Declaring Our Independence from War

W.J. Astore

“War is a madhouse”

It’s Independence Day in America, so it seems like a good day to declare our independence from the insanity of war.

Sadly, since the presidency of George W. Bush if not before, it’s become routine for U.S. commanders-in-chief to boast of having the world’s finest military in all of history. Obama did it routinely, and Biden recently said the same during his disastrous debate with Trump. Few Americans stop to think about the implications of boasting about having the world’s greatest military—is such a boast truly consistent with democracy, liberty, and freedom?

Certainly, empires rely on strong militaries. Think of the Roman Empire or the Mongol Empire, or the Third Reich (Empire) of Nazi Germany. Do we want to be like them?

Those empires lived by the sword (quite literally so with the Roman Empire) and died by it as well. Their militaries, I would argue, were also more effective than the U.S. one, which hasn’t won a major war since 1945, the latter with a lot of help from our “friends” like the Soviet Union. The Roman, Mongol, and German empires are no more, worn down in part through the constant costs and demands of war. We need to learn more from history than the “fact” that America’s military is supposedly the world’s best since forever and a day ago.

I’ve been reading Oriana Fallaci’s “Nothing, and So Be It,” in which she recounted her time reporting on the Vietnam War. Two conversations with U.S. troops in Vietnam caught my attention. On pages 22-23, she recounts a conversation with Army Captain Scher, during which Scher confesses his disgust with war: 

God, how disgusting war is. Let me say it—I’m a soldier. People who enjoy making war, who find it glorious and exciting, must have twisted minds. There’s nothing glorious, nothing exciting; it’s just a filthy tragedy you can only cry over. You cry for the man you refused a cigarette to and who didn’t come back with the patrol. You cry for the man you bawled out and who is blown to pieces in front of you. You cry for the man who killed your friends …

Later in the book, she interviews a Marine Lieutenant whose surname is Teanek (pages 174-75). Here’s what he had to say:

Teanek: “Men have been saying that [we should abolish war] for thousands of years, and with the justification that they’re abolishing war, they’ve soaked the greatest periods of their civilization in blood.”

Fallaci: “That’s no good reason to keep on doing it.”

Teanek: “Theoretically, you’re right, but in practice what you’re saying is very silly. It’s like convincing yourself—as I bet you do—that when you describe people dying in war you’re helping to abolish war. On the contrary. The more you see people who’ve been killed in war, the more you want to go on fighting wars: it’s a mystery of the human soul.”

It is indeed “a mystery of the human soul” why we humans persist in killing each other in such vast numbers through war. Of course, it’s partly because we glorify it, when we should recognize, as Fallaci does on page 187, that “War is a madhouse.”

I am sane!

One of my favorite scenes in any war film came in “The Big Red One,” a World War II movie by Samuel Fuller starring Lee Marvin as a grizzled Army sergeant of the 1st Infantry Division. It’s a scene in which U.S. troops liberate an insane asylum.

The unforgettable part of this scene for me is when one of the madhouse residents picks up a submachine gun and starts blasting away, crying “I am one of you. I am sane!”

We need to declare our independence from that.

Fumbling the Nuclear Football

W.J. Astore

Being President Is Not a Part-Time Job

Being President of the United States (POTUS) is not a part-time job.

Apologists for Joe Biden suggest that he’s capable of doing the job during normal office hours. Say roughly 10AM to 4PM. But sadly last week’s debate started at 9PM and Biden was tired, he had a cold, and he just couldn’t think and speak clearly and coherently.

So, let’s remind America’s rivals that if they are to launch any attack that might, just might, activate nuclear contingency plans in the Biden administration, they had best do it when the president is capable of clear thinking, which apparently means a six-hour window, Monday through Friday, 10AM-4PM EST.

Seriously, as an American, all my life I’ve been told that being POTUS is the toughest, most demanding, job in the world. That POTUS has in his charge the nuclear “football,” the codes that would unleash America’s awesome, possibly world-destroying, nuclear arsenal, and that therefore the president had to be a person of sound body and of soundest mind. And now I’m being told that Joe Biden, a man in obvious decline, is exactly that person of sound body and of soundest mind to serve another four years as president and commander-in-chief.

The nuclear “football” is actually a briefcase containing the codes needed to authorize and authenticate a nuclear attack

The nuclear football is not something to fumble. Once those missiles are unleashed, there will be no redo.

Joe Biden’s recent debate performance featured sustained moments where he stared blankly into space, where he was obviously confused, where he spoke nonsense. Put bluntly, there were times when he quite literally didn’t know what he was saying.

Sure, Biden isn’t always confused, muddled, or whatever term you care to use to describe obvious mental compromise. But no POTUS can afford to be mentally muddled or compromised because you never know when he or she may be needed to make a decision (under the severest pressure and in a matter of minutes) involving nuclear weapons. It’s an awesome, almost unimaginable responsibility that requires the most stringent vetting of America’s candidates for POTUS.

Today’s Joe Biden is not up to that responsibility. Anyone who says otherwise is denying the evidence of their own eyes and ears.

Standard Disclaimer: This is not in any way an argument for Trump. It’s an argument for a fitter president, right now, and for the Democrats to nominate someone other than Biden to run against Trump this November.

“War Is Making Us Poor”

W.J. Astore

Peace Activist John Rachel Challenges Us to Imagine a Better World

War is the health of the (anti-democratic) state. On those terms, America is very healthy indeed. America dominates the global trade in weaponry, accounting for 40% of that trade over the last five years (“We’re #1 in bombs, bullets, and blowing things up!”). America spends more on its military than the next ten nations combined (most of them being U.S. allies). Roughly 60% of federal discretionary spending is devoted to the Pentagon, sold to the American people as an “investment” in national security, even as it’s truly all about imperial dominance and resource extraction and exploitation.

John Rachel knows this. He asked me to write a foreword to his new book. “War Is Making Us Poor,” and what follows is that foreword. Check out his website and consider buying his book. Its succinct title sums up much about what’s wrong in America.

FOREWORD

Recently, I was reading the letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, who made a wise assertion in 1888: “Battles, like hypotheses, are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.”

My country, the United States of America, has been needlessly multiplying its battles around the world without necessity.  The result has been a series of devastating wars in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, wars that killed millions for little purpose other than the enrichment of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961 termed the military-industrial complex.  Thus, Martin Luther King Jr. was right to conclude in 1967 that the United States had become the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet, its unbridled pursuit of militarism producing a form of spiritual death.

As James Madison, one of America’s founders, wrote near the close of the eighteenth century, no nation can preserve its freedom and maintain a healthy democracy when it embraces and pursues endless warfare.  John Rachel knows this, feels this, and embraces the challenge of fighting against it.  He knows America is dedicating more than half of its federal discretionary spending to wars, as the Pentagon budget soars toward $900 billion in 2024.  He knows America is suffering from a form of spiritual death.  He knows militarism will be the death, not only of democracy in America, but possibly of our planet itself, whether in quick time due to global nuclear war or in slow motion due to war-driven calamities aggravated by climate change.

America needs to change course.  It needs to learn the word “peace” again.  It needs to embrace diplomacy and reject militarism.  It needs to stop being the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.  It needs to dismantle its global network of 800 military bases, it needs to reject its vision of “full-spectrum dominance,” it needs to end its glorification of warriors and warfighters as heroes, it needs to stop exporting weapons to the world’s worst hotspots.  But how?

As I write this, the U.S. government is sending massive arms shipments to Israel to enable ethnic cleansing in Gaza.  Palestinian innocents, including thousands of women and children, are being pummeled and eviscerated by bombs and missiles carrying the label, “Made in USA.”  America, which fancies itself a beacon of freedom, has become an abattoir of death through endless war.

I served in the U.S. military for twenty years.  I taught thousands of military cadets the lessons of history.  Yet I failed to question and challenge the system in meaningful ways until after I retired from the military.  Somehow, collectively, Americans need to find the courage to change our violent ways.  We need to act—now.

John Rachel’s book, by provoking us to think and to examine our often-unquestioned biases and assumptions, is just what we need to execute an “about-face” in America’s constant march to war.

In Last Night’s Biden-Trump Debate, America Lost

W.J. Astore

Two Angry Old Men Tell Us Much About America

Last night’s political debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was a sad spectacle. Clearly, Biden performed poorly. Trump, I suppose, was Trump. The CNN post-debate commentators were universal in saying the Democratic Party is panicking after Biden’s appearance and performance, almost as if they were reading from the same script. It’s finally OK in the mainstream media to state what’s been obvious for years: that Biden is simply too old and infirm to serve as president for another four years. Look for Biden to be replaced as the Democratic candidate, though how gracefully remains to be seen.

Neither candidate did well in last night’s debate

Biden started poorly and never fully recovered. He walked out haltingly. His voice was raspy. He was arguably over-prepared, talking too fast, spouting too much detail, looking confused. A low point came when he lost his train of thought and then concluded by saying “We finally beat Medicare.” Trump pounced. If this had been a fight, the referee would have stopped it then and there.

There’s a catchphrase from a Clint Eastwood movie that “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Biden doesn’t know them, not anymore, and the people around him are doing him a grave disservice in continuing to push him forwards, in continuing to prop him up. It’s time for Biden to retire, to be a one-term president, which was initially the plan when he ran and won in 2020.

After the debate, Trump walked grumpily off the stage. Biden stood there, seemingly at a loss, until Jill Biden came and guided him carefully down a few steps to greet the moderators.

The debate itself was a charisma-free zone. Both men spent most of their time bashing the other. It was a house of frowns. As I watched and took notes, I wrote this: Biden and Trump trade insults while America burns.

In a rare burst of pseudo-agreement, Trump and Biden both said their opponent was the worst president in U.S. history. Both also had surprisingly weak and inept closing statements.

That being said, Biden and Trump did offer a sharp contrast. Biden continues to assert America is the envy of the world, the best country bar none, with the finest military in all of human history. For Trump, America is a failing state, a “sick” country, akin to a “rat’s nest,” overrun with illegal immigrants.

Turning to foreign affairs, both men eagerly supported Israel, with Trump going the extra mile in saying he wants Israel to finish the job in Gaza, the job being genocide of the Palestinians there. Interestingly, Dana Bash, the CNN moderator, said only that Israel’s massive offensive in Gaza had killed “thousands” of Palestinians. She, of course, said nothing of ethnic cleansing or genocide, and neither did the candidates. Pro-Palestinian protests went unmentioned.

“We’re a seriously failing nation,” Trump said, and he’s right about that. The problem is that Biden is too old to run again and Trump remains temperamentally unfit to serve as a public servant at any level. Both men toward the end got into an argument about their respective golf handicaps. It was really that bad—and that out of touch with the needs and concerns of workers and families across America.

“Nobody should profit from the slaughter of innocents”

W.J. Astore

Jack Gilroy has his day in court against the Merchants of Death

This afternoon at 2:00PM, 89-year-old Jack Gilroy has his day in court in Endicott Village, New York. His crime: trespassing. His real “crime”: protesting against genocide in Gaza and a murderous war in Ukraine and U.S. support of and profiteering from the same.

Believe me, this video is available, but YouTube prefers to dissuade you from watching it

Jack reached out to me a week ago. He’s a “Bracing Views” reader and asked if I might share his ideas and plight with all of you. Hell yes, I said, so here are some words from Jack Gilroy as he prepares for his day in court later this afternoon:

My reward [for peace activism] at St Francis Xavier Parish (Jesuit) in NYC was just last week when I was given a nice plaque for my peace and justice actions over the decades. It was the first recognition since I received Soldier of the Month in my Infantry Battalion in the Austrian Alps in June of 1955. I had just come back from Vienna and some face-to-face confrontation with Godless Communists. I saw just young people like me, and I was just turning 20 at the time. The good Catholic sisters (IHM) who taught me in Carbondale, Pa a little coal town, were the same ones that taught Joe Biden just a few miles away in Scranton and seven years younger than me. I woke up to the lie of militarism in 1955 but Joe is still trapped in the lies of the Cold War.

Today I will go on trial in a village court in Endicott NY for trespass on the property that I pay for with tax dollars, nearby BAE Systems. I was attempting to deliver a letter to warn management and workers that they are part of a series of criminal law-breaking as outlined in our Veterans For Peace Six Broken Laws Letter. I was arrested when BAE Security called the cops. 

In my attempt to get folks to come to my trial, I note the trial is not about me, but the Merchants of Death, and BAE Systems is one of the largest.

We (VFP, Pax Christi and Peace Action members) started Tax Day 2024, April 15 at the 155mm shell factory of General Dynamics in Scranton (like BAE, General Dynamics makes a lot of dough from nuclear weapons but 155mm shells are the most desired ammo of both Israel and Ukraine). They would not take my letter so we left it for an armed soldier to maybe deliver it. He said he could not take letters. Our little cortege of vehicles drove north to nearby Archbald, PA, where Lockheed Martin makes Paveway I and Paveway II bombs to blow apart children and other living beings anywhere in the world, e.g. Gaza. A security guard took the letter and likely got his ass reamed out when he took it to a superior–the Chief of Police of Archbald was there (I called his office the day before) and he seemed surprised to learn we were opposing the company that has done so much for the depressed anthracite coal valley.

Then, back in our cars and on to Endicott NY where others met us and where I used the envelope in my attempt to deliver the letter. 

We have videos of all that [see above video], and I will defend myself in court (my last time out was very expensive for attorney fees in Syracuse, where I refused to take a plea bargain like the other 31 who did outside the gate of the 174th Attack Wing of the NYS National Guard. My sentence was three months in the Jamesville Penitentiary and the biggest Community Service anyone had ever seen at 1500 hours.

This offense will not be like my other trespass times like the SOA and my trips to four federal prisons shortly after retiring as a high school Participation in Government Teacher. One U.S. Marshall said as he scanned my file, “Schoolteacher, eh. Well, we’re going to give you a lesson.” The lesson was called Diesel Therapy and I won’t get into it. 

So, maybe you can squeeze in a column on this only trial that we know going on that challenges the Merchants of Death. I’ve been in contact with Josh Paul, who resigned his position as Director of the Department of State because he said laws were being broken and he didn’t want to be part of it.

Well, we put members of the Krupp family in prison following the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-47, so let’s start looking at CEOs and others from Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and my nearby BAE Systems, who most people around here think electric buses are their only product. (96 % of BAE contracts are military.)

Jack Gilroy then added a few more details about Congress and the military-industrial complex:

Dems and Repubs are always at the war factories when a new contract is announced. What nice smiles Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand have when the big bucks are announced. Schumer takes more money from the war merchants than any other U.S. politician.

And Senator Gillibrand married into a British family who are major stockholders in BAE Systems. Her in-laws sold their stock when she became a Senator (but funded her campaign with a half million bucks).

Readers, please keep Jack in your thoughts as he faces the judge today. And especially keep his words here in mind: “Nobody should profit from the slaughter of innocents. We must protest loudly and persistently, lest we ourselves become complicit in war crimes and genocide.”

You have to work so hard to be poor in America

W.J. Astore

Before my father became a firefighter, he was for many years a factory worker. He knew hard work, and he once told me that the harder he’d worked in his life, the more physical the labor, the less pay he’d received. He also reminded me near the end of his life that the rich had neither sympathy nor use for the poor.

Perhaps you’ve already seen the above video in which a working-class American, a painter who has his own small business, breaks down as he laments his inability to provide for his wife and daughter in these increasingly bleak economic times. His naked vulnerability, and his call for real change, will break your heart.

Have a heart if you’ve got a heart, my Polish mother-in-law would say, and she too knew the reality of factory work. Speaking of heart, she had a large and generous one. Why is it that those who have the least money while slogging the hardest for it often are the most generous?

Truly, you have to work so hard to be poor in America. Being poor comes at an enormous price in so many ways. Yet Americans are encouraged by our “betters” to focus on “lifestyles of the rich and famous” while disparaging and looking down on the working poor.

This country is seriously fucked, to use a technical term, and nothing is going to change until we listen to those who are calling for us to come together and make fundamental changes to a thoroughly corrupt and corrupting system of government/business that worships nothing but money as a measure of goodness and greatness.

Is Joe Biden Issuing Legal Orders to the U.S. Military?

W.J. Astore

Enabling a Genocide in Gaza Is Surely Unconstitutional as well as Morally Wrong

Is it legal for a U.S. president to order American troops to take action that enables a genocide? I should think not. The president takes essentially the same oath of office as military members do. Its essential thrust is supporting and defending the U.S. Constitution. As the civilian commander-in-chief, the President issues orders to the military that are of course authoritative, that must be obeyed, except when those orders are illegal. So, for example, U.S. presidents shouldn’t be able to order torture, nor should they be able to issue orders that contribute to genocide, and, if they do, service members are within their rights to refuse to obey such orders. Indeed, if they put “integrity first” (the leading Air Force core value) as well as the U.S. Constitution, one might argue that should feel compelled by conscience to disobey.

It’s not an easy issue for sure, because the Biden administration claims that Israel is not prosecuting a genocide in Gaza. In fact, the Biden administration sees Israel as a vital ally to America, fully deserving of near-total U.S. support, therefore any service member who objects to orders on legal or moral grounds runs up against the full authority and weight of the chain of command.

Honestly, I’m glad I was never put in this position when I was in the U.S. military. Yet I still think about it. How would I feel as an Air Force officer loading or flying 2000-pound bombs to Israel to be dropped on Palestinians in Gaza? How would I feel as a Navy officer covering the flanks of Israel so that the IDF can concentrate its forces in murderous assaults on Gaza? How would these and similar actions be in the cause of defending America and supporting the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic?

(In the video clip above, Matthew Hoh further discusses this issue. I highly recommend it.)

Judging by this article by Mike Prysner, more than a few service members within the U.S. military have their own doubts, with some seeking conscientious objector status and others going AWOL or simply refusing to consider reenlisting. I have to assume that a lot of Soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen are thinking, “This is not what I volunteered for. This is not serving the best interests of my country, most especially the rights enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, to which I swore an oath.”

So, it’s quite possible Joe Biden is issuing illegal or at the very least morally questionable orders to American troops. Shouldn’t this matter? Shouldn’t Americans be talking about this more?

I’m not picking on Biden here. I strongly condemned Donald Trump back in 2016 when he claimed U.S. troops would follow his orders no matter what, even if he ordered torture, assassinations, and other acts forbidden by law.

Either we follow the law or we don’t. Either we respect the Constitution or we don’t. Either we use our military wisely or we don’t.

Beware the military that has been used poorly by its leaders. Beware the military that feels betrayed. For that military will soon be hollow, or, even worse, estranged from the people and the nation, and perhaps angry enough to seek vengeance.

Build Submarines

W.J. Astore

Destroy the World!

Whenever I watch my hometown baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, at Fenway Park I’m told by a message painted along the first and third base lines to “build submarines.” At commercial breaks between innings, sometimes I get another reminder courtesy of the following ad:

The ad features some serious welding, including a comely female welder, showcasing the diversity of the military-industrial complex. Hooray America!

We build giants, the ad says, but there’s no sense of what those giants can do to the world. That’s where Frida Berrigan comes in. Her post today at TomDispatch.com details the awesome destructive power of the Navy’s new class of nuclear-missile-firing submarines. I like her title: The Art of the Submarine, or 5,824 Hiroshimas per Sub.

The new subs are part of the Columbia class, but they really should be called the Armageddon class. Here’s how Berrigan describes them:

Columbia Class nuclear submarines [are what] General Dynamics Electric Boat is building right now. The Navy’s budget for just 12 of those ballistic missile submarines is $126.4 billion. Imagine! If the Navy’s budget for that one weapons system was a country, it would have the third-largest military budget on earth.

The Columbia will be the biggest and most expensive submarine ever built. How perfectly American, right? Even down to the fact that it’s named in honor of the District of Columbia, the disenfranchised, desperately unequal, and remarkably segregated capital of the United States of America. I’d love to see an artwork that encapsulates that grim irony.

Those new Columbia subs will dwarf what Beatrice Cuming’s welders were working on when she captured them in 1944. Each will be 560 feet long, or a few feet more than the height of the Washington Monument. And its bulk will displace 20,810 tons of water.

But the size and expensiveness aren’t anywhere near as important as the payload of nuclear weapons it will carry with a power those welders of Cuming’s time could hardly have imagined and that Cuming would have been hard-pressed to render with brushes and paint. Each of those 12 new submarines will be equipped with 16 nuclear missile tubes for Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). And those tubes will each be able to house up to 12 independently targetable nuclear warheads, known as W88s, costing about $150 million each and packing a mind-boggling 455-kiloton wallop. 

Okay, now do the math with me. What does 12 times 16 times 12 equal? That’s right: 2,304. Now, multiply that by the thermonuclear force of 455 kilotons, and you get more than one million kilotons. An unthinkable power.

America is yet again spending enormous sums of money on weaponry capable of ending life on Earth if those weapons should ever be used. Better dead than red, I suppose.

It’s great that welders are being put to work, but maybe they should be fixing America’s many bridges and buildings that are structurally less than sound. After all, why is it a good thing that our comely welder in the ad above is helping to build a “giant” that could very well destroy us all?

Instead of “build submarines” at my favorite ballpark, what we really need are ads like “repair bridges.” And maybe a message as well that submarines whose missiles are equivalent to thousands of Hiroshima bombs are, to put it mildly, a potential season-ending error, not only for Team America, but for team humanity.

The Heretics

W.J. Astore

Global Dominance at Any Price

American foreign policy remains in the grip of heretics. They believe that the Prince of Peace is actually a god of war. They believe America is strengthened by entangling alliances (think here of our so-called alliance with Israel). They believe in constant war as a recipe both for dominant power and greater freedom and democracy throughout the world. They believe that spending roughly a trillion dollars each year on weapons and war is a wise “investment.” And they believe they are the toughest and truest of patriots, the ones who see further, the ones with the guts to get things done, no matter how poorly America’s wars have gone from Korea and Vietnam through Afghanistan, Iraq, and today’s proxy wars.

There used to be a different America, a much less militaristic and bellicose one. The American tradition is rich and complex; it contains multitudes, as Walt Whitman might say. Why are we so stuck on warmongers, thieves, and vainglorious simps of empire?

As an American, I’m very much a part of my country’s complexity and richness. And the America that speaks to me contains elements and lessons such as these:

George Washington’s prescient warning about the dangers of entangling alliances with foreign powers.

James Madison’s warning that constant warfare is the direst of enemies of liberty, freedom, and democracy in America.

General Smedley Butler’s confession that “war is a racket” and that he had often served as a “gangster for capitalism.” 

The Nye Commission in the U.S. Senate that investigated arms manufacturers and weapons makers as “Merchants of Death” that profited greatly from war.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “cross of iron” speech and his warning about the growing power and insidious nature of the military-industrial complex.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/0fkKnfk4k40?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

President John F. Kennedy’s powerful peace speech in which he extended an olive branch to the Soviet Union.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful speech against the Vietnam War and the perils of militarism, racism, and materialism in America.

Of course, America has always had its dark side, with slavery and the genocidal treatment of Native Americans being at the top of the list. Yet America also has had its triumphs of wisdom and goodness. That is the America we should be embracing and celebrating. I believe it’s captured in the words of Washington, Madison, JFK, MLK, and so many others who’ve fought for peace and sanity, people like Dorothy Day, the Catholic activist who fought against war and all its awful excesses.

All that said, sometimes cartoons can express truths in ways that are as powerful as they are simple. In the cartoon below, the heretics of U.S. foreign policy are so many Calvins, spreading destruction and employing nukes in the name of manly seriousness. They are wrong. They are heretics. And if we continue to allow them to rule, they will surely lead America (as they already are in Gaza) to mass graves.

If Trump Wins, Resist Him!

W.J. Astore

Because Democracy

These are strange times in America. Today the New York Times is telling me there’s already a movement afoot to resist Donald Trump if he wins the election, in the cause of defending democracy, naturally. Here’s the blurb:

Top News

The Resistance to a New Trump Administration Has Already Started

An emerging coalition that views Donald J. Trump’s agenda as a threat to democracy is laying the groundwork to push back if he wins in November, taking extraordinary pre-emptive actions.

Now, as I’ve said on numerous occasions, I won’t be voting for Trump or Biden. I’m not a Trump supporter and I hope he loses. Yet, assuming the election isn’t “rigged,” as Trump likes to say whenever he loses, I’m prepared to accept the result as an expression of democracy, or at least as much “democracy” as the electoral college in America permits us to express.

I’m glad an “emerging coalition” is planning something, apparently, to curb the worst excesses of Trump and the Republicans. I hope this coalition will act to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza, pursue diplomacy to end the Russia-Ukraine War, pursue peace wherever and whenever possible, lower the threat of nuclear war on the planet, and cut the Pentagon budget while rebuilding America. How about fighting for America’s workers, raising the minimum wage, providing affordable health care for all that’s untied to employment, and similar steps that put the health and welfare of people first.

Or, is this “emerging coalition” motivated purely by animus against Trump and his followers? Is it still going to fully fund the Pentagon and wage war across the globe? In which case I’m not so excited.

Again, I come back to this question: If an “emerging coalition” is so worried about a Trump victory, why not put forward a candidate more fit to beat Trump than Joe Biden? Don’t “resist” Trump after he’s already won again—defeat him at the polls by putting forth a dynamic candidate with a populist worker-first platform.

I’m with James Madison that the biggest threat to liberty and freedom in America is perpetual war. War breeds authoritarianism and weapons built in the name of war represent, as Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said in 1953, a theft from the people. Weapons do not represent an “investment”; quite the reverse. And incessant preparations for war are not a recipe for peace.

If you truly want to defend democracy, resist war and the authoritarianism it breeds. Make major cuts to the Pentagon budget and invest in education and health rather than death and destruction. That’s the “emerging coalition” I’d like to see.