The
Clinton campaign’s full-scale effort to turn this election into a referendum
on Vladimir Putin is causing liberals like Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor
of The Nation, and Glenn Greenwald, the energizing force behind The
Intercept, much heartburn. Here is Ms. van den Heuvel wondering what the heck is going on:
“How does new Cold War – which ends space for dissent, hurts
women & children, may lead to nuclear war – help what Clinton claims she is
for?”
According
to both vanden Heuvel and Greenwald, the Clintonian assault on Russia – the
crude, J. Edgar-Hooverish smear campaign conducted against WikiLeaks, Julian
Assange, and especially Donald Trump – is an opportunistic deviation from
“true” progressive values. It’s a corruption of American liberalism that has
nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with winning the election. As
Greenwald puts it, in answer to vanden Heuvel’s question:
“Exploiting Cold War rhetoric & tactics has helped her win
the election. I guess the idea is: deal with the aftermath and fallout later.”
Yet this evades what Mrs. Clinton and her supporters have
clearly stated about the alleged immediacy and seriousness of the “threat”
represented by Russia under Putin.
Clinton
has likened Putin to Hitler – and hasn’t that always been the
prologue to a regime change operation by the United States? Remember that
Saddam Hussein was supposed to be the Iraqi incarnation of Hitler. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
was also another “Hitler.” If we go back far enough, we can recall how George
Herbert Walker Bush said that Manuel Noriega was “worse than Hitler.”
The ideological underpinning of this nonsense is part and parcel
of the American liberal canon, which valorizes World War II as the “good war” –
a heroic struggle against fascism by the forces of progressivism and
Goodness – which was only opposed by anti-Semitic cretins and Hitler apologists
(a.k.a. “isolationist” conservatives). And it goes deeper than that, for
progressivism is an ideology that seeks universal moral “uplift” – not only on
the home front, but on a global scale.
Woodrow
Wilson’s argument for getting us into World War I – arguably the most futile
and unjustifiable conflict ever to be engaged in by the United States – was
that it was a “war to end all wars,” a struggle to bring the benefits of
democracy and national self-determination to the long-suffering peoples of the
world. And this was echoed by the collectivist intellectuals who provided the
amen corner for Wilson’s war. One such cheerleader was the philosopher John
Dewey, who hailed the war as the beginning of the end of laissez-faire because
“private property had already lost its sanctity” and “industrial democracy is
on the way.” The revered avatar of American liberalism, Walter Lippmann, in a
speech uttered as America was entering the war, enthused:
“We who have gone to war to insure democracy in the world will
have raised an aspiration here that will not end with the overthrow of the
Prussian autocracy. We shall turn with fresh interests to our own tyrannies —
to our Colorado mines, our autocratic steel industries, sweatshops, and our
slums. A force is loose in America. Our own reactionaries will not assuage it.
We shall know how to deal with them.”
Tied in to
the campaign for progressive “reform” was a religious factor: the postmillennial pietist movement that swept the country in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Stamping out “sin” and
stamping out the alleged evils of capitalism were sentiments inextricably
intertwined: thus we saw the advent of the “Social
Gospel.” The Prohibitionist movement was a key source of the early
progressive movement. Yet as the educated classes – the political class – shed
the remnants of religious belief, their determination to stamp out “sin” was
hardly extinguished: it just took on new, secularized forms.
The modern
definition of “vice” was shifted to conform to the new religion of political
correctness: instead of drunkenness, prostitution, and other avenues of
self-gratification, the new vices have been redefined as “racism,”
“homophobia,” “xenophobia,” and all the rest of the “phobias” and “isms”
denounced by Hillary Clinton in her infamous “basket
of deplorables” speech. Indeed, her condemnation of Trump supporters
as “irredeemable” is couched in the very language used by the old-time
religionists who saw their political and social enemies as instruments of Satan
headed straight for the lowest rungs of Hell.
And this messianic impulse to cleanse humanity of “sin” wasn’t
limited to a single country, the United States: if the human race was going to
be made ready for the Second Coming it first – according to the postmillennial
pietists – had to undergo the reign of virtue for a thousand years. The Kingdom
of God on earth – the entire earth – had to be
established: then and only then would the redeemed by saved and ushered into
Eternity, whilst the “irredeemables” would burn in hellfire forevermore.
Russia has
long been in the crosshairs of the PC set: “homophobia,” “racism,” “nationalism,” i.e. all the “sins” as
defined by the paladins of modernity are attributed to the Russian bear.
Indeed, this longstanding liberal meme was formalized by Hillary Clinton in her
infamous “alt right” speech, in which, after smearing Trump as the
avatar of a neo-Nazi revival, she opined:
“The godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism is
Russian President Vladimir Putin. In fact,[UKIP leader and Brexit advocate
Nigel] Farage has appeared regularly on Russian propaganda programs. Now
he’s standing on the same stage as the Republican nominee.
“Trump himself heaps praise on Putin and embrace pro-Russian
policies.
“He talks casually of abandoning our NATO allies, recognizing
Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and of giving the Kremlin a free hand in Eastern
Europe more generally.
“American presidents from Truman to Reagan have rejected the
kind of approach Trump is taking on Russia. We should, too.
“All of this adds up to something we’ve never seen before. Of
course there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial
resentment. But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it,
encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now.”
Clinton’s speech outlines a unified field theory of messianic
liberalism in the twenty-first century: the forces of
homophobia-racism-xenophobia are broadly defined as “nationalism,” which is, in
the liberal lexicon, a synonym for Evil. According to the Clintonian theology,
the epicenter of this Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy is located in the Kremlin.
Putin is Satan with a sword. It’s all very neatly packaged and readily
marketable to the liberal college professors, the single women with half a
dozen cats, the editorial page editors, and the clueless millennials who can
barely read and write but know for a fact that the Founding Fathers were evil
racists.
Identity politics have long since trumped – if you’ll pardon the
expression – the traditional liberal pieties of opposition to unnecessary wars
and mindless militarism. The smug self-righteousness of “humanitarian
interventionism” having displaced “We ain’t gonna study war no more,” there are
no effective obstacles to Hillary Clinton’s war plans within the precincts of
American liberalism. And she has history – the history of progressivism as
secularized moral uplift – on her side.
So let us answer Ms. vanden Heuvel’s question: “How does [a] new
Cold War – which ends space for dissent, hurts women & children, may lead to
nuclear war – help what Clinton claims she is for?”
To begin with, it enables the ongoing legislative tradeoff that
has sustained the Welfare-Warfare State for the entirety of its existence. It’s
a classic case of what we call log-rolling, or “you scratch my back and I’ll
scratch yours.” In return for not putting up much of a fight over the liberal
demand for more “social spending,” conservatives get the vast expansion of the
military that is their stock-in-trade – military spending which, after all, is
“needed” in order to “stand up to Vladimir Putin.”
As for the women-and-children angle: what about the poor women
and children of Ukraine, who are supposedly about to be rolled over by Russian
tanks? We can’t have any of this “America First” nationalism pushed by the
likes of Trump – our concern for women and children has to be global.
And what’s
this about “space for dissent”? Has Katrina vanden Heuvel been on a college
campus lately? And you’ll remember the last time a great progressive leader led
America into a world war – that was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who demanded
that his Attorney General initiate a sedition trial against war
opponents and who signed an executive order putting
hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans (and Italians) into concentration camps.
“Space for dissent”? Don’t make me laugh!
Rather than confront the ideological canons of what passes for
American liberalism today, both Karina vanden Heuvel and Glenn Greenwald stand
in agonized awe of the dawning of the new cold war that could quickly turn hot.
What, they ask, is going on? To which one can only reply: Brother, you
asked for it!
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can
check out my Twitter feed by going here. But
please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made
in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
I’ve
written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993
book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative
Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by
Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).
You can
buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus
Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.