Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have something in common. They both embrace colossal Pentagon budgets and both celebrate the “lethality” of the U.S. military, which, they agree, must be the strongest, bestest, in the world. They also agree on giving a blank check to Israel and its leaders to do whatever they want in Gaza to the Palestinians and will continue to provide whatever weapons Israel desires to kill massive numbers of Palestinians while flattening and destroying the Gaza Strip.
With respect to Iran, Harris appears to be even more hawkish than Trump, and indeed criticized him for not being aggressive enough with Iran’s leaders. Harris is also a strong supporter of Ukraine, seeing war as its best option to defeat Russia, whereas Trump is more skeptical of war and more open to diplomacy with Putin and Russia.
This isn’t surprising. Mainstream Democrats in DC are basically warmongering neo-conservatives on foreign policy, so a vote for Harris/Walz is a vote, as the “liberal” New York Times reported, for “muscular patriotism” (or, to paraphrase my wife, febrile and unapologetic nationalism). This is Washington Beltway conformity at its finest, as organs such as the National Interest write unironic articles about cheerleading the wonders of the military-industrial complex (MIC).
Ike got it all wrong. Embrace the MIC! Cheer for it!
See, President Dwight D. Eisenhower got it all wrong. We shouldn’t be wary of the MIC; we shouldn’t worry that its unchecked power threatens democracy and our very freedoms. No, we should embrace the MIC, celebrate it, enrich it with even more of our taxpayer dollars.
At Responsible Statecraft, Bill Hartung wrote a thoughtful response to the recent National interest piece. To me, it all depends on what vision of America you want to advance. If you want to advance America as the world’s hegemon, the empire of global reach, power, and dominance, the empire of constant warfare, then, heck, three cheers for the MIC.
But, if you want to advance America as a republic that leads “by the power of its example,” one that focuses on national defense and defense alone, then “three cheers for the MIC” guarantees the death of that republic and the corruption of its moral authority as an exemplar of democracy.
Of course, whether you choose to support Harris or Trump, we are witnessing exactly that latter fate. When you embrace the MIC, war, and empire, you set in motion the death of Democracy.
Whether America’s politicians put an “R” after their names or a “D,” it doesn’t alter the fundamental reality that the power of America’s example is very much driven and determined by examples of its military power. That is not about to change whether Harris or Trump prevails.
Last night was Obama night at the DNC as both Barack and Michelle Obama spoke to endorse Kamala Harris while denouncing Donald Trump. Perusing my various media streams this AM suggests they did a bang up job of it. Perhaps a few sobering reminders are in order:
Obama promised in 2007 he’d codify Roe v. Wade into law as his top priority. Once he won the election, he did nothing; in fact, he said it wasn’t among his top priorities.
Obama himself admitted that his administration, politically speaking, could best be described as moderate Republican. Here he was honest, for Obama was pro-corporate, pro-banks, pro-war, pro-Big Pharma, and pro-Wall Street.
Obama gave us a corporate-friendly health care plan without a single payer option. Thus, Americans continue to pay more than double what people in countries like Germany and France pay for their health care.
Obama “surged” in Afghanistan with military forces, prolonging a lost war in that country.
Obama, with Hillary Clinton by his side, overthrew Libya, leaving that a country a wreck. Open slave markets, anyone?
Obama, by his own admission, became very good at killing people, especially via drone assassinations.
Obama, after winning a Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush, promised a muscular U.S. foreign policy supported by military operations to protect vital U.S. (corporate) interests.
Obama bailed out the banks while allowing them to foreclose on millions of homeowners.
Obama admitted “We tortured some folks” and then held no one accountable except for the brave whistleblower, John Kiriakou, who helped to expose the torture regimen (and regime).
Obama said we had to look forward, not backward, so no one was held accountable for the disastrous Iraq War.
That’s just ten reminders, off the top of my head, so I wouldn’t get too excited by soaring rhetoric from the Obamas about saving democracy.
The main point here isn’t to bash the Democrats or to rain on their parade. It’s to realize where the corporate-aligned Democratic Party really stands on issues like war and economic fairness, to take that knowledge in fully, and then to use it to change the Party.
And the time to do that is now, when Harris/Walz need your vote. It’s too late to wait until after the election, which Harris just may win (a big reason why, I think, is Trump fatigue, as Americans ponder what another four years of the Trump circus may be like).
A Sign You Didn’t See Inside the Convention Hall
Democrats tell me not to attack or criticize Harris because when I do I’m helping Trump. But not to criticize politicians, not to make demands of them, is tantamount to surrendering to authoritarianism even before it’s taken hold. No one is helped in America by surrendering to a politics of joy or for that matter the MAGA crowd.
For I guarantee you, the corporate Democrats will tell you the time is NEVER right to challenge their power and agendas. The time is wrong now because of Trump. The time will be wrong in 2025 because Harris/Walz deserve a honeymoon. The time will be wrong in 2026 because of Congressional midterms. The time will be wrong in 2027-28 because of the threat of a “new” Trump (Ron DeSantis? Tom Cotton?).
One example from the Obama years. My friend and colleague, Matt Hoh, resigned from the State Department to protest the Afghan War surge. He came to Congress and spoke to Democrats. He persuaded many to take action. And then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stood up. Literally. She said Democrats had to support Obama’s expansion of the war because of a bigger fight, Obama’s fight for the Affordable Care Act.
That’s right: the time was wrong to save American and Afghan lives in a lost war because Pelosi said Obama couldn’t afford dissension within the ranks as he “fought” for the corporate-friendly ACA, most commonly known as Obamacare.
The corporate Democrats will persist in telling you the TIME IS ALWAYS WRONG to challenge them because of Trump, new Trump, some legislative priority, perhaps a foreign leader like Putin, etc. It’s total BS. The best and only time you can push them is when you have real leverage, and that’s now, before you give them your money and votes.
After all, if you don’t speak up, it’s guaranteed no one will hear you. Dare to speak up, Democrats, for what you believe in. For that is what Democracy truly is about.
It’s convention week for the Democrats, which brings me to concerns expressed by a couple of loyal readers. They tell me I’m being too hard on Kamala Harris and the Democrats. They say I’m missing a much bigger picture when I criticize them. That bigger picture is the threat of another Donald Trump victory, which very well could end elections in America, or at the very least produce a much more conservative and reactionary judiciary than the one we already have. They point to Project 2025 and challenge me to write about it and denounce it.
Together with this is one reader’s optimism for a Harris presidency. She may not be the best choice, this reader admits, but she’s shown some progressive chops. And strong support for her within the party has grown organically as she’s raised over $200 million from mostly smaller donors, money that could help her to move away from corporate agendas and in progressive directions.
And that’s all OK with me. I’m willing to hear criticism of my positions and priorities. Indeed, that’s a big reason why I started Bracing Views, not only to air my thoughts but to hear responses from others.
As I thought about this feedback, I saw this headline and story at the New York Timesthis morning:
Harris’s Muscular Patriotism: At her first rally with Tim Walz, Kamala Harris delivered a riff about their quintessentially American backgrounds. She grew up in Oakland, Calif., raised by a working mother, while he grew up on the Nebraska plains, she explained. They were “two middle-class kids,” she said, now trying to make it to the White House together.
“Only in America,” Harris said, as the Philadelphia crowd burst into a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
This sort of unabashed patriotism doesn’t always come naturally to today’s Democratic Party. But it has been central to Harris’s presidential campaign. In her ads and speeches, she portrays herself as a tough, populist, progressive patriot.
Source: New York Times/Siena College poll, Sept. 2022 | By The New York Times
Given all this, it’s not surprising that most voters consider the Republican Party to be the more patriotic one:
Source: YouGov April 2024 poll | By The New York Times
The far left plays a role here. Parts of it — think of Noam Chomsky— can be disdainful of the U.S., describing it as a fundamentally oppressive country. Liberals, not conservatives, tend to argue that immigrants are forced to move here because of the consequences of American imperialism. Liberals are more likely to have qualms about national institutions like Thanksgiving, the military or the flag.
The most prominent left-wing movement of the past year — the Gaza protests — is a case study. The movement has not merely called attention to the high civilian death toll in Gaza; it sometimes portrays the war as an extension of U.S. immorality. Protesters have pulled down American flags and defaced a statue of George Washington with the word “genocidal.”
The America-skeptical left isn’t the Democratic Party, of course. But the left does exacerbate many swing voters’ concerns about the party — namely, that it isn’t cleareyed about a dangerous world. These same swing voters generally don’t like Trump, but they do appreciate his apparent toughness on trade, immigration, crime and more.
Harris combines patriotism with muscular promises to defend the interests of ordinary Americans. “Being president is about who you fight for, and she’s fighting for people like you,” the narrator in a campaign ad says. Her ads explain that as a prosecutor, she took on murderers, child abusers, drug cartels, big banks and big drug companies.
Harris’s flip-flop on immigration embodies both the toughness and patriotism themes. As a presidential candidate in 2019 — when the left was more influential in the Democratic Party — she favored decriminalizing border crossings. Today, she promises to protect Americans from gangs and fentanyl flowing across the border, and she criticizes Trump for blocking a border-security bill.
The image that accompanied this story showed a person wearing a Kamala Harris t-shirt in which she’s depicted as Captain America.
Given this article and many others like it, I don’t think my two readers have to worry about Kamala Harris being treated unfairly by the corporate-owned news (the CON)!
According to the New York Times, Harris is going to outmuscle Trump for who can be tougher on crime, drugs, and illegal immigrants. As Captain America, she’s going to be even more muscularly patriotic (or blindly nationalistic, my wife quipped) than Trump. The only concern is killjoys on the “far left,” who think mass destruction and genocide in Gaza is wrong. They don’t think America is the greatest, goodest, bestest country in the world. But Kamala does!
Sadly, Bracing Views doesn’t have quite the same market penetration as the New York Times, so my critique of Harris and the Democrats will hardly make a dent in all the partying and enthusiasm for Kamala this week. It does seem to me, however, that the tactics being used here are yet another case of the Democrats faking left and running right.
Anyhow, here’s a reply I sent to a loyal reader and friend about my approach to Kamala and the Democrats:
I’m not anti-Harris per se. She has such a thin record that who knows how she’d make decisions.
I am against how Harris is being shoved down our throats as an almost savior-like figure. I am against the Democratic party, which is why I left it and am now an independent.
I am also against Trump and the MAGA crowd. I wrote article after article denouncing them from 2016 to 2021. Do I have to repeat all that again so that I can be “fair and balanced”?
I get that you see Trump and MAGA as major threats, much more so than the Democrats. I see a different threat, I suppose, a uniparty that embraces empire, militarism, colossal spending on wars and weapons, and a foreign policy agenda that may yet produce World War III, whether the figurehead at the top is Trump or Harris.
I was hoping the Democrats would offer a REAL alternative to Trump with respect to the issues I cited above, but Harris is a lightweight in foreign policy whose description of the Russia-Ukraine War should really scare you for its ignorance and vapidness. She, like Trump, will spend $2 trillion on new nukes. She, like Trump, will brag that the U.S. military is the finest in the world, thus the Pentagon budget will continue to soar toward $1 trillion as the Pentagon continues to flunk audit after audit. She, like Trump, will keep the weapons flowing to Israel so that Gaza can be made Palestinian-free, giving more living space to Israel and Bibi.
Will Harris be more populist at home? I guess. Will she be friendlier to LGBTQ+ and pro-choice movements? Definitely. Is that enough to vote for her? That’s up to the voters to decide.
Harris is basically trying to play from the Obama book, “Yes, we Kam,” supported by big-money donors who expect a big return on their “investments.” Again, maybe she won’t be as bad as Trump domestically, but, as they say, the lesser of two evils is still evil. How long must we wait for a non-evil candidate?
If we don’t push the Democratic party to offer something other than corporate tools, we’ll keep getting corporate tools like I believe Harris to be.
I stand by that response. For many Americans, the Kamala/Walz ticket is attractive, but I will continue to criticize it, as I will Trump and the MAGA crowd. For I think neither party, and certainly neither candidate, is the last best hope of America.
Readers, what do you think? Should we be enthused by the Harris/Walz ticket? Is it time to embrace the politics of joy? Should we not criticize the Democrats because the MAGA Republicans are worse? Should I write more articles that are critical of Trump, because there are not enough of those already in the CON? Fire away!
I’m old enough to remember when New Coke was introduced in 1985. Coke had been losing market share to Pepsi (you might remember all the “taste tests” back then that Coke was allegedly losing to Pepsi). So the execs made New Coke, a sweeter, blander, version of “old” Coke, and hired Bill Cosby (yes, that Bill Cosby, before we knew he was a sexual predator) to sell it to the world as the new and very much improved version.
It flopped.
I remember trying it soon after it came out. No matter what Bill Cosby said, few people liked it. They wanted the “old” Coke back, so Coca Cola had to save face by reintroducing it, rebranding it as “Classic Coke.”
I know it’s not a perfect analogy, but the New Kamala I’m being sold by the DNC (and many, many, others) reminds me of the New Coke sold to me by Bill Cosby back in 1985. A lot of hype, many millions thrown at advertising, but in the end I’m left with a bad taste in my mouth.
Coincidentally, I just saw this in my New York Times news feed this morning:
See what I mean? In the past, she’s been “uneven” and “prone to missteps” but now there’s a New Kamala who’s “found her footing.” How so?
To my knowledge, Kamala has yet to hold an unscripted press conference and has yet to sit for an extended interview. Yet she’s “found her footing” because she can attend political rallies and read from a teleprompter. Oh, and she’s brat!
She’s also good at telling genocide protesters to shut up, warning them that Trump will win if they continue to protest mass murder and atrocity in Gaza.
Kamala is being sold like a new and improved commodity by cynical sales people who’d make Bill Cosby look slightly less menacing and predatory.
Standard Disclaimer: This is in no way a promotion for another overhyped, oversold, and dangerous product, one commonly known as Trump.
Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for Vice President, has come under fire about his military record. Leading the charge has been another Vice President nominee, J.D. Vance of the Republican Party, who served in the Marines and deployed to Iraq.
A young Tim Walz. Little did that young man know how this photo and his military service would become yet another battleground in American politics, generating plenty of heat but very little light
Let’s use the Army acronym of BLUF (bottom line up front); in other words, let’s cut to the chase:
Tim Walz has said he retired as a command sergeant major (CSM) after 24 years of service in the Army National Guard. While he did serve as CSM for his battalion, he didn’t attend the Sergeants Major Academy and therefore he retired a step down as a master sergeant (MSG).
When Tim Walz retired in 2005, he was preparing to run for Congress. His unit was also preparing to deploy to Iraq, which it eventually did in March of 2006. Walz was well within his rights as a soldier to retire when he did. Whether he did so to avoid war service in Iraq is known only to Walz. He claims he’d made his decision to retire before his unit was notified of its overseas deployment to Iraq.
Tim Walz has talked loosely about using weapons of war “that he carried in war,” implying he’d seen combat service when he hadn’t. I don’t see this as a case of “stolen valor.” He wasn’t boasting about being some kind of badass hero in war. Obviously, in 24 years of service in the Army National Guard, he’d carried weapons of war and trained with them under simulated combat conditions “down range.” He should have simply said: “I’ve trained extensively with weapons of war.” Period.
Does any of this matter? Not to me. Tim Walz, by all accounts, served honorably, reaching the senior enlisted ranks. If the Army had wanted him to stay instead of retiring, he could have been stop-lossed or his retirement request could have been denied. He moved on to Congress, winning his election in 2006. He seems to be a person motivated by public service.
The issues that really matter here aren’t mentioned by the Republicans or the corporate-owned news (the CON). Here are those issues:
Tim Walz is a strong supporter of Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Tim Walz is a strong supporter of massive military aid to Ukraine.
To my knowledge, Tim Walz has not criticized the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) in meaningful ways, though he has spoken out against the idea of China being an inevitable U.S. enemy.
Tim Walz, in short, is a typical pro-Israel, pro-Ukraine, generally pro-MICC, Democrat.
The most important issue of all is the whole idea that one must go to war—to serve in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and, more likely than not, to kill other human beings, to prove one’s “valor” in uniform. Why is carrying and using a gun in war such a great and glorious thing? Especially wars like those in Afghanistan and Iraq that were based on lies? Would we respect Tim Walz more if he’d gone to Iraq in 2006 and shot up some Iraqis in the cause of “freedom”?
As a candidate for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump famously denounced the Iraq War, using words like “stupid,” “dumb,” a “total disaster.” and a “big fat mistake.” The war was based on a lie, Trump said, about weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Even worse, the Bush/Cheney administration was behind the lie, leading to a war that destabilized the Middle East, costing the U.S. military thousands of lives and U.S. taxpayers $2 trillion, Trump concluded.
Under that bright blaze of honesty from Trump (yes, you read that right), we might question anyone who wants to trumpet service in Iraq as praiseworthy in the sense of “bringing freedom” or “spreading democracy.”
Kamala Harris is officially the Democratic nominee for the presidency. As Lee Fang has noted, it’s not wise to underestimate her, as she’s savvy at “messaging” and positioning herself among party elites. In this interview between Fang and Glenn Greenwald, it’s almost conclusively shown that Kamala doesn’t have a progressive bone in her body. What she is most of all, perhaps, is an opportunist.
It’s interesting to see how my local paper, The Boston Globe, announced her nomination:
Vice President Kamala Harris, a daughter of immigrants who rose through the California political and law enforcement ranks to become the first female vice president in US history, formally secured the Democratic presidential nomination on Monday — becoming the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket.
A lot of boxes are being checked there. She’s “a daughter of immigrants.” She rose through the ranks, with an emphasis on law enforcement. She’s the first female VP and now the first “woman of color to lead a major party ticket.”
Her positions on most of the leading policies and topics of the day, however, are largely unknown. Meanwhile, rank-and-file Democrats didn’t have a chance to vote for her or against her in the primaries. She’s been selected by party insiders, not elected by party voters.
All this brings to mind a snippet of conversation I overheard at a coffee shop this weekend. Three young women were ahead of me in line, talking about some offerings at the shop, and one said: “I don’t even know what that is, but I like it.”
You could say something similar of Kamala: “I don’t even know who she is or what she believes, but I like her.” It’s the ultimate triumph of image over substance.
So, for example, you might ask Kamala why the Biden/Harris administration is complicit in genocide in Gaza, and the answer might be: “She’s a daughter of immigrants!”
Or you might ask her to support single-payer health care and a higher federal minimum wage, and the answer might be: “She’s BIPOC!”
Kamala isn’t going to cut off the flow of weapons and money to Israel no matter how atrociously the Israeli government acts. She isn’t going to fight for affordable single-payer health care or for a higher federal minimum wage. She’s savvy, i.e. a cynical instrument of power, and she knows what to do and what to say to raise money and secure the support of the powerful.
Kamala wouldn’t have been selected (again, she wasn’t elected) by powerful corporate interests if she wasn’t sympathetic and obedient to them. In fact, the DNC has shown how it treats true progressives like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich. Kamala is on top because she’s willing to afflict the powerless for the powerful, and that’s not a formula that promises any change in a progressive direction.
Whether you believe the corporate-owned Democratic Party is less bad than the Trump-dominated Republican Party is a separate question, but let’s not kid ourselves about what Kamala represents.
Update: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is Kamala’s VP choice! I thought Walter Kirn’s description of Walz was telling. Kirn, talking to Matt Taibbi, described Walz as a “county fair huckster,” a sort of “white hick” who balances the urban BIPOC Harris. Kirn and Taibbi speculated that Democrats are trying to outflank the Republicans and their choice of J.D. Vance, i.e. Walz is even more of a flannel-wearing Midwesterner, and he has more military experience to boot.
VP choices often don’t matter that much, until they do. Just look at Kamala. She basically didn’t matter until she did.
As Walter Kirn also noted, Democrats are now spectators in their own party. You don’t get to choose your president or VP candidates; you have no say; yet you’re expected to cheer those candidates selected for you by the DNC and big donors.
Hooray, Harris/Walz! We didn’t get to vote for you, we had no say in your nomination, but we love you anyway!
Perpetual War Abroad Is the Most Insidious Enemy to Liberty and Freedom at Home
I wrote my first article for TomDispatch in 2007, two years after I’d retired from the military. That article was highly critical of the U.S. military and its disastrous war in Iraq. I wrote that we, the citizens of America, had to save the military from itself and its worst excesses. Sadly, we the people have been demobilized; we have no say about “our” military and its wars.
In fact, while the Iraq and Afghan Wars are now officially over, both lost at enormous cost, we the people are still issuing blank checks to a Pentagon that is wildly if not fatally deluded and delusional.
Much like a black hole, the Pentagon keeps sucking in everything around it, especially taxpayer dollars
Back in 2018, Tom Engelhardt, the creator, editor, and prime mover of TomDispatch, asked me to write a new introduction to my article from 2007. Here’s that intro as I wrote it back then:
Retiring from the U.S. military liberated my tongue, but I quickly learned few people were interested in what I had to say. In 2007, I was outraged by the way the Bush administration hid behind the richly bemedaled chest of General David Petraeus, using his testimony before a spineless Congress to evade responsibility for the catastrophic war in Iraq. I wrote an op-ed about how ‘my’ military was deluding itself not only into believing that it was the ‘greatest’ but that it could somehow find a formula to win an unwinnable war. I sent it to the usual suspects, newspapers like the New York Times and Boston Globe, with no response. A friend then mentioned a website I’d never heard of, TomDispatch.com, and I found a man there who would listen: today’s equivalent of I.F. Stone, Tom Engelhardt. What started as a one-off article led to 55 more ‘Tomgrams‘ over the last decade.
In that very first post, I asked, ‘How can you win someone else’s civil war?’ It’s a question the U.S. military still avoids asking, let alone answering. Indeed, a state of what I then called ‘ongoing self-delusion’ about war persists in that military and American society as a whole. More than a decade later, its commanders continue to mislead themselves and the rest of us by speaking about ‘new’ approaches that promise ‘progress’ in places like Afghanistan.
Who will teach the Pentagon that wars that never should have been fought cannot be won? Who will remind the American people that perpetual war abroad is the most insidious enemy to liberty and freedom at home? Members of the military, active duty and retired, need to speak up. Our oath to the Constitution was never about saluting smartly and following blindly, but about allegiance to the noble ideals expressed in that document. William J. Astore, May 2018
Since 2018, I’ve written another fifty or so articles for TomDispatch, nearly all of them focusing on U.S. military folly and fallacies. It hasn’t mattered. Both parties, Republicans and Democrats, profess their unconditional love of “our” troops, even as they’ve shoved and shoveled trillions of dollars to the military-industrial-congressional complex, the all-powerful MICIMATT* that increasingly infects our lives and infests our society and culture.
This November provides us another opportunity to go to the polls and allegedly vote for what we want. Most people want peace. The Republicans and Democrats offer us more war. Might I suggest that we vote for a person or party that actually seeks peace?
It’s highly unlikely we’re going to vote ourselves out of the mess we’re in. Look at the mainstream candidates! But at least we shouldn’t vote for yet more insanity.
*MICIMATT: military industrial congressional intelligence media academe think tank complex. To that you can now add Hollywood and the world of sports as well. Hercules had a much easier time vanquishing the hydra. It only had seven heads.
And reflecting on notes I made in the margins forty years ago
In college, I majored in mechanical engineering but also took courses in U.S. history and philosophy. I kept most of my college textbooks for a couple of decades, books on statics, dynamics, strength of materials, fluid mechanics and dynamics, thermodynamics, heat transfer, vibrations, along with calculus, physics, chemistry, and the like. But there came a time when these books seemed not only obsolete but a burden of sorts, so I brought them to various used bookstores for trade.
One book I didn’t trade in was a slim volume: John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” It cost me the princely sum of $5.75 in 1983, and I read it for a course in political philosophy. The theme of liberty seemed timeless to me, always pertinent and worth pondering, so I kept the book.
Yesterday, I was shifting some books around and spied my copy among my small collection on philosophy. I opened it and came across a long passage I wrote in the margins back when I first read it in college in 1983. This “marginalia” struck me as a somewhat interesting window into America in 1983 and what I was thinking about as I tried to apply Mill’s insights to American culture.
My college copy of Mill’s “On Liberty” with my marginalia
My marginal comment came as Mill discussed liberty and when people are warranted “in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number.” Self-protection, Mill wrote, was the only purpose sufficiently compelling here to exercise power to abridge liberty. Preventing harm. It’s insufficient and wrong, Mill added, to act to abridge someone’s liberty because you think it would be better for them, wiser for them, as well as being better for society at large. If the person isn’t harming others, if their actions aren’t “calculated to produce evil to someone else,” those actions shouldn’t be interfered with.
Now, here’s the example that popped into my head back in 1983, which I wrote in the margin:
Note [the] case of homosexuals wanting to go to the prom. Mill says they should have the liberty to do this. One can advise them not to [go], i.e. they will be chastised, outcast, uncomfortable. But one cannot prevent them from going, since they are not harming others.
Back in 1983, before LGBTQ+, in the era of the Reagan revolution in which real men didn’t eat quiche, the idea of homosexuals taking same-sex (or non-binary) dates to the high school prom was more than controversial. It must have been “in the news” for that example to have popped into my head.
It’s interesting how times have changed in forty years. Personal liberty for the LGBTQ+ communities is, I think, far less restricted by the “tyranny of the majority” than it used to be. We have Pride month, Pride celebrations, rainbow flags, and the like. I assume it’s now unremarkable when LGBTQ+ members attend proms with same-sex (or non-binary) dates. And that reflects greater diversity and tolerance within our society along with more liberty, which John Stuart Mill would applaud.
Mill’s message is a good one. We should strive as a society and culture to maximize personal liberty. We should be very careful indeed in exercising power to abridge liberty, especially in the cause of “helping” the other person. As Mill writes, quite powerfully, “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
Which, to put it in non-gendered language: Over themselves, over their own bodies and minds, individuals are sovereign.
Sometimes, old college textbooks are worth keeping around.
Readers, is there an old high school or college textbook you’ve never parted with, and why?
Are you feeling “Kamalove” for Kamala Harris? Are you gaga for MAGA and Donald Trump? Or maybe you’re angry J.D. Vance once made a comment about “childless cat ladies.” This is the preferred narrative being pushed by the great CON, the corporate-owned news.*
It wasn’t that long ago that, thanks to Bernie Sanders, among others, Americans were talking about real issues. Affordable health care for all. A $15 federal minimum wage. Sweeping student loan debt relief. Tax reforms that would favor the working classes rather than the richest among us. Campaign finance reform that would get “big money” out of politics.
This is the madness of war. (Mourners from the Druze minority carry the coffins of some of the 12 children and teenagers killed in the rocket strike in the village of Majdal Shams. Photograph: Léo Corrêa/AP)
Another vital issue, of course, is America’s seemingly permanent state of war and its slavish support of Israel in its ongoing demolition of Gaza. As expected, that genocidal act is beginning to spin out of control as it appears Israel is preparing to strike Hezbollah in Lebanon in the aftermath of a deadly missile strike on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
When will the madness of war in the Middle East end? And is it the intent of the U.S. government to continue to provide all the weapons Israel needs to continue its campaign of mass killing? (Always done in the name of “defense” and “security,” naturally.)
In his recent address to America, President Biden declared that under him U.S. troops weren’t at war for the first time this century. His exact words were: “I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.” This boast came as U.S. forces were bombing Yemen in support of Israel’s operations in Gaza. Meanwhile, America leads the world in selling weapons and spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined, most of those being U.S. allies.
When does the U.S. get to become a normal country in normal times, rather than a nation permanently at war and forever preparing for it, even for nuclear Armageddon? Why are we spending possibly as much as $2 trillion on “modernizing” a nuclear triad that, if used, could easily destroy life on earth as well as several other earth-sized planets? When are we going to end this insanity?
We need to challenge Democrats and Republicans as well as the media to cover real issues, issues of life and death, rather than writing puff pieces about Kamalove and MAGA.
Soon after Joe Biden took office as president in 2021, I remember hearing that his VP, Kamala Harris, was put in charge of immigration, informally known as the “border czar.” Yesterday, the House passed a resolution condemning Harris for her handling of the border crisis. Yet I’ve also been hearing from Democrats and the media that Harris never was the border czar, even as there’s plenty of video evidence of networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC referring to her using that term.
Denying that Harris was the border czar is a fairly small lie immersed in much larger sea of lies, and of course it’s a bipartisan effort. Donald Trump exaggerates and lies just to stay in shape. Democrats love to attack Trump for lying even as they lie themselves. Truly, it’s hard to run a government and a country when lies confuse every issue.
Another lie being told about Kamala Harris is that her candidacy is the result of democracy in action. She’s the people’s choice! Except almost nobody voted for her as a presidential candidate. She’s been elevated and selected by the DNC and the donor class. She is a packaged product of the so-called elites within the party, the very opposite of a candidate chosen by the people. And yet I’m told this packaged product is going to “save democracy” from Trump, who was actually selected as a candidate in a more democratic process.
Of course, there are far bigger and more serious lies than whether Harris was the border czar or whether she’s the people’s choice as the savior of democracy. U.S. troops’ deadliest enemies, I’d argue, are most often the lies told by the U.S. government, abetted and amplified by senior officers in the military. Think here of Iraq and Afghanistan, or go back further to Vietnam.
Daniel Ellsberg, truth-teller about the Vietnam War and so many other things
Knowing (or sensing/feeling) you killed for lies, or knowing your friends died for lies, is surely a contributing cause to a rash of suicides in the U.S. military today. The sacrifices and horrors of war may be eased by a “just” war, like World War II, but they are aggravated by unjust wars. And they are further aggravated when you try to get help through the VA only to be turned away or stonewalled.
All this is prologue to a note I received from a regular reader of Bracing Views about lies in America. I’ve decided to retain the profanity because it’s more than appropriate:
I don’t know about you, but I find it quite amazing that, despite decades of bold-faced lying about US wars, all of it proven and even reported in the NYT and other mainstream media, the narrative of the each subsequent war is always accepted as true, until it too is exposed as being nothing but lies.
Let’s look at the recent record:
1) Vietnam–exposed as nothing but lies by the Pentagon Papers.
2) Iraq–exposed as lies when the infamous WMD were never found and there was nothing found to back up the claim of links to Al Qaeda.
3) Afghanistan–exposed as pure fiction as revealed by the Washington Post “Afghanistan Papers” which said that “senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”
Add to the above list the fact that the Mueller report investigating the Russiagate hoax came up with nothing, ZERO.
Currently, there are a couple of new false narratives duly reported by the mainstream media and, for the most part, swallowed by most people. First is the false narrative about the US war in Ukraine, that NATO expansion has nothing to do with it but rather was caused by naked Russian aggression and Putin’s plans to re-create the Soviet Union and take over the rest of Eastern Europe. Second, the false narrative that Israel is just defending itself against Palestinian terrorism rather than committing grotesque war crimes, completely ignoring the fact that the Israelis have been keeping the Palestinians under illegal occupation for over 50 years, since June 1967.
Lie after lie after lie after lie. And yet none of it matters. It is all sent down the memory hole as if it never happened. And then it is on to the next war, when the official narrative spewed out by the DC blob will once again be swallowed hook, line and sinker. It appears to be never ending. No matter how much lying is exposed, it simply does not matter.
I think it is pretty fucking amazing. What will it take to get people to come out of their coma and realize what the fuck is going on?
And keep in mind…..it has nothing to do with party affiliation. The lying is endemic, it’s in the DNA of the National Security State. Presidents come and go, but the lying for war-making never stops. And no one is ever held accountable either.
It’s pretty fucking impressive, when you think about it.
Keep this is in mind……one would think that, after this abhorrent track record, the appropriate response would be to assume that the narrative justifying the new war of the moment was not true and nothing but more of the same lying. But that NEVER happens. NEVER.
How is that possible? Is it just a serious form of denial? Is it due to mental illness? Is it just some perverted form of patriotism? In what other realm is it possible to lie non-stop and never be held accountable? Even worse, to continue to have credibility despite a track record of pathological lying?
A friend of mine pointed out that, in the old USSR, people knew that the official news on their TV every night was nothing but lies.
So, this begs the question: Which system is more pernicious and has more effectively brainwashed its people? The one where people are controlled but they are aware that they are being fed nothing but lies, or the one that is constantly lied to but the people still believe they are being told the truth?
To those keen insights, I made this reply:
Our [American] system of lying is better! We have state/corporate media too, it’s just more subtle and advertised as “free.” We have our own “Pravda” except it rarely tells the truth, unless that “truth” is in the interests of the powerful.
To which our BV keen reader replied:
Exactly. But to suggest that we have our own version of “Pravda,” only worse because it has the cover of supposedly being “free,” is tantamount to treason, you realize.
This is the reason why Julian Assange/Wikileaks was such a threat…for actually challenging the right of the National Security State to lie non-stop about its war making and never be exposed for its lying or held accountable.
Of course, that is exactly why Assange was locked away in prison for so long and tortured, not because he was spreading lies but because he was revealing truths.
And we can’t have that in America!
*My hearty thanks to this Bracing Views keen reader for allowing me to cite this. I always say I learn so much from my readers, and I mean it.
Bracing Views 