Self-examination

Sorry for the delay in posting. I went home to see Mama and Papa T for Thanksgiving, and then I took the GREs this weekend, which I totally recommend to anyone who thinks they might enjoy sitting in a white room for 4 hours while being surveyed by 8 cameras on the ceiling to make sure nobody smokes drugs or dreams about opening the unauthorized candy bar they somehow smuggled past the 5 layers of security outside. I'm SO glad I only spent $150 for the privilege.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about an article by John Bellamy Foster from the Monthly Review a friend passed along a few weeks ago, tracing the evolution of American foreign policy, alongside the explosive growth of the military-industrial complex since WWII. It's long, but worth reading in full, particularly for the contrast it paints with the political debates I've been highlighting here.

In it, he says:

The immediate response of the Bush administration to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was to declare a universal and protracted global war on terrorism that was to double as a justification for the expansion of U.S. imperial power.

[..]

The unpopularity of geopolitical analysis after 1943 is usually attributed to its association with the Nazi strategy of world conquest. Yet the popular rejection of geopolitics in that period may have also arisen from the deeper recognition that classical geopolitics in all of its forms was an inherently imperialist and war-related doctrine. As the critical geopolitical analyst Robert Strausz-Hupé argued in 1942, “In Geopolitik there is no distinction between war and peace. All states have the urge to expand, and the process of expansion is viewed as a perpetual warfare—no matter whether military power is actually applied or is used to implement ‘peaceful’ diplomacy as a suspended threat.”

U.S. imperial geopolitics is ultimately aimed at creating a global space for capitalist development. It is about forming a world dedicated to capital accumulation on behalf of the U.S. ruling class—and to a lesser extent the interlinked ruling classes of the triad powers as a whole (North America, Europe, and Japan). Despite “the end of colonialism” and the rise of “anti-capitalist new countries,” Business Week pronounced in April 1975, there has always been “the umbrella of American power to contain it....[T]he U.S. was able to fashion increasing prosperity among Western countries, using the tools of more liberal trade, investment, and political power. The rise of the multinational corporation was the economic expression of this political framework.”

People who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 typically did so because they believed that there was no substantive difference between the major parties. When Bush subsequently stole the election and wrecked the country, many Democrats reserved a particular animus for Nader voters, shrieking that they and their foolish "idealism" were at least somewhat responsible for what happened. Al Gore wouldn't have launched an unprovoked war based on lies, they said; Al Gore wouldn't have built legal black holes and tortured prisoners and all the rest.

But as Foster's article indicates, the most egregious crimes of the Bush Administration should be seen not as aberrations but instead as the entirely natural outgrowths of our foreign policy consensus.

Sure, there are Democrats in Congress who challenge some of these basic geopolitical assumptions. But they don't hold any power. The purse strings are always given to the right people, and those are the people, Democrat or Republican, who never question the central tenets of our foreign policy.

***

I live in DC, and I have a few friends who work on the Hill--most as Democratic Congressional or Senatorial aides of some sort. Whenever we get together and talk politics, it quickly becomes clear that, while we generally agree on domestic policy issues, we might as well be from different planets when it comes to foreign policy. To put it plainly, they think my understanding of the issues is shallow and naive. The conversation usually hinges on the various options available to the president regarding troops in Afghanistan. My friends talk about the political infighting, the difficulty of getting the Karzai government to stop being corrupt, the various carrots and sticks available (always vague, nobody knows any hard data; nobody says anything not already in the public record, of course). I nod, and say, "yeah, but what the fuck are we doing there in the first place?"

At that point, my friends smile and make a quick calculation. Am I serious? There's a lot of mind games going on on the Hill; access and information are key, and so being able to joke and take a joke is of vital importance. But it's also vitally important to look down upon those views that are not part of the debate. Once my friend realizes that I'm serious, his smile gets bigger. "Well, sure," he says, his voice patting me on the head, "but we're there now." And if I want to learn what the options are, if I want to hear about the politics that surround the most horrible and weighted decisions a country can make, I need to forget about asking those irrelevant questions. Those kinds of questions, to the Hill people, are quite literally of zero importance. We're there now. What are we going to do about it? We can't leave. We have a commitment (in money and bases and outsourced warmaking et al). I can either man up and play the geopolitical game--literally the only game in this town--or I can sit here in my fantasy world and imagine how I'd like the world to be. Everyone gets another round, and the conversation moves on.

***

Here's the thing, though: the Monthly Review is a socialist journal. Its first published article, called "Why Socialism?" was written by Albert Einstein in 1949. Its critique of American empire comes from the same place as the question I asked my friends: a fundamental reevaluation of basic tenets underlying our foreign policy. So does this mean that the very act of examining those fundamental assumptions is a socialist act? Was my question a socialist question? Is what I do in this blog an act of socialist media criticism? And if so, does that mean that I'm not a liberal? And does that mean that there is no hope for the Democratic party? That I should peddle my story to somebody who cares? That the Democrats are just the benign face of American imperialism, the "mommy imperialist" to contrast with the dumb, angry, alcoholic, wife-and-child-abusing Republican daddy imperialist?

Well yeah, maybe. But whatever my personal political beliefs, I seem to always vote Democratic when the time comes. Of course, given the choice, I'd prefer a Democrat who understands and fears the way American imperialism works. (This was part of Obama's allure--he seemed like a politician who might actually read things like the Monthly Review.) But just because the party leaders are eager beneficiaries of the geopolitical outlook, that doesn't mean they'll always be in charge. Sure, that sounds a little crazy. But imagine if we had more people like Grayson or Bernie Sanders in office and taking on leadership roles? It's a long road, but changing the rhetoric has to be the start.

Am I living in a fantasy world? Maybe. But if so, it's a lot more hopeful than the world in which liberals sit around, drink beer and argue whether 30,000 or 50,000 is the number of troops necessary to kill all the terrorists. Those people aren't liberals. It can't hurt to try and reclaim the term for people who are.

And if that means we need to learn a thing or two from a Socialist magazine, well, who cares? The crazies think anyone to the left of Sarah Palin is a socialist anyway. They won't know the real thing from a smack in the face.