1.
In this weirdest year, there may be no weirder
phenomenon than the rise of the progressive Donald
Trump supporter.
2.
There exist two broad species of this political
genus. First are the radical instrumentalists who see the Republican nominee as
a noxious but necessary way station on the road to socialist revolution. Two
months ago in this space, a writer named Christopher Ketcham made the “left-contrarian
arsonist” case for Trump, arguing that, “What’s needed now in American
politics is consternation, confusion, dissension, disorder, chaos—and crisis,
with possible resolution—and a Trump presidency is the best chance for this
true progress.” While acknowledging Trump as “fascistic,” Salon’s
Walter Bragman urged his fellow lefties to at least acknowledge that “he
would shake the current system to its core.” In March, actress Susan Sarandon explained
to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes her hesitancy to support Hillary
Clinton in the general election because “Some people feel that Donald Trump
will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in.”
3.
With their purposeful enablement of right-wing
populist extremism over center-left incrementalism, America’s latter-day
revolutionaries are behaving like Weimar-era German communists, who, on Joseph
Stalin’s orders, attacked Social Democrats as “social fascists” rather than
battle Nazi brown-shirts. Clearing the way for an actual fascist to take
power would “heighten the contradictions of capitalism,” a dialectical Leninist
concept holding that conditions must deteriorate drastically in order to wake
the proletariat from its slumber.
4.
Today in America, the stakes may not be as great
as they were 80 years ago, but the political strategy is similarly
irresponsible. Exultant in their moral narcissism, these lefties for Trump
display no concern whatsoever for the consequences of their juvenile behavior.
It shouldn’t surprise us that the vast majority of them are white and upper
middle class, precisely the sort of people most insulated from the ravages of a
potential Trump regime.
5.
But it is the second group of progressive Trump
fans, subtler in their sympathies, who warrant the most concern. These are the
so-called anti-imperialists who harbor deep revulsion at the idea of American
power being used for good in the world. America, they believe, is more often
than not a source of evil and disorder—a jaundiced view of our global role that
they share with the Republican nominee. Unlike the aforementioned wannabe
revolutionaries, most of these progressives haven’t endorsed Trump. But they
nonetheless embrace the radical departure in American foreign policy that his
presidency promises. (Update: Several of the authors discussed in this piece
have
responded to it here.)
6.
Despite bootlegging Ronald Reagan’s campaign
slogan of “Make America Great Again,” the Trump campaign has thoroughly scorned
The Gipper’s optimistic message and acclamation of the United States as a
“shining city upon a hill.” In 2013, when Russian President Vladimir Putin
denounced the notion of “American exceptionalism” in a New York Times op-ed
responding to a speech by President Barack Obama calling for humanitarian
action in Syria, Trump declared
the article “a masterpiece” to Piers Morgan. “You think of the term as being
fine, but all of sudden you say, what if you’re in Germany or Japan or any one
of 100 different countries? You’re not going to like that term,” Trump said.
“It’s very insulting and Putin really put it to him about that.”
7.
More recently, the Times’ David Sanger asked
Trump if he would make “the spread of democracy and liberty” a component of his
foreign policy. “I don’t know that we have a right to lecture,” Trump replied
in a bit of whataboutery that could have been mistaken for Noam Chomsky. “Just
look about what’s happening with our country. How are we going to lecture when
people are shooting our policemen in cold blood? How are we going to lecture
when you see the riots and the horror going on in our own country? … We have to
fix our own mess.”
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8.
For centuries, Americans have broadly accepted
the idea that their country serves a unique world role as both a political
leader and moral exemplar. This notion of American exceptionalism traces itself
to the nation’s founding upon universal ideals of liberty and individual
rights, garnered real sustenance through the part America played defeating
fascist and then communist totalitarianism, and endures today as America
remains a beacon for people living under tyranny overseas. Except, that is, on
the isolationist right and anti-imperialist left, two groups the Trump campaign
has united in rejection of American global leadership.
9.
“Trump is right, we are flawed messengers,” declared
radical left-wing Brooklyn College political science professor Corey Robin in
reaction to Trump’s Times interview. As evidence, Robin cited a United
Nations hearing on American police brutality, where delegates from human rights
luminaries like Pakistan, Russia, China, and Turkey denounced Uncle Sam. “No
matter the DC freakout over Trump NYT interview, think his tacit repudiation of
US exceptionalism is praiseworthy,” echoed
Washington Post blogger Ishaan Tharoor.
10.
Over the past eight years, a bevy of Republican
politicians and conservative polemicists (including
yours truly) have assailed Obama for disavowing American exceptionalism. Many
of these selfsame conservatives, however, have no problem endorsing Donald
Trump, who has repeatedly and explicitly rejected American exceptionalism in a
manner Obama has only hinted at. The least that can be said of Trump’s
left-wing admirers is that they’re intellectually consistent. Much as the far right
is giddy over Trump’s normalizing previously taboo rhetoric on race and
immigration, the candidate’s progressive fans welcome his normalizing the
rejection of American global primacy.
11.
They’re certainly not wrong to see an
intellectual fellow traveler in Trump, who has scorned America’s postwar
leadership role like no major party presidential nominee. While Trump’s
invocation of “America First” has been roundly condemned for its odious
historical associations, one left-wing historian writing
for The Huffington Post defends it on grounds that the organization has been
spuriously maligned, its pro-Nazi leanings emphasized to the exclusion of its
righteous pacifism.
12.
Likewise, some progressives seem inclined to
overlook Trump’s more bellicose rhetoric (proposals to “bomb the shit out of
ISIS,” torture terrorists, and kill their families) as just window dressing for
what is ultimately the sort of non-interventionist foreign policy they favor.
“Unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my
first instinct,” Trump declared in his first foreign policy address back in
April.
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17.
Such words are music to the ears of those on the
left who paint Hillary Clinton as a “warmonger” for her mainstream foreign
policy views and traditional support for the American-led liberal world order.
“The only alternative to Trump’s frothy isolationism is Clinton’s liberal
hawkishness,” sighs The
New Republic’s Jeet Heer. Writing for The Electronic Intifada, whose
worldview is exactly what it sounds like, Rania
Khalek concludes that “Clinton is also dangerous to world stability. And
unlike Trump, she has the blood on her hands to prove it.” Though Khalek admits
that “Trump is riling up fascist sentiments,” she says that “he’s doing so by
tapping into legitimate anger at the negative consequences of trickle-down
neoliberal economics driven by establishment politicians like Clinton.” In a Nation
magazine symposium, Sherle Schwenninger, co-founder of the left-wing New
America Foundation, merrily predicts
that “Trump would redefine American exceptionalism by bringing an end to the
neoliberal/neoconservative globalist project that Hillary Clinton and many
Republicans support.”
18.
The Intercept’s Zaid Jilani, meanwhile,
observes approvingly
that “With Trump’s ascendancy, it’s possible that the parties will reorient
their views on war and peace, with Trump moving the GOP to a more dovish
direction and Clinton moving the Democrats towards greater support for war.”
Trump’s “dovish” inclinations are largely attributed to his belated opposition
to the Iraq War, which he frequently and falsely tries to portray as something
he expressed before, as opposed to after, the conflict began. For many
progressive Trump defenders, however, his furious condemnation of George W.
Bush elides such complications. “Trump opposed Iraq. Hillary voted for
war: Let’s take his foreign policy vision seriously,” Patrick L. Smith urges
his fellow anti-imperialist progressives in Salon.
19.
Finally, there is the Russia factor. There
exists no greater challenger to American global hegemony today than Vladimir
Putin’s regime, a fact that has led many Western anti-imperialists to defend
Russian prerogatives and generally portray Moscow as a benign actor in world
affairs. Khalek explicitly recapitulated this perverse moral equivalency in a
tweet:
20.
Do
people really believe the US is less reactionary and toxic than Russia?
Actually the US as sole superpower is far more destructive.
—
Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) August 8, 2016
21.
To see this tendency in action, consider Green
Party candidate Jill Stein, who, like generations of useful idiots before her, ventured
to Moscow last December where she publicly vilified her own country and sat
at Putin’s table for a 10th anniversary extravaganza celebrating Kremlin
propaganda network Russia Today. Belief in America’s unique iniquity and a
resultant blind spot for Russian depravities has also led some progressives to
stick up for the presidential candidate Moscow clearly favors.
22.
It’s no secret the Kremlin wants Donald Trump to
win this November. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has worked for the
pro-Russian former president of Ukraine, and one of his foreign policy
advisers, Carter Page, has a financial interest in Gazprom, the Russian state
energy concern. Trump has repeatedly attacked NATO—whose destruction is Putin’s
top foreign policy objective—and has gone so far as to state that he would
consider recognizing Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. Last month, after Wikileaks
published embarrassing email correspondence from the Democratic National
Committee that was likely delivered to them by Russian
hackers, Trump openly called upon the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s
email server. For these reasons and more, both Russian domestic and
international media have been overt in their support for Trump, whom Putin
himself has praised.
23.
To be sure, Trump is not an “agent” of the
Russian government. But his rhetoric and policy prescriptions are precisely
what the Russians—and left-wing anti-imperialists—want to hear. Trump’s
disparagement of American allies for “taking advantage” of the United States,
promises to dismantle NATO, and attacks on American exceptionalism are all
echoed by Moscow and its sycophants. In The Nation symposium, New
America’s Schwenninger
said that Trump “would stop the drift toward a potentially dangerous new Cold
War with Russia,” as if it were America and, not Moscow, that’s responsible for
heightened tensions. Schwenninger also praised Trump for recognizing “Russia’s
national-security interests in Ukraine” (a euphemistic validation of Moscow’s
annexation and ongoing invasion of a sovereign European country), “welcome[ing]
Russia’s fight against ISIS,” (largely nonexistent considering that most of its
bombings have targeted anti-Assad rebels), and acknowledging “that there is no
reason for the United States not to have good relations with Moscow” (other
than the fact that it is a territorially revanchist, nuclear-armed, virulently
anti-American dictatorship). In that same symposium, Stephen Kinzer happily
predicted that, under a president Trump, “Our new anti-ISIS coalition would
include Russia, Bashar al-Assad, Hezbollah, Iran, and the Kurds,” a ghastly
list, excepting the latter, of longstanding American adversaries.
24.
Julian Assange, whose
WikiLeaks is a cut-out for Russian intelligence, states that a vote for Clinton
is a “vote for endless, stupid war,” and that she “shouldn’t be let near a gun
shop, let alone an army. And she certainly should not become president of the
United States.” Assange’s fellow “transparency” activist Glenn Greenwald, who
shares the anarchic libertarian nihilist contrarianism of the Antipodean sex
pest (as well as his Clinton hatred), explains Trump’s attacks on NATO as
nothing more than an expression of fiscal prudence. “Questioning… whether it
has this ongoing value and whether the U.S. should be expending the resources
it is expending on NATO when we have massive income inequality and our working
class is being deprived in ways previously unimaginable, those are perfectly
legitimate questions to ask. NATO is not a religion,” he told Slate’s Isaac Chotiner, framing Trump’s
repudiation of American treaty obligations as heartfelt concern for the working
man. Criticizing Trump’s bromance with Putin gets in the way of “reducing our
belligerence towards Russia,” (emphasis added), because in Greenwald’s
warped view it’s the Obama administration, and not Putin’s regime, threatening
the peace in Europe.
25.
Confronted with the full, disturbing array of
evidence indicating Trump’s unseemly coziness with a hostile foreign power, the
Republican nominee’s left-wing sympathizers revert to a timeworn tactic: accuse
his critics of “McCarthyism.” While this accusation was once hurled at
right-wing demagogues who flung irresponsible accusations of dual loyalty at
liberals, today it’s being hurled at liberals who cite very real evidence of
dual loyalty on the part of a right-wing demagogue. A Nation editorial entitled
“Against Neo-McCarthyism” faults liberals for “promoting the narrative of a
devious Russian cyber-attack” against the DNC, which all available evidence
indicates it was. (Accusing Trump of asking the Russians to hack Clinton is
“such unmitigated bullshit,” says Greenwald; the candidate was merely
“trolling.”) Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel elsewhere warns
that Democrats “are on the verge of becoming the Cold War party,” and
admonishes her fellow progressives against “turning the Orange Menace into a
new Red Scare.” A recent Paul Krugman column raising concerns about Trump’s
ideological consonance with Russian policy priorities constitutes, in the eyes
of the World
Socialist Web Site, “a mission on behalf of the US military and
intelligence complex in defense of Washington’s core imperialist war strategy,”
probably the first time that the reliably liberal New York Times
columnist has ever been accused of such calumnies.
26.
Vanden Heuvel’s husband Stephen Cohen, a former
professor of Russian Studies at Princeton and New York Universities, has
long been the Putin regime’s loudest apologist in the United States, and so
it’s predictable that he would join his wife in rationalizing Trump’s alarming
amenity with Moscow. Recently
on CNN, Cohen defended Trump’s chumminess toward the Russian president by
asserting that “Vladimir Putin wants to end the new Cold War.” If that’s the
case, Putin has a very strange way of showing it, considering how his regime
invaded and occupied two of Russia’s neighbors, launched massive military
exercises simulating nuclear strikes on NATO capitals, funds an assortment of
extremist political parties across Europe, and pumps out virulent anti-Western
propaganda 24/7. “Ricky Vaughn,” one of the most prominent, pro-Trump white
supremacist “alt right” Twitter personalities, admiringly
posted a video of Cohen’s interview on Twitter, a portent of the synthesis
between right-wing isolationism and left-wing anti-imperialism the Trump
phenomenon has produced.
27.
During the Cold War, when Moscow made a moral
claim (however tenuous) to supporting the workers of the world, Western
progressives at least had a patina of intellectual justification (however thin)
for sympathizing with the Soviet Union. Today, however, Russia is the world
headquarters of global reaction, a predatory crony capitalist state that screws
the poor, oppresses gays, pronounces itself the last bulwark of traditional
Western Christianity, and suborns a variety of far right and outright
neo-fascist political forces across the European continent. There is nothing
remotely “left-wing” or progressive or even “anti-imperialist” about the Putin
regime, on the contrary, it is the most imperialist power on earth, illegally
occupying the territory of two sovereign countries and coveting much more.
28.
Some progressives, however, captive to a crude
and one-dimensional anti-Americanism, routinely talk themselves into defending
the Russian gangster state. Having justified the appalling behavior of
reactionaries abroad, it’s only natural they would validate one here at home.
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