Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race.… as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything.… They … feel their dreams slipping away … opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.
Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.10 (Emphasis added.)
In Obama’s mind, black anger at “racial injustice and inequality” is “legitimate.” White anger and resentment over affirmative action, crime, and welfare abuse is not. Why not? Although whites may “feel” they are victims of racial injustice, this feeling is not rooted in reality, but is only an irrational emotion that is being “exploited” by conservative opportunists.
This passage reveals the great blindness and great dilemma of the left. It cannot admit that the anger of white America is legitimate. Obama cannot concede that injustice is being done to white people, because they are white, for he would then have to ask himself: Who is inflicting this injustice?
For the Left to concede that white anger is a legitimate response to racial injustices done to white people would be to concede that the Left is guilty of the very sin of which it accuses the right.
Obama’s contrast of black America’s legitimate anger with white America’s manipulated feelings recalls Murray Rothbard’s insight:
Anger by the good guys, the accredited victim groups, is designated as “rage,” which is somehow noble.… On the other hand, anger by designated oppressor groups is not called “rage,” but “resentment”: which conjures up evil little figures, envious of their betters, skulking around the edges of the night.11
Obama’s ideology was manifest in the Ground Zero mosque dispute. Many intellectuals denied that there could be anything motivating opponents of the mosque other than ignorance or prejudice. Wrote Michael Kinsley: “Is there any reason to oppose the mosque that isn’t bigoted, or demagogic, or unconstitutional? None that I’ve heard or read.”12
Obama initially and instinctively took that side. But so stunned was he by the reaction he said the following day he was not endorsing the wisdom of putting the mosque at Grand Zero, only the imam’s right to do so.
If Obama is the personification of the revolution, Palin was its antithesis. A pro-life Christian mother of five who celebrates the “Real America,” Palin became an icon for people repelled by Obama. The two are the antipodes of the culture war.
Herein lies Obama’s dilemma. Millions of Democrats who revere the memory of FDR, Truman, and JFK never cottoned to the 1960s revolutions, never accepted those values. They do not believe Vietnam was an immoral war. They do not believe all religions or all lifestyles are equal. They do not believe America is a racist country. They believe her to be the best country in the history of man. They love her. And, yes, they cling to their Bibles, beliefs, and guns, and resent the hell out of being called bigots.
Many names have been given to the revolution begun in the 1960s—radical liberalism, secular humanism, cultural Marxism, the Gramscian revolution. But a crucial point is this: while it changed the way millions of Americans think, it never captured the heart of America, nor is it predestined to triumph. Half a century on, most Americans reject and despise its values.
Sixty-two percent of Americans believe abortions should be more tightly restricted, or outlawed. Ward Connerly’s campaign to abolish affirmative action has won in Michigan, California, Washington, and in Arizona, where it garnered 60 percent of the vote in the fall of 2010. Propositions calling for making English the official language have rarely failed. Same-sex marriage has been rejected every time it has been on a ballot. Even Obama declines to endorse it. And as Congress and Obama impose the values of Fire Island on Parris Island, he will feel the force of the counterrevolution. The culture war is not over. The culture war is never over. As it is rooted in colliding beliefs about right and wrong, God and country, good and evil, the culture war will be with us forever.
“[A]dvanced liberalism,” writes Chilton Williamson Jr., has “divided the United States between the New and the Old America, a division that is unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future, but is becoming rather more fixed and rigid”:
Liberalism in the era of Obama represents for the Old American culture what Islam does for the culture of Old Europe.…
The battle lines have been drawn. America is fated to remain a house divided against herself for many generations, and afterward to share the inevitable fate of all divided houses which are by nature ungovernable, and hence unlivable.13
Americans face a “real civil war, a war among citizens that cannot be settled by the physical separation of the adherents of the two sides, who are integrated one with the other across an entire continent.”14 Black columnist Carl Rowan came to a darker conclusion in his 1996 The Coming Race War in America.
As the revolutionaries and radicals of the 1960s did not want to live in Eisenhower’s America, traditionalists do not want to live in their America. Social peace would seem to require separation.
Vanderbilt University law professor Carol Swain sees America “increasingly at risk of large-scale racial conflict unprecedented in our nation’s history.” The risk is growing, she writes, because of the
changing demographics, the continued existence of racial preference policies, the rising expectations of ethnic minorities, the continued existence of liberal immigration policies, growing concerns about job losses associated with globalization, the demand for multiculturalism, and the internet’s ability to enable like-minded individuals to identify each other and share mutual concerns and strategies for impacting the political system.15
Swain identifies what divides us. But these forces need not lead to violence. Despite threats of “a long hot summer” if Nixon did not capitulate to “non-negotiable demands,” the urban riots stopped after 1968. Campus violence dissipated after the draft was ended. Violent crime leveled off when the Baby Boomers moved out of the high-crime age bracket and violent criminals were locked up in the millions. Rowan’s prediction in the aftermath of Oklahoma City never came to pass.
The likelihood is far greater that this unhappy family is headed for an acrimonious coexistence. What Bill Bishop, Rich Benjamin, and Orlando Patterson observed will continue: self-segregation and the withdrawal of Americans into ethnocultural enclaves of their own kind will become the natural and normal responses to diversity. America is a huge land. If we cannot live together, then let us live apart.
“How small of all that human hearts endure/That part which laws or kings can cause or cure,” said Dr. Johnson. After Nanking and Nagasaki, there appears quite a bit of heartache modern kings can cause. But cure? Dr. Johnson’s point remains valid.
THE FIRST IMPERATIVE
The first duty of a president would appear to be to put the nation’s house in order before America suffers the disaster and disgrace of a default on the national debt, a run on the dollar, or an inflation that ravages the savings of her people. That is the immediate peril. And as interest on the debt must be paid, there are only two places where substantial cuts can be made. The first is the entitlement programs—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and related social spending for unemployment insurance, Earned Income Tax Credits, veterans’ benefits, and food stamps. The second is the national security state: over $1 trillion and counting spent on two wars, an archipelago of 700 to 1,000 bases in 130 countries, our imperial embassies, foreign aid, the military-industrial complex at home, and the hidden billions spread through the government for intelligence work and nuclear weapons.
With federal spending for the third year running at 25 percent of GDP, while taxes produce only 15 percent of GDP
, deep cuts must come in both the welfare and the warfare state.
DISMANTLING THE EMPIRE
It is absurd that the United States, stumbling toward a debt default, must borrow from Japan to defend Japan, borrow from Europe to defend Europe, and borrow from the Persian Gulf to defend the Persian Gulf. How did we get to this point?
When Kennedy became president, fifty years ago, General Douglas MacArthur counseled him not to put his foot soldiers into Southeast Asia. General Eisenhower urged him to bring home the 300,000 troops in Europe, lest Europe become a dependency. Instead, Kennedy, setting out for his New Frontier, declared in his inaugural: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge—and more.”
The result: at the end of what would have been Kennedy’s second term, 525,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam and 31,000 were dead. When the nation elected Richard Nixon to end the war, it turned away from interventionism. In his “Silent Majority” address on November 3, 1969, Nixon restated the new policy he had declared in July on Guam.
First, the United States will keep all of its treaty commitments.
Second, we shall provide a shield if a nuclear power threatens the freedom of a nation allied with us or of a nation whose survival we consider vital to our security.
Third, in cases involving other types of aggression, we shall furnish military and economic assistance when requested in accordance with our treaty commitments. But we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense.16
MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Nixon were not isolationists. But all three recognized the limits of American power and were determined to put U.S. vital interests ahead of any crusading or ideological agenda. Two generations later, let us finally reconsider what these wise men advocated.
Why are scores of thousands of U.S. troops still stationed in Europe when “the evil empire” against which they were to defend Europe collapsed twenty years ago? Why can’t Europe defend itself from a Russia whose army is but a fraction of the Red Army of 1990 and whose western border is hundreds of miles east of where it was under Nicholas II? Between Russia and Central Europe lies a buffer zone of nations—Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, and Ukraine—that were part of the Russian Empire when the twentieth century began. How long must 310 million Americans defend 500 million rich Europeans from 140 million Russians whose numbers are shrinking every year? To shock the European Union into manning up to its responsibilities, the United States should declare its intent to withdraw from NATO, transfer leadership of the alliance to the Europeans, and begin to vacate air and naval bases.
“We’ve got too many daggone bases,” says U.S. air commander in Europe General Roger Brady. There’s “big money” to be saved in shutting them down and averting cuts in aircraft. “We really need to look at the real estate question again.… I don’t think we can afford not to.”17
The general is correct. Our strongest NATO allies are Britain and France, nuclear powers both, and Germany, which has the fourth largest economy on earth. With Poland, they can defend themselves and Central Europe as well. As for the Baltic states, America is not going to war if some Muscovite militarist marches into Tallinn. No vital U.S. interest could justify so insane a war. Our response would have to be restricted to the political, diplomatic, and economic.
The United States should also renegotiate its security treaties with South Korea and Japan and remove U.S. ground troops from both countries. We are not going to fight another land war with China or North Korea. No vital interest could justify such a war, and the American people would not support sending an army to Korea like the 330,000 soldiers we sent in the 1950s.
The European and Asian defense pacts negotiated by secretaries of state Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles were relevant to that time. But that time is gone. And as our situation is new, so we must think and act anew. If America is to fight again in the Pacific or in East Asia, the decision should not be made by statesmen who died half a century ago but by the generations that must fight now.
When one looks at America’s alliances, the war guarantees we have issued, the commitments we have made to fight other countries’ wars, many dating to the 1950s, one is reminded of Lord Salisbury’s insight: “[T]he commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.” It was an 1838 treaty to secure the neutrality of Belgium that brought Britain into the Great War of 1914–1918, which led to World War II, the bankruptcy of Britain, and the end of the empire.
The United States must bring an end to its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They have bled us for a decade and done less to make us safe than to inflame the Islamic world against us. And once the troops are home, the U.S. bases in Central Asia should be closed. This region is fated to be a theater of rivalry among its ethnic groups, and China and Russia. U.S. interests in Central Asia are economic and commercial, not strategic.
The immediate goal must be to derail the War Party campaign to have America launch a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities that would trigger acts of terror against U.S. soldiers and civilians from Baghdad to Beirut. An early result of such a war could be the closing of the Persian Gulf, crippling the U.S. and world economies.
And what would be the justification for such an attack? Iran has enough low-enriched uranium for one nuclear test and one bomb. That uranium is under UN watch at Natanz. Were it to be moved to a site to be enriched to weapons grade, we would have a year’s notice before Iran could test a device. The Stuxnet virus, a cyber weapon likely introduced by Israel and the United States, has damaged Iran’s centrifuges and set her enrichment program back two years.18 Moreover, our sixteen intelligence agencies have never rescinded their 2007 conclusion that Iran is not actively seeking a nuclear weapon. Again, what is the justification for the new war the neocons seek?
Despite alarms about Ahmadinejad being the new Hitler, Iran has not started a war in living memory. Shia and Persian, Iran swims in a vast sea of Sunni Arabs, Sunni Turks, and Sunni Afghans. Half her people are Azeri, Arab, Kurd, and Baluch. National dissolution along tribal and ethnic lines is a permanent threat. Her economy moves at a crawl. Her population, part of which is pro-American, is fed up with mullah rule. Elections come in less than two years. Even if Iran had a nuclear bomb, would she give it to terrorists to use and thereby insure her annihilation? As Bismarck said, preemptive war is like committing suicide out of a fear of death.
If America could deter the Russia of Stalin and the China of Mao, who declared himself willing to lose three hundred million Chinese, why can’t we deter an Iran that has no bomb and no missile to deliver it? As for nuclear blackmail, Kim Jong-il has atom bombs. Has he intimidated the United States?
Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have all called our deficit-debt crisis the principal threat to national security. Downsizing the empire, ending our wars, and reducing our commitments to fight new wars that have nothing to do with vital interests, have become strategic imperatives.
Resistance will be intense—from diplomats and domestic agents of foreign powers, from the military-industrial complex and the lobbyists it deploys, from journalists, think tank scholars, and professors who have built careers as the acolytes of empire. But if we do not do this rationally and methodically, it will be done for us the way it was done for the British and French, through humiliation and defeat.
Troop withdrawals and a reduction in foreign bases can be made more palatable by a rise in military sales to nations that would now be undertaking their own defense. And the money saved could be used to restore the military to the condition it was in before our decade of war. The more we shrink our defense perimeter the greater the gain in national unity behind our foreign policy.
DOWNSIZING THE STATE
For
three years, the U.S. government has been spending five dollars for every three it collects in taxes. This explains the surge in both the national debt and the public debt that is held by citizens, corporations, and foreign countries. To balance the budget by cuts alone, spending would have to fall 40 percent. Were tax increases alone to be used to balance the budget, the tax load on corporations and citizens would have to rise by 67 percent.
Not since World War II have we seen such deficits. But World War II was a temporary emergency. We knew that when the war came to an end, the twelve million in the armed forces would return to civilian life and spending on tanks, trucks, ships, guns, shells, and planes would abruptly halt. Then we could begin to pay down the debt.
Today that prospect does not exist. And with Republican resistance to tax hikes and Democratic determination to defend social programs, the odds of any great compromise that produces serious deficit reduction are slim. The probability is that the march of the deficits continues until the world realizes America will never repay her debts in dollars of the same value as the ones she borrowed. Then the crisis will come.
“The difference between an optimist and a pessimist,” said journalist Clare Boothe Luce, “is that the pessimist is usually better informed.” While it is difficult to see how our political class summons the courage to impose the necessary sacrifices upon its constituents, here are ideas for budget cuts based on two principles. The public sector must shrink and the productive sector grow, and all should sacrifice something:
• A two-year freeze on all federal salaries, including “in-step” pay raises, and including the military.
• A two-year suspension of all cost-of-living adjustments in all entitlement programs from Social Security to veterans’ benefits to federal pensions.
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 42