Progressives (Liberals)

But for tonight I say go on and fall in love in the primaries. Just fall in line in the general. Our lives; our planet depends on it. Vote blue no matter who.

I imagine there were quite a few enlightened Modern Age Germans who thought a dictator could never rise to power in their country.

One of the lessons which Hitler has taught us is that it is better not to be too clever. The Jews put forward all kinds of well-founded arguments to show that he could not come to power when his rise was clear for all to see. I remember a conversation during which a political economist demonstrated—on the basis of the interests of the Bavarian brewers —that the Germans could not be brought into line. Other experts proved that Fascism was impossible in the West. The educated made it easy for the barbarians everywhere by being so stupid. The farsighted judgments, the forecasts based on statistics and experience, the comments beginning “this is a subject I know very well,” and the well-rounded, solid statements, are all untrue.

As I have stated repeatedly (and which you have ignored repeatedly) I am not predicting a tyrant coming to power in the US anytime soon, but I do not believe it could never happen here for any reason (including the vague techo-culturo babble you seem to be spouting) and for that reason I believe the integrity of the 2nd Amendment is important.

If I though tyranny was around the corner and I wanted, as an old geezer, to be on the firing lines...

If anyone needs to put the #Resistance fantasy to bed it's progressives and their Anitfa shock troops.

Remember, unlike Russia and China, a sizeable number of Germans voted for Hitler — his supporters might as well have been wearing MGGA hats. Having voted for him, having seen and approved of his policies in the early stages of the Reich, they were loathe to oppose him. You see that same dynamic in today's GOP.

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But for tonight I say go on and fall in love in the primaries. Just fall in line in the general. Our lives; our planet depends on it. Vote blue no matter who.

Absolutists are always unusually passionate and self-certain. The positive and the negative consequences of such thinking are pretty obvious.

People saying vote blue no matter who will never grasp what is at stake here. It's necessary to actually move to undo the past thirty years before anything can get better. Only one candidate comes close to that description.

edgarblythe wrote:

People saying vote blue no matter who will never grasp what is at stake here. It's necessary to actually move to undo the past thirty years before anything can get better. Only one candidate comes close to that description.

What do you do when that candidate doesn't get the nomination?

What sort of foreign policy do Americans want? One thing seems clear: They don’t want the one they’ve been getting in recent decades. And who can blame them?

Americans have repeatedly expressed their frustration with the overly ambitious and mostly failed strategy of liberal hegemony that has been in place since the end of the Cold War. Instead of making the United States more secure and prosperous, while defending core U.S. values, the misguided attempt to remake the world in the United States’ image sparked needless rivalries with some states, made the terrorism problem worse, led to costly quagmires and failed states, and failed to deliver prosperity beyond the richest 1 percent.

Given this sorry track record, it’s not surprising that critics of this broad approach are increasingly numerous and vocal. The voices advocating greater foreign-policy restraint are growing in number and attracting far more attention now than in the past. The founding of a new, restraint-oriented think tank—the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—whose supporters include the odd couple of George Soros and Charles Koch, suggests that realism and restraint are ideas whose time has come. (Full disclosure: I played a minor role in this initiative and presently serve on one of the institute’s advisory committees.)

Just as predictably, however, these developments have prompted a backlash from critics who believe the United States should continue to follow more or less the same grand strategy it has pursued since the Soviet Union broke up. Neoconservative godfather Bill Kristol has already tweeted his disdain for the Quincy initiative (given Kristol’s past advice, this could be taken as evidence that the new institute is on the right track), and prominent critics of restraint (also known as offshore balancing) include Frank Hoffman, James Holmes, Peter Feaver and Hal Brands, and Foreign Policy’s own James Traub. Finally, it seems, Americans are beginning to have a genuine debate on what the U.S. role in the world should be.

I’ve laid out my own views on these issues at considerable length elsewhere; my purpose here is to consider the critics—and the arguments that have been advanced against a more realistic and restrained foreign policy. I can’t claim to be objective, but I find most of the counterarguments to be surprisingly weak.

Myth 1. Offshore balancers are crypto-isolationists.

By far the most common charge leveled at advocates of restraint is that they are die-hard isolationists who believe the United States should withdraw from the world and concentrate solely on defending its own territory. Because “isolationism” is a loaded term, forever associated with those who sought to keep the United States out of World War II, the charge still carries some political weight. But as a serious criticism, it is without foundation.

Nearly all supporters of a more restrained foreign policy have made it clear that they believe the United States should be actively engaged with other nations both economically and diplomatically and, in some cases, militarily. More importantly, the strategic logic that underpins the offshore balancing approach—which concentrates on the balance of power in critical strategic regions—explains why the United States should be ready to intervene abroad in certain well-defined circumstances.

In particular, offshore balancers do not believe the United States can always remain “offshore.” While avoiding significant military commitments in foreign lands might be preferable much of the time, there will be moments when it is necessary for the United States to go “onshore,” usually to prevent the emergence of a regional hegemon that might threaten the country’s long-term security. Thus, offshore balancers believe it was correct for the United States to intervene in World Wars I and II, and they endorsed the policy of containment (and especially the commitment of U.S. troops in Europe and Asia) during the Cold War.

Today, most restrainers believe the United States should be militarily present in Asia to counter a rising China, and it should retain a residual capacity to intervene in other areas should a potential hegemon emerge. Because no country could dominate either Europe or the Middle East today, however, there is little need for the United States to deploy significant forces in either place, and it should let local powers do the heavy lifting in these regions.

Myth 2. Offshore balancing requires anticipating threats perfectly.

Offshore balancers recommend passing the buck to local powers when possible so that they pull their weight and the United States stays out of unnecessary trouble. But what if Washington misreads the balance of power and does not respond quickly enough? If this were to occur, the United States might wake up and discover that it is too late to intervene or that doing so will be much more expensive.

There is a grain of truth in this charge, insofar as the strategy does depend on gauging the balance of power in key regions and getting more actively engaged whenever a potential hegemon begins to emerge. But two additional factors must be kept in mind. First, spotting potential hegemons is often pretty easy—as it is with China today and as it was with the former Soviet Union after World War II—and the United States’ geographic position in the Western Hemisphere gives it some margin for error. Second, and more importantly, the risk of underreaction must be weighed against the opposite danger of overcommitment. If offshore balancers cannot absolutely guarantee that the United States will always respond quickly, advocates of liberal hegemony or other forms of global activism cannot assure us that their overzealousness does not lead to unnecessary wars, costly quagmires, and a bloated national security state.

The history of the past quarter century suggests that the latter danger is very real. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States has repeatedly found itself dragged into wars of choice fought for less than vital interests. Hardly any of them led to a successful conclusion, and every one of them cost more and lasted longer than Washington anticipated. Each of the past four U.S. presidents campaigned promising to do less abroad and more at home, yet each ended up doing far more in distant lands than they intended.

Myth 3. If the United States retreats, rivals will fill the void.

Another frequent complaint is that any reduction in the United States’ overseas commitments and military presence signals an ignominious retreat and will create opportunities for U.S. adversaries to increase their own global influence. You see this warning at work every time people get the vapors over Russia’s supposed influence in Syria or the possibility that a reduced presence in the Middle East or Africa will enable China to replace the United States there.

Like the old Cold War domino theory, the precise logic by which this process will occur is rarely spelled out, and there are good reasons to question its validity (except as a scare tactic). To begin with, some parts of the world are of modest to zero strategic importance, so it doesn’t really matter if other states gain influence there or not. Moreover, such fears typically overstate the influence the United States supposedly had in the past while exaggerating the ability of others to exercise similar influence in the future. If the past 70 years tell us anything, it is that it is difficult for distant powers to exercise reliable control over the bristling nationalisms that make up the modern world.

Furthermore, in some cases, U.S. security would be enhanced if it got out of one of its current quagmires and let adversaries have their turn there instead. The United States won the Cold War in part by letting the less prosperous Soviet Union squander resources in places like Afghanistan and Angola; one suspects that Chinese politicians have been delighted to watch Washington waste trillions of dollars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the global war on terrorism.

Myth 4. Offshore balancers don’t care about values.

If the United States were to act with greater restraint, some argue, it would be abdicating the liberal principles on which the country was founded. In a recent critique of my book The Hell of Good Intentions, for example, Kori Schake accused me of “jettisoning” American values. For Schake and other liberal internationalists, American power—including military power—should be used to spread democracy, defend human rights, and eventually make the rest of the world become more “like us.” Or as Kristol and fellow neoconservative Lawrence Kaplan put it some years ago, “Well, what is wrong with dominance, in the service of sound principles and high ideals?”

What’s wrong, of course, is that trying to transform the world in the United States’ image isn’t working very well. According to Freedom House, 2018 was the 13th consecutive year in which global freedom declined, and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index recently downgraded the United States from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy. Trying to remake the world in America’s image isn’t succeeding abroad; instead, it is helping undermine those same values here at home.

According to offshore balancing, the best way to promote liberal values is by setting a good example and using the United States’ power, wealth, and good fortune to create an equitable and prosperous society that others would admire and seek to emulate in their own fashion. Restrainers do not “jettison” values; we believe a different strategy would promote them more effectively.

the chances that something as archaic as handheld devices which propel lumps of soft heavy metal at supersonic speeds would be an effective response are even slimmer.

Can you provide one bit of evidence to show that the antifa demonstrators have any solid connection to "progressives" in the Democratic Party

People saying vote blue no matter who will never grasp what is at stake here.

I have always been stunned by the argument from 2nd A types that an armed militia (or heavily armed citizens) would prove some sort of viable opposition to the modern state's military armaments. "We'll just shoot down those cruise missiles and choppers and jet fighters and tanks will be no match for a thousand pickup trucks filled with dildos and fertilizer or something... we'll figure it out. We're Americans."