Andrew Bacevich on the continuities in Trumpism

Historian Andrew Bacevich has a Niebuhrian view of public policy that gives his writing a sense of tragedy mixed with cautious hope.

In After Trump: The Donald in the Rearview Mirror TomDispatch 09/11/2018, he looks at the continuities of the Trump Era with its predecessors, seeing Trump in his way as being a normal product of the preceeding political and economic trajectory of the United States.

He does not mean it as a compliment.

Looking back to the immediate postwar area, which in retrospect we call the beginning of the Golden Age of Capitalism these days, Bacevich notes three "large facts" that defined the US reality: the gigantic industrial role of the country in the world economy; a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and income (he actually calls it the distribution of "the benefits" of the economy); and, a broad pacifist sentiment.

The latter sounds especially surprising in 2018. But after the end of the Second World War, there really was a big hope and expectation from the American public that we needed peace and should try to avoid becoming involved in new wars. There was a big public demand to bring US troops home from abroad, to President Harry Truman's consternation. As Bacevich describes it, Americans "may not have been a peace-loving people, but they knew enough about war to see it as a great evil." Recogniying that war in itself is a great evil is the most appealing aspect of Niebuhrian realism.

But those three "large facts" of the postwar America are part of the past. The US is no longer the industrial powerhouse of the world in anything like the way it was in 1946. "Ours is increasingly a 'gig' economy," Bacevich writes, "which might be cool enough when you’re 25, but less so when you’re in your sixties and wondering if you’ll ever be able to retire."

Wealth and income distribution, of course, are radically more unequal today than in the postwar period. Republican Administrations promoted that outcome with deregulation and tax cuts slanted for the wealthy. So did the Democrats, if not quite so recklessly.

And, of course, today the government and the political parties and many ordinary citizens, too, accept constant war as normal rather than viewing war as a terrible though sometimes unavoidable evil:

By 2016, Americans had also come to accept war as normal. Here was “global leadership” made manifest. So U.S. troops were now always out there somewhere fighting, however obscure the purpose of their exertions and however dim their prospects of achieving anything approximating victory. The 99% of Americans who were not soldiers learned to tune out those wars, content merely to “support the troops,” an obligation fulfilled by offering periodic expressions of reverence on public occasions. Thank you for your service!

Bacevich developed that latter theme at length in his book, The New American Militarism (2005). And the trend wasn't interrupted by the Obama or Trump Administration.

Bacevich's Nieburhian perspective keeps in view the fallen state of humanity and the fragility of good intentions, particulary in foreign policy. This sometimes lends a fatalistic tone to his writing that makes me wish he would get a dose of Hegelian optimism. But he's not being cynical when he writes things like:

By the twenty-first century, the values that Trump embodies had become as thoroughly and authentically American as any of those specified in the oracular pronouncements of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt. Trump’s critics may see him as an abomination. But he is also one of us.

Yet as his article also makes clear, he is highly critical of Trump and very aware of his particular obnoxious traits. What he says about Trump's supposed "isolationism" in foreign policy is on point.

At the same time, he is emphasizing that there are deeper problems whose solutions depend on an activated citizenry. I don't know if that's Hegelian so much as Jeffersonian, but he is making a call for ordinary voters to be more engaged and to take on their responsibilities in a democracy:

The nation’s too-little, too-late response to climate change for which a succession of presidents share responsibility illustrates the great and abiding defect of contemporary American politics. When all is said and done, presidents don’t shape the country; the country shapes the presidency -- or at least it defines the parameters within which presidents operate. Over the course of the last few decades, those parameters have become increasingly at odds with the collective wellbeing of the American people, not to mention of the planet as a whole. ...

Trump is not the problem. Think of him instead as a summons to address the real problem, which in a nation ostensibly of, by, and for the people is the collective responsibility of the people themselves. For Americans to shirk that responsibility further will almost surely pave the way for more Trumps -- or someone worse -- to come. [my emphasis]