What a
Perverse Presidential Incentive System!
By
Sheldon Richman
April
15, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "
Libertarian Institute"-
All I can say is, we’ve got a hell of a
political system on our hands when the surest
way for a president to win the adoration of
those who thought him a dangerous, ignorant,
narcissistic, erratic, and bullshitting blowhard
yesterday is to drop a bomb or fire a cruise
missile today.
We
already knew something like this was the case.
War presidents tend to be remembered better than
presidents who had the misfortune to reign
during peacetime, sometimes despite their best
efforts.
I guess
it’s understandable that a president who “led
the nation into war” would stand out in the
memory more than one who did not, but it’s no
less a matter of concern to those who actually
hate war and love peace rather than just say it.
It’s especially worrisome when you realize that
many people — pundits and scholars in particular
— believe that only in waging war does a
president display his finest traits: leadership,
courage, strength, resoluteness, and so on.
Since presidents are thought to come into their
own only during state-sponsored butchery, we may
find a parallel in what
Randolph Bourne
said of the state itself. Writing in 1918, after
the evil evangelist Woodrow Wilson had taken the
United States into the Great War, Bourne
observed that a republican state in peacetime is
boring. It “has almost no trappings to appeal to
the common man’s emotions. What it has are of
military origin, and in an unmilitary era such
as we have passed through since the Civil War,
even military trappings have been scarcely seen.
In such an era the sense of the State almost
fades out of the consciousness of men.
“With
the shock of war, however, the State comes into
its own again. The Government, with no mandate
from the people, without consultation of the
people, conducts all the negotiations, the
backing and filling, the menaces and
explanations, which slowly bring it into
collision with some other Government, and gently
and irresistibly slides the country into war….”
Then
everything changes.
“The
moment war is declared…,” Bourne continued, “the
mass of the people, through some spiritual
alchemy, become convinced that they have willed
and executed the deed themselves. They then,
with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed
to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced,
deranged in all the environments of their lives,
and turned into a solid manufactory of
destruction toward whatever other people may
have, in the appointed scheme of things, come
within the range of the Government’s
disapprobation. The citizen throws off his
contempt and indifference to Government,
identifies himself with its purposes, revives
all his military memories and symbols, and the
State once more walks, an august presence,
through the imaginations of men. Patriotism
becomes the dominant feeling, and produces
immediately that intense and hopeless confusion
between the relations which the individual bears
and should bear toward the society of which he
is a part.”
In
other words, war reminds the people that their
real religion is the religion of State, i.e.,
nationalism. Their other religions place a
distant second.
War of
course has changed in many ways since Bourne’s
day. We won’t see columns of men marching down
joyously tearful crowd-lined American streets on
their way to be dispatched to Syria or any of
the other places in which “we are at war.” There
will likely be no conscription with its
patriotic appeals. (Am I too hasty in ruling
this out?) America’s heroes do their killing
largely though not entirely by remote control,
from behind drone consoles or on ships safely in
the Mediterranean. To be sure, special-ops
“advisers” and “trainers” get to see some of the
action up close, and sometimes one of them takes
a hit, at which time we’ll be frequently assured
that he or she really did die for our freedom.
Anyone who suggests an American warrior died in
vain or on behalf of imperial ambitions will be
shunned — or worse.
So a
president today may have to work a little harder
than in the past to garner adoration — but not
that hard, especially when it comes to our
furrowed-brow pundits and solemn politicians.
The
Trump case drives home the point. Here was a guy
who until recently scared the bejeezus out of
our weightiest thinkers. He was thought to
combine three of the worst traits: conceit,
ignorance, and impulsiveness, born of an
exaggerated estimate of his own gut. Yet all he
had to do to win over these critics was
(illegally) to command the Navy to fire several
dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles from some ships,
and suddenly he’s just the right man in just the
right place at just the right time. CNN’s and
the Washington Post‘s Wise Pundit,
Fareed Zakaria, declared him president just
after the missiles launched. The New York Times‘s
Nicholas Kristof said Trump’s action was of
“dubious legality,” “hypocritical,” and “right.”
Every major newspaper lauded him editorially and
turned over its op-ed page exclusively to
commentators who agreed. Such praise gushed
forth even though Trump’s strike against Syria
was rash, having been ordered before an inquiry
into the origin of the chemical-weapons attack
had been conducted. Dissent was as scarce as a
hint of humility in the Trump household.
We can
be sure that Trump did not misread the lesson.
He’s a man who has craved the respect of the
establishment all his adult life. When he could
not win it in the business world, he said the
equivalent of “screw you” and ran for president
as an anti-establishment candidate. But that was
never authentic; he was as transparent as
a snake-oil hawker.
Yet Trump continued to crave the respect of
those who, in his mind, really matter (unlike
the forgotten working people he
pretended to
champion). It didn’t hurt that by going after
Russia’s ally and suggesting that Vladimir Putin
was complicit, he could show Those Who Matter
that he really isn’t a Kremlin puppet. It also
didn’t hurt that he chose to go after a guy (Assad)
whom the American establishment has wanted to
get off for a long time, although this will
benefit the bin Ladenites and worse. (“If there
was anything that [the strike on] Syria did, it
was to validate the fact that there is no Russia
tie,”
Prince Eric said.)
Neocons and humanitarian (sic) interventionists
alike favor the destabilization of Syria long
sought by Israel and Saudi Arabia, not to
mention America’s Israel-firsters.
So as I
said, we’ve got a hell of a political system on
our hands.
Now,
what about Trump and North Korea?
Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The
Libertarian Institute, senior fellow and chair
of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless
Society, and a contributing editor at
Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at
the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane
Studies, former editor of The Freeman, published
by the Foundation for Economic Education, and
former vice president at the Future of Freedom
Foundation. His latest book is America’s
Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
A
Government of
Morons
By Paul Craig
Roberts |
 |
Western
Civilization, if
civilization it
is, is the
greatest
committer of war
crimes in human
history. -
Continue |
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