Americans have every right to protest peacefully against Donald Trump and attempt to influence his positions and policies.
Why were there not far stronger and large protests against George W. Bush’s positions and policies, especially those involving war crimes, as with Iraq?
During this last campaign, why were there not far stronger and large protests against Hillary Clinton’s positions and policies, especially those involving war crimes, as with Libya? A reasonable accounting of her misdeeds in toto is truly shocking.
Why single out Trump and not Clinton? The leftists who are so dismayed by Trump but who were so lenient and forgiving to Clinton have no political home except the Democratic Party. Their allegiance is to party politics, not to justice across the board. It is to a half-assed version of justice. This is a version that places enormous weight on concerns over prejudices of many kinds but very much lower weight on actual death, destruction, disability, misery, physical violence and injury that’s caused by people like Bush and Clinton. Why be so strongly concerned over prejudices and not over crimes against human beings? When the prejudices are realized in the form of crimes, then they gain some attention from the left. Why not be strongly against these crimes from all sources and especially from governments run by both Republicans and Democrats? Why the attachment to warring against prejudices and not violent crimes of the state? Which is more important, the choice of a bathroom and the feelings of a transgender person or an American bomb dropped in Afghanistan that kills 32 innocent women and children? Why focus on one but not the other?
The fears emanating from the left are as exaggerated and absurd in their own way as the fears of the rightists that Russia is about to take over the Baltic republics or invade eastern Europe. The left acts as if Trump were about to control female employment, hold women down, place badges on Jews, round up all Hispanics and create concentration camps throughout the land. This is not going to happen under current conditions. America’s condition is not the same as Berlin’s in the 1920s. We do not have paramilitary organizations of fascist and communist parties contending in the streets. We do not have an unstable politics resulting from the loss of a major war and a despised peace treaty. We do not have left and right attacking parties in the middle. We have our own political problems, but prejudices of the kind that the leftists are so concerned about are not a major issue or a source of major concern.
We see exaggerated fears on the left and on the right, each of its own kind. Each has an axe to grind, and each presents a story to make its point that’s Hollywoodized into something unrealistic as a thriller whose action hero and heroine dodge hundreds of machine gun bullets unscathed. The imagined threats become more real in the narratives than the actual misdeeds of players like Bush and Clinton who actually kill people and should be tried as war criminals. When Trump starts doing this, I’ll say the same about him. I’m not going to worry if he says in public someone is ugly when I know that this is not only how people often think but also how they talk in private and worse. People talk about each other, as Thomas Hobbes observed hundreds of years ago, often making comments as soon as someone leaves the room. You are not going to change that and it’s not important to do so. There are bigger fish to fry in the way of actual deeds that violate well-known canons of justice.
If principles of justice are observed in international relations, it will become far easier to recognize and enforce them in domestic matters, and vice versa. If justice is violated in foreign affairs, then violations in domestic matters will amplify.
What is justice? See Lysander Spooner for guidance.
A major part of the problem with the exaggerated fears of left and right is a misunderstanding of the property rights basis of justice. If this were understood, we’d be far more concerned over destroying a supply of water in Iraq and causing deaths than using a demeaning word to characterize someone, regrettable as the latter may be.
9:39 pm on November 13, 2016 Email Michael S. Rozeff
