The Establishment Party

On Friday the Democratic Party sued the Russian government, several members of the Trump campaign, and Wikileaks for allegedly conspiring to influence the 2016 election. The lawsuit itself will very probably go nowhere and accomplish nothing for a variety of reasons. For one, foreign governments are in general immune from legal action within the United States. For another, there is very little publicly available evidence that such contact as Trump campaign officials had with Russians was in itself illegal - the people who have thus far been charged have been charged not for the actions themselves, but for lying about them to investigators.

The suit itself throws into sharp relief the direction taken by the Democratic Party under the Trump Presidency. It is in effect a direct extension of the argument it made against him during the campaign. Trump isn't like "normal" Republicans. He is exotic and dangerous to the norms and structures of the government, and as such even (or perhaps especially?) the comfortable and respectable should fear him. He isn't even really, purely American, because his election was manufactured by the Russians!

It isn't difficult to divine what this argument is designed to accomplish. It aims, as the Clinton campaign did, to capture a population that is by temperament thoroughly Republican but disturbed by some aspect of Trump's behavior or government, and subsume it into a working majority of Moderation. Even the choice of the bogeyman in Vladimir Putin evokes the Cold War paranoia that is practically embedded in what is left of the American middle class.

The practical consequences of such a strategy are revealing. The party has discouraged and in a number of cases openly opposed candidates to the left of the party norm, in spite the evidence given by the 2016 primary and recent local elections that such candidates can generate an enormous amount of enthusiasm. This is done, as it was in 2016, for the sake of giving the party the "best chance" to win in a favorable environment. The hearts and minds of the upper middle class are not in general receptive to principles rooted in a democratic socialism.

The central strategic question at issue in the Democratic Party is really how one sees the 2016 election. The party leadership genuinely believes that Hillary Clinton was unjustly denied the presidency by the combination of Russian meddling and James Comey trying to protect himself from being accused of protecting her. The strategic errors of her campaign, the hubris and insularity of its leadership, and the lack of enthusiasm born of the candidate herself running as fast as she could from an energetic base don't seem to be factors that they have taken seriously.

The Democrats, myself included at the time, banked on the quintessential moderate, establishment-approved candidate in the hope that she would be the more comfortable choice in light of the profound unfitness of her opponent for high office. That was a mistake. It permitted an ignorant, boorish man whose only guiding principle is the single-minded pursuit of controversy as a means to fame and wealth to define himself as a roguish disruptor. This at a time when the electorate was registering an almost unprecedented disgust with the direction of official policy.

The bizarre thing is that the popular backlash to the Trump Presidency has been so powerful that in spite of their strategic buffoonery the Democrats remain likely to be swept to power in at least one house of Congress. I can't help but wonder, though, at what they could accomplish with this kind of popular angst if they were willing to take bold policy stands and use this opportunity to change the contours of the public discourse.

The party has actively discouraged discussion of a truly universal health insurance system, for example, in spite of the fact that the electorate which elected Connor Lamb in a Pennsylvania special election - in a district that preferred Trump to Clinton by an overwhelming 20 point margin - said that the most important issue to them wasn't Russia or Syria or taxes or even Trump himself, but health care.

The Sanders campaign was disappointing in many respects, but one thing it demonstrated unequivocally was that campaigns that embrace causes unflinchingly can be made financially viable without the money of a top dollar donor. Yet the Democratic Party has increasingly focused on large donations from wealthy liberal benefactors without significant critical examination of how those donations unreasonably empower the people who give them, or consideration that the super-rich as a class might have material and personal interests that are fundamentally incompatible with those of the rest of the country.

The Democratic Party, having run an establishment candidate against Trump and failed to beat him, has observed Trump remaking the GOP in his own image and resolved to make itself a party of the establishment. Granted, that decision still leaves a place in the party for activists and working-class advocates, but it is a fundamentally secondary and inferior place. I have grave doubts about whether the political overlap between the upper middle class voters the Democrats are courting and the young, working class base that is providing the real political energy on the left is significant enough for the strategy to be effective in the long term.

The bottom line is that if the Democrats take power but remain in hock to corporate money and the respectability politics of the upper middle class, all they will have accomplished is the power to establish limits on the damage President Trump can do. That is, to be sure, a worthy goal, but it is by definition a shortsighted one. What positive good would such a Congress accomplish?

When Trump leaves office, however he ends up doing it, the basis of their power would be revealed to be nothing more profound than the conservation of the status quo. That is an aim which fails to meet even the modest standards of progressivism the Democrats have set for themselves in recent decades. If the holding of power is all the Democratic Party really cares about, this doesn't present much of an issue. But if it is to be an organ for legitimate, positive change for a society desperately in need of it, more ambitious goals and more democratic (small d) politics are required.

Infinite War

In the last couple of weeks, national news coverage has been mostly concerned with rapid developments in the Mueller investigation and the related hubbub concerning the imminent release of former FBI Director James Comey's memoir. The far more important news has come from Syria, where it has been claimed that the regime of Bashar al-Assad has once again directed a chemical attack on a civilian population. Assad as well as his Russian and Iranian allies deny the claim, and have invited an international organization to investigate the claim.

Assad, if he is indeed innocent on this occasion, has not made himself seem so by using chemical weapons repeatedly in the course of the civil war that has gone on for seven years. Presidents Trump and Putin have engaged in some unusually intense saber-rattling, making a US-Russian conflict seem uncomfortably possible.

Yet the President is known to be ambivalent about US involvement in Syria and the Middle East in general. The Washington Post featured a fascinating piece of reporting detailing the tension his position has produced between him and high ranking military officials. Its description of the Pentagon's position left me slack-jawed, and for that reason I will quote it directly.

For America's generals, more than 17 years of combat have served as a lesson in the limits of overhwelming force to end wars fueled by sectarian feuds, unreliable allies and persistent government corruption. "Victory is an elusive concept in that part of the world," said Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who led troops over five tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. "Anyone who goes in and tries to achieve a decisive victory is going to come away disappointed..."

 ...His remarks reflected a broader Pentagon consensus: In the absence of a clear outcome, winning for much of the U.S. military's top brass has come to be synonymous with staying put. These days, senior officers talk about "infinite war."

"It's not losing," explained Air Force Gen. Mike Holmes in a speech earlier this year. "It's staying in the game and... pursuing your objectives." 

Infinite war. Even saying the words in seriousness is an act of hubris. In a way though, it is the only possible conclusion from the premises given by current US foreign policy. If the lesson of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc is that no amount of external force can destroy an effective insurgency short of destroying the population itself, and if the policy of the United States is that neither withdrawal nor wholesale destruction of the population is acceptable, then the position taken above is the only one still available.

The problem, of course, is that the policy is bad. In spite of the fact that the military is openly admitting that "winning" these conflicts is not really feasible, in the last ten years our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has expanded to Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. We are continually pouring resources into a region-wide conflict which we admit cannot be won in the traditional sense in a vain attempt to maintain some sort of control over the situation for as long as possible.

This is not to say that the shape of our involvement hasn't evolved. The full scale occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq under George W. Bush were anathema to his successor President Obama, who nonetheless failed to abandon either the logic or practice of the open-ended, conceptually preposterous War on Terror. Since then we have instead engaged in widespread localized use of special forces, and an exponential increase in the use of lethal drones.

This makes the United States a faceless, looming, frequently deadly presence in countries already plagued by violence. Aside from significant questions about the morality of military intervention in the first place, our approach is unlikely to temper anti-American sentiment region-wide. The unavoidable conclusion is that Trump's reservations about military action in the Middle East are, whatever his reasons for harboring them, correct.

Infinite war, the constant application of violence in a region for no greater purpose than to bend the local political arc somewhat more in the image of the United States, is an atrocity. It is an act of imperial hubris sufficient to strip the United States of whatever moral credibility it retains on the world stage.

At some point, we are going to have to acknowledge that our fears cannot justify the human cost of our actions. The impermeability of the US is not a goal for which the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and the distruption of tens of millions is a reasonable price to pay. The turbulence of our domestic politics notwithstanding, we bear a responsibility as citizens to do what we can to police the use of force in our name abroad, especially when it is unjust.