The Mattis Default

“One core belief that I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies. Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman to the world. Instead, we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense including providing effective leadership to our alliances.” (from James Mattis’ resignation letter to Trump)

Retired General James Mattis, butcher of Fallujah, was on Hillary Clinton’s short list for Secretary of Defense, too. And now he has abandoned Trump. I’d hardly be the first to point out how the anti-Trump establishment is opportunistically flocking to his defense as the wheels fall off the Trump bandwagon. He is a General, and those Democrats — much like Republicans and independents in the United States — do love a man (or woman) in uniform. The unfortunate fetish many “progressives” have for the hawkish Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is how she checks the boxes . . . woman, person of color (that still can pass for white), and military veteran.

We are not a self-consciously militaristic society, even with a military that dwarfs every other armed force in the world, even with our economy utterly dependent upon military contracts as a surrogate foreign market, and even with a military presence in 150 other countries. The reason we don’t think we are suffering from militarism is because most of us have an impression of the world as a political phenomenon that is exactly like that of Mattis. This is as clear a statement of American exceptionalism as we might find. Even many “progressives” would concur with Mattis’s words above.

We believe that, with certain regrettable dispensations, we really are the “free world’s” big brother, standing watch against the pernicious forces of barbarism and chaos. This mythos is the mystical strange attractor of American exceptionalism. The “strength” with which we bear this grave responsibility is itself benign — people love their big brothers — and without it all that is good might perish.

This “shining city on the hill” narrative didn’t begin with Ronald Reagan, though he popularized it in a speech. It is an American white settler reference to Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” Jesus was talking about charitable discipleship, but why let facts or history or even established texts stand in the way of good propaganda. When my ancestors were happily putting bounties on native scalps and running escaped slaves to ground, they were also calling the expanding United States a “New Jerusalem.”

The straw that broke the Mattis-camel’s back was Trump’s latest grand mal tantrum that included ordering a troop withdrawal from Syria and a substantial troop redeployment from Afghanistan. I completely approve of both (even a busted clock is right twice a day), even if these impulsive actions by the Groper-in-Chief were coordinated with Vladimir Putin (I don’t know if they were, but I still maintain that Russian officials have photos of Trump diddling German shepherds or some such thing). Even if this move is advantageous to Russian designs in the Great Game that now pits the American empire against the upstart empires of Russia and China.

For the record, I am not one of those leftish apologists for Putin and Assad or even hypercapitalist “Communist” China.

Will troop withdrawals trigger various kinds of instability? Absolutely. How could they not? But this will always be true; and American troops have been crawling over that region in hot wars for decades now — seventeen years in Afghanistan alone! The world is a world system, genuinely globalized, so disruptions will always ripple. Under Trump’s generalized incompetence, those ripples could get pretty ripply. He’s an idiot, but that doesn’t make James Mattis or Hillary Clinton or the liberal-hipster gulag of MSNBC right either.

The actual background here is inter-imperial rivalry, the exact same thing that triggered two world wars. But that rivalry is distinct from those past conflagrations, because there are over seven billion people alive at once right now; and the old lies about bringing them to a common level of “development” have been revealed as a massive con game . . . not unrelated to the fact that we are now governed by a thieving, emotionally-stunted compulsive liar and flim-flam artist. Which is why he is so dangerous to the Hillary Clintons and Bill Kristols of the world. He’s giving away the game.

This, I think, points to a crucial objective for the left in the US in its various tactical alliances to stop Trump, to repair some of the damage, to scoot back away from a fascist abyss, and then to shift political discourse and action back to the left. The mythos — the story — that the American political center clings to like the pantlegs of a protective father is American exceptionalism. From the big brother to the free world, this gets retranslated into justifications for undeclared war, violations of inconvenient international standards of behavior, fomenting coups, serial violations of the Law of Land Warfare and the Geneva Conventions, support for violent regimes like misogynist Saudi Arabia and racist Israel, and the maintenance of war-alliances like NATO. The American center is not shocked, as you might like them to be, when we tell them that the US is maintaining a military presence in 150 countries in the world.

In 2009, when Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa refused to renew the lease for an American military base at Manta unless the US allowed the Ecuadoran military to establish a base in Miami, calling George W. Bush a “dimwit” in the process. Not to be outdone in dimming and witting, the US would trump even Dubya. But the point is, Americans saw this story and scratched their heads. “Why do they want a base in Miami?”

My hope is that over the next year or so, the organized left, like the DSA to which I belong, will hit the accelerator on public education to disabuse more of the American center of the Mattis default, of American exceptionalism; because between now and the last Democratic Primary in 2020, we will be trying to knock off as many establishment Democrats as we can. The bar will be low, because that is the political reality. My own litmus tests will be pretty minimal — Medicare for All, Green New Deal, no corporate contributions, because these are stopgaps that will empower the working class against their bosses and the bourgeoisie’s retainer class, until the conditions for a generalized left-face have matured.

Within that existing social democratic current is humanity’s best last hope of a politics of transformation that mobilizes societies in preparation for the long emergency that is a combination of the systemic failure of capitalism, the collapse of the American empire, massive populations displacements, and ecologic calamity. Absent that politics of transformation, we will ride this train right onto the broken bridge. American exceptionalism is a wall standing between us and that emergency transformation. It must be torn down.