I'm sure that our current president, if he's given the time--and, if he's not, some other Republican or Democrat--will meet or exceed the high standards that have been set, but Donald Trump has not yet come near committing the series of crimes for which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (following the precedent of five previous American administrations) are responsible. These crimes produced the twin horrors of imperialist and jihadi chaos, of which the destruction of the Libyan state was one egregious example, and the killing of young concertgoers in Manchester another. This represents a deep, persistent bipartisan policy that is much more important and difficult to confront than the question of which front man or woman will be selling it.
Manchester is the latest iteration of a scenario we've gone through so many times now, like some groundhog-day dream. At the end of my post two years ago, I was urging and hoping that Americans would wake up. But a lot of American liberals and lefties, including Berniebots, still like to imagine there's a political space they can inhabit called Progressive Except Imperialism. There isn't. Imperialism with Social Security and Medicare and Obamacare--even single-payer healthcare--is imperialism, and it's reactionary and supremacist. Equal-opportunity imperialism is imperialism. African-American, women, Latinx, or LGBTQ presidents, generals, and drone operators do not make it any less criminal, or dangerous, or any less inevitably erosive of all those cherished progressive domestic programs.
Ignoring or putting aside what the U.S. does in Libya, or Iraq, or Syria, or Palestine because"Trump! The Republicans! is ignoring a fundamental element of a progressive politics as well as an immediate danger to the country. One can do it, but those who do can't claim to be seriously confronting the horrors of a tragedy like Manchester, no matter how many tears they shed.
I'm afraid that is where we're stuck. The absurdity of Trump is drawing more well-meaning people into the flames of nostalgia for an imaginary Democratic copasetic state that disappeared on January 20th. The #Resistance can't even get its act together for single-payer healthcare--the easiest sell imaginable; it's not only avoiding the more contentious issues regarding American aggression in places like Libya and Syria, it's succumbing to the dangerous, war-mongering, Russophobic program of the military-intelligence complex.
I t's still dream on , and I fear it will take a shock much greater than Manchester before Americans finally get the news.
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