One of the most disappointing things in American politics in the last ten to fifteen years has been watching the left abandon their antiwar fervor.
The Vietnam War began under one Democrat, escalated and spread beyond Vietnam under his Democratic successor, and then under a Republican. It was ended by another Republican.
The Persian Gulf War was entirely a Republican affair.
The Bosnian war and the bombing of Serbia were overseen by a Democrat.
The "war on terror" was started by a Republican who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and continued for nearly 8 more years under a Democrat.
democrats are centrist relative to the left.
Even really smart and educated people I know are surprised to discover most voters in the US do not have a party affiliation.
We poll the hell out of our populace and ask, "What do you identify as?" That's how we know how people identify.
> In other countries, people pay membership dues to their political parties and get membership cards. Here, we just declare our allegiance to these private organizations on twitter.
Some states in the US have state-level party organizations which you join and receive a card. Not all.
I don't think a pollster would be disappointed that you don't have a party affiliation. In fact some of biggest emphasis in election season is on independents or undecided voters.
Exactly. You can look it up on 538 or wherever you like, but all the polls say roughly the same thing: There's more unaffiliated voters than there is voters for either party. Something like 40-45% unaffiliated, with ~25% identifying as Republican and ~30% identifying as Democrat.
And nowhere in these splits - neither in Democrat/Republican, nor in left/right - is there any notion of actually looking at the problem and trying to find an actual, effective, efficient solution, that maximizes the desired impact and minimizes undesired second-order effects.
All forms of change that aren't voting are either de jure or de facto illegal. Sure, you can march... on a route cleared with the authorities... with a permit 90 days in advance... as long as absolutely nothing untoward happens within two blocks.
The prospect of a (Jeb) Bush vs. (Hillary) Clinton race seemed emblematic of a government that was a democracy in form, but not in practice. And then along came Trump who nicely put everyone I know (myself included) in either pro-Trump or anti-Trump camps.
But there is a very real difference in policy between rural Alabama and Chicago. In no small part because of different parties exercising control in those localities.
I believe this difference exist. But I attribute it mostly to "rural" vs. "urban" part - and for far enough places, also to difference in cultures between the two locations. Rural Alabama has a different lifestyle, different market, different pressing problems than urban Chicago, different individual needs - which may result in people in those two locations overall promoting opposite policies.
How well these differences overlap with with Dem/Rep or left/right belief clusters is, I think, mostly incidental.
The parties, to the degree they do differ, do position themselves on opposite sides of the urban vs rural divide.
We (Americans) live in a representative democracy (for choosing public officials) and that democracy gives a great deal of influence and power to capitalists/industrialists (the "racket"), which has been absolutely successful in establishing and maintaining the existence and wealth of the country.
If you want to argue there is no democracy, find another person to argue with; my premise begins with the US being a representative democracy.
> Anyone arguing it's not is moving goalposts or arguing No True Scotsman.
With this be considered rhetoric?
When Trump was campaigning for his first presidency everybody was saying he would start a bunch of wars and nuke the whole world. When none of that happened he had to be a traitor since he didn't start any beautiful patriotic wars. Reality is of no consideration to the uneducated and educated masses. War is peace, peace is war.
I will not be mutilated by mortar in a ditch or send my children to die in a trench, no matter who is president. War is a racket, I feel truly sorry for those who suffer and will suffer for following their "leaders".
Find me a quote of someone on the left saying Trump was bad for not starting a war
I am fully aware that most leftist (which means most of HN) think that Trump is an insane war monger, even though he served four years as president without starting any wars. Like I wrote, reality does not matter at all anymore to anyone.
And missiles shot at Syrian air base, where Russian/Syrian planes were luckily moved just in time, very conveniently, almost like it was a good PR stunt.
How is that diplomacy?
lmao
These aren't intellectual positions at all, they're just soap opera stuff. If they've picked up anything about political economy, it was because they were in left-wing spaces during the rise of the Sanders campaign. As far as I can tell, all they took away from it is the slur "tankie," which they think has something to do with Tienanmen Square and should be screamed at anyone anyone to the left of Bill Kristol.
In general, it's obvious that identity politics forms the core of the political class of today's Democratic Party (especially the young), and equally obvious that America is the innovator that other progressive parties follow in this respect. America also has thrown itself into gender politics with particular enthusiasm - gender transitions, even of minors, are a cornerstone of American progressivism today, even as progressive European countries have rolled that back to an extent.
I will concede that Europe leads in the other main aspect of current-day progressivism, the Green movement, although American progressives are avid followers.
Traditionally the left has been associated with social policies (stemming from socialism/communism vs capitalism)
And there always was a part of the left which was anti-war, and always was a more "totalitarian" version of the left that felt it was morally justified.
But in every society the meaning of left and right has been fluid.
The 'Democrats' were very popular in the South in the 1950's among people who would now refer to themselves as 'conservative'. (Edit: look at the electoral maps for mid century US - Democrats/Republicans were not Left/Right)
Not that Left/Dem are different things today, they are effectively the same, it's just that policy is constrained by the other side, which has a dampening effect on legislation.
No, I refuse to play that game and I'd rather burn the place to the ground and suffer together than walk willingly to my own execution.
Ignoring the whole background of Korea, it's occupation by Japan, and split at the end of WW2, the Korean War began when the North invaded the South.
For Vietnam, the war ended when the North Vietnam 'won' and the South collapsed.
Antiwar sentiments existed for many of these, though it's notable that considerable anti-war sentiment in the US against entry into WWII had a distinctly hard-right flavour to it. Not all anti-war sentiment, as there can be many possible motiviations, but in this specific case, domestic groups sympathetic with (and often orchestrated by) rightest European belligerents had an outsized role.
The anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s became associated with Democrats as that party swung leftward and shed its own long-standing Southern affiliations, and grew our of anti-nuclear and civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, all of which saw Vietnam specifically as an unjustified and unjust war, with considerable merits to that viewpoint.
Painting pro- or anti-war sentiments as distinctly left or right, or aligned with either of the two present major parties is not historically accurate and misses considerable nuance.
And ended by a Republican
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/286787-gop-questions-obamas-afg...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-defense-guantanamo/ho...
As you noted, Obama and Biden increased troop count before Trump signed the Doha agreement to end the war.
Regardless, who is there when they withdrew is not the same as who made the plan and started the withdrawal. The Doha Agreement was drafted and signed under Trump. Biden didnt renege on the agreement and executed it.
We have no idea if he would have drafted such an agreement but his track record in that regard isnt good. Obama and Biden increased troops as another commenter noted.
It's not necessarily meaningful to call one party more or less hawkish than the other. It often comes down to the leader, era, and coalition behind them. Bush/Cheney were definitely more aggressive than Gore would have been, but HRC was positioning herself to be much more hawkish than Trump ended up ruling as. That's why in the post-2016 era many infamous hawks like Bill Kristol and David Frum have been Democrat-aligned.
Eisenhower continued and increased support for the French till 1954. Then backed Diem, blocked the 1956 elections, and sent in more "advisers", however .. :)
An OSS Dear Team provided training, medical and logistical assistance to Hồ Chí Minh and the Việt Minh in 1945. An OSS doctor is reported to have treated Ho Chi Minh for malaria and dysentery. [0] Then Truman provided troop transport, money and materiel for France to re-conqueror Indochina (Democrat).
Archimedes Patti, from the OSS wrote a book [1] about the experience.
War is multi-party, forget tech stocks, I gotta invest in Lockheed Martin.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSS_Deer_Team [1] "Why Vietnam?: Prelude to America's Albatross
From ~FDR-LBJ, the democratic party was pretty pro-war (so was the average american, really, so I guess that's fair for a party called democratic), but that really starts to flip in the late 60s/early 70s.
You might be mixing up anti-imperialism with antiwar sentiment. In the past, the 2 were typically hand-in-hand due to the geopolitics of the day, but it is not a given - depending on the circumstances[0].
It's interesting how the American right is also taking up an anti-war stance, while maintaining pro-imperialist attitudes[1]
0. Cf. The left's attitude towards the Vietnam war vs. the Apartheid government in South Africa.
1. With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the "peace with North Korea at all costs" under Trump
Republicans are a lot more interested in the militarization of the pacific and southern border.
As left people gain political maturity, they understand that those in power will not give up their power willingly, so force is required.
As a liberal person I am suspicious of any liberal who does not believe in gun rights, and I am even more suspicious of a liberal person who does not believe in unions, which is the 2nd amendment of labor rights. Neither the 2nd amendment nor unions can be used for their purpose within the bounds of the law.
Believing in human rights means believing in defending human rights with force, otherwise what is to stop someone from violating human rights?
If a powerful person uses their power against you, your choices are submit or fight. Leftists are slowly understanding:
1. There are powerful people
2. They will arbitrarily use your power against you
3. Those people use their power to influence law so the law will not protect you
4. You can't solve this problem within the bounds of the law
It also assumes that such disagreements require force to be resolved, and that's just demonstrably not always true. Even if it sometimes is.
If you and everyone in a 10-mile radius of where you're sitting right now decided to ignore some federal law, like maybe the one against cannabis, what the heck is an F-35 going to do about it? Blow up a building, is that supposed to help? No, you get some guys with guns and trucks and then you can start going door to door, threatening people, looking around, collecting stuff, whatever. You can set up checkpoints and block off bridges, the whole shebang, because you're trying to establish control, not just blow things up.
Blowing things up has its uses but if you want to intimidate someone to the point where you have power over them, you need to be a little more intimate. You can't just be a fleck in the sky and you can't just show up do to the big stuff. You need to be in their face as a persistent, immediate threat. That's what influences human behavior and that's how power is established. That's exactly why small guns are such a sticking point in the USA, they're a very effective counter to this intimate threat.
I am pro gun rights but not anti regulation.
I think liberals fail to acknowledge that sometimes you can't get out of "might makes right" resolution for disputes, which results in situations of denial around gun rights.
So regulation is seen as a weakening of gun rights because the people most in favor of regulating guns fail to also make arguments in favor of guns or discount the pro-gun argument entirely.
The most serious threat to an American insurgency isn't the US military, it's the police. And the police don't have F-35s... yet.
Military inventory, while powerful, isn't the end-all. Just ask Afghans about their experiences with two superpowers' machinery.
"Who are the 2nd amendment protected guns theoretically meant to be used against? When are they supposed to be used? Can the 2nd amendment ever be used to protect a free state within the bounds of the law?" are pretty major critical thinking questions that it are probably worth meditating on, especially for liberal people.
What would have happened if Trump won is a question every liberal person needs to contemplate.
When the rule of law (the idea that powerful people cannot arbitrarily exercise their power) fails, it becomes might makes right. Would you rather be in a might makes right society where you have a gun or where you don't? I think that answer is obvious.
> Even if it sometimes is.
If you want peace prepare for war.
Truman, Johnson, Clinton, Obama, etc.
The only difference between now and the 70s is that the politicians have more control over the left.
The Carter presidency is in the running for the most peaceful modern presidency. He did start arming the rebels in Afghanistan, and ordered what I guess amounts to a brief invasion of Iran, but overall, pretty peaceful. It's either him or Trump.
Antiwar doesn’t really make any sense because you can’t end wars without fighting in wars. Or surrendering but that proves the “doesnt really make sense” point. It also just encourages more wars in the future. There can be diplomatic solutions but you still have to embrace the war until then.
It requires fiat control of the situation.
That control of sovereign entities can only be attained by threat or actualised violence.
Putting it another way.
That you even consider yourself entitled to tolerate a sovereign nation requires that you believe you are entitled a degree of control it.
Anti-war thinking requires not just that you consider war a last resort. But you consider that you have no option at all. War is not another just lever.
If it is then you do not have anti-war beliefs you just are more adverse to it than some hawks.
Treaties are signed regularly having nothing to do with any kind of threat of violence. Breaking of treaties often even has legal redress mechanisms within international courts of law, all without military threats. Instead economic sanctions are often the recourse.
Re "paradox of tolerance" it's a pretty close analogy so I'm really not sure what you're going on about. An absolute anti-war position puts you in the position of tolerating wars. Thus any group that wants can engage in violence to acquire more resources. At the limit it can even overpower you although that's not so important because your tolerance of the war has a net result in having caused more war and violence. In military circles it would be called appeasement* but it's the same basic philosophy.
* Interesting side note is that there are some historians that suggest that Chamberlain's appeasement strategy wasn't because he thought it would work to pacify Hitler but because he was desperately trying hard to avoid Britain getting sucked into a conflict until they were properly staffed up (Stalin did the same btw). Additionally the appeasement strategy arguably was helpful in also pulling America into the European theater because domestic supporters of Germany couldn't claim that Hitler's expansion was somehow legitimate given that every grievance raised by Germany had a legitimate attempt to redress.
Your comment is the best example of Godwin's law I've seen in a while.
I'll take your sprinting away from the point at hand to mean you're not interested in the original discussion?
To tolerate suggests you could not tolerate it. That requires control.
Actually it does not and I’m not sprinting away from anything. I am concerned about the refusal to engage with analogies though. I thought my analogies were passable but you seem to have gotten quite triggered. What’s going on there?
Let me try again. If someone is robbing you without you doing anything, you tolerate getting robbed because otherwise you might risk bodily harm. So if anything, tolerance is the opposite and implies a lack of control because otherwise if you could not tolerate it and had control, you probably wouldn’t. Indeed, if we look at examples of intolerance, it’s actually the intolerant that have the control which is where the paradox comes from (governments self-limiting their ability to control situations and thus letting intolerant people take that control, Britain appeasing Germany because they’d otherwise lose the war before it started if they didn’t buy themselves time etc).
As for Godwin’s law:
> the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 100%.
I’m not comparing anyone or anything to Nazi’s nor Hitler but instead I’m showing the similarity between appeasement and the paradox of intolerance through the lens of the most famous appeasements of the 20th century. Just saying “Hitler” doesn’t automatically make it an example of Godwin’s law. Ironically:
> Godwin's law itself can be applied mistakenly or abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, when fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparison made by the argument is appropriate
And this is just talking about the link between authoritarians and Hitler / genocides and Nazis.
COVID is similar; Trump fucked it up because everything he touches turns to shit, not a surprise. Biden continues to fuck it up to this day and... crickets from Democrats.
Thankfully, Biden is doing the right thing, very skillfully, with Ukraine. I wish he could get it together on domestic policy. Making his bumblefuck COVID czar his chief of staff was a incredibly bad decision, though.
As an "anti-war leftist", I find myself cheering on the assistance to Ukraine, as that is the first war in my memory that seemed worth fighting.
Still no love for the Military Industrial Complex though...
But he was still Commander in Chief.
I'm going to guess that he was wary of the political attacks over doing so -- if all it took was french mustard or a tan suit, imagine the outrage of "cutting and running"
Afghanistan shows that trying "nation building" on a place where they don't actually want any nation doesn't really work. But it did work for Japan and Germany after WW2, so maybe it was worth trying. I'm sure the women who are now forbidden to learn to read liked the Americans more than they like Taliban, but does that mean extending the war was worth it?
As for Iraq, the WMDs were a complete lie and Bush and Cheney just wanted more war - some say Cheney was the mind behind and Bush was just idiot, some say Bush wanted to finish what his father started - but average Iraqi is now better off than with Saddam. That doesn't help those who died in the war, of the people who could have has better lives for the money the war had cost though.
It was actually Ukraine that changed my opinion on Iraq, because the arguments "Iraq under Saddam's brutal dictatorship wasn't that bad, there was no reason to war" started resonate with "don't help Ukraine, their lives aren't going that bad under Putin's brutal dictatorship, tell the to surrender" little too much. Was Iraq different from Ukraine only because in one the dictator was status quo and in the other it wasn't?
Yeah, complicated.
As far as Ukraine and Iraq, one big difference is that there Iraq under Saddam was not fighting a war on its territory when US invaded in 2003. So you have to consider the number of people who would have likely died due to political repressions vs the number of people who died from the war and the resulting instability - and I don't think that arithmetic is in favor of the war even today.
OTOH in Ukraine it was Russia that invaded and forced the war on them, so from the perspective of outside assistance you have to compare the number of Ukrainians that would die resisting by themselves vs the number that will die resisting with Western aid. I don't think this comparison is a given either way - there's a lot of rhetoric in the West along the lines of, "if we didn't support them they'd fold quickly and then the war would be over", but given the determined resistance that we have seen and the sheer number of people who joined the volunteer territorial defense units and their willingness to engage early in the conflict (e.g. under Kyiv), I think it's more likely that even if Russia managed to occupy the entire country, it would still be dealing with large-scale guerilla warfare, with all the massive civilian casualties that entails.
The other key difference is that Iraqis under Saddam weren't really given a choice whether they preferred to suffer Saddam or an invasion to remove him. Ukrainians, OTOH, are pretty open about their preferences.
There was never a plan, more so, never a formal declaration of what the hell victory was supposed to look like.
And sadly, this is more normal than peace when it comes to Russian border states.
But that’s entirely different than blaming him for not solving the crisis.
what is there left to do on COVID? The healthcare system is not collapsing and lockdowns have ended. Remember, the lockdowns where there only to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing. We even have vaccines and a host of other treatments widely available. If you're expecting total eradication of an airborne respiratory virus I don't think you're being realistic.
In what way? Don't get me wrong, I think Biden sucks. But when wearing a mask became an issue of deepest political ideology before Biden was elected, it's a tough task to change public opinion when you're a politician.
History books will hopefully acknowledge just how terribly the entire world handled it.
Yes, it could have been worse, maybe we could have had utter collapse. But hospitals did get overrun multiple times and many people died completely unnecessarily because we stopped fighting. I really wouldn't call this a win; covid is now endemic and continuing to evolve inside us. At best this is a bloody stalemate.
The goals, which were never real, started to have political consequences and it became a whole thing.
https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/flattening-curve...
> Six House Republicans and one Independent joined 126 Democratic members of the House of Representatives in voting NAY. In the Senate, 21 Democrats, one Republic, and one Independent courageously voted their consciences in 2002 against the War in Iraq.
https://www.thoughtco.com/2002-iraq-war-vote-3325446
Worth mentioning among the NAY votes is Barbara Lee representative of California’s 12th congressional district (9th during the vote) who has announced she’ll be running to take Dianne Feinstein’s (who voted YAY) seat in the 2024 senate race, and is a favorite among many progressives (i.e. left wing Democrats).
But for the Iraq war specifically (a part from the racketeering) why many people think it was the wrong decision is in large part based on the lies and deceptions that were used to justify the invasion.
At the time many people believed those lies and thought they were justifiable reasons for the invasion. When it later turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction, that ties of the Ba'ath party to terrorist organizations were none, that the USA imposed government was corrupt and offered little benefits to regular people over Saddam’s dictatorship, etc. etc. When this all became common knowledge, on top of all the war crimes, the torture scandals, the massacres, after Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange went to prison for revealing some of those war crimes, many of these people who previously believed the war was justified, changed their opinion of it.
What does helping Ukraine defend themselves have to do with 'war fervor'?
Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014 and Obama/Trump reaction was to ignore it - which directly resulted in a much bigger war.
The US Military Industrial Complex is why there are no wars against rich allied states. If Ukraine were part of the system and had a well managed, functional military - Putin could not have invaded, in fact he never would have tried.
Thank you for stating that. I hate when smaller countries are just talked about as pawns in a chess game between larger powers with no self determination, or should just take one for the team to prevent rocking the boat.
If Russia doesn't like its smaller neighbours wanting to join NATO, it should've treated them a lot better.
In any case, what does "supposed to be a buffer" even mean? Supposed by whom? Ukraine certainly didn't sign up for that.
I know it’s not what you’re saying exactly, but it’s what Putin’s actions boil down to.
But really, it's more about the money, the people and the control over trade routes and resources in my estimation and less about security.
It's astonishing that in the West, so many people see short term things like money or resources, that is often the reality of it, and Crimea does have offshore Oil, but in 50 years he won't be remembered for that - he will be 'Putin the Great' for re-conquoring lost territories and uniting the Russian people and their Empire. Even if there is a stalemate now - it means over a 10 year period he took Crimea and a huge swath of land - that is a big win. It won't feel like a win for a few years, but in the long run of history it'll be viewed as a victory - an expansion of the empire.
For the same reason Westerners talk about China wanting to invade Taiwan for TSMC? Gosh no - they view Taiwan as 'China' - and all the states around them as 'natural vassals to their greater power' - and that's that, they are the 'Middle Kingdom Centre of the World' and Xi is on that mission.
Those guys are using 19th century geopolitics and ethnography, taking very long term view of things.
A victory for Ukraine is important to maintain some very basic and essential things we have come to expect in the world - not fancy ideals - just basic freedoms, democracy, rule of law etc..
The military industrial complex will take a pound of flesh unless we manage them effectively, but they are not driving this war, not even from the Russian side where most of the money is pilfered anyhow.
NATO basis were next to Russia for decades.
Plus, one does not need to commit genocide to achieve safety. Anand Putin just happen to be committing genocide.
For me: the manner in which it is done (the rhetoric in media, etc).