Jimmy Carter and the Limits of Liberalism


This article was originally posted on Policymic 06/26/12

Earlier this week, the New York Times published an op-ed by Jimmy Carter, in which the former president bemoans the fact that "the United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights." 

Carter is disturbed by the recent exposure of a Presidential "Kill List," viewing it as the latest evidence of the USA's mounting disdain for human rights, a process that, according to our friend from Georgia, began on September 12, 2001.   

Now, before we start to list the centuries-long litany of American crimes – slavery and genocide being most prominent  – let us first point out that Carter, in his time as an ex-president, has been very active in all sorts of good causes, at home and abroad. He's even managed to summon up the courage to call Israel's occupation of Palestinian land what it is – a system of apartheid (although one wishes that Carter had taken a similar stand against South African apartheid during his presidency, instead of aiding the South Africans as they fomented civil war in newly-independent Angola). Carter is a liberal's liberal.

And that's the problem. Carter's op-ed is a perfect example of the limitations and blindspots of American liberalism. Chief among these deficiencies is a lack of pattern recognition. When Carter writes, "while the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past," we have to ask exactly what past he's referring to here.   

It couldn't be the Clinton years. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died needlessly because American-backed sanctions against their country left them unable to get proper healthcare, sanitation, or nutrition (when asked about those deaths, liberal interventionist Madeleine Albright would declare "we think the price is worth it") would weigh heavily against that being the demarcation between "widespread human rights abuse" and "global champion of human rights."  So would the ruinous bombings of Yugoslavia, or the multitude of Russians and other residents of the former eastern bloc states who were killed by free-market shock therapy (a therapy that led to one of the largest and fastest shortening of life expectancy in recorded history), or any of a multitude of other crimes. 

Rewinding through the rest of the 20th century is no good either, as Vietnam, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, and a host of other unprovoked invasions would seem to mar the record, as would the non-stop support of various tyrants and torturers that fill the interstices between American wars. Even the American contribution to the destruction of fascism in WWII sits uncomfortably next to the fact that many of the defeated fascists and collaborators were restored to power by the Allies immediately following the war, as in Greece, Italy, and South Korea.

It would be tiresome to backtrack through American history all the way to 1776. Two paragraphs of more recent crimes is grim enough. Hopefully, the reader can forgive the absence of a complete history of atrocities and a dearth of attention to domestic oppression of the non-white population.

The problem is that somehow liberals are able to overlook all of these crimes, and when confronted with one that is absolutely inescapable – such as American involvement in Vietnam – they only shake their heads and say "we had good intentions, but somehow mistakes were made and we lost our way."  Today, you can substitute Afghanistan for Vietnam, as many liberals still seem to regard that invasion as "the right war." 

It's this attitude, that the USA is some kind of clumsy but well-intentioned giant, stumbling around trying to right wrongs but inadvertently causing more trouble, that allows liberals like Carter to be shocked and indignant about torture, assassinations, indefinite detention, and other unpleasant practices of the national security state. It is this worldview that prevents liberals from truly challenging the root of the problems they decry. Carter, in his op-ed, seems to believe that if the United States just stops drone assassinations then Washington will suddenly "regain moral leadership" and all will be right with the world.

Combating the sort of historical blindness and aversion to pattern-recognitions inherent in liberalism is a necessary first step toward creating a more realistic view of the world and an analysis of how to solve the problems it faces. Liberalism is as good as a band-aid on a sucking chest wound when it comes to solving the very real problems of global war, poverty, and illness, and until it is no longer the dominant position from which criticisms are made, any progress made will be fitful, stumbling, and constantly vulnerable to being rolled back.

The Radical Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr


This article was originally posted on Policymic 01/16/12 with the title "Why Martin Luther King Would Not Get Along With Mitt Romney or Barack Obama"

Today marks the birthday of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Both political parties will likely use the opportunity to try to appropriate the man for their own political agendas. Both liberals and conservatives will try to affiliate themselves with King, but neither are correct. However sanitized his public image is today, King's words are those of a brave and radical man who would be shunned by both of America’s mainstream political parties.

For example, in discussing the strange behavior of American troops supposedly sent to “liberate” Vietnam, King said, “We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops … We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?” Would this view be at home on the stage of any of the recent Republican primary debates? Does anyone think that the DNC will host any voices asking similar questions about America’s modern day imperialist adventures in the 2012 election?

King famously said of the Vietnamese, “they watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees … So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children.” What would this man say of our current drone-friendly president, who has ordered the push-button murders of who-knows-how-many foreigners, many (if not most) of them civilians?

King would be firmly against people like GOP candidate Mitt Romney, the draft-dodging protestor of anti-war draft dodgers, when he speaks of the necessity of counseling young men of military age on “our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection.”

It would be easy to go on at length about King’s principled stand against U.S. imperialism (and not just in Vietnam), to provide passage after passage where he abjures the methods of his own government in favor of a policy of compassion and peace. But it is not only foreign policy where King disagrees with the American political consensus.

When it comes to domestic issues, and especially racial policy, King’s stances are in conflict with both the Republican Party – whose stance on racial oppression seems to vary between ‘it is a relic of the past’ and 'white people are the real victims' – and with the tepid liberal non-solution of “tolerance” presented by the Democrats. This is embodied perfectly by King in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail in the person of the “white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’"

King identified the source of racial oppression not as a flaw of bigotry in individual people but in a “system that still oppresses us.” His advice was to organize to obtain the power necessary to fight the entrenched and oppressive systems of racism and empire in this country.

When it came to economics, King committed the cardinal sin of questioning the benevolence and usefulness of the capitalist system, asking, "Why are there forty million poor people in America? … When you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.” No pundit in America would ever question the idea of private property by asking, "Who owns the oil?" and “Who owns the iron ore?” and "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?"

Neither did King limit himself to these broader questions of inequality and exploitation. He proposed concrete policies to combat poverty and inequality, including the creation of a national guaranteed income program, which he estimated would cost $20 billion a year, and said “if our nation can spend $35 billion a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own two feet right here on earth.”

King was radical in the truest, most original sense of the word. He understood that problems of oppression cannot be confronted piecemeal but must be solved through a total transformation of society, something he expressed by saying "America, you must be born again!” While most of the political establishment rejects this idea, a radical social transformation is, and has been, the only real path to the country and the world King and people like him wished to live in. The words of Langston Hughes, quoted by King and many others, remain just as relevant today as when they were written:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!