EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE

Later this morning, Susie and I will go to DC to have dinner with my big sister, Barbara, and my son, Tobias, who is driving down from Philadelphia for the occasion.  We will fly into Washington National Airport, which was renamed Reagan National in memory of the late and utterly unlamented fortieth President.  I have in the past primly refused to call the airport by its proper name, imagining thereby that I was striking a tiny blow for truth, justice, and the American way.  This time, I reflected ruefully that I had been wrong to consider that B actor suffering from early signs of dementia to be the worst person I would ever see in the White House.  If I were a good deal younger and gifted with the ability to write History, I might try my hand at a multi-volume work tentatively entitled The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.

SIMPLE PLEASURES

These are, for me, deeply depressing times.  I genuinely do not know how I am going to maintain some measure of equanimity, day by day, in what I now am forced to consider my declining years.  In these circumstances, I find that I need to take such simple pleasures as I can find, merely to preserve my sanity.

Susie and I have been watching The Young and the Restless pretty faithfully for twenty-eight years or so.  We cannot watch it when we are in Paris, of course, but since nothing ever happens in a soap, that doesn't make much difference.

Y&R, as it is known, is the premier soap, on for an hour, not a half hour, five days a week.  New characters are constantly being introduced, but a few central characters [and the actors who play them] have been on the show so long that they feel like members of the family.  A few moments ago, Tracy showed up again for one of her rare appearances [Tracy Abbot, sister of Jack and Ashley, for those in the know.]  It was sweet, sort of like when Han Solo, played as always by Harrison Ford, showed up in The Force Awakens.

A simple pleasure.

FROM TIGGER TO EEYORE

Settle down, this is going to take me a while.  I should like to attempt a thoughtful response to Robert Shore, who writes as follows:

“Prof. Wolff,
I don’t mean to minimize your fears about what we can expect from the Trump Presidency. However, along with many dreadful things it is possible that something important and positive may also come about; namely, a big step in the direction of normalizing relations with Russia. To provide some important background information the following interview, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/emeritus-professor-russian-studies-stephen-cohen/ with Stephen Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Russian Studies at Princeton University is very much worth listening to for two reasons. One, he talks eloquently of the awful revival of something close to the Red Scare and McCarthyism that is going on at present in which anyone trying to say anything positive about Russia immediately gets smeared as a Putin puppet as the Clinton campaign did to Trump. Indeed the New York Times has been demonizing Russia for much of the past year. The second reason is that Cohen presents a picture of what the world looks like from the Russian point of view with NATO expanding to the very borders of Russia carrying with it the frightening possibility of a nuclear war with Russia. If Trump indeed follows through on his campaign promises and is able to put an end to the uncalled for and terribly dangerous hostility towards President Putin, he will have achieved something of great importance for which we should be grateful. Nothing of the sort could ever have been expected had Clinton won the election.

Robert Shore”

First of all, let me thank Bob for taking on the role of Blog Tigger.  I am usually the one who sees a drop at the bottom of a tumbler as evidence of a glass half full, but the election of Trump has turned me into an Eeyore, and I welcome his capacity to see light at the end of a wormhole.  I admire Stephen Cohen’s work and I thank Bob for the link to his piece.

In these remarks, I am going to take off from a single word in Shore’s comment, namely the word “normalizing” in the second sentence.  I think it reveals a point of view with which I have considerable disagreement.  Let me explain.

The United States is an imperial power.  That is not a moral judgment, it is a statement of geopolitical fact.  It is not the first imperial power, nor will it be the last.  There are other imperial powers at present – China comes to mind – as well as a number of regional powers that aspire to at least quasi-imperial status, but the United States is currently the richest and militarily strongest imperial power, a status it maintains by spending a much larger fraction of its Gross Domestic Product on its military than do its competitors.  Russia was an imperial power when it was the Soviet Union, and it seeks to reestablish itself at least as a regional hegemon.

Imperial powers expand their spheres of control in a variety of ways, depending in part on geography and in part on history.  Some, like Rome, the Mongols, Great Britain, and the United States, seek to project their power well beyond their borders, establishing and manning permanent military bases in the portions of the world they dominate.  Others, like China and Russia, extend their imperial sway to areas contiguous to their homeland and are hesitant to seek control of areas not reachable by land bridges from the homeland.  Imperial powers generate a wide variety of self-justifications for their quest for dominion, sometimes laying claim to cultural superiority [Rome, Great Britain, France], sometimes invoking divine sanction [China], sometimes claiming moral and political superiority [the United States.]

The earth being shaped as it is, imperial powers expand their spheres of control until they bump up against other imperial powers or reach natural boundaries [the Pacific Ocean, for the United States, the limit of the territories feasibly reachable with available technology, for the Romans.]  For the past several centuries, Central and Eastern Europe have been contested areas, over which wars have been fought repeatedly.  [I assume at least the outlines of this history are familiar to the readers of this blog, and I shan’t attempt a summary.]  At any moment in history, the relative weights of the constellation of forces establish a geopolitical balance, either stable or unstable.  This balance is always contested, always challenged, always undergoing revision as the power of the competing imperial nations shifts.

Quite often, after a major war, a new balance is established which those living at the time consider “normal” or “appropriate” or “inevitable.”  This was true after the Napoleonic Wars, after the First World War, and again after the Second World War.  WW II changed the prospects and opportunities for virtually all the aspiring or existing imperial powers.  It destroyed the imperial sway of Great Britain and France, put paid to the imperial ambitions of Germany, Japan, and Italy, and established the United States and the Soviet Union as the two dominant imperia of the post-war world.  The Soviet Union expanded farther into Eastern and Central Europe than it could ever have hoped to do, and the United States in effect took control of whatever the Soviet Union was not actually sitting on.

None of this has anything at all to do with considerations of what is right, or what is best for mankind, or what can be justified by appeal to heaven, to history, or to the ideals of the human spirit.  It is simply a description of what happened.  The United Nations, like its predecessor, the League of Nations, is an attempt both at formalizing the power relations that existed at the end of a great war, and at freezing those relations so as to protect the hegemony of the existing imperial powers and stymie the ambitions of imperia on the rise.

When the Soviet Union broke apart, a shift in the power relations of Eastern and Central Europe took place, and the United States, with its agent, NATO, moved to expand its influence into regions that Russia could no longer control.  Vladimir Putin seeks to recapture at least some portion of that region as part of Russia’s sphere of influence and control.  If the United States [under President Trump] agrees to this Russian move, the balance of imperial control will shift.  If Trump resists Putin’s move, then in all likelihood Putin will fail, because the worldwide fall in oil prices has substantially diminished Russia’s power.

What would it mean to “normalize” America’s relations with Russia?  Would it mean to freeze things as they now are?  Return to the spheres of control of the so-called Cold War period, with Russia dominating and perhaps reincorporating Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, and so forth?  Return to the situation that existed in 1933?  In 1918?  In 1818?  There is no coherent meaning that can be given to the term.

But, you ask, what ought America to do?  What ought we, on the left, to want America to do, regardless of how little ability we have to determine what it will do?  What is the right thing for America to do?  That is a very much more difficult question to answer than it might at first seem.  Consider the possibilities.

First, America could eschew all imperial aims, close the overseas bases it maintains in most of the nations of the world, and reduce its military establishment to what is required to protect its territory from invasion.  It could then claim that it had foresworn Empire [try telling that to Native Americans, by the way.]  What would be the result?  Other actual or aspiring imperial powers would expand their spheres to fill the gap.  We [i.e., we on the left] might consider the consequences good or bad, but we could tell ourselves that we have clean hands, we are morally above reproach, because no matter what happens we did not do it.  I leave it to the professional moral philosophers to consider that defense [I assume we are not falling back on religious justifications in the style of Sergeant York.]

Second, we could embrace America’s military power as a reality and argue that it should be put to good use – to advancing the prospects of socialism, for example, or stamping out the abuse of women in nations around the world, or punishing nations that criminalize homosexuality.  If that is our choice, then what is the argument for withdrawing our sphere of influence from territories over which Russia seeks to reestablish its Imperium?

Third, we could embrace imperialism in principle and throw our support behind some other imperial power which for some reason we prefer to the United States.

This would be an interesting and enlightening discussion, but I cannot see that the term “normalizing” would play a useful role in it.

A REQUEST FOR HELP

Trump is apparently weighing a registry of Muslims in this country.  If he makes an attempt to implement such a plan, I think everyone opposed to him should step forward and declare himself or herself to be a Muslim.  I do not have any knowledge of how to get this proposal on social media in hopes that it will go viral, as the saying has it.  I will certainly do this myself, but does anyone know how to popularize this idea?

BABY STEPS

OK.  I emailed my Representative, asking him to sign the letter opposing the appointment of Steve Bannon to the White House Staff.  I joined Democratic Socialists of America [I know, I know, don't start], I renewed my subscription to the NAACP and also joined the NC branch, I donated $250 to Foster Campbell's run-off race for Senate in Louisiana, and I tried [unsuccessfully] to let UNC Philosophy let me use their distribution list to circulate the email I received and posted, as a first step to organizing a group here in Chapel Hill.  None of this is significant, but if we all do these sorts of things, maybe we can create a wall of opposition to the horrors Trump is preparing to visit on this country.

SOMEONE BEAT ME TO IT

I should have checked the Washington Post before writing my most recent post!

FIRST STEPS

I received the following from someone who prefers to remain unnamed.  I reproduce it here because it strikes me as a sensible way that those of you on college campuses and elsewhere can take some first steps.  We are going to need to mobilize millions of people in many different places and having many different agendas, if we are to counteract some of the harm Trump seeks to inflict on this country.

"Hello,

I am writing this email to follow up on a series of suggestions that I have made to a number of people in the department concerning the recent election. If you are receiving this email, it is because I think I have a good sense of your political persuasions and that you are the people that need to be reached. If there is anyone not on this email list who you think might be interested in the proposals I am about to make, please let me know or contact them yourself. Furthermore, I am not on social media and so I am not sure whether this is a new proposal that no one else has made yet, or if I am simply out of the loop. If the latter, please let me know.

Many people have suggested that we start taking some action. This email is a first step in that direction. The reason I am emailing all of you is to propose that we meet sometime in the near future to discuss and try to start some form of collective action group. There is a tremendous amount of discontent at this moment and I think that the thing to do immediately is to tap into that discontent and start mobilizing. I also believe that if we don't start doing something now there is a great danger that apathy will begin to set in and people will begin reconciling themselves to this nightmare and become complacent. That would be a horrendous mistake. In the past I have spent some time doing volunteer work for some left wing organizations. I know that many of you have done, and continue to do, the same. I propose that we discuss the possibility of trying to coordinate these separate efforts. Moreover, I know from my own personal experience volunteering that I am weak. The same is also true for many of you. For this reason, I think it is extremely important to begin working together and to provide one another with mutual support and to try and hold each other accountable. The thing for us to do now is to begin to organize and support opposition groups to put as much pressure as possible on the incoming administration and mitigate as much of the damage as we can.

Finally, I am very much aware that we are all different kinds of leftists. But at a time like this, we need to be unified more than ever, and so I hope we can set aside our differences for the purposes of fighting to prevent as many destructive actions as possible.

If you agree with this proposal, then let’s start figuring out a time and place to meet and discuss. Let’s also start thinking about what kinds of things we can do and how we should go about it."