Letter 2 America for March 28, 2014

Dear America,

There is an interesting dialectic taking place within the Republican Party.  It is the attempt to reconcile two kinds of Republicanism relative to international affairs, between those who are world-wide interventionists on one side and those on the other side who see that the ruination of the United States is in that doctrine.  It is not the old hawk vs. dove debate.  That dichotomy exists in both parties and has for as long as I can remember.  Rather, it is the reconciliation of two views not of the world, but of the United States' role in the world--not of protection of American interests worldwide but of fiduciary duty to preserve everyone else's.  One side--manifested, for example, by the plaints of Senator Bob Corker that the Obama administration's policy on Syria has frustrated the King of Saudi Arabia because he expected American military intervention there as if the real problem with our policy is that the King is disappointed--is a tacit claim that this country is the final arbiter of how nations and their governors should behave, and that the right to arbitrate is really a duty.  That is the school of thought that led to everything from the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion through the war of attrition that led to more than 55,000 casualties in Vietnam all the way up through Afghanistan today, where we have spent 5,000 American lives and a trillion dollars to achieve nothing more than the entrenchment of  a kleptocratic regime that is leaning toward giving back to the enemy we went there to fight everything they had before we went there.  It is a doctrine predicated on the notion that futility is not a measure of imprudence if you just believe you are right, and that American virtue, and thus the right of America to opine and enforce its opinion in every geopolitical matter, is axiomatic regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.

On the other side of the debate are people like Rand Paul, the Libertarian/Tea Party acolyte aspiring to the Republican presidential nomination.  Paul, whether or not he is confirmed in the belief, as are those on the other side of the debate, that "American" and "virtuous" are synonyms, believes that we have enough problems on our own shores that there is no need to look for problems on someone else's.  That is significant because traditionally, there have been more Democratic doves than there have been Republicans, and there have been times when that mattered electorally, but overall, foreign affairs have been a secondary factor in determining who the next president will be.  But the 2016 election may be the first departure from that tradition in recent decades...since Lyndon Johnson's abdication led to the nomination of George McGovern and the election of the resurrected Richard Nixon in 1968.  Rand Paul could actually be president if the bellicosity of the world around us continues to blossom, and that would be a good thing and a bad thing at the same time.  He would keep us out of the conflagration that seems imminent, but he would run this country into the ground with his irrational laissez-faire beliefs if the Democrats don't control both houses of congress, which leads me to this coming November.  We have a lot to worry about between now and then.

Paul might be inclined to persist in the trend of the Obama administration toward pulling in American horns and participating in international politics rather than directing them, and that would be the good thing.  But, while he shows signs of a kind of rationality in that arena, it is frighteningly absent in the rest of his politics as evinced by his willingness to say some of the most absurd things in the course of grandstanding on the senate floor.  He is a glutton for attention, and his smug conviction that he is always right leads him to demand things like the right to buy incandescent light bulbs rather than acknowledging that they have taken us a large step toward the energy independence that he extols on other occasions as he demands more drilling, apparently in lieu of the conservation policy of which the advent of the LED light bulb is emblematic.  And like many politicians, seemingly conservative Republicans trying to make a dubious point in particular, he is inclined to embrace any canard that he thinks will enhance his libertarian creed in the eyes of others.  In committee, he complained that his low flow toilet didn't flush properly and that his pipes were clogged as a consequence.  Coincidentally, I heard the same claim from someone who came to clear a clog in my own pipes...at the site of an old style toilet.  But when another toilet in the house needed to be replaced, it was replaced with a new, low-flow toilet that uses less than one third of the water that the old style toilets do, and I concomitantly retrofitted the other toilets in the house, including the one that had been clogged, with low-flow mechanisms, and we haven't had a plumber in the house since.  Of course, my anecdotes are no more persuasive than Rand Paul's, but research demonstrated that, while the internet is rife with apocryphal reports of Rand Paul style complaints, research has not demonstrated any increase in plumbing problems in consequence of the switch to low-flow technology, but our local water authority is reporting an 18% decline in water consumption over the past decade or so.  Put in practical terms, there is a drought in much of California that threatens our economy as a whole as that is where most of the produce we eat comes from.  An 18% increase in the water available for irrigation would have a national impact, so low-flow toilets and sprinklers that run at night and apply smaller amounts of water to greater effect would be a boon to us all, so, at least in my opinion, Rand Paul's need to exercise the right to choose his own toilet and light bulb technology in the name of civil liberty is at best misguided, and probably more like idiotic, which is a bad quality in a president.  But with a Republican congress, who knows what he might succeed in doing as he sends us back into the past with the rapidity of a projectile from the gun he insists on owning.

My point is that the election in November may be the only way for us to protect ourselves from the possible advent of an ultra-conservative political trend in 2016.  The ascendancy of Rand Paul sounds absurd, but look at him and ask yourself if you want to take the risk that it isn't.

Your friend, \\

Mike