[Peace-discuss] [New post] Politics in this country has never felt the way the it does now…

[C G Estabrook]

Mort--

I disagree with the parallel between the Nixon administration and the Trump administration, largely because it’s couched in personal terms, rather than in terms of policies - continuous, but not identical. It collapses the differences between 40 years ago and today. History doesn’t repeat itself, even if it occasionally rhymes.

Even to sound the rhyme requires accurate descriptions of the politics of each administration - and the US political establishment is desperate to misrepresent what they want this administration to do (namely, promote corporate globalism and retard Eurasian economic integration - both for the profits of the US 1%).

Instead of accurate descriptions of Nixon and Trump, we have almost exclusively tendentious accounts, particularly from liberals. I suggested what the Nixon administration was (viz., the culmination of the New Deal), and the Trump administration (viz., a proposed rejection of 40 years of neoliberalism and neoconservatism - now cudgeled into the pro-war/pro-Wall St. shape of the Obama administration: “a US-led NATO is on Russia’s borders and sanctions persist”). 

I do not defend Trump but want to point out that it was his suggestion of a modus vivendi with Russia that so frightened and enraged the US political establishment - for good reason, if one pays attention to the crimes that that establishment has committed vis-a-vis Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. 

The differences between Trump and Obama in action on practically all the matters you mention (military buildup, nuclear weapons, Korean provocations, environmental nonfeasance, Israeli policies re Iran and Palestine, education, judicial appointments, etc.) are differences of style, not substance. The victims of those policies don’t notice much change.

Of course Trump has the context of “the drone murders and the continuing depredations in Afghanistan and Syria” -  “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” and the only president to be at (illegal) war throughout two terms. But he lacks his predecessor’s talent for hiding his crimes.  
 
Trump is estopped from making any real changes in the policies of the Obama (and Bush, etc.) administrations because he’s probably the weakest president since Coolidge (from whom he differs primarily in bluster). 

If the Nuremberg principles had been applied to US presidents since WWII, they all would have been hanged - and Trump as well (for the “supreme international crime ... aggressive war”). Recognizing that destroys the propaganda of the US political establishment, up to the moment, as they try to foist those policies on Trump, largely successfully. 

Chomsky, who as you know I regard as the most cogent American political analyst of the last half-century, noted that - as he said - “Nixon’s defenders had a case,” if one attended to the nature of US politics at the time - rather than just to his presumably rotten character; the same can be said of Trump. They both are scapegoats. Trump is not the problem: US war-making is. 

The effective political establishment in America hides its crimes by directing attention to personal failings. “Resistance” to Trump is a distraction from the establishment’s nefarious policies at home and abroad. (See “Anti-Trumpism Is Anti-Progressivism In Disguise” <https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/anti-trumpism-is-anti-progressivism-in-disguise-9e688e6152e9>.)

The deficiencies of presidential character in our lifetimes shouldn’t blind us to the fact that the polity for which we’re responsible is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” - and has been throughout our lifetimes. “Two minutes’ hate” for chief executives like Nixon and Trump doesn’t make up for the crimes that we’ve allowed American liberals - from Kennedy and Johnson to Clinton and Obama - to commit; and that continue. 

Regards, CGE 


> On Dec 28, 2017, at 11:46 AM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> I don’t get it Carl.  Just what do you disagree with about Roth’s description of his own disgust with American policy in the times he talks about?Be specific. All that you reply/comment upon  below is beside the point. What I find particularly dismaying is your ambiguous defense of Trump, as if he were a great anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, peace maker. You have truly been fooled—that is a good word— by Trump's hope for a modus vivendi with Russia; now we can see that it was illusory—a US  led NATO is on Russia’s borders and sanctions persist. Are you ignoring his military buildup, his threats to use and develop even more nuclear weapons, his crusade against N. Korea, his attack on the environment (EPA ) and anthropogenic climate change, his association with the fossil fuels complex and walking away from the Paris agreement. His continuation of threats against Iran linked to Israeli policies and against Palestinians, his attack on the public school system with his appointment Vos, His overt militarism, his appointment of federal judges of the most reactionary stripe he can find, his catering to violence and racism. I am unable to list all his regressive and dangerous policies, yes, many a continuation of what went before his term in office, like the drone murders and the continuing depredations in Afghanistan and Syria. 
> 
> Perhaps you should consult the reflections of your muse Noam Chomsky on all this.
> 
> No, I have not forgotten about how Democrats have also played (many of) these vile games. 
> 
> All this reminds me that you have also forgotten about the crassness of Nixon, his subversion of law, his continuation of the Vietnam war, his anticommunist fervor. But yes, he as not all encompassing evil, as you point out.The times were such that he advanced some policies that now would be regarded as “liberal”. And how about his Secretary of State Kissinger, the mastermind of his foreign policy in Chile against Allende, but yes also China.  
> 
> As for Trump, he is a personal  but consequential nonentity, ignorant, stupid, and amoral beyond measure. The two,Nixon and Trump, are not totally comparable, but Roth’s disgust certainly rhymes with what many of us feel today with the Trump/Republican administration. 
> —mkb