ENFIN!

Went to airport to fly to JFK, on the way to Paris.  After clearing security, had leisurely snack at 42nd Street Oyster House.  Strolled to gate.  Discovered flight to JFK was cancelled.  Panic.  Re-routed to direct London flight, then flight to Paris.  Major agita.  This would mean going through Heathrow, the world’s worst airport.  Got to Paris, went to baggage claim.  Waited.  Last bag came off flight.  Not ours.  More panic.  Went to baggage office.  Told by distracted young woman that our bags would arrive from Philadelphia.  Philadelphia?  What on earth were our bags doing in Philadelphia?  Took taxi to apartment, unencumbered by luggage.  Good news, everything worked.  Bad news, computer was in luggage.  Called.  Was told luggage would be delivered the next day.  Gave voice at other end the building code.  Was called next day, told luggage would arrive between one and five in the afternoon.  Waited.  Got a call.  Luggage would be delivered between five and nine p.m.  Got cranky.  Meanwhile, jets flew low overhead in Bastille Day display for Trump.  Considered emigrating to Canada.  Luggage arrived at 7:30.  Walked to Brasserie Balzar.  Assigned to table 37, my favorite.  Had a dozen snails.  Equanimity restored.  Bonjour Paris!

ILLUSIONS WITH REGARD TO THE MORAL STANDING OF NATIONS

I have sufficiently recovered from the shock of discovering that Donald J. Trump is following me to Paris so that I can, in the quiet of my comfortable office, make a stab at clarifying what I wrote about morality and state actions.  This exercise has helped me to come to a clearer realization that the point of view I was trying to articulate is nothing more than an elaboration or extension of the position I set forth more than half a century ago in my little tract, In Defense of Anarchism.  Say what you will, at least I am consistent.

Moral judgments, strictly understood, are appropriately made concerning the actions, intentions [and perhaps the characters] of persons.  Corporations are not persons [the United States Supreme Court to the contrary notwithstanding], armies are not persons, churches are not persons, fraternal organizations are not persons, animals are not persons [I exempt dogs from this judgment, of course], the environment is not a person, and most importantly for this discussion nation states are not persons.  Strictly speaking, no nation acts, and therefore it makes no sense, again strictly speaking, to judge that a nation’s acts have been moral or immoral, right or wrong, justified or unjustified.  People act, often claiming to act in the name of a nation, or by virtue of a position held in the government of a nation.  Almost impenetrable and unchallengeable mystifications conspire to make it seem as though nations or corporations or armies or churches are persons or possess personhood, that they, not the persons who occupy positions in them, act and can be judged to have acted rightly or wrongly.  But that appearance is always an illusion.

It makes perfectly good sense to make moral judgments about the actions of individuals, even those individuals who claim to have institutional authority by virtue of election, appointment, nomination and confirmation, divine election, or some other procedure supposedly conferring upon them rights not possessed by persons simpliciter, but those claim are always false.  Such persons may have what I called long ago de facto legitimate authority, but they never, ever have de jure legitimate authority.  That is to say, they may make those claims and succeed in getting them accepted by those against whom or with regard to whom they make the claims.  That can be described as conferring on them de facto legitimate authority.  But all such claims are always false, a fact which I try to express by the statement that no individual ever has de jure legitimate authority.

When a warplane belonging to the United States drops bombs on a battlefield area, destroying a field hospital, it is common to say that the United States has destroyed a field hospital.  People then argue about whether this act by the United States was morally justified or morally unjustified.  That is always a mystified and misleading way to speak.  The men and women flying the plane dropped the bombs, and they are morally responsible for doing so.  The men and women who ordered them to drop the bombs are morally responsible for issuing those orders.  The high command who ordered the bombing campaign are morally responsible for ordering that campaign.  The civilian individuals “in the chain of command” are morally responsible, as are all the individuals in the national administration who participated in the decision, including even the low level staffers who simply held the chairs for the big brass who sat at the table in the Situation Room.  The men and women who voted for the elected officials bear some moral responsibility.  And, most difficult of all to comprehend and acknowledge, so too do all the individual men and women who, by accepting the false claims of legitimate authority advanced by those claiming to possess authority by virtue of some process of election or appointment, strengthen those false claims and make it more likely that orders issued from on high will be obeyed all the way down to the men and women in the airplanes who actually press the buttons that cause the bombs to be dropped.

Almost four centuries ago, John Locke argued that the kings and queens of Europe were in a state of nature with one another because there was no social contract of nations analogous to the social contract of individuals about which he was writing.  This, and countless other writings over several millennia, have encouraged us to think of nations as super-persons, as it were, as unitary agents capable of making decisions and acting in ways that can be judged morally.  That is an illusion.  It was false when Locke wrote and it is false today.  America does not act, Google does not act, the Navy does not act, the Roman Catholic Church does not act, the NFL does not act, Ben and Jerry’s does not act [although of course Ben does and so does Jerry.]

If all this is true, as in fact it is, what then should each of us as an individual agent do?  Ah well, that is the real question, of course, but before we can address it, first we must clear away the illusions and mystifications of the state.  Then perhaps, as Portnoy’s analyst suggests in the very last line of the novel, we can begin.

THE FICKLE FINGER OF FATE

At three p.m. today the taxi comes to take us to the airport.  Before then, I hope to write a reply to Jerry Fresia and others.  But this morning, I have learned truly disastrous news.  DONALD J. TRUMP IS GOING TO PARIS TODAY!!!!   As I was taught long ago by old Marxists, there are no accidents in history.  Obviously Trump is doing this to torture me.  I must think deeply and divine the true world-historical meaning of this conjuncture.

RATS.

UPDATE

We fly off to Paris tomorrow for two weeks.  I shall blog from there as soon as we are settled in.  I want to try to clarify my post in response to Jerry Fresia, because I think, as so often happens, I did not make myself clear.  Perhaps I can do that tomorrow morning or later today.

Meanwhile, I am enjoying the discomfiture of Donald Jr.  I predict a plenary presidential pardon is in the offing.

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT JERRY FRESIA'S COMMENT

I should like to spend a little time commenting on Jerry Fresia’s response to my North Korea story, and on a quite informative story in Counterpunch.org, the first of two to which he links.  Here is what Jerry says:

“Malcolm X insightfully noted more than half a century ago that if you read the newspaper everyday, you'll end up loving your enemies and hating your friends. A more modern version of that quip might be that if you get your news from the NYTs and MSNBC you'll live within the liberal bubble, not knowing diddly-squat about "our" official enemies.

To wit, check out these pieces on NK found in Counterpunch.org (can you imagine Rachel reporting thusly??) - all of which compels me to add, quoting Naomi Klein, that Trump is more a symptom of our malady and not the cause:  http://bit.ly/2tpEN8O  http://bit.ly/2tyERBi”

The article has a great deal of detailed information about long-range missiles in general and North Korea’s missile program in particular, a quick summary of which is that it will take much longer than popularly imagined for North Korea to develop reliable, usable Intermediate Range and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles [IRBMs and ICBMs].  But the ideological thrust of the story is what I wish to address today.  Rather than trying to summarize the article, I am going to assume that those of you who are interested have taken the time to read it.  I shall launch into my discussion with that assumption as a background.

Over the course of the last five thousand years, give or take a millennium, a number of states have sought and achieved imperial status, which we may describe as the successful exercise of significant influence and control beyond their national borders.  Many, but perhaps not all, have claimed the moral, religious, political, or racial high ground, representing themselves as deserving of their imperial sway by virtue of their superiority in one or more of these ways.  The Greeks characterized those speaking other languages as barbarians, initially a mnemonic characterization of the way other languages sounded to them [“bar bar bar”] but later a dismissal of other cultures as inferior.  Chinese rulers claimed the Mandate of Heaven.  The British manfully bore the White Man’s Burden.  The Soviets saw themselves as the avant garde of history.  And so forth.

Americans have long congratulated themselves in a similar fashion, describing their break-away slave state as the first nation in history created as the embodiment of an idea, the Idea of Freedom.  After the end of the Second World War, America appropriated the self-congratulatory title of Leader of the Free World, and went on to issue annual lists of nations that it judged to be failing to make suitable progress toward the successful imitation of The American Experiment.  In an eerie fashion, Donald J. Trump’s compulsive self-aggrandizing braggadocio is a natural extension of America’s claim to moral supremacy in the international arena.  Unreconstructed American patriots take all of this quite literally and either ignore or deny the overwhelming contrary evidence.  Enlightened liberals condemn America’s actions as a fall from grace and demand that the nation live up to its founding principles and ideals, thus granting the premise of the imperial rationalization.

I don’t imagine I have to spend any time explaining why I consider all of this arrant nonsense.  What interests me in the post is the fact that the successful claim of the moral and political high ground [successful in the descriptive sense of getting the claim accepted, grudgingly or not, by those to whom it is made] is a form of power quite as real and often quite as effective as military or economic power.  Insofar as America can present itself to the world as humanity’s moral arbiter, the embodiment of the ideal of democracy, a shining city upon a hill, a beacon held high to inspire those who are downtrodden but aspire to [American-style] democracy, it gains the capacity to shape world affairs in ways favorable to its interests.  This capacity is sometimes referred to as “soft power,” admiringly by those who value its effectiveness, dismissively by those who think to assert their manhood by valorizing weapons and uniformed soldiers.

But the power of successful claims of moral superiority is unlike military or economic power in one striking and significant way:  this power requires, for its effective exercise, that those wielding it actually believe the absurd claims they are making!  A gun, even a quite sophisticated model, does not come outfitted with an ideology.  It makes no claims, it just shoots when the trigger is pulled.   But I cannot think of a single imperial power whose rulers did not actually believe that they had the Mandate of Heaven, or bore the White Man’s Burden, or led a nation embodying The Idea of Freedom.

So, when American State Department officials or Presidents condemn North Korea as a rogue state, a sponsor of terrorism, a violator of UN dictates, a breaker of international agreements, while simultaneously ignoring America’s own sponsorship of terrorists, its repeated overthrow of democratically elected governments, its embrace of nations such as Israel whose nuclear weapons are a violation of the same United Nations regulations, part of their success in getting the world to take their condemnation seriously derives from their own belief in the supposed grounds of that condemnation.

There is nothing in the least unusual either in America’s claims or in the self-delusions of its leaders.  If America can get the world to take seriously its moral pretensions, that is a form of power quite as effective as [and rather more flexible in its deployment than] a carrier group sailing in the North China Sea.

I strongly recommend that we avoid the error of imagining that if we [I.e. America] have dirty hands then those whom the American government condemns must have clean hands.  I suggest that when it comes to nation states, we should forsake moral judgments and simply strive to understand as best we can what is happening or is likely to happen.  This is not to say that we should cease judging the world morally.  Not at all!  Each of us must choose what he or she believes right, which men and women are our comrades, as I have put it elsewhere.  We must be unrelenting in our efforts to advance what is good and combat what is evil. 

With regard to North Korea, which was the subject that provoked this post, it seems to me clear that it would be better if North Korea did not have nuclear weapons, just as it would be better if Israel did not have nuclear weapons, if India and Pakistan did not have nuclear weapons, if the United States and Russia and China and Great Britain and France did not have nuclear weapons.  It would be better if Iran were not to develop nuclear weapons.  There is simply no good argument for the existence of nuclear weapons.  But it does not surprise me in the slightest that the United States should portray North Korea’s development of missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons as a world-historical threat, nor does it surprise me that the American officials claiming that believe it themselves.  Insofar as they can get the rest of the world to believe that, they will have successfully deployed a certain measure of soft power in pursuit of America’s regional geopolitical aims.  Our time would be better spent debating whether we support or oppose America’s pursuit of those regional aims

TRUMP, PUTIN, AND NUCLEAR WAR

It is a quiet Saturday morning in this Continuing Care Retirement Community, or old people’s home, as I think of it, and a good time to respond to some recent comments.  First, I note with manifest pleasure Jerry Brown’s Trumpesque expression of the blessedness of reading my blog.  All groveling gratefully accepted.  [For those incapable of detecting irony in the absence of emoticons, this was not meant seriously.]

But on to more serious matters.  Anonymous writes as follows:  “I have some disagreements with your view on Trump and Russia that I was wondering if you could address. As you have discussed on here before, Chomsky has argued that the one decent policy to come out of the Trump administration (or sentiment) is Trump's desire to have better relations with Russia. He believes this because, even if Trump's campaign coordinated with the Russians in the 2016 election, such a relationship could avert a nuclear war between the two powers.

My concern with your view is this: even if we assume that Trump himself colluded with the Russian government in 2016 to win the Presidency, and even if Trump himself is under the control of Putin (a worst-case scenario), would this treasonous act not still be somewhat desired so as to avoid the very real threat of a US-Russia war which would result in nuclear catastrophe? Yes, treason is something to be taken seriously even in the formal democracy of the United States, but if this treason resulted in us avoiding a nuclear catastrophe, shouldn't we be at least hesitant to want Trump impeached (assuming that other figures/administrations would simply take the traditional, hostile stance towards Russia)?”

This is a very interesting and rather complex comment and question.  I shall try to address it as clearly as I can. But I should say at the outset that I am hindered by an inability to make really plausible estimates of the probabilities of the various dangers Anonymous refers to.  I cannot speak for Noam, of course, but I am somewhat doubtful that he can do much better in that regard, even though he is more knowledgeable than I.

First of all, if it is true that we now face a very serious threat of an American/Russian nuclear war, and if it is also true that Trump’s stance with regard to Russia materially reduces that threat, then there is a good argument for embracing Trumps’ Russia policy, such as it may be, as a very necessary evil.  A nuclear war would be so terrible that even if the price of avoiding it were the end of the American political system as we know it, or even the end of America’s independence as a nation, that would perhaps be a price worth paying.  I am not sure everyone these days understands just how civilization-endingly terrible a nuclear war would be.  Chomsky, of course, does.

My problem with Chomsky’s point of view, and hence with Anonymous’ question, is that I have serious doubts about the first of the premises and grave doubts, bordering on disbelief, about the second.  Let me take them in turn.

Ever since nuclear weapons were invented, there has been a great risk of accidental or unintended nuclear war and some risk, less I think, that a nuclear armed nation will deliberately initiate a nuclear war.  Short of the nuclear disarmament for which I argued and worked sixty years ago, preventing accidental or unintended nuclear war requires three things:  First, that the weapons systems be stable and well-protected [in hardened silos or on nuclear submarines] so that snap decisions do not have to be made about potential threats under conditions in which mistakes are easily possible;  Second, that each adversary possesses sufficient nuclear weapons to respond with unacceptable force [unacceptable to the opponent] to even a nation-destroying first strike;  and third, that both adversaries [or all, if there are more than two] make their aims and actions unambiguously clear, so that miscalculations, misunderstandings, and battlefield confusion are reduced to an absolute minimum.  These conditions have for the most part been met during the past half century in confrontations between The Soviet Union [afterwards Russia] and America, although there have been several terrifyingly close calls, most notably the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis [in which John F. Kennedy was the principal source of the danger, in my judgment.]  They are, I believe, met today, despite such provocative actions as the placement of weaponry in Eastern Europe by the United States and the annexation of Crimea and attempted annexation of Ukraine by Russia.  [I am not really interested in, and will not discuss, whether any of these actions was, in any sense, “justified.”]  In the absence of irrational or unpredictable actions on the part of the Americans or Russians, I do not think that the danger of nuclear war is greater now than it was five, ten, or fifteen years ago.  [I leave entirely to one side the confrontation between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, which has its own terrors and dangers].

Do I know these judgment to be true?  Good God, no.  How could I?  It is my best guess, and if Chomsky says that I am wrong, well, he may be right, but then again I may be right.

It is the second premise whose dubiousness really seems manifest to me.  Trump clearly has no idea at all what he is doing, either in domestic or in international affairs.  He has nothing remotely akin to a coherent policy, strategy, or point of view regarding Russia, and I see no sign that he will acquire one.  Of one thing I am certain:  characterizing the question as one of “having better relation with Russia” is entirely the wrong way to think about these matters.  International Relations is not relationship counseling.  Avoiding a nuclear war calls not for two men to like one another, or for them to get along, or for them to have “better relations,” and as for the relationship between two countries, all such language drawn from popular talk about interpersonal relationships is utterly irrelevant.  Avoiding a nuclear war between two nations neither of which seeks to have a nuclear war requires clarity, predictability, successful and reliable channels of communication, and rationality.

Putin is, in my utterly amateurish judgment, quite capable of behaving with self-interested rationality on the basis of clear, predictable, reliable channels of communication.  Trump is not, and in my guesstimate is just as likely to react irrationally toward Putin when they are BFFs as when they are sworn enemies.

For what it is worth, I judge that Pence would be more predictable, albeit equally despicable.

For these reasons, I am dubious about Chomsky’s expressed view concerning the relationship between Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE

Well, Trump is sucking up to Putin and my back has stopped hurting so I think it is time to take stock.  The behavior of the President is so revolting, the actions of his Cabinet so randomly evil, the behavior of the Congressional and Senatorial Republicans so maliciously cruel that it is difficult to achieve any balanced perspective on the American political scene.  While I have been shelving books and putting up pictures, I have been turning over in my mind what I have read and seen on television lately.  The NYTIMES Op Ed piece by Penn and Stein served, like a train wreck, to concentrate my mind, and this morning during my daily walk I sorted through my thoughts.  Herewith, as best I am able, are the conclusions to which I came.

I begin with two facts that define the terrain on which political struggles are fought in America and circumscribes the realm of the possible.  First, a sizable fraction of the electorate, but by no means a majority, supports or can be brought to support progressive social and economic policies – policies that I think of as constituting enlightened welfare state capitalism.  Some fraction of that fraction is sympathetic to European style social democracy – strong labor unions, single payer health care, and the like – and a very much smaller fraction of that fraction of a fraction can actually contemplate collective ownership of the means of production without having an attack of the vapors.

Second, in round numbers, two-thirds of eligible voters vote in Presidential election years and one-third vote in off-year Congressional elections.

From these two facts I draw two conclusions, one depressing the other not so.  My first conclusion is that at least as things stand now, a robust progressive Social Democratic-style set of institutions and proposals has little or no chance of becoming the new normal, the accepted, unquestioned daily politics for which a majority will vote reflexively if nothing special is going on.  There are countries where that is indeed the norm, but America is not and is not likely to become one of them, at least in my lifetime [a short time span, admittedly.]

My second conclusion is that transient enthusiasms can have a considerable effect on the character of the government actually elected and the policies actually enacted.  With only a third of the electorate voting in off-years and two-thirds in Presidential years, intensity of preference, as rational choice theorists put it, actually makes a very great deal of difference in election outcomes.  The reason is simple: a passionate vote counts for no more than an indifferent one, but passionate voters are more likely to vote.

At the moment, for a variety of reasons, most of which have weird orange hair, the progressive fraction is more fired up than at any time I can recall, including the anti-war days of the Viet Nam era.  People are donating money, they are calling the offices of their Representatives and Senators, they are attending Town Halls, they are even volunteering to run for local public office.  This intensity of political expression and action began the day after the Inauguration, and it does not seem to be subsiding.

For these reasons, I think this is a moment, our moment, to translate the intensity on our side into some form of measurable political power.  A strong, uncompromising progressive program, strongly supportive of workers’ rights and especially union rights, a program calling for a federal minimum wage of at least $15/hr., for stringent controls of Wall Street, for higher taxes on the rich, for a trillion dollar infrastructure program --  all of that can win in  the present political climate.  Mind you, this moment will not last – no such moments do.  The coalition of actual voters making this possible will dissipate before very long, and we will have to fight endless rear-guard actions against those seeking to reverse what we have accomplished.  But I am convinced this is a moment when such programs, and the candidates who support them, can indeed win.

Clearly the touchstone issue, the mobilizer, is health care, so this is the moment when we should “defend” Obamacare by proposing to transform it into universal single payer health insurance.  We should make not merely the defense but the extension of health insurance the centerpiece of a comprehensive progressive program, and we should seek out candidates at every level who will embrace that proposal and run on it.

I believe that in 2018 the forces of reaction will be dispirited and will not turn out to vote.   Even if I am right, the moment will not last.  We must make the most of it.