Retired General Andrew Bacevich is one of the living generals I most admire. Bacevich understood, from his military perch, that the War Against Vietnam was unnecessary, and was cruel to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Thais, and even to US soldiers. He is best known among political junkies as a commentator for what has been the best self-styled conservative magazine in our nation for at least the last decade, The American Conservative (which transcended much, though not all, of the magazine's founding members' racism). Bacevich has long understood the rot inside our nation from an economic, political, and cultural perspective, and from a perspective that remembers the root word of "conservative" is "conserve." Too often, as Corey Robin ably showed us in The Reactionary Mind, conservatives and reactionaries primarily are interested in conserving privilege, whether wealth privilege, male privilege, or white privilege. It is a conceit of conservatives rarely uttered in American corporate media because it would give away the game of most of our disputes, and illuminate the triviality in much of our discourse--where corporate cable news has conditioned us to merely and largely wait for, and argue about, the "outrage of the day." Trump's tweets are a particularly odious manifestation of our trivial discourse, but Trump merely seized a new platform for use in a system corporate media "news" structures helped create.
Anyway, Bacevich has written a short, sharp, and insightful piece for another conservative journal, The Spectator US, which journal is a more strident and polemical conservative journal than The American Conservative. The essay speaks to Bacevich's integrity, as he did not change his overall style for the Spectator. The two key paragraphs in the essay are near the end, where Bacevich answers two major questions he poses for the reader:
...(F)or too long, ruling elites allowed the purported obligations of global leadership to take precedence over tending to the collective wellbeing of the American people. This was a conscious choice made by leaders of both political parties. We are now living with the consequences of that choice, with the persistence of racism offering just one example of what neglect has produced. Yet it deserves to be emphasized: the neglect was not Trump’s doing; he was merely its ironic beneficiary. We are its victims.
A preliminary answer to the second question must begin with this admission: the era of US dominion has now passed. So Americans can no longer afford to indulge in the fiction of their indispensability, cherished in elite circles. In fact, the sun has set on the American empire. Subordinating the wellbeing of the American people to ostensible imperatives of global leadership — thereby allowing racism, inequality, and other problems to fester at home — has become intolerable.
My critique of Bacevich's essay is in the second of the two paragraphs quoted above, which is about the end of American leadership around the globe. Bacevich says the time for America's leadership in the world has passed, and that it was a long time coming. I would say he is correct as far as what he says, but not so for what he does not say. I would say, had we ever elected a Robert Kennedy or Bernie Sanders-type as president, the nation would have become a leader again with respect to climate change, and the push for renewable energy and mass transit, which would also entail, because of RFK's and Sanders' recognition of the interconnectivity between energy, diplomacy, and economics, a change in priorities regarding economic growth. It may be a stretch to give RFK credit for things before his time, but his GNP speech tells us he understood things beyond his moment. The US would have become a leader in diplomacy, starting in various hot spots, though, in the Middle East, it would have been a carrot-stick approach with Israelis, and, to a much lesser extent, Palestinians (the latter are victims, and their acting out is a response to oppression, so less sticks and more carrots are necessary for Palestinians). The US would have become a leader in promoting labor rights and unions, pulling up wages, and in the process, experimenting with Universal Basic Income, transferring wealth in various nations, and, very importantly, improving women's autonomy over their own bodies.
Yes, I know this is a very sentimental what-if, but we could have done a lot more good than we have done for the globe, and a lot more good for each other, even if we still fell short. Also, let us keep in mind how the Chinese government is already going around the world, building influence through building hospitals, and roads, and providing doctors. We could have done something similar to create, instead of an arms race, a "race" to help the people and creatures in our planet.
We have long had the potential to be a nice nation. It is too bad, and a tragedy, how rarely we showed our nice side to the world, and to the Native Americans we genocidally displaced. The one exception is perhaps the Marshall Plan for Europe, but, even then, there was some deep political corruption involved.
At this particular point in our nation's history, only movement politics, led more by our disaffected, indebted youth, and younger people up to ages 38-40, is capable of saving our nation from ourselves. However, movement politics' most insidious enemy remains corporate network television and radio. I am working on a theory, which will now have to be put aside for personal reasons of securing my first job as a high school teacher, that future historians--if there are any, besides the equivalent of monks squirreled away from cataclysms and dystopian environments--will see broadcast network news as a technological "advance," which had the ironic effect of leading the "masses" to become addled, passive, confused, misled, and polarized--in short, blaming each other instead of the overlords who own the nation. The late Neil Postman saw this, as did Jerry Mander. Bacevich may not know about Postman, Mander, or anything relating to corporate media criticism of the past 100 years.
Bacevich knows the true overlords in the military-industrial-financial-entertainment-and-prison complexes within our society, and rightly blames them in his essay, and in many of his other essays over the past decade or more. I sometimes wish Bacevich had run for president, as he had instant credibility for the mass of our nation from his status as a respected general. However, Bacevich's level of cultural conservatism reveals something missing with respect to his ability to understand the dynamics which exists in any modern culture. Bacevich's inability to understand modern culture would have been a flaw greater than Bernie Sanders' inability or refusal to stick a rhetorical knife into his opponents, the way most political leaders do as they rise to the top.
Bacevich knows the true overlords in the military-industrial-financial-entertainment-and-prison complexes within our society, and rightly blames them in his essay, and in many of his other essays over the past decade or more. I sometimes wish Bacevich had run for president, as he had instant credibility for the mass of our nation from his status as a respected general. However, Bacevich's level of cultural conservatism reveals something missing with respect to his ability to understand the dynamics which exists in any modern culture. Bacevich's inability to understand modern culture would have been a flaw greater than Bernie Sanders' inability or refusal to stick a rhetorical knife into his opponents, the way most political leaders do as they rise to the top.
What I continue to say is Boomerang is coming, while climate chaos is already here. Addled Joe Biden won't save what remains of the Republic, but voting out Trump probably will forestall the collapse. Hence, my back and forth about, on the one hand, #NeverBiden, and third party politics development, and, on the other hand, my recognition that Trump represents destruction in so many ways. This indecision leads me back to my belief that what has the best chance of saving the nation--and getting around corporate broadcast television and radio cable news--is movement politics. We older people continue to remain an enemy to all that is good in our nation--not all of us old people, of course, but certainly the majority of older white people, and a less higher percentage of older minorities who somehow think they can just go along, get along, and wait things out. We older people really have been bad parents and grandparents in our voting habits and how we evaluate what is happening in our world.
But, Hey, Baby, It's the Fourth of July. Strike up the bar-b-que, open a beer, and sing that "tribute" to ignorance and hateful nationalism, Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA. Meanwhile, for those other people who watch MSNBC, and think of themselves as "liberal," and supposedly enlightened, can download Disney Plus, and watch Hamilton. We all have our sentimental myths, and sentimental hopes. I admit mine is, every few weeks, re-reading parts of, and arguing with, Claude Bowers' Jefferson and Hamilton (1925), a book most famously in history reviewed by then-future president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. To each our own, I suppose. But, we better learn to own up, and stop punching downward and sideways.
