What If the Empire Held an Election and Nobody Came?
What if a presidential candidate threw a political rally, and nobody came? What if a government held an election, and nobody voted? What if that same government started a war, and nobody participated, whether in body or in spirit?
These questions are related.
Election season is trudging on, as are the wars. Many fans of peace hold out hope that if the former turns out a certain way, the latter may at last be mitigated.
Some are terrified of Hillary Clinton. And who can blame them? As Secretary of State, “Dick Cheney in a pantsuit” was midwife to so many of the disasters that wrack the world with bloodshed and chaos to this day. Many anti-war folk of a left-leaning persuasion are flocking to Bernie Sanders.
Others are more concerned with finally toppling the neocons from their perches of power. And who can blame them? The roots of our geopolitical plight reach back to before Clinton’s executive tenure, when the Bush administration neocons were launching their plans to remake the Greater Middle East. Many anti-war folk of the right-leaning persuasion are looking to Donald Trump to be their neo-con-slayer.
But is this really the best we can do?
At the end of the day, Sanders is a moderate foreign interventionist who isn’t all too interested in foreign policy in the first place. Must anti-interventionists really settle for that in order to oppose hyper-interventionist Clinton?
And Trump actually out-hawks many Republicans when it comes to torture, the security state, civilian casualties, and blood-for-oil. Is such a man really to be the anti-war movement’s appointed champion against the neo-cons?
Thankfully, there is no need to support lesser warmongers in order to oppose greater ones.
Imagine if all the anti-war progressives now supporting Sanders, plus all the America-firsters now supporting Trump, were to stop flooding the internet and social media with electoral polemics. What if all that passion and digital ink was redirected to the message of peace.
Imagine “Stop the War on Yemeni Babies!” blazoned across the web instead of “Stop Hillary!” Or “Don’t Let the CIA Arm Al Qaeda in Syria” instead of “Don’t Let the Establishment Steal the Nomination from Trump.”
An intense focus on policies over personas could really turn public sentiment against the actual combat of war, and divert public attention away from its obsession with the theatrical combat of political Wrestle-mania.
You may wonder, what about the consequences of the peace camp abandoning its stations in the electoral battle against the worst war hawks? What if as a result Hillary or Ted Cruz’s neo-con allies sweep to victory?
A clique may seize office, but the new administration will not govern in a vacuum. All regimes must strive to preserve public legitimacy. And no regime can afford to flout too blatantly the prevailing spirit of the times. The new president may have won a majority of votes. But if only a small proportion of the country actually voted in the first place, that translates into a rather shrunken mandate.
And if the non-voting bulk of the public is stridently anti-war, that especially diminishes the president’s foreign policy mandate in particular. Faced with a sizable segment of the public intransigently opposed to war, even a militaristic president will be constrained, and may even need to draw back. Even Richard Nixon ended a war when public opinion demanded it.
Throughout history, most reductions in tyrannical violence have had nothing to do with the ideology or virtue of office-holders. Instead, such reforms were the result of shifts in public sentiment. Under such conditions, to be a “reformer,” a politician need no redeeming quality other than being self-serving enough to shift with the wind. And if Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, or any other politician are anything, it is self-serving.
I’m not saying we should hope Hillary or Ted will win. I’m saying that who wins doesn’t matter nearly as much as the public’s attitude toward war and toward the Washington war machine itself.
On election day, if fewer people lined up dutifully to choose between aspiring elective emperors, and more people assembled defiantly to decry the empire itself, peace would have much better prospects.
They Will Never Stop Letting You Down
He was supposed to be different: a hero for hope; a champion of change; a one-man rebuke to the bellicose jingoism and unilateral arrogance of the Bush administration. President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize early in his first term on his perceived promise alone.
Yet, Obama only perpetuated and expanded the Long War that Bush began.
He launched a futile “surge” in Afghanistan that squandered over 1,500 American lives (74% of total U.S. casualties in that war ).
He had hardly “ended” Iraq War II before launching Iraq War III (the War on ISIS) over a handful of foreign-soil murders and internet snuff films.
When the Arab Spring emerged, he did not welcome it as an assertion of self-determination and a cue for the US empire to exit graciously, as some of his supporters might have expected their “peace President” to do.
Instead, when the Arab Spring reached the US client states of Egypt and Yemen, he supported counter-revolutions to reimpose dictatorship and restore their client status. And now that the new puppet ruler of Yemen has been overthrown, he is backing a vicious Saudi war to reinstall him.
And when the Arab Spring reached “rogue states” Libya and Syria (global empires see every non-client as a rogue), he co-opted, militarized, and radicalized the uprisings. He armed and abetted jihadists, sending both countries spiraling into civil war and chaos, and forcing hundreds of thousands to either flee into Europe or drown in the Mediterranean Sea trying.
On top of all this, he launched multiple drone wars (which have set precedents for the assassination of American citizens and the routine assassination of anonymous targets), imperialist pivots to Asia and Africa, and a new cold war with nuclear Russia after fomenting a civil war in Ukraine.
Far from fulfilling Hope for peace and delivering a Change in US foreign policy, Barack Obama has joined the likes of Henry Kissinger as just one more war criminal with a Peace Prize.
For pro-peace libertarians, conservatives, and progressives alike, their recent attempts to vote away the Bush administration’s legacy of war have been utter failures.
So will it ever be. War is vital to the State. The State was born of war and is nourished by it. This irresistibly conditions the incentives of those who hold its offices. The State is a war machine and cannot be repurposed for anything contrary to its function.
This is especially true for a global empire with a vast, vested, and nested deep state bureaucracy and military-industrial complex.
Even worse than such failures and reversals for short-term peace are their ripple effects on the prospects for long-term peace.
Ideology is what ultimately decides whether there will be war or peace, tyranny or freedom. And so when office-seekers and office-holders use their prominent positions to impact ideology for the worse, it can be even more damaging long-term than the direct effects of their policies.
For example, Rand Paul has not merely embraced many of the War Party’s policies, but has adopted its talking points. By doing so he is in practice working to undo his own father’s most important advances for peace (although thankfully not very effectively, since he’s not making much of impact in any direction).
What Ron Paul accomplished for peace, he did so by using his position, not as a policy lever, but as an educational pulpit. He spent his time in Congress giving speeches and voting no. And even his no votes were speeches in a sense: registered statements of protest. They almost never directly affected policy, since he never made political deals.
He used his Presidential campaigns in the same way: essentially pirating the excessive bandwidth the media allots to the Presidential campaigns to broadcast the philosophy of peace and liberty. His campaign was far more an educational campaign than a political one.
His success was spectacular. With one conspicuous act of courage and statement of principle in particular, he changed the minds of multitudes and launched a movement.
It happened during a televised Republican Primary debate for the 2008 election. On that stage, Ron Paul radically distinguished himself from the rest of the candidates by characterizing the 9/11 attacks as blowback from the US government’s interventionist foreign policy.
Rudy Giuliani, the “mayor of 9/11,” immediately anathematized Ron Paul for blaspheming the greatest sacrament of the Holy Homeland and demanded a retraction.
Ron Paul treated Giuliani’s demand as a lovely opportunity for more speaking time to use to hammer his point home even harder: to elaborate on his public mini-lecture on the concept of blowback. What to most would have been a backtrack-inducing, career-ending incident was for Ron Paul a movement-launching, teachable moment. Countless people have said that they became anti-war after watching Ron Paul in those debates, and particularly after that moment.
Rand Paul has been criticized for never seizing his own “Giuliani moment” in the 2016 campaign. But it is worse than that. His campaign trail showings have been rife with statements that are actually antithetical to his father’s “Giuliani moment.”
In his exchange with Giuliani, Ron Paul famously said:
“They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there.”
This was a rebuttal to Bush’s catchphrase: “They hate our freedoms.” The ludicrous implication is that our female drivers and voting booths are so offensive to our attackers’ Islamist sensibilities that it drives them into complex international campaigns of murder-suicide.
This was the crude narrative that Ron Paul heroically dispelled for so many. Terroristic guerrilla wars against empires often draw from religious extremism to galvanize their warriors . But that does not change the fact that they are primarily driven by opposition to imperial domination.
Rand, however, seems to be working to restore the crude narrative his father had combatted. He has adopted as his oft-repeated foreign policy slogan: “The enemy is radical Islam.” In his announcement of his candidacy he said:
“Without question we must defend ourselves and American interests from our enemies, but until we name the enemy, we can’t win the war. The enemy is radical Islam. You can’t get around it. And not only will I name the enemy, I will do whatever it takes to defend America from these haters of mankind.”
According to Rand then, and contrary to Ron, the challenge before us is not defusing extremism by ending the interventionism that energizes it. It is not about “just coming home” as Ron always preached. It is not about thereby ending the war, but about “winning” it. Our chief problem is not our blowback-generating empire, but our foreign “enemy.” And our enemies aren’t “attacking us because we’re over there”; they are attacking us simply because they embrace radical Islam. Their religion makes them, not just haters of freedom, but “haters of mankind.” With this, Rand actually one-ups Bush. They don’t just “hate us because we’re free”; they hate us because we’re human!
This is the worst kind of simple-minded, jingoistic rhetoric and “analysis” parading around in the mantle of liberty. It is a “Giuliani moment” in the sense that it sounds like something Giuliani himself would say while denouncing Rand’s father.
And it is incredibly pernicious.
It hardly matters whether Rand Paul’s concrete foreign policy proposals are technically non-interventionist if you look at their fine print, as some of his die-hard supporters are so adept at doing. After all, it’s not like he is going to win, for all his pandering “pragmatism.”
What truly matters is the public’s basic foreign policy worldview. Do they see today’s global turmoil as chiefly a problem of empire and intervention? Or do they see it as a Manichean struggle between unalloyed champions for goodness and incorrigibly evil foreign villains? With the former, we will have peace. With the latter, war. By pulling public discourse toward the latter, Rand Paul has in effect joined the War Party. (Although, again, thankfully he hasn’t had very much pull to speak of.)
So will it ever be. Politics and the State demand such pandering and compromises. It is a truly rare individual who can stand firm and resist that demand. American history records only one.
Campaign rhetoric is one way in which politicians can adversely affect ideology. The other chief way is through the object lessons offered by their actual policy records.
For example, during the 2012 election, I predicted that:
“…Obama’s continued foreign meddling would sow the seeds of further conflict and global instability. Yet this failure would be blamed on his ostensibly ‘soft’ foreign policy, thereby giving peace a bad name.”
I dare say my prediction has been borne out by events. This is especially true because Obama’s militarism has been largely covert and by proxy, and therefore under the media radar. This obscures the true cause of the “blowback” that has since ensued, making it easy to blame Obama’s high-profile “dovish” policies, like his Iraq “withdrawal” and his refusal to bomb the Syrian and Iranian regimes.
Indeed, that is the propaganda drumbeat being pounded every day by the War Party, with considerable success.
Hardly anybody tells the truth that ISIS returned to Iraq from Syria as conquerors on the march due to Obama’s major interventions in Syria in support of ISIS’s allies in the uprising against the regime. “What Syrian interventions?” most would reply.
Instead the War Party is able to make the superficially plausible accusation that ISIS conquered north-western Iraq because Obama pulled most of the American troops out of the country, weakling “peacenik” that he is. The lesson this false record imparts is: “Don’t ever leave. If you don’t want terrorists gaining ever more power, you’re just going to have to occupy the rogue states you invade forever.”
And hardly anybody tells the truth that the refugees now flooding Europe or drowning in the Mediterranean are fleeing civil wars fomented by Obama in Syria and Libya. Again, “what Syrian intervention?”
And because Obama adopted the “moderate” policy of “merely” bombing Libya, as opposed to invading and occupying it, most Americans are not even aware of that war of regime change and its role in cauldronizing that country.
Thus Obama’s low-profile war-waging enables the War Party to instead blame the refugee crisis on his high-profile, “dithering” failure to directly bomb and overthrow the Syrian regime.
And if you think things would be any different with a President Bernie Sanders, you’re fooling yourself.
Just as the market took the blame for the blowback from the low-profile market interventionism of Reagan and Bush Jr, peace is taking the blame for the blowback from the low-profile foreign interventionism of Obama.
Reagan and Bush maybe did less direct damage to the market than the candidates they defeated would have. But this was very likely outweighed by the long-term damage they did to the reputation of the market. Similarly, Obama has maybe waged less war than Mitt Romney would have. But this will very likely be outweighed by the long-term damage he has done to the reputation of peace.
This is one reason it never makes sense to support the lesser short-term evil; in politics, such a choice will very likely wind up being the greater long-term evil.
If peace had any chance in politics, it would have found true champions (or at least one!) in the members of Congress swept into office by public regret over the Iraq War, and a true deliverer in the President with a clear mandate to repudiate the warlike Bush legacy.
But politics is inherently pernicious to peace. Far more promising are such worthy endeavors as education (like Ron Paul’s movement-making teaching tour), economic activism (like the BDS movement against the Israeli occupation of Palestine), resistance (like Thoreau’s tax-resistance to the Mexican-American War), and generally clamoring for peace (like the hugely successful Vietnam protest movement and the 2013 rejection of a direct war on Syria, which was accomplished through sheer expression of opinion).
Stop looking to Commanders-in-Chief and other officers of the imperium to be the deliverers of peace. They have always let us down, and they always will.
For more details on how exactly peace and freedom can be attained without direct engagement with the political machine, see my essay, “Let’s Boycott Hate Season.”
