the authors of the June 26th Stundin article, wrote that American officials updated the indictment against Assange in a London Magistrate Court. The legal entanglement between Assange and Manning could regain lost ground if Assange were guilty of felony-level crimes in Iceland. Kellen S. Dwyer, the deputy of Trump’s Attorney General appointee William Barr, offered Thordarson immunity from any crimes he admitted to in his testimony against Assange. Nor would any such admissions be shared with any other law enforcement agency. Thordarson now admits that he never had any position of standing within WikiLeaks nor was he ever instructed by anyone therein (let alone Assange) to do anything illegal.
With this now being a matter of public record, consider the opportunity that Joe Biden now has. Consider the moral contrast with Trump that got Biden elected- especially with Trump’s open hostility toward the American press. If Biden were to pardon Assange and Snowden and cease any legal machinations against them and Manning, imagine the support he would galvanize. Right now, we exist in an era where Neera Tanden’s confirmation is thrown off because she said mean thingson Twitter and not because she punched a journalist or fantasized out loud about seizing Libya’s oil as compensation for our military presence there. Being mean on the internet is treated like a more serious wrongdoing than actual war crimes. If Biden unconditionally pardoned Manning, Assange and Snowden, he will have set the moral foundation for a withdrawal from our Middle Eastern occupations.
By legitimizing Snowden, Manning and Assange as whistleblowers, he would be elevating the moral seriousness of war crime which would be the ideal set up to a full withdrawal. He would also alleviate some of the anxieties of leftists like myself who fear a return to the equivocation and apathy of the Obama era.
There would be no better way to differentiate himself from his former running mate than to cease the persecution of whistleblowers that Obama initiated. He would be sending a message that his would be a presidency of real change and real hope, instead of those words as kitschy slogans on a red and blue, pseudo-Warhol campaign image.
Joe Biden and the Democratic Party need to ask themselves what they want their legacy to be in the wake of Trump. The American left sees the Democratic Party as opportunistic and dismissive of their values. We feel like we are trapped between war-profiteering cultural reactionaries and manipulators. Leftists in America feel like the Democratic Party keeps claiming to share our values while insisting that they’ll set thought to deed in just a little while. Just a little while has been happening for over a decade.
Obama promised to end the militaristic puppeteering in other countries before he got elected…and afterward, somehow got the comfortable, complacent network TV demographic to embrace the proselytizing of Western democracy. Formerly, the moral justification for the Vietnam War. Biden wrote, in the introduction to Sarah McBride’s autobiography that trans rights are now at the frontlines of the Civil Rights movement. This last Pride month, he had many flowery remarks to share about the urgency to stop violence against trans women. There have already been suicide attempts in the Arkansas Children’s Hospital following the prompt cessation of hormone replacement therapy. Mary Bentley, an Arkansas Republican Representative, recently threw her weight behind a bill that would protect educators who wish to persistently misgender and dead name trans youth.
This is a mental health issue that has long suffered in mainstream opinion. It is difficult to communicate the hardship this inflicts to a cisgendered public. I could unload a ton of personal stories but it wouldn’t advance my point at all. This is an experience that teaches trans people that our feelings and mental health count less than everyone else’s. It is an experience that has taught many of us that, no matter how civil things become, we will never truly belong anywhere.
That is the depth of pain and alienation Biden would be addressing if his White House began an uncompromising reversal of the transgender policies of the Trump era. Many of us, perhaps for the first time, would begin to wonder what it would be like to have a president who was also our president.
If Biden’s claims of enacting a morally bold Administration are sincere, then now is the moment to prove it.
Update, 7/5/21: We have just left our biggest military base in Afghanistan. Credit where credit is due.
Alex Kane, in a May 25th article on jewishcurrents.com, wrote that the Biden State Department committed over five million dollars of aid to Gaza humanitarian efforts. Simultaneously, the State Department also accepted a 735, 000, 000$ offer from Israel in exchange for military support.
Kane writes that the State Department dispensed an export license to Boeing to carry out the American end of the purchase. This included Joint Direct Attack Munitions and Small Diameter Bombs: two varieties of laser-guided explosives used by Israel in an eleven day attack on the Gaza Strip which ended on Friday, the 21st of May.
Reporting earlier that month suggests an interesting dialectical process leading up to this point. On May 3rd, Axios reporter Rebecca Falconer published an article detailing remarks made by Hilary Clinton on a potential withdrawal of American military forces from Afghanistan. Clinton warned that such an event could cause a surge of Afghan refugees and give Jihadi militias a chance to regain lost ground. Two weeks later, the UK branch of The Independent reported that Trump sent a private memo to his Pentagon appointees, stating a wish to immediately withdraw from Afghanistan following his loss of the 2020 Presidential election.
The irony is hard to miss: Trump gets all furious and apoplectic after losing so he decides to punish his own base. So Mister “I love selling weapons to the Saudis” wants to take his ball and go home. Since the 2020 Presidential election and immediately afterward, all criticism of Trump is welcome on the left- even if it’s for things the left should be doing. This leaves the door open for Hilary to look after her own bottom line and look good doing it.
So on the 25th of May, we learn Biden sold laser-guided weapons to Israel for 735 million dollars while kicking five mil to Palestine for humanitarian aid. The dude is hedging his bets but it’s clear which one he expects the bigger return from.
You know how green infrastructure reform, universal healthcare and universal basic income are constantly shot down by people asking how we’re gonna pay for it? Do the outraged deficit hawks have nothing to say about the laundering of perpetual war? Is this what the big liberal rollback of the Trump administration looks like?
Anti-LGBT lawmakers and activists are taking inventory, now that Biden is in office. Under Trump it was open season on the queer community and now social conservatives are testing boundaries to determine what they can get away with. Hopefully, this reconnaissance won’t cost too many lives.
On January 19th of this year, North Dakota began legislation on House Bill 1476. On January 21st, it was fortunately withdrawn. The bill would have made same-sex marriages from other states as good as non-existent in North Dakota and penalize any corporate or state entity that openly expresses support for LGBT people in general. The bill also would have criminalized the teaching of anything about sexual or gender variance in history, science or health.
As bad as that would have been, there was a truly surreal detail in the bill’s list of relevant definitions.
After my head stopped spinning, I looked online for any legal validation or precedent for this. I found only two outstanding instances. One of them was a 1890 court ruling and the other dates back to 2014. The 2014 case involved convicted prisoners who wished to form a secular humanist discussion group, the way that prisons host religious discussion groups. That particular case ended in a ruling that secular humanists are entitled to the same First Amendment rights that protect religious expression.
The 1890 decision, meanwhile, was simply the last attempt made in court to set a legal definition of religion. It was then provisionally offered that “The term ‘religion’ had reference to one’s views of his relations to his Creator, and to the obligations they impose.” In the same case, it was said that to defend fundamentalist Mormons who wish to practice polygamy as a religious freedom is to “offend the common sense of mankind.”
Further reading revealed that the 1890 case only affords potential for interpreting secular humanism as a religion. And this is only because one of the attendant Justices capitalized Secular Humanism like a proper noun in a written brief.
There are two likely possibilities: one is that the “religion of secular humanism” is something the author(s) of ND HB 1476 fabricated out of whole cloth and means nothing. This would be nice and the withdrawal of the bill could make it seem likely: maybe it was withdrawn because that claim was so sweeping and dramatic that the authors pulled it before it could be scrutinized closely by other lawmakers.
The language of 1476 also reveals conceptual, theocratic groundwork: repeatedly within both the definitions and the proposals, it is written that the bill attempts to isolate the public from “nonsecular” influences and classifies secular humanism as “nonsecular.” On it’s face, this echoes the claim within Christian apologetics that Christianity is both necessary and relevant to every living human.
C.S. Lewis frequently espoused this, to name just one of the Christian thinkers to champion that argument. In this view, the only reason you would claim to be an atheist or an agnostic is either ignorance or dishonesty and everyone is “religious” whether they cop to it or not. (as the image above shows, claiming to be non-religious is treated as patently false) The only meaning of the word ‘secular’ that would make sense in this theology is a state intermediary between religious individuals.
Claiming that all values must necessarily come from religion sounds like it would be laughed out of the room by lawmakers in a country that separates church and state. This is where we get to the scarier possibility: what if increased scrutiny was not the reason it was withdrawn? What if, because so many state-level lawmakers play to social conservative voters, increased scrutiny would not have stopped it anyway?
An absurd claim can either indicate ignorance or the existence of an understated plan. Twenty-eight states have considered similar bills lately with less expressly theocratic language. This could simply be part of a trial and error exercise for social conservatives to delineate where the “line” is. In that scenario, ND HB 1476 could simply be an effort to test the deep end, which would be cold comfort to those who have already suffered from these laws.
In Arkansas, doctors are prohibited from providing transition-related health care to minors. Minors who were already receiving hormone replacement therapy have had their treatment summarily stopped. A USA Today article paraphrased Rep. Deborah Ferguson’s description of a testimony provided by a physician from Arkansas Children’s Hospital. This doctor stated that several minors that receive HRT at Arkansas Children’s Hospital attempted suicide days after this law went into effect.
If one were determined to play devil’s advocate, it could be said that North Dakota is willing to put it’s money where it’s mouth is. There are also two separate bills banning transitioning minors from school sports, one of which contains a stipulation that medical research will be gathered going forward. However I do not envy the person who has to tell the parents of a suffering child “don’t worry, we’ll do research. If your child’s mental health tanks, we’ll consider it with the rest of the data!”
Oval Office memo this morning: “Talk to corporate LIKE A BOSS“
Welp, America just attacked Syria, the first military action ordered by Biden during his presidency. Without congressional authorization. The reporting relays a claim that the targets of this strike were Iran-led militias.
As someone who was a preteen in America when 9/11 happened, this is depressing. This is even more depressing because it might not occupy the spotlight of the American media for very long, as it doesn’t have a conventionally salacious antecedent.
If you’re an American in your early thirties or older, you can probably remember the press dialectic during the years immediately after 9/11. The memory almost feels like a Lonely Island song that’s written around repetition, like Jizzed In My Pants or Like A Boss. Where the thing being repeated gets more and more unrelated to everything else and becomes comically random.
First it was all about Bin Laden and al Qaeda. Then there was a “preventative” reframing that was all about getting weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of heads of state who collaborate with terrorists. We then hyper-focus on Saddam Hussein and ignore the break in cause and effect. Because Dick Cheney is clearly a man of honor and wouldn’t even consider continuing the botched Iraq invasion from the days of George the Elder. I mean, why would you even go there, that’s ridiculous, right?
So at that point the dialectic shifts to the need for providing stability until a functional local government takes control. This was an effective way to quash debate since, in the absence of context, the moral stakes look confusing. If someone says “we never should have been there in the first place and there is no causal link between this and 9/11” the other side can reply with “what are we supposed to do, just leave them without any judicial system or constabulary?” An American could say that, regardless of what happened in the past or how we have a responsibility to vulnerable Iraqis right now. I grew up with people who joined the military and were deployed to Iraq at that time, when this was the prevailing point of view.
Actually…when I was a senior in high school, I had classmates who thought spreading “western democracy” would have been justification enough without the war on terror. I grew up in Nowhere, Alaska in a small, rural town with a distinctive cultural and ethnic history. Not every small town in America is comparable to the one I grew up in, but there are probably some similarities. It is conceivable that there were average Americans watching Fox News and CNN every night at that time who may have thought something like that in the back of their minds. There were probably more than just a few thinking that, really.
So between the lack of a clear either/or choice and the emotional temptation to think that your own nation should expand anyway, a lot of people checked out of the conversation. To this day, the popular wisdom among Americans is that we’re occupying the Middle East to provide stability until a local democracy develops. Obviously, the insistence on only relinquishing control to a democracy gives America the ability to set its own standard for withdrawing.
Nearly a week ago on MSNBC, Morning Joe discouraged the usage of terms like “perpetual war”, “forever war” and “occupation” to describe the American presence in the Midde East. He prefers the term “open-ended presence.” The apathy and confusion that followed the American assumption that we just gotta stay there forever has taken root. And those roots are so deep that a pundit on MSNBC can claim that perpetual war is both normal and desirable. I repeat- on MSNBC, which has a reputation for being a left-leaning news network. In 2001, openly justifying perpetual war would have been political suicide for anyone on the mainstream right. Back then, a conservative who didn’t want to get heckled out of the room would have to at least invoke the appearance of a definite end-point.
It is so tempting to think that the American mainstream has ceased to care about this loose thread. Many probably have. And there are many dimensions of culpability on both the left and the right. When Barack Obama was sworn in, he said he was not inclined to allow an investigation into the war crimes of George Junior. In keeping with his morally bold and assertive image, he said his would be an administration that looks forward, not backward.
Perfectly good sentiment on its face, if it didn’t continue the laundering of neverending American war. The dude went on to authorize Air Force and drone strikes on Middle Eastern civilians. In the case of the air strikes involving pilots, said pilots were directed to swing back and bomb the same location to make sure the emergency first responders were killed. This was referred to as a “double-tap”. I guess he was looking forward, just not the way we hoped.
Perpetual war, at that point, was so deeply entrenched in our sense of normalcy that the prosecution of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange barely got a rise out of anyone.
Many learned, then, that blowing a whistle on war crimes was no longer a moral slam dunk in America. People learn through example and Obama was a President with a dedicated, skin-deep liberal movement behind him. Do the math.
Then came Trump. If ever there was a convenient opportunity to make war crimes evil again, it would be with a President we all love to hate. The first time the dice were rolled on impeachment, the blue dogs decided to invoke the phone call about Hunter Biden. The second time, it was over the Capitol riot. Out of all the reasons to go after Trump, no one decided to make an impeachment movement about laundering money through his DC hotel chain. Through which payment was made to Trump by the Saudis, in exchange for American-made weapons. Late in 2018, spent shell casings that were manufactured in America were found in warzones where Saudi Arabia was participating in guerrilla warfare.
I mean, you’d think the assassination of General Soleimani a year ago might have been brought up. Emoluments, weapons-dealing with laundered money or assassinating an Iranian General at a peace conference in Iraq were not deemed worthy to base an impeachment case on. Trump even said, in an interview, that our military forces in Libya have seized their oil wells. He elaborated that he wasn’t inclined to take permanent possession of the wells- but he wasn’t ruling it out, either. Later on, Neera Tanden spit balls the notion of confiscating Libyan oil revenue for compensation for our military expenditures and gets picked by Biden for Budget Director.
This is a huge reason why the discourse around civility is so mind-numbing (even if I think a version of it is desirable- read my ‘Civility’ post if you care what I think about that). What most people mean by civility is decorum: if Tanden’s confirmation is nipped in the bud, it will be because Joe Manchin was upset by her mean Tweets. Being a catty troll on social media will stop you from holding office but openly fantasizing about colonial piracy will not.
If you live in America, ask yourself if this is really a nation you feel good about being a part of. We revile bad manners on Twitter more than war crimes. If that seems whiny/hyperbolic, then where does this lead eventually? Just a few decades ago wasn’t there a hugely popular counter-culture movement galvanized by moral outrage over our invasion of Vietnam in the sixties? Wow. Just wow. And to think, these days if you scream bloody murder over illegal, offesnive wars you’ll be lucky if getting told to shut the fuck up is all that happens to you. Ask Chelsea Manning about that one. If you do comissions for a high-profile news outlet like the Guardian, you might lose that comission if you criticize a fashionable, above-board arms deal. While the cash stimulus for COVID relief gets shaved down.
Oh and escalating death and disaster because of climate change? Remember back in 2018 when the WMO said we had about ten years to get that under control before we can’t? That was three years ago. Tick-tock, tick-tock. That pesky problem that gets laughed out of the room if anyone brings up anything decisive and effectual, like a Green New Deal? Does the military industrial complex get to go on spending billions every year while alternative energy is always slapped down by people asking how we’re gonna pay for it? The invisible elephant in the room loves money. This even carries over into deficit-hawkery. Whenever a 15 dollar minimum wage, green energy, police reform, universal basic income or Medicare for all gets brought up, conservatives and blue dogs love to invoke the deficit. It’s almost like there’s a huge, voracious, cancer-like growth that that keeps wasting billions of dollars. Every damn year. People insist on money for goods and services so maybe that could do the motivational heavy-lifting that regard for life and limb can no longer accomplish. If the depth of trauma we inflict across the globe doesn’t get under your skin then maybe somebody could think of the money. Maybe if we saved more of it we could do something about the looming floods, hurricanes and our non-functioning healthcare system. You know, bringing us full-circle back to the value of human life and limb.
During the final days of Trump’s lame duck period, Andrew Yang said that, if we prosecuted Trump for war crimes, we would risk keeping company with third-world dictatorships where heads roll between administrations. I’m just a catty troll on the internet but I think having Presidents who can commit war crimes with impugnity is a bigger problem.
AilixChaerea 