The South Has Risen Again!

Jamelle Bouie posted a video about Marco Rubio's recent performance in Athens, which was another example of Jake Bacharach's dictum about the defenders of Western civilization. Other commentators have detailed Rubio's many historical inaccuracies, but Bouie latched onto this bit:

And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history. 

The monuments that were torn down weren't "ours," unless you identify with the Confederacy.  Maybe Rubio does; many Americans do, as shown by the popularity of the Stars and Bars even in formerly Union states today.  Rubio's complaint reminded me of what someone posted on Facebook when Confederate monuments were being removed during Trump's first term:

Yes American should remember the history off our great nation when people fought to make are country a better place to live for all of are people do think people of our older generations would put up with the bullshit that's going on in our country?? I think not!!

As with Rubio, I wish I could believe that this person didn't confuse the Confederate rebels who tried to make slavery the law of the land with those who really did fight "to make are [sic] country a better place to live for all of are [sic] people", but I know better.  Rubio went on, by the way: "And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit."  "Countries" might be a typo - after all, that's how it appears in the official State Department transcript - but it's all too plausible to me that he meant the countries, plural, that our oligarchs and their children will inherit to their enrichment: Venezuela and other Latin American countries, Gaza, Greenland, etc.

This is an unwelcome reminder of how many people saw, and still remember, the demolition or removal of monuments to Confederate criminals.  It was an attack on their America. They are vaguely aware that the Civil War happened, but only vaguely.  I suspect that doublethink, the maintaining of two opposed ideas at the same time, is involved.  Maybe they think that any statue of a guy in uniform on a horse must represent a good guy who fought for "are country," regardless of which side he fought on.

Besides, it's so hard to tell which team somebody is playing for.  For example, 

in the 1990s historian H. Bruce Franklin found that most college students recognized the famous image of a prisoner being executed by a man firing a pistol inches away from the victim’s temple. But most of the students believed the shooter was a communist officer, rather than General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the South Vietnamese national police, an American ally.

The historian Sam Wineburg showed people a 1970 news photo of US "hardhats" (construction workers) rallying in support of President Nixon and the US war against Vietnam. 

Sixty percent of students turned the picture of flag-waving hardhats into a protest against the war.*

As Wineburg commented, "Vietnam, as remembered by these youths, was a war waged without supporters."  But that may not be fair.  These youths didn't live through that period, they lived a generation later, and as Wineburg found, many Americans learned what they knew about the Sixties by watching the movie Forrest Gump.  When Ken Burns' TV series on Vietnam aired a couple of years ago, even people my own age, who were old enough to remember the war, found how little they knew about it.

Most people don't think historically, they think mythically, and "myth" doesn't necessarily mean stories with supernatural or magical content: it means stories which are structured to give meaning to the world we live in, to teach simple lessons about right and wrong.  Even when a story is more complex than that, people tend to boil it down to good guys vs. bad guys, as I realized when I read Homer's Iliad last winter  It's much more ambivalent than I thought it would be.  Before I read it, I saw some online arguments about whether it's pro-war or anti-war, with people arguing passionately on both sides of the question. I suppose both sides were partially, arguably right.

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Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, Temple University Press, 2001.

 

Bringing Cuba Under Our Wings

Daniel Larison has written several good posts on President Obama's move to resume diplomatic relations with Cuba.  Today he took Marco Rubio to task for saying the predictable stupid hawkish things about it:

There is no good reason for the U.S. and Cuba not to have normal relations today, and so we should have them. If the U.S. refused to have normal relations with every state because of its authoritarian character or the abuses it has committed, as Rubio claims to want, it would have to shut down its embassies in half the countries around the world.

But then he wrote something just about as absurd as anything Rubio had said:

That is especially true in those states that mistreat their people and govern in an authoritarian and abusive fashion. These are the states that most need to be opened to outside influences, and they are the states that are often the most opposed to the U.S. Having diplomatic representation in these countries not only helps to secure U.S. interests there, but it also provides an opening for communication with the people of that country.

I know Larison knows better than this, because he wrote in this very piece that "The U.S. maintains normal relations with all kinds of governments, including some of the very worst in the world."  I go further than that, and want to stress that the US has excellent relations with numerous very repressive governments, indeed with "those states that mistreat their people and govern in an authoritarian and abusive fashion." Far from viewing this state of affairs as a distasteful Realpolitik necessity, our rulers are quite enthusiastic about right-wing dictators.  I doubt Rubio is an exception to this rule.  It's simply false that such states "are often the most opposed to the U.S."  Sometimes, yes, they are; but often they are quite friendly with us.

Once we've removed a turbulent, excessively democratic government, we train the new regime’s police in techniques of torture. I don’t know if it’s still true that there’s a positive correlation between a state’s human rights abuses, positive investment climate, and the amount of US aid it receives, but it was true until the 1980s at least. Far from opening such countries to outside (presumably ameliorating) influences, having good relations with the US protects them from such influences. Apologists for this tendency, who are of both parties, tend to adopt an extreme cultural-relativist position: Oh, Those People don’t feel pain the way we do, life is cheap there, they don’t understand Democracy, and besides, we can’t play cops to the whole world.  Openness to outside influences goes both ways, too: the US generally manages to resist such influences that would curb our abuses.

Anti Maim

There's nothing wrong with Rubio's boilerplate anti-Obama positioning, but there's nothing especially unique about it, either.

Thus spake (or rather wrote) David Harsanyi for Reason magazine the other day, explaining why he thought Marco Rubio is overrated as a Republican presidential contender.  I'm not a regular reader of Reason, by the way: I came to the post via one by Daniel Larison, in which he also gave Rubio a drubbing.  (Also today from Larison: Chris Christie's recent ridiculous foreign-policy speech, and why so few people take Rick Santorum seriously as a presidential candidate.  Belaboring the obvious, you see.)

Unlike many of the Democrats I know, I'm not rooting for the Republicans to come up with an effective candidate for 2016.  At least, that's how it sounds when they concern-troll over the poor quality of today's Republican presidential hopefuls, in the nearly universal treatment of politics and elections as a horse race, or a WWF match.  An "effective" candidate really means someone who can seduce the corporate media and play them all the way to the end, not someone who thinks about issues and policy.  But then, who cares about issues and policy?  The general belief among political elites and those who work for them is that the voters are stupid, only interested in personalities, and must be fooled into voting for your candidate.  Only the true Gnostics see past the shadows on the cave walls to perceive the Ideal Forms.  And who knows?  That might even be true.  I certainly don't mean to overestimate the sagacity of most voters, but then I don't think much of the elites either, who are nowhere near as smart as they like to think, especially when it comes to personality cults.

The trouble with the Republican candidates, it seems to me (and to other, more knowledgeable observers) is that they appeal only to a very restricted sector of voters, mostly older, white, highly religious, racist, and bellicose.  They can certainly generate excitement among such people, who seem to have the free time to pack the rallies and debate halls on weekdays, and also vote.  But there aren't enough of them to win presidential elections, and without gerrymandering and voter suppression there aren't enough to win elections at other levels.  Hence the GOP's reliance on gerrymandering and voter suppression.  And as candidates that appeal to this demographic start trying to appeal to those outside it, as they must do to win the election, they either make fools of themselves before the outsiders by sounding too wingnut, or disappoint the Republican core (as opposed to base) by sounding too moderate.  That seems to be a large part of what has happened to Rubio, as to his predecessors.

The thing that got me about Harsanyi's comment, quoted at the top of this post, is his claim that there's nothing wrong with reflexive "anti-Obama boilerplate."  Maybe there's nothing wrong with it in campaign speeches, but on the job, in Congress, that mindset brought us, among other wonders, dozens of futile attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, demands for more wars, and two debt-ceiling squabbles, one of which shut down the federal government, with all the bad effects attendant on that adventure.  All of these might have been defensible if they'd really spoken for the majority of citizens, but they didn't.  (One of the signs of the Right's detachment from reality is its fondness for organizing events with ludicrously inflated numbers -- the Million Moms Campaign, Thirty Million Patriots, and the like -- which draw only a few stragglers.)  The reflexive anti-Obama mindset of the Republican party has not just been self-defeating for them (can you see my tears of sympathy?), but very harmful for most of America and much of the rest of the world.

I'm all in favor of harsh criticism of bad policy and bad action.  I have no interest in moderation for its own sake in either tone or content.  But reflexive anti-anything or -anybody boilerplate isn't real extremism; it's just reflex.  A two-year-old yelling "No!" does it as well.  And it's not limited to Republicans: remember the popular line among certain Democrats in 2008, "I'll vote for anybody who's Not Bush" -- even though Bush wasn't running?  A related trope was their fear of a Third Bush Term; alas, that was pretty much what we got.

For all that, I don't want to overstress the anti-Obama thing.  My ambivalent pro-Obama friend posted a meme the other day that began: "When one party can hate one president so much that they're willing to destroy the country, something is very, very wrong."  I'm not trying to minimize the Obama-hatred, but as I commented, the Right wants to destroy the country just for the sake of doing it; look at the agenda of Goldwater and Reagan, and you'll see that it long predates Obama.  Their aim is to strangle the federal government in any area where it might actually promote the general welfare, so that most Americans can be made miserably subservient to ruling elites.  Hating Obama is just an added bonus.

If the Republicans did field a sane, competent presidential candidate, she might get my vote.  But such a person would never get past the primaries, or even to them.  And the Democrats, though their candidates will probably contain their insanity somewhat better, are not going to give us anyone who's any good either.

Keeping Up With the Chinese

Garance Franke-Ruta provided an entertaining account of Marco Rubio's speech at CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference).  I noticed something different than she did, though.  She was interested in Rubio and Rand Paul pandering to their right-wing audience, I was interested in something else.  The relevant passage:

"The Chinese government provides their people no access to the Internet. The Chinese government will hold citizens prisoner without any right to recourse. The Chinese government coerces and tortures people until they get confessions. The Chinese government restricts the ability of people to assemble. If you escape China, they actually put pressure on governments to forcibly return you. The Chinese government has coercive birth limitation policies, which means that in some cases they are forcing abortions and sterilizations. The Chinese government uses forced labor. And this is what they do to their own people.

"We want that to be the leading country in the world?"

"No!" replied the audience.

"We want that to be the leading voice on this planet?" Rubio continued.

"No!" came the cry.

Oh, my goodness!  Almost all the crimes Rubio lay at the feet of China are, in fact, part of the great phenomenon he calls America.  The US was built with forced labor, which has made a comeback in the prison-industrial complex.  Torture, forced confessions, the abolition of habeas corpus, extradition of political dissidents (or nowadays, simply killing them with drones), restriction of the freedom of assembly, even forced sterilization -- all are American traditions, and they're happening now.  As for restricting people's access to the Internet, that's been tried too.  All of these have been acceptable to conservatives of Rubio's stripe.  Do we want that to be the leading country in the world?  Do we want that to be the leading voice on the planet?