I am now 57 years old, and now in 2016, for the first time in my life, one of the two major American political parties will nominate a radical for the office of president of the United States. I mustn’t get ahead of my reader, so I ought to parse the term ‘radical’ straight away. Radical is used to mean extreme or extremely different.
So, how is the this major party candidate different? I have nothing critical and categorical to say about white people, nothing unseemly to impugn to males, no contempt of billionaires, and I have no interest in discussing whether he seems likable or not. My comments here concern only what this candidate has proposed, his political policies. Much ado has been made in the media about the candidate’s intention to deny all Muslims entry into the United States and to build a multi-billion dollar wall along the American border with Mexico and extort an ill-disposed Mexican government to pay for it. These proposals may be different, but even combined they amount to a cavil in comparison to other of his crazily ill-advised proposals. The following is a brief critical discussion of some of his extreme views.
ONE: KILLING CHILDREN
In regard to terrorism, the radical has stated that an agency of the US government, the U.S. military, must “take out their families.” The idiomatic uses of “take out” are many, but only one carries any relevant meaning in this geopolitical context. The radical was not suggesting that the brothers and sisters and children of militant radicals be taken out to eat dinner. He means targeted killing.
This is very different, is it not? Aside from the fact that this is an unarguable war crime, it is unusual in the extreme. Such idiotic flailing in the fight against international terrorism is not and has never been avowed policy. It hardly needs to be stated that no nominee of a major political party in the entire history of the United States has advocated such atrocious barbarism… no, none in the whole 240-year history of the nation. That is as different as different gets! That such an uncivilized policy has in all American history been completely nonexistent establishes its differentness.
TWO: TORTURE
The radical is an avowed advocate of torture, of accommodating torture as a matter of forthright, unapologetic administrative policy. He has several times advocated a kindergarten approach in foreign policy: they did it first. And in this way – that easily – the barbarousness of the terrorists becomes our barbarousness. A candidate suggests that we comport utterly with the repugnant methods of the most virulently uncivilized people in the world.
The United States of America has signed and ratified the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the “U.N. Convention Against Torture”) and is now among over 150 states party to it. Does the radical know this? Perhaps not. But a just invocation of the appellation “radical” does not become a whit less valid by the dint of unscholarliness. Maybe the radical will counsel the wholesale abandonment of many international human rights agreements. But maybe also, in a world of hypothetical mindful and irreprehensible leadership, he ought to first become introduced to them.
THREE: ENCOURAGING JAPAN AND SOUTH KOREA TO DEVELOP NUCLEAR ARSENALS
The United States has never shared the fundamentals of its nuclear weapons-making with any other nations – not even America’s closest and dearest allies: Canada, France and Great Britain. And the reason was simple: nuclear weapons themselves will at some point pose an extential threat to humanity (and history reached that alarming point in the early 1970s), and that threat is in no wise reduced or contained the long run by any policy advocating proliferation. Japan, South Korea, and many other nations have ratified international nonproliferation agreements in part because of a ceaseless American policy of promising to defend these democracies vigorously if they should come under attack. And major joint American-South Korean naval preparedness exercises in the Yellow
Sea in recent years offer evidence of this ongoing American policy.
What I am about to discuss here is probably little known and still less understood by the radical candidate.
The most important international agreement in recent decades concerning nuclear weapons controls is the NPT, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The treaty came into force in 1970, and the United States, South Korea and Japan are three among approximately 190 nations signatory. (In May, 1995, the Treaty’s application was extended indefinitely.)
The NPT has three fundamentally guiding categorical components, sometimes referred to as “pillars”. Crucial among the three are “nonproliferation” and “disarmament”, and although progress on disarmament has been utterly disappointing, the compelling logic that – If one unrestrained black mamba in the house presents a danger to humans, then a hundred such merely increase that danger – has corroborated the basic philosophical soundness of the Treaty. Responsible leaders all over the world are and have been well aware that there are already several black mombas in the house, and believe that it is perfectly reasonable to conjecture that the addition of more black mombas will not bring greater real security to those who must forever remain in that (metaphorical) house.
Picture now the fellow who treats the poisonous snake infestation in his comfortably warm abode with the introduction of still more of the critters. Is his response nonstandard? Is it a “different” response? Might it be deemed more than different? Is it radical?
Again I point to a characteristic mentioned previously: prior nonexistence. There has been no such wild-eyed policy proffered in the nation’s entire history, none even in the candidate of the losing party in the presidential election; not ever!
Certainly Pope Francis, with all his indifference to material wealth and his unremitting faith, is so different from ordinary folk that he can be described as a kind of radical. But there also exists a different sort of radical, and we might identify this other type as that of the misanthropic ilk. The Pope has freely volunteered to wash and kiss the feet of persons whose sole qualification for the rare bounty was that they were poor refugees. We would be clumsy in our criticism of the Pope if we were to cite some pigheadedness of Vatican teaching, to use specifics of Vatican policies or teachings to buttress a criticism of the leader. We do not ever associate the voluntary washing and kissing of others’ feet with misanthropy. Misanthropy neither washes nor kisses anything, not even once the ring of its most ardent benefactor! I go these extra sentences and paragraphs to illustrate that there is a chasmic dissimilarity between the radicalism of the proactive altruist and that of the misanthrope.
If, hypothetically, a candidate were radical in several qualities closely related to malevolence and incivility, what might we cite as specific evidence of it? And how are malevolence and incivility of service to a nation’s honor? How does malevolence serve a nation’s long term security interests?
FOUR: THE POSSIBLE NUCLEAR BOMBING OF ISIS TARGETS IN SYRIA
Since the very beginning of the nuclear era, which dates precisely to the end of World War Two, the United States has staunchly adhered to the principle of exclusive and exigent defense in the prospective future hostile uses of nuclear weapons. In all wars since World War Two, the leadership of the United States, both legislative and executive, have determined to use only conventional weapons, never nuclear weapons. Whether this policy was a component of an overarching American strategy to avoid setting any precedent that might make the Soviet Union even more menacing, or to avert a possible escalation into global thermonuclear war, or to merely contain an already minatory set of weapons systems, the U.S. Has steadfastly held to this if not exactly pacifist, then decidedly mature and intelligent element of foreign policy.
And for nearly all foreign policy experts, the longstanding policy is a no-brainer. There is more than solely the risk that the itself-escalatory introduction of nuclear weapons into a conflict may incline further (and unpredictable) escalations, both immediate, and ongoing. Such weapons are in their very preternatural essence so indiscriminately wide in destructiveness that they do not even remotely participate in any sane, morally persuasive strategy of legitimate defense. And this illegitimate aspect is very much consequent to the well known effectiveness of existing conventional ordnance. (One U.S. naval carrier battle Group – or “carrier strike group” – possesses sufficient conventional weaponry to completely destroy an entire nation the size of North Korea or Syria. And the United States Navy possesses eleven of them.) Contemporary conventional weapons systems obviate any standard military usefulness of nuclear weapons.
When I was a kid, I remember thinking that American democracy was ultimately doomed, because to ruin their democracy for all future time the people only had to vote away their political heritage once. Interminable, hope-abandoning communism requires our assent only once, while democracy requires constant care. Eventually human attention fails, of course. Now, communism gone back to its cage, we are met with a radical fascist threat in the mainstream theater of politics. Government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is actually contemplating handing it all over to an atavistic power hungry enemy of human rights, devoid of moral scruple, reminiscent of infantile democracy – the republic in 1816! – where the white and male and moneyed held exclusive political power.
The formerly conservative American political party is preparing to unite behind a radical and fascist who believes that the United States is in decline because of its accommodating, inclusive, moderate and human rights respecting political ethos (and unsaid, in decline because of the appreciable increase of participation among minorities in American democracy). He thinks the United States was at its puissant apex before the world wars. And this strange perspective is instructive. He harkens romantically back 110 years to a time when Europe had not embarrassed itself irreparably before the world, before the everlasting shame of he Holocaust, before the time that the white race came to be unmasked, and when all before their haughty countenances amounted to a “white man’s burden.”
We would do well to maintain in appreciation that when we embrace political 1816 it is different than other more commonplace political divergences, and to retrogress this way is to drop into a political black hole, with no prospect of return. In this, we mark a turnstile to democracy’s abrogation. Such an odyssey takes its venturers one way. To that unhappy place we go only once.