“Give war a chance,” the maverick strategist Edward Luttwak implored at the tail end of the Clinton administration. The quest for durable peace, he thought, was habitually interrupted by those liberal do-gooders who refused to let wars “burn themselves out.”

Spool forward some 25 years and war is being given a whole lot of chances, from Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and Lebanon to weaponized famine in Sudan to the long, grinding war in Ukraine. Amid this devastation, Western leaders have in the past years showed a unified front, largely supporting Ukraine and Israel and ignoring Sudan. But a new dynamic has underpinned this informal coalition: the growing penchant for war — and the tolerance of its costs — among the Western liberal-left establishment once lampooned by Mr. Luttwak.

When did the left become so comfortable with war? We need to ask this question with some urgency — not least because Donald Trump repeatedly played on fears of global war in his election campaign before promising to “stop wars” in his victory speech. The standard explanation is that terrorists and an axis of autocracies are threatening the world order, and Western leaders — whatever their political affiliation — must act. Certainly, the world looks more dangerous than it has for a long time. But this does not fully explain the way that the Biden administration has so single-mindedly been arming Ukraine and Israel while also letting allies in the Persian Gulf wage a devastating proxy war in Sudan. Nor does it quite explain the enthusiasm for the remilitarization of Europe coming from liberal commentators, Nordic social democrats and German greens alike, who will now be looking worriedly across the Atlantic.

When liberals compete to give war a chance — and when speaking the unspeakable comes down to fringe and hard-right politicians — we are in serious trouble. Unless we can open up political space for dissent and confront the true costs of conflict, wars will not burn themselves out. They will simply burn.

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posted by f.sheikh

A note on context by Huckgutma.;   Vladimir Mayakovsky was one of the greatest of twentieth century poets.  A Russian who wrote during the modernist period, his first important book was published in 1915.  He died (well, he did end up in despondency and madness, committing suicide) in 1930. 

  After the Russian Revolution he worked for the Russian State Telegraph Agency (ROSTA, which is referred to in the poem) designing posters – both the art and the text.  That’s where the poem starts, with Mayakovsky in a summer cottage in Pushkino[1], 20 miles outside of Moscow, in July, working on posters every day.  He’s angry that he is stuck with poster assignments which have to be completed in what he thinks is a dump where nothing goes on except that the sun comes up in the morning and goes down in the evening, seemingly descending into a “pit” on the western side of the village.  He’s so angry at his situation, “flying into such a rage one day,” that he curses the sun as a “shiftless lump.”  And then – well, read the story for yourself.

An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovksy In A Summer Cottage
     Vladimir Mayakovsky

A hundred and forty suns in one sunset blazed,
and summer rolled into July;
it was so hot,
the heat swam in a haze—
and this was in the country.
Pushkino, a hillock, had for hump
Akula, a large hill,
and at the hill’s foot
a village stood—
crooked with the crust of roofs.
Beyond the village
gaped a hole
and into that hole, most likely,
the sun sank down each time,
faithfully and slowly.
And next morning,
to flood the world
anew,
the sun would rise all scarlet.
Day after day
this very thing
began
to rouse in me
great anger.
And flying into such a rage one day
that all things paled with fear,
I yelled at the sun point-blank:
“Get down!
Stop crawling into that hellhole!”
At the sun I yelled:
“You shiftless lump!
You’re caressed by the clouds,
while here—winter and summer—
I must sit and draw these posters!”
I yelled at the sun again:
“Wait now!
Listen, goldbrow,
instead of going down,
why not come down to tea
with me!”
What have I done!
I’m finished!
Toward me, of his own good will,
himself,
spreading his beaming steps,
the sun strode across the field.
I tried to hide my fear,
and beat it backwards.
His eyes were in the garden now.
Then he passed through the garden.
His sun’s mass pressing
through the windows,
doors,
and crannies;
in he rolled;
drawing a breath,
he spoke deep bass:
“For the first time since creation,
I drive the fires back.
You called me?
Give me tea, poet,
spread out, spread out the jam!”
Tears gathered in my eyes—
the heat was maddening,
but pointing to the samovar
I said to him:
“Well, sit down then,
luminary!”
The devil had prompted my insolence
to shout at him,
confused—
I sat on the edge of a bench;
I was afraid of worse!
But, from the sun, a strange radiance
streamed,
and forgetting
all formalities,
I sat chatting
with the luminary more freely.
Of this
and that I talked,
and of how I was swallowed up by Rosta,
but the sun, he says:
All right,
don’t worry,
look at things more simply!
And do you think
I find it easy
to shine?
Just try it, if you will!—
You move along,
since move you must;
you move—and shine your eyes out!”
We gossiped thus till dark—
Till former night, I mean.
For what darkness was there here?
We warmed up
to each other
and very soon,
openly displaying friendship,
I slapped him on the back.
The sun responded!
“You and I,
my comrade, are quite a pair!
Let’s go, my poet,
let’s dawn
and sing
in a gray tattered world.
I shall pour forth my sun,
and you—your own,
in verse.”
A wall of shadows,
a jail of nights
fell under the double-barreled suns.
A commotion of verse and light—
shine all your worth!
Drowsy and dull,
one tired,
wanting to stretch out
for the night.
Suddenly—I
shone in all my might,
and morning ran its round.
Always to shine,
to shine everywhere,
to the very deeps of the last days,
to shine—
and to hell with everything else!
That is my motto—
and the sun’s!

 

[trans. from the Russian by Max Hayward and George Reavey]

posted by f.sheikh

https://www.huckgutman.com/blog-1/vladimir-mayakovsky-extraordinary-adventure 

“But viewing Gaza’s political repercussions merely through the lens of identity misses something fundamental. Over the past year, Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media — has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation. Many Americans roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction have no personal connection to Palestine or Israel. Like many Americans who protested South African apartheid or the Vietnam War, their motive is not ethnic or religious. It is moral.”But viewing Gaza’s political repercussions merely through the lens of identity misses something fundamental. Over the past year, Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media — has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation. Many Americans roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction have no personal connection to Palestine or Israel. Like many Americans who protested South African apartheid or the Vietnam War, their motive is not ethnic or religious. It is moral.”

“Surely, many young and Black voters were dissatisfied with the economy. Some may have been attracted to Mr. Trump’s message on immigration. Others may have been reluctant to vote for a woman. But these broader dynamics do not fully explain Ms. Harris’s underperformance, because she appears to have lost far less ground among voters who are older and white. Her share of white voters equaled Mr. Biden’s. Among voters over age 65, she actually gained ground.”

“All this provided Mr. Trump an opportunity. According to The Times, his campaign found that undecided voters in swing states were about six times as likely as other swing-state voters to be motivated by the war in Gaza. Mr. Trump wooed them. He pledged to help “the Middle East return to real peace” and lambasted former Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican with whom Ms. Harris had chosen to campaign, as a “radical war hawk.” Like Richard Nixon, who in 1968 appealed to antiwar voters by promising “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam,” Mr. Trump portrayed himself — however insincerely — as the candidate of peace.”

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“It’s happened. And it’s bad. America has elected as president a man who doesn’t really bother hiding his authoritarianism. Again. It is alarming. And yet to give way to alarmism at a time like this is a mistake. If American democracy is to survive the test of the next four years—and no, that is not a given—it will be because we’ve understood clearly what this moment means.

To those of us raised to revere constitutional democracy, seeing millions of people line up to vote to weaken constitutional democracy will always be upsetting. Yet in voting for a candidate who promised to use the repressive power of the state to persecute and punish his political opponents, who refused to accept a previous election defeat and rails against the notion that anything lies outside the president’s powers, tens of millions of Americans have just done precisely that. It feels inexplicable.

But it isn’t.

Political scientists have thought carefully about the kind of situation we’re in. Back in 2011, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote a paper together with Ragnar Torvik titled “Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances?” that doubles as a Rosetta Stone to our political moment.

Acemoglu, Robinson and Torvik built a model to show there are circumstances where it is rational for voters to prefer leaders who reject democratic institutions. This doesn’t normally happen in well-functioning democracies. But where unelected elites have outsized power, checks and balances can function to hem politicians in, preventing them from enacting policies a majority of voters want. In those circumstances, voters can rationally interpret a leader’s disdain for democratic institutions as a feature, not a bug: checks and balances come to be seen as the eggs you have to crack to make the democratic omelet.  “

“If the American polity isn’t going to break apart completely over the next four years, it’s important for everyone to accept Trump voters as rational actors. Acemoglu, Robinson and Torvik theorize that voters can come to see even the corruption that their preferred candidate is sure to engage in as a price worth paying for the enactment of policies that have no chance otherwise. The calculus Trump’s supporters have made may be appalling, it may be reckless—surely it is—and it may spectacularly backfire.

But irrational it is not.”

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posted by f.sheikh