A decade or so ago, some Republicans started a meme about Democrats as the war party.
Democratic President Wilson? Started World War I.
Democratic President Roosevelt? Started World War II.
Democratic President Truman? Started the Cold War.
Democratic President Johnson? Started the Vietnam War.
OK. Then there were the Bushes.
Democrats were extremely offended by this. Because Democrats know that they are the Peace Party, and the Republicans are the warmongers. I mean, who are the people that display Peace symbols on their cars and houses? Democrats. Who are the people who are in love with assault rifles? Republicans. ‘Nuff said.
But I believe, following Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, that politics is about defeating your enemy and rewarding your friends.
And I believe that applies whether the enemy is the tribe next door, the feudal lord across the river, the empire on the other side of the mountains, or the hated racist-sexist-homophobes of which you’ve heard tell.
And I believe that, looking at the United States government in 2024 it has Russia and China as foreign enemies, and it has extreme-MAGA Republicans as domestic enemies. As for friends, it has its NATO allies and its domestic allies in the educated class and the activist class and the recipients of government benefits and DEI discrimination.
And I believe that everything that government does comes down to fighting its enemies and rewarding its friends.
And I believe that the foreign enemies represent a risk for World War III and the domestic enemies represent a risk for Civil War II.
I do not regard the leaders of the United States as evil. I just believe that it is the natural instinct of political leaders to worry about foreign enemy threats and about domestic enemy threats, and then, from time to time, do something about those enemy threats.
Is there a better idea? I don’t know.
I’m reading Henry Kissinger’s World Order and he tells how the Peace of Westphalia set up a balance-of-power arrangement in Europe in 1648 after a century of religious wars ending in the Thirty Years War in which about a third of Germans died from war and/or famine. Then there was the Congress of Vienna — starring Metternich and Talleyrand — in 1815 after 30 years of ideological war in Europe that set up a new balance-of-power arrangement. Then there was the Treaty of Versailles after World War I demolished the empires of Russia, Austria and Germany and didn’t set up a balance-of-power arrangement. Then there was the armed peace of the Cold War after the slaughter of the ideological war of World War II. There is now a default balance-of-power arrangement because nuclear powers don’t want to go to war with another nuclear power, because Hiroshima.
I’d say that the story of the last 500 years is all-out wars getting more and more brutal and more and more devastating.
But, this was supposed to be the Age of Enlightenment and Reason and Progress. What went wrong?
Well, I think that the reason is politics. The idea that raged through the finest minds of the Age of Enlightenment and Reason and the believers in Progress that the royal road to the future was politics. On the contrary, I believe that anyone that thinks politics is going to make things better has a screw loose. I believe that everyone in politics is like the man with a hammer. Everything looks like a nail.
I believe that the political instinct is the ape-like instinct to defend your food-growing land from people who might take it away and make it their food-growing land. Food-growing land was a matter of life and death. But today food-growing land is an afterthought. That’s because the Industrial Revolution has created a worldwide market economy for the production and exchange of goods and services and anything you do to mess with that makes humans poorer. It doesn’t matter who grows the food and where. What matters is to get plugged into the worldwide exchange economy and contribute something so that you can benefit from its deluge of goods and services.
Fine. We don’t need to own and defend our food-growing land. So what do we do with our ape-like instinct to defend our territory?
I say we need to convert the political instinct into a recreation, a sport in which men can exercise their warring political instincts in a harmless manner.
But what? But how? I don’t know.
Maybe the answer is to give every nation its own nukes.