"The Triumph of the West"

The most recent Krauthammer piece, titled "After a Mere 25 Years, the Triumph of the West is Over," appeared in todays Post.  Part of me wants to say, thank goodness, because another way of writing the same headline might be "after a mere 25 years, American imperialism is over."  I started a post yesterday, suggesting that I needed to resign myself to living in a facist country, but then deleted it, partly because I don't want to believe we ARE a fascist country, partly because I'm not sure I can muster the proper resignation to the new regime where our facism is on proud display.  I mention this only because I believe Krauthammer might be right in eulogizing the short lived triumph of the west, though not for the reasons he might think.  We are in decline because, like many advanced western democracies, our civilization is beginning to feel its discontents, our superpower superego is finding it more and more difficult to repress our facist id.  Pardon the Freudian metaphor, but it seems to fit.  The manifest discontent arises from "the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual," and "the primary friction, he asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctive freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and repression of instincts."  

At any rate, back to Krauthammer's argument.  He writes, "Twenty-five years ago — December 1991 — communism died, the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union disappeared.  It was the largest breakup of an empire in modern history and not a shot was fired. It was an event of biblical proportions that my generation thought it would never live to see."  I can't help but agree.  I was still in the AF at the time, still embued with cold war rhetoric of the sort that led my wing king to hang a poster reading "kill a commie for mommie" in the command post, and the very idea that we had triumphed, that marxist-lenninism as an effective ideology was effectively dead, did mark a significant historical turning point.  Whether it was of biblical proportions, one could argue, but I wanted to believe, along with Francis Fukuyama, and apparently Krauthammer, that we had reached the end of history, and that the fall of the soviet empire "marked the ultimate triumph of the liberal democratic idea" and "promised an era of Western dominance led by a preeminent America, the world’s last remaining superpower."

Although for almost a decade the argument seemed to hold and  "the community of democracies expanded, first into Eastern Europe and former Soviet Empire," but as Krauthammer suggests "that era is over," and despite some modest advances toward the liberal democratic idea, "the autocracies are back and rising" and "democracy is on the defensive." Worst of all, the US, as the beacon light on the hill for the liberal democratic idea, "is in retreat."  Although I would quibble, it is an important quibble.   Setting aside the putative power struggles in the developing world, it is not so much autocracies that are back and rising, but oligarchy.  One might argue that an oligarchy can exist with an autocrat at its helm, so long as the autocrat serves the common interests of the oligarchs and is adept at resolving their competing interests.  One might argue too that oligarchy can exist with democratically elected officials, again so long as the elected officials represent the common interests of the oligarchs and are adept at resolving their competing interests.  Although the signals from the Trump camp are still too mixed to read -- aside from his continuing admiration for himself as a proto-fascist autocrat in the making -- there are few signals that his populist agenda will in any significant way trump the interests of the oligarchs.  The so-called "Carrier deal" being a case in point.  As Bernie Sandars has editorialized, "Carrier just showed corporations how to beat Donald Trump," though I suspect there was little competition involved.  It was, in business parlance,  a "win-win" deal.  Trump got his PR coup.  They got their tax concessions and  without doubt the parent company, United Technologies, will benefit hugely from the military expansions promised by candidate Trump.  

There is, and always has been, a difference between "running for office" and "governing in office," and now that Trump is faced with the horrifying prospect of actually governing, his cabinet is filling, as one NY Times headline put it, with "the guys from government Sachs," not unlike a long line of duly elected officials before him, I see little reason to believe he will "drain the swamp."  I see plenty of reason to believe that he will serve the common interests of the oligarchs.  How adept he is at resolving their competing interests, however, only time will tell, but then again, who am I kidding.  His actions throughout the campaign don't portend much hope, and his actions as president elect don't either.  On the one hand, we have headlines like, "Silicon Valley Chiefs Notably Absent From Trump’s Cabinet of Business Advisers," which suggests that Trump, despite his many tweets, may be stuck in a 1940s, or charitably, a 1950s version of the economy.  On the other hand, we have headlines like,  "In Affront to China, Trump Speaks With Taiwan Leader," which suggests that Trump may be too enthralled with the Russian oligarchs, and the Russian autocrat, to see our economic interests in the "greater" China. 

Krauthammer, however, seems to see American greatness in the lapse of western ambitions -- or perhaps more precisely, our failure as the leader of a free world with our own  manifest destiny to spread "liberal democratic ideas" throughout the globe.   " The West," he writes, "is turning inward and going home, leaving the field to the rising authoritarians — Russia, China and Iran."  Indeed.  Setting aside an Iranian ascendency in the middle east, as I implied above, twenty-five years later, the West seems to feel that our victory was pyrrhic, that we have exhausted ourselves, and that the real "winners" were those nations that emerged from the communist debacle with "strong," ambitious, and above all else autocratic, leadership.  Trump's odd deference to the "leadership" of Putin is just one case in point.  "In France," as Krauthammer notes, "the conservative party’s newly nominated presidential contender is fashionably conservative and populist and soft on Vladimir Putin" and it might just be the peculiarity of France were not Italy too getting in on the putsch.  The Times headlines, "with populist anger rising, italy may be the next domino to fall,"  and, as Krauthammer notes,  "several of the newer Eastern Europe democracies — Hungary, Bulgaria, even Poland — themselves showing authoritarian tendencies."   Instead, we have exhausted ourselves, and  Jeane Kirkpatrick, the quintessential neoconservative, seems to have been prescient.  As the Cold War was ending in 1990, she "argued that we should now become 'a normal country in a normal time.'  It was time to give up the 20th-century burden of maintaining world order and of making superhuman exertions on behalf of universal values.  Two generations of fighting fascism and communism were quite enough. Had we not earned a restful retirement?"

The answer would have been yes, perhaps, if we had really been true believers in our own manifest destiny, if we had fully embraced and internalized the moral imperative to spread "liberal democratic ideas" and make "superhuman exertions on behalf of universal values" -- if in fact we had taken up "the 20th century burden of maintaining world order."   Had that been the case, we could well have "declared victory" and begun the demobilization of the "military industrial complex" in order to attend to our own manifest problems here at home.  Krauthammer seem to suggest that "the West’s retreat began with Obama, who reacted to (perceived) post-9/11 overreach by abandoning Iraq, offering appeasement (“reset”) to Russia and accommodating Iran."  Moreover, he retreated because "he’s always felt the U.S. was not good enough for the world, too flawed to have earned the moral right to be the world hegemony."  Although this just echoes the ad nauseam conservative complaint against Obama "apologies" for America, there is a significant enough grain of truth to the complaint to make it resonate, and Trump's ascendency has made our flaws altogether too visible.  We are not a country committed to "liberal democratic ideas" -- or perhaps more precisely, a sizable minority within this country are committed with passionate intensity to overtly fascist ideologies that Trump tolerated (even courted?) during his campaign, and still seems to court with the appointment of Bannon to his advisory staff.  Still a minority, one might say, but a wide swath of America seems more than willing to ignore the connections, to "see no evil" and "hear no evil."  So, no, we have not "earned the moral right" to be the world's spokesperson for "human  rights."  We have our own issues right here at home, and if anyone should know how far we need yet to go in order to actually earn the "moral right," it would be Obama.

Then too, there is that pesky problem of "maintaining world order."  One might ask, legitimately so, what exactly is the idea of order that we are so burdened to maintain?   God bless Eisenhower (what's not to like in Ike?) but he saw it perhaps more clearly than Truman, that the "real" solution to the great depression was not Roosevelt's nibbling at the edge of the cookie with the WPA and the CCC and the other transfusions of cash into the American economy, but the spreading debacle across Europe, which created, in abundance, the gold standard of economic recovery -- demand.  Although the standard and retrospective version of American history would have us entering the war to fight the good fight, the moral fight, against the tyranny of fascism, at the outset, it wasn't entirely clear that we gave a great hoody-doo to whether or not the great empires of Europe succumbed to fascism, particularly when fascist Germany and their war machine provided such a lucrative market.  One does not need to be a devotee of conspiracy theories, or even Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States, to suspect that initial conservative opposition to entering the war wasn't just a desire to stay out of Europe's troubled business, but to actually continue doing business with what appeared to be an inevitably fascist dominated Europe.  All was good until war itself forced the choices, and then war itself, however, created, in abundance, that gold standard of economic growth -- more demand -- and it was demand in service to the moral good of stopping tyranny.  In the immediate aftermath of the war, the world's recovery from the devastation created, in abundance, the gold standard of economic growth -- even more demand -- and lo! it too was demand in service to the moral good of rebuilding the devastation.   

War, as it turned out, was good for capitalism, and so what do when the war and its recovery are over?   The cold war fueled by outsized nuclear fears, would seem to suffice, and so it did, though it never quite lived up to expectations.  It never quite recreated the prosperity that America enjoyed in the 50s, those halcyon years following the good war, but even so, what to do when even the cold war is over?  The answer seems, well duh! a new war, one handed over to us as "radical islamic terror," and we entered into it with gusto -- well, not exactly.  First Korea, then especially Vietnam, had exhausted any pretense we might have had about fighting the good fight, the moral fight.  It was a new war, for a new generation, but after the initial patriotic urge following 9/11 had seemed to be diverted away from the wholly understandable need for revenge and misdirected toward the old cold war bogey man of WMDs.  Our middle east adventures seemed, almost from the outset, a proxy war, a war fought on behalf of "others," though it was never quite clear who the "others" were.  Nor was it ever quite clear who exactly the "enemy" was.  At least during the Cold War, we had sovereign states as enemies -- Russia and China -- but we didn't bomb the Saudi capital of Riyadh, even though most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudi, we bombed Baghdad instead.  Why exactly again?  WMDs?  Terrorists?  Obama's subsequent "failure" to name the enemy, call out the "radical islamic terrorists," may have been in deference to the millions of muslims who were neither radical nor terrorists, but in the end the idea that "radical islamic terrorists" were a threat on the order of communist Russia or communist China was just too ludicrous for the urbane Obama to countenance.  Sharia law in America?  It was a new war, for a new generation, but there was no "draft" to engage that generation either in the fight or the fight against the fight.  In the end, our middle east wars were being fought not by "Americans," except in the putative sense that the largely mercenary forces actually fighting the war were comprised of Americans, the technicians (often, quite literally, the technicians) of state sponsored violence.  Really, let's face it, unless one reverts to the crusades of the middle ages, and believes (really believes?) that spreading christianity justifies the use of state sponsored violence against muslims, then its difficult to find a moral purpose in our middle east wars.  Stopping genocide and repression?  Perhaps, but doesn't it seem the worst sort of hypocrisy, then, that we didn't intervene in, say, Rawanda?  

I don't quite accept the "apologist for America" narrative leveled at Obama,  nor do I fully accept its close cousin the "blame America" narrative advanced by the likes of Noam Chomsky or Anonymous.  If our behavior is blameworthy, and some is, it is no more, no less blameworthy than any other sovereign nation, though perhaps what makes us exceptional in this regard is the sheer hypocrisy of it all -- the very idea that we are NOT merely one among many self-interested forces in the world, but rather THE moral force advancing "liberal democratic ideas" and "world order" -- the very idea that we are NOT merely "a normal country living in normal times," but rather THE country forever engaged in an existential struggle against the forces of evil within a world that rarely acknowledges, much less appreciates, our sacrifice for them in tax dollars, in flag draped coffins, in the constant reminder of maimed and damaged veterans.  Consequently, one hears the sort of sentiment that Trump has expressed, that we should "continue the pullback, though for entirely different reasons."   It is the altogether human reaction to an unappreciated sacrifice.  We can take our toys -- our over-whelming military technologies -- and go home, "disdaining allies and avoiding conflict, because the world is not good enough for us."  It is "undeserving, ungrateful, parasitic foreigners living safely under our protection and off our sacrifices" and now is the "time to look after our own American interests."   Although this sentiment plays well in the heartland, it may be too soon to assume that Trump will indeed "continue the pull-back."  He has he given consideration to a number "generals" for cabinet posts, "who reflect the President-elect's predilection for leaders with a 'tough guy' profile, but they also mark a 180-degree turn from some of the insults he leveled at military figures during the campaign."  There is nothing unusual in this, and most had distinguished careers, like Petraeus, until he didn't.  Moreover, as revealed in the discussion surrounding his potential conflicts of interest, as the oligarch in chief, he himself has any number of "assets" abroad that might need "protecting." So I strongly suspect that Trump may well turn out to be the difference that makes no difference so far as our use of military force abroad, and I am sure the heartland will again suck it up lest their patriotism, their support for the troops, be questioned.  We are, after all, the good guys, and it is our duty, no matter how little appreciated, to advance democracy and maintain world order.  

At any rate, as the recent election has revealed, we really don't have the "human rights" standing at home, and the exceptional hypocrisy of our imperialist (or just self-interested) ambitions abroad, have undercut our standing as "the world's hegemon."  We may have won the cold war, and stood briefly as the world's sole superpower, but it was a slow, excruciating, exhausting war of attrition, and the war on terror is a poor substitute, though no less a slow, excruciating, exhausting war of attrition, all of which may well leave us utterly bankrupt both morally and fiscally.  War may no longer be as good for capitalism as it was in the past.  Its demands no longer seem to create the gold standard of economic boon that it created in the last century.  We have become so technically proficient that its demand no long create much demand -- no large scale redistribution of capital into the paychecks of a mobilized population -- at least not enough redistribution to sustain a thriving economy, and it has come to resemble, metaphorically speaking, a credit card debt that has grown beyond our ability to pay the interest, much less the principle.  We had a balanced budget with Clinton, more or less, but the subsequent Bush investment in the war on terror threw us into debt and near depression, and Obama gave us something of a reprieve, but he has not done (was not allowed to do) nearly enough to really reverse course.  Will Trump reverse course?   Will he continue the pullback.  One might actually hope so, but there is little indication that he will do so.   What seems clear enough, however, is that a sufficient number of republican voters have decided to cede the republic to the oligarchs.  The irony is not lost on me.  One hesitated to vote for Clinton, in part because she was too enthralled with the oligarchs, and perhaps a bit too bellicose.  Whether Trump, the very incarnation of our messianic fascist id, will cross the Rubicon, and put an end to the constitutional republic once and for all, seems unlikely, but then too so did his election.  What will stop him?  The moral rectitude of Paul Ryan?  of Mitt Romney?  The idea that a republican house and a republican senate will restrain a putatively republican president is almost too ludicrous for this commentator to countenance.