Can Liberal Internationalism Be Overthrown?
Twenty years of US military involvement in Afghanistan — war fighting, counterinsurgency, gun-point nation-building, rape, torture, looting, assorted other war crimes, drug running, contractor profiteering, etc. — is now, on paper, finally ending. Ending with the predictable, if not quite inevitable, outcome of Taliban re-conquest of the country.
The obvious, if trite, observation is that this is a great tragedy for liberal Afghans.
I am not an Afghan, liberal or otherwise, however. It is not my place to assert the mindset of people in a country not my own, who have a different history, society, and culture. Not because they are some unfathomable Other, but because speaking for people outside your own group arrogantly trespasses on their self-expression, agency, and self-determination.
Most people in the modern world are born into and raised in one nation state. That usually produces some degree of inclusion in that national society and therefore understanding of its history, mores, beliefs, myths, faults and sins, and range of the socio-politically possible. Even non-default groups within a national society (women in the vast majority of countries, ethno-racial and religious non-default communities in most societies, LGBT and disabled people in essentially all countries) have better understandings of the dynamics of that society, real and imagined, than outsiders do. (Non-default group members on the margins may in fact be the only ones with adequate ability to truly evaluate any given society.)
US liberal internationalists, for all their wonkish intelligence and sense of moral obligation, utterly fail to truly grok this reality. They are currently unable to think with any degree of moral limit and humility. And seemingly ironically, they are therefore unable to take responsibility for the actual (domestic) state of their own society.
This moral arrogance sets them up to defend the status quo regarding the US role in the world outside its borders.
On its own this is horrific enough: the US currently has over 800 military bases around the globe, 7,000+ nuclear weapons, and the most “force projection” of any country (although China is working diligently to close the gap).
But the liberal internationalist seems to pursue this arrogant focus on militarized foreign nation-building precisely *because* US (domestic) problems exist.
The presidential pivot to foreign policy one or three years into an administration following stalemate or failure in advancing a domestic policy agenda is well known. But the dynamic among the liberal internationalist intelligentsia is simply one of permanent disinterest in the US itself as a domestic sociopolitical arena.
That is, given the one country that, like most humans, these liberal intellectual Americans will ever have in this one life, they are uninterested in its own problems and conflicts.
They do not care about movement conservatism’s Mask Off moment and the specter of genuine tyranny on US soil it promises. They do not care about white supremacy’s corrosive effects on life and liberty for people of color in the US, or on the unfulfilled aspiration of US democracy. They don’t care about climate change, deindustrialization, the anti-urbanism in US political culture, the dire state of US elementary education, or the fact that the US has among the highest rates of child poverty and maternal mortality in the developed world.
Amazingly, despite the gut-level belief of many American leftists and people outside the US that “ordinary Americans” are merely capitalism-brainwashed lemmings who don’t have the capacity for self-rule, most non-elite Americans do not actually think the US should be policing or ruling other countries.
They actually care about the domestic US. Their specific community, their city, their state and region. The nation.
Not who has control over the Taiwan Strait or the Strait of Hormuz.
What would it take to get US liberal internationalists to adopt the same mindset? How could they be made to STOP being focused nosily outward on other people’s problems, and instead be made to focus on the many, many problems of their own country?
There is quote from the early 20th century muckraking US journalist Upton Sinclair that leftists in the US love to cite: “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”. Leftists love this quote because it reduces the motivations of everyone who is not a leftist to money. No one else has beliefs, identities, or experiences of their own, there is no tension between values because everyone should just prioritize them the same way the left does, no one else has incomplete/blinkered/confused knowledge of the world, and no one has non-material human weaknesses like pride, gullibility, or laziness/boredom.
In this leftist idea, humans are perfectly flawless, except that some of them like money, and that corrupts them past all persuasion or shame.
But what if money isn’t the only human motivation?
What if US liberal internationalists don’t bother to focus on US problems because those problems simply bore them? A lot of major US problems are simply treated by US media and the center-right US political establishment as facts of life, the grim nature of an adult, real-world existence. Poverty? Lack of healthcare? Laziness. Climate change? A conspiracy to end the economy. Billionaires? They have *work ethic*, honey, unlike you lazy people.
(There’s a reason the ironic refrain of my US Millennial generation is “Life sucks, then you die.”)
So what if liberal internationalists simply turn away from the US in despairing boredom? The Rest of the World is a place where change is still possible, where people’s lives can improve, where a difference can still be made.
This means that the only real way to change the liberal internationalist role in US foreign policy, the only way to get them to focus again on solving the US’s many problems, is to solve some of these problems at the grassroots, to show that it is still possible to do so.
I’m particularly interested in how this is slowly (so slowly) starting to happen in elementary education. I hope it is happening in other areas.
I think it’s really the only hope for change, both in the US itself and in its role in the world. So let’s wish it well.
