Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 4 of 4)

The fact that the US is confronted with the kind of serious problems that Bacevich describes does not mean that the country will deal with them in a constructive way. His own description of the nature of Trump’s electoral coalition illustrates that.

The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”

This book is reminiscent in some ways of one that appeared at the beginning of Bacevich’s Emerald City period, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Culture of Contentment (1992). He identified some of the large challenges and dangers for American democracy that he saw then. Including the central role that the fear of international Communism had played in the maintenance of the US’ massive military establishment:

The fear of Communism was also responsible for three major developments in the military power as that existed in the political economy of contentment. The first, supplementing and extending what was an already large expenditure, was a further enormous increase in military and defense spending as the constituency of contentment gained full power in the 1980s; this was the Reagan arms buildup. The second was the emergence of a largely autonomous military establishment standing above and apart from democratic control. The third was a series of foreign ventures designed ostensibly to arrest the threatening spread of Communism but with the further purpose of justifying the expanding role of the military establishment by providing a presumed enemy. [my emphasis]

As Bacevich himself has long been explaining, the internal political imperatives connected to the military-industrial complex create strong incentives for an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy. And if one enemy (the “Communist bloc”) goes away, there is not just vague psychological incentives but very material lobbies with ample funding that will be eager to create a new one. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) has recently come under scrutiny for its years-long advocacy for war against Iran. (James Carden, “Will This Billionaire-Funded Think Tank Get Its War With Iran? The Nation 01/08/2020; Nick Wadhams, U.S. Official Central to Hawkish Iran Policies Departs NSC Bloomberg Politics 01/04/2020; John Judis, The Little Think Tank That Could Slate 08/10/2015)

Galbraith concluded his book on an explicit note of “sadness”:

Books of this genre are expected to have a happy ending. With awareness of what is wrong, the corrective forces of democracy are set in motion. And perhaps they would be now were they in a full democracy - one that embraced the interests and votes of all the citizens. Those now outside the contented majority would rally, or, more precisely, could be rallied, to their own interest and therewith to the larger and safer public interest. Alas, however, we speak here of a democracy of those with the least sense of urgency to correct what is wrong, the best insulation through short-run comfort from what could go wrong.

A key point of Galbraith’s notion of the contented majority is the low voter participation in the US. The 2018 midterm election produced a striking increase in voter participation which produced a distinct shift to the Democrats and away from Trumpism. As Galbraith emphasized, the wealthy and more affluent Americans have high voting participation rates, while the participation rate of the less affluent is distinctly lower. That means the portion of the electorate that votes is considerably financially better off, whiter, older, and more conservative than the American people, the potential electorate. The Republicans are acutely aware of this fact and want to preserve that condition. Thus, they have aggressively pursued segregationist voter-suppression measures against black and Latino voters, measures that also often affect poor whites, as well.

This is one of the fundamental challenges for actually fixing the serious problems that Bacevich describes. Another is the extreme effect of private money in political campaigns, already a serious problem in 1992, far more extreme now in the Citizens United era. Those are both serious limitations on American democracy.

And with the vast increase of Executive power that Bacevich identifies as one of the four basic markers of the Emerald City era, the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College system has become a bigger problem than ever now that, as he says, the Presidency is “overshadowing every other aspect of American politics.”

Moving away from neoliberal globalism is as necessary as it is difficult. This in itself requires not only confronting oligarchical power, but reducing it. And that inevitably involves not just limiting but reversing the current staggering concentrations of wealth and income. Rightwing populism will not fix those problems. But far-right populists like Steve Bannon do mobilize around those issues. The model “illiberal democracy” in the European Union right now is Viktor Orbáns Hungary that combines oligarchic rule with a certain level of social support for the less affluent with xenophobic nationalism and unaccountable oligarchic rule. In the United States, the progressive left offers a meaningful counter-appeal to that particular anti-neoliberal perspective. The corporate Democrats embrace corporate-deregulation neoliberalism. Any successful movement to build constructive political alternatives to neoliberal globalism will also have to be backed by a much-expanded labor union movement.

Moving away from militarized global dominance by the US will require a political movement that demands drastic changes in the current interventionist foreign policy, most obviously an end to the Forever War approach currently being pursued by Republican and Democratic administrations, including Trump’s. It will also require a major reduction in the US military budget and a major de-mystifying of the military in American political culture. As Bacevich points out in this book and elsewhere, the current idolatry of the military coincides with an unprecedented isolation of those actually bearing the burden of military service from the large majority of the American people. This situation needs to be countered either by military proscription (the draft) or by providing other concrete incentives to make military service more attractive to “middle class” families. But only a draft is likely to ensure that people like Trumps and Bushes would share even remotely equally in military service.

It’s less clear how the situation Bacevich problematizes as “freedom, empowerment, and choice became all but interchangeable terms” can be resolved in any short term. White racism is real, it’s damaging, and it’s wrong. It’s been an effective mobilizing tool for conservative and reactionary politics for the entire history of the Republic. Bacevich notes how not only did Obama’s election did not end racism against African-Americans, it was met by a militant racist counter-display. And gruesome elements of white racism like the often wanton murder of unarmed black men by white cops and the grossly disproportionate effect of law like prohibiting marijuana usage have had on African-American men.

Women’s rights have not yet been fully realized and the political assault on the core right to abortion – a right that is distinctly a woman’s right – is intense. Antiabortionists have gone a long way in many parts of the country to seriously restrict women’s access to abortion.

And as we’ve seen during the Trump Administration particularly, many Republicans are willing to literally howl in approval at Trump’s Nuremberg rallies for hostility to Latinos and immigrants, including the sadistic kidnapping of children from their parents and caging them in brutal and even life-threatening conditions.

And this is where a general appeal that “the proximate aim should not be to obscure differences but to sharpen them further and thereby give them meaning” misses a critical element of the current situation. In the “cultural wars”, the current polarization is asymmetrical. Black people aren’t demanding that unarmed, young white men be murdered by rogue cops proportional to how young black men are murdered. Democrats may be overly fond of partisan gerrymandering, but they aren’t aggressively purging white voters from voter rolls. Women’s rights advocates aren’t demanding that women who don’t won’t abortions have abortions forced on them. Latinos aren’t demanding that native-born white children be kidnapped from their parents, caged, and occasionally allowed to die on the concrete floors of their cages. And there are no Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden rallies where angry mobs howl for such things.

Bacevich notes, not entirely inaccurately that Hillary Clinton in 2016 “conveyed a distinct cluelessness, as illustrated by her infamous dismissal of Trump's supporters as ‘deplorables’.” But the truth is that people who enjoy the thought of immigrant children being kidnapped from their parents are deplorable. People who chant “blue lives matter” as approval of extralegal murders of unarmed black people are deplorable. Christian fundamentalists who want to not only ban abortion but also jail or execute abortion doctors and women who do get abortions – or even jail women who have miscarriages! – they are deplorable. And for a non-trivial number of those taking such positions, their prejudices and hatreds are generally more important to them than even the economic well-being of themselves or their children. White nationalist identity politics provides some real psychological rewards. And people who are strongly authoritarian are always going to be attracted to characters like Trump who they can image as a Stern Heroic Leader.

The point here is not that people firmly attached to such positions are incorrigible for life on such matters. Some of them are. Others are actually capable of having a real dialogue and altering their viewpoints and viewing their own experience in a more complex way. For the hardcores, as David Neiwert writes in his book Alt-America (2017), “There’s really no point in trying to reach out to people who will only return your hand as a bloody stump. The only thing they understand, in the end, is brute political force: being thrashed at the ballot box, and in the public discourse.”

In other words, white racism, sexism, and xenophobia have to be challenged and defeated for democracy and social equality to flourish. And in the current situation of asymmetric polarization, no mutual live-and-let-live attitude between white racists and minorities, between fanatical antiabortionists and women, between rabid xenophobes and decent people. Which means that anti-discrimination laws and regulations as well as special protections for electoral rights will be absolute necessary for the foreseeable future. Asymmetric polarization is real, and it can’t be ignored or wished away.

Part 1: From Boone City to the Emerald City

Part 2: The Emerald City Presidencies

Part 3: Bacevich’s political perspective

Part 4: The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”