War and destruction is slouching towards Bethlehem. With Israel about to invade Lebanon for the, what is it, fourth, eighth, nineteenth time, and Vladimir Putin about to escalate the stalemated war against NATO’s proxy, Ukraine, the US election should be and feel momentous. How the most powerful and extended country in the world behaves in the next four years is going to determine how we live.
Yet the election is being fought on domestic grounds, with international affairs drawn into the mix merely as an index or symptom of attitudes. Typically the second US presidential debate, of three, would have been on foreign policy. That will not now happen, a symptom of the US governance system in some small ways, starting to come apart, and leaving the contestation in disarray.
The Democrats may well be breathing a sigh of relief. As the brutality of Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now, again, Lebanon, start to become a single entity, the pressures on the Democrats will become immense — from the nationwide left and progressives they need to get the vote out, and in Michigan, which has the country’s largest Arab-American community. Democrat fealty to Israel will persuade some to stay home, and others to actually vote Republican on economic and social conservative grounds.
The Democrats will also be glad that the issue of the Russia-Ukraine war is not going to get any sort of serious airing. This issue has seen the left side of politics split — with many progressives fusing together with liberal interventionists to see Ukraine as a nation long struggling for its freedom etc etc.
The actual left, what remains of such, sees it as the end-product of the West’s use of Ukraine as a proxy to limit Russia’s expansion into world affairs, and to expand NATO quite far beyond the North Atlantic. Having been invaded, Ukraine is now in a war of national defence, and has a right to defend itself. How much support the US and its vassals (Australia mentioned!) provide for that is another question entirely.
Trump and the Republicans are playing a double game on this sort of foreign relations. They’re backing Israel to the hilt for obvious reasons. But they have returned to an isolationist stance on Russia-Ukraine, a position which combines genuine realpolitik with active support for Putin’s Russia.
Progressives have added the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag to the rainbow flag on their profiles, presenting the country as an analogue to culture war struggles. The right has followed in turn — indeed, preceded the left — by actively identifying with Russia.
Ukraine is quirky, chic, led by a comedian, who once played the president of Ukraine in a sitcom. Shot to power by the backing of the TV oligarch he produced his shows for, he went rogue — i.e. became a client of NATO/the EU. The whole thing is so “wag the dog” it’s laughable, but it’s become a thing. Ukraine is hip, Putin is Big Daddy Russia, defending Christian civilisation and jailing Pussy Riot.
For one whole section of the Republicans, Russia has become the white European otherworld, capable of defending that civilisation against pagan nihilism, due to its authoritarianism, which allows Putin to keep the “elites” in check, preventing them from swarming the state and media as in “the democracies” (their scare quotes not mine, though…)
For most, that is not a sudden abandonment of the US — it’s simply the idea that the US has been occupied, and that Russia is Christian government in exile and a base from which to reclaim the republic. Thus they have no problem, some of them, with accepting Russian money, though that has been wildly exaggerated by the Democrats in order to discredit any and all opposition to US liberal interventionism.
All this needed thrashing out, and it ain’t gonna be, and Kamala Harris has probably saved herself from losing a point or two, or more, by not having to stand at a podium defending US backing for the unilateral state of Israel, while condemning Russia. Keeping those two causes apart may have been a lucky break for the Democrats.
This focus on the domestic, and especially on a couple of key issues, is occurring as humanity gets ever closer to crossing a threshold that has been before us since 1945: the second and possibly repeated use of nuclear weapons in conflict. This is going to happen eventually, in decades or in weeks, or anywhere in between.
Like most such events, it is impossible to imagine it will happen, in prospect. In retrospect, it will be impossible to think how it could have been otherwise. Quite possibly the Democrats are tempted to use it as a campaign point, and may well do so in the coming weeks. It was, after all, the nuclear war question that gave LBJ his huge victory over hardline anti-Communist cold warrior Barry Goldwater in 1964 (Hillary Clinton worked on that campaign, as a young volunteer. For Goldwater).
Why wouldn’t the Democrats go all out on this question of whether a crazy man might have control of the US in a nuclear situation? Probably because, though it is Russia doing the sabre rattling, the very real possibility is that the first nation to use nukes since 1945 will be Israel. That country is now widely believed to have a range of nukes, from full city-destroying missiles, to “suitcase” tactical nuclear weapons.
Most nuclear-armed states have such weapons, they are made to be used, and they will be. When they are, the Western lobby group of whichever country uses them will abandon any inherited notion of a return to nuclear weapons as a “red line” for all humanity, and defend their side’s necessary use of them, against all others.
There are life-and-death domestic issues on the ballot for Americans — cost of living and legal abortion being two. The Democrats are running hugely hard on the latter, calculating, I guess, that whoever they lose in grumpy middle-aged men and conservative religious Democrat women, they will gain in turning out younger women who might not otherwise vote. It’s a way of cutting through the post-news fog.
But the overwhelming focus on domestic matters puts the US in a weird place. This really is a mark of the place in decline as a healthy and vibrant world power. It is becoming cicada nation, armed, bristling and extended on the outside, decaying within. This is a country whose citizens have long since ceased to want to be a liberal empire. Even after that, they wanted dominance, usually expressed as a clean missile strike on some upstart client state.
Now, there is a sense that they don’t even want that. What’s called the “culture wars” is really a social war between two massive groupings which behave like the old economic classes. For many in the US, the battle between the college and non-college educated is the war they’re now fighting, and it is one not merely about culture in a limited sense, or class, but about collective being-in-the-world, what the world is for you as a group, what its objects and values are.
There are cross-cutting issues, and abortion is obviously one of them, which is why the college-educated Democrats are so keen on it. But “the war” is of a type deeper than previous recent social struggles. Decades ago, a tycoon and a Communist worker could agree in some ways on how the world was “constituted”. Now the division between the two groups defined around knowledge have much less in common. That is why the Democrats are running neck-and-neck against a candidate who is a zombie version of his 2016 self, which was a zombie version of Reagan.
The Republicans are building a force of everyone rich and poor who thinks and values things a certain way. The Democrats have to build a coalition of groups who share political values, but think in very different ways. It’s a harder task, it will be for sometime, and all the while it is happening, the US remains an empire, slouching towards Bedlam…
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