a rantlet

I started writing a comment over at John McCrarey's place, and I guess I couldn't stop because it turned into a long rant. Here's an edited version:

Trump, in remaking the [political/global] paradigm, made neocons the enemy because the neocons think the world ought to “drink from the cup of liberty.” What became clear under Trump, if not before him, was that many non-Western countries don’t want American-style liberty. The neocon project, especially under people like George W. Bush and John McCain, was about starting wars as a way to “spread democracy.” I hope that most of us, post-Bush, see how wrong and arrogant it is to do other cultures’ thinking for them. Dubya, in particular, misinterpreted a generic desire for liberty as a desire for specifically American-style liberty, and we see how well that went in places like Iraq, where we knocked over the sand castle of Saddam’s government, established what was supposed to be a more American-style government, and watched that slowly backslide. I can’t say that Iraq today is all happy and prosperous.

The MAGA project rejects the neocon’s warlike desire to spread democracy on the assumption that that’s what everyone wants. If we swept into Iran, destroyed the current government, and installed a US-style democracy, Iranians would simply use that democracy to vote in more theocrats. This is a point I’ve heard in certain sectors of the right quite frequently: countries can’t just have democracy imposed on them—democracy has to grow up organically. There has to be a history of it for it to work. Meanwhile, it’s dictatorships and warlords for the masses until a home-grown Thomas Jefferson shows up and starts changing things from the inside. I think part of Trump’s reluctance to start new wars was linked to his anti-neocon stance (and also, of course, to his businessman’s reflex to solve problems through deal-making).

At this point, I think America has enough problems of its own that it should spend way more time cleaning house (which may mean taking a flamethrower to Congress while it’s in session, forcing the Supreme Court to grow some hairy balls and a spine, and throwing out the chimpanzee currently in the Oval Office) than worrying about how free other countries are.

We should also be less hypocritical in how we conduct business with other countries. Our addiction to China’s cheap labor has to go: China is a fucking genocidal country almost on the order of North Korea, not to mention a global polluter and an epic thief of Western technology. It’s currently gobbling up parts of Africa and all of Sri Lanka, after having raped and murdered Tibet. It’s also slavering over Taiwan. Why align with China at all? Pivot to India, I say. India may be corrupt, but it’s nowhere near as far gone (morally) as China is. Elon Musk, who’s putting on the airs of a free-speech advocate in the States, has major Tesla facilities in China, both in Shanghai and Xinjiang, the latter being where all the Uyghur concentration camps are. It’s hard to take Musk seriously as an advocate for free speech when he’s still buddy-buddy with a repressive regime. This is the sort of hypocrisy I’m talking about.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of countries whose values align with ours, and with whom we could be doing productive business. Remember when people used to talk about the Anglosphere, and they included Eastern Europe? There’s so much untapped potential in that region, and we’re all dropping the ball on this.

Anyway, I could rant on and on. Neocon was the way to go for a lot of Republicans/conservatives a couple decades ago, but then along came Trump, who is basically a 90s-era Democrat, and he flipped over the chessboard. As Trump was happening, the left realigned itself to become a psychotic moral scold. 60s lefties used to be antigovernment and pro-free speech, but today, they’re totally the opposite, probably because those 60s radicals have all become old farts staring down the twin barrels of retirement. Meanwhile, it’s conservatives who are defending the potty-mouthed people while giving the government the finger. What universe is this?