Bacevich, andrew

=<div>=10 22 something rotten...Two Books to Help Us See the LiesTwo recent books help us see that spin for what it was. In <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316282235/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Because Our Fathers Lied</a>, Craig McNamara, Robert’s son, reflects on his father’s dishonesty about the Vietnam War and the reasons for it. Loyalty was perhaps the lead one, he writes. McNamara suppressed his own serious misgivings out of misplaced loyalty to two presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, while simultaneously preserving his own position of power in the government.Robert McNamara would, in fact, later pen his own mea culpa, admitting how “<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mcnamara-was-wrong-terribly-wrong-about-vietnam/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">terribly wrong</a>” he’d been in urging the prosecution of that war. Yet Craig finds his father’s late confession of regret significantly less than forthright and fully honest. Robert McNamara fell back on historical ignorance about Vietnam as the key contributing factor in his unwise decision-making, but his son is blunt in accusing his dad of unalloyed dishonesty. Hence the title of his book, citing Rudyard Kipling’s pained confession of his own complicity in sending his son to die in the trenches of World War I: “If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied.”The second book is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250870178/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars</a>, edited by <a href="https://tomdispatch.com/russias-underperforming-military-and-ours/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Andrew Bacevich</a> and <a href="https://tomdispatch.com/spilling-ink-and-spilling-blood/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Danny Sjursen</a>. In my view, the word “misguided” doesn’t quite capture the book’s powerful essence, since it gathers 15 remarkable essays by Americans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and witnessed the patent dishonesty and folly of those wars. None dare speak of failure might be a subtheme of these essays, as initially highly motivated and well-trained troops became disillusioned by wars that went nowhere, even as their comrades often paid the ultimate price, being horribly wounded or dying in those conflicts driven by lies....<div>=</div></div><div>=
<div>6 22 hmmn dunno</div><div>
</div><div>Bacevich, Trapped in the 1930sLet’s face it, we’re on a different planet, even if you might not know it most of the time living here in the United States. After the old Cold War ended, it turned out that it wasn’t as easy as our leaders imagined to be the “sole superpower,” “<a href="https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">the indispensable nation</a>” on Planet Earth. And you can see the results of that even now, when so many of those in Washington yearn to be on an all-too-old globe, as <a href="https://tomdispatch.com/putin-changed-the-subject/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">TomDispatch regular</a> Andrew Bacevich suggests today. Our leaders seem to feel comfortable opposing the Russians as if we were still in the Cold War or the “fascists” as if we were in World War II (as does Vladimir Putin who claimed from the first moments of his invasion of Ukraine that he was doing so to “<a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/03/01/1083677765/putin-denazify-ukraine-russia-history" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">denazify</a>” the country).The Republicans would, of course, prefer to live in a wildly Second Amendment-ized universe, as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/28/business/daniel-defense-rifle-texas-shooting-gun.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">interpreted by</a> the National Rifle Association and carried out by mad 18-year-olds with <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1101274322/uvalde-ar-15-style-rifle-history-shooter-mass-shooting" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">legally purchased</a> military-style weaponry. Meanwhile, the Democrats of the Biden administration now inhabit a new (or perhaps very old) version of the Cold War and yet it turns out that even Russia isn’t enough of a repeat to make them happy. Joe Biden and crew are also working <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/world/bidens-trip-to-asia/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">hard</a> to recreate a similar dynamic with China. Add to that a Supreme Court unlike any in recent memory and a Congress in utter gridlock (if you’re not talking about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/us/politics/senate-passes-ukraine-aid.html/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">appropriating more money</a> for weaponry for the Ukrainians), and I could go on.Worse yet, I understand why few enough of us really want to be on the planet we happen to inhabit right now. You know, the one that’s heating to the brink of… well, who really knows what; the one where a figure not previously from our political history at all, a billionaire grifter with a knack for self-pity, could possibly win the White House a second time and preside over a country and a system in the sort of disarray that would once have been unimaginable. But let me stop here and turn you over to Andrew Bacevich to consider the moment in history we actually inhabit. TomThe F-Word (The Other One): Repurposed and MisappliedTimothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale University, is a scholar of surpassing brilliance. His 2010 book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541600061/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin</a> chronicles in harrowing detail the de facto collaboration of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union that resulted in the murder of millions of innocents. On any bookshelf reserved for accounts that reveal essential truths of our past, Bloodlands deserves a place of honor. It’s a towering achievement.I just wish Professor Snyder would stick to history.According to an old chestnut, the past is a foreign country. Even so, similarities between then and now frequently interest historians more than differences. Few, it seems, can resist the temptation to press their particular piece of the past into service as a vehicle for interpreting the here-and-now, even when doing so means oversimplifying and distorting the present. Historians of twentieth-century Europe, Snyder among them, seem particularly susceptible to this temptation. Synder’s mid-May <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/russia-fascism-ukraine-putin.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20220520&instance_id=61868&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=8060587&segment_id=92819&user_id=76db6032aaac228d42c5ac97f7405015" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">op-ed</a> in the New York Times offers a case in point. “We Should Say It,” the title advises. “Russia Is Fascist.”Introducing the F-word into any conversation is intended to connote moral seriousness. Yet all too often, as with its first cousin “<a href="https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3159871/stop-misusing-genocide-political-purposes" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">genocide</a>,” it serves less to enlighten than to convey a sense of repugnance combined with condemnation. Such is the case here.Depicting Vladimir Putin as a fascist all but explicitly puts today’s Russia in the same category as the murderous totalitarian regimes that Snyder indicts in Bloodlands. Doing so, in effect, summons the United States and its NATO allies to wage something akin to total war in Europe. After all, this country should no more compromise with the evil of present-day Russia than it did with the evil of Hitler’s Germany during World War II or Stalin’s Soviet Union during the Cold War.For Snyder, therefore, the job immediately at hand is not just the honorable one of assisting the Ukrainians in defending themselves. The real task — the obligation, even — is to decisively defeat Russia, ensuring nothing less than democracy’s very survival. “As in the 1930s,” he writes, “democracy is in retreat around the world and fascists have moved to make war on their neighbors.”As a consequence, “if Russia wins in Ukraine,” he insists, the result won’t simply be the brutal destruction of one imperfect democracy, but “a demoralization for democracies everywhere.” A Kremlin victory would affirm “that might makes right, that reason is for the losers, that democracies must fail.” If Russia prevails, in other words, “fascists around the world will be comforted.” And “if Ukraine does not win” — and winning, Snyder implies, will require regime change in Moscow — then “we can expect decades of darkness.”So once again, as in the 1930s, it’s time to choose sides. To <a href="https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">paraphrase</a> a recent American president, you are either with us or you’re with the fascists.Who Are You Calling Fascist?Allow me to confess that I was once susceptible to this sort of either/or binary thinking as an organizing principle of global politics. I grew up during the Cold War, when bipolarity — a U.S.-led Free World pitted against a Soviet-controlled communist bloc — offered a conceptual framework that any patriotic adolescent could grasp. Emphasizing clarity at the expense of empirical precision, such an us-against-them approach allowed little room for nuance. And as it happened, Americans paid dearly for the misjudgments that ensued thanks to just such thinking, the disastrous war in Vietnam being an especially vivid example. Ultimately, of course, our country did indeed “win” the Cold War, even if we have yet to tally up the cumulative costs of victory.With an ample display of moral outrage, Professor Snyder appears intent on resurrecting that framework. By greenlighting this piece for their op-ed pages, the editors of the New York Times implicitly endowed it with establishment-approved respectability. In this way, the remembered politics of Europe in the 1930s finds renewed relevance as a source of instruction for the present moment.How Americans responded then offers a model for how the United States should respond today, albeit with a sense of urgency rather than the foot-dragging that characterized U.S. policy prior to Pearl Harbor. Put simply, stopping fascism has once again emerged as an imperative surpassing all others in importance. The <a href="https://tomdispatch.com/the-ukraine-wars-collateral-damage/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">climate crisis</a>? That <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/04/28/putting-bidens-new-whopping-33b-ukraine-package-into-context/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">can surely wait</a>. Problems on the border with Mexico? Talk to me later. A never-ending pandemic? Just roll up your sleeve and follow Dr. Fauci’s orders. Recurring school massacres? Blame the Second Amendment.
“Russia Is Fascist” offers a definitive rebuttal to the Trump-promoted revival of “America First.” It’s a call to action, with a prospective anti-fascist crusade serving as an antidote to the setbacks, disappointments, and sense of decline that have haunted Washington’s foreign-policy establishment since the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11.In a broader sense, targeting fascism may fill a vacuum that dates from the very end of the Cold War, one that the subsequent Global War on Terror never adequately addressed. Finally, America again has an Enemy Worthy of the Name. Vladimir Putin’s criminal aggression in Ukraine seemingly validates <a href="https://sgp.fas.org/crs/natsec/R43838.pdf" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">the idea that</a> “great-power competition” defines the emerging world order, even if including Putin’s Russia in the ranks of legitimate great powers requires a distinctly elastic definition of that term. Nonetheless, given the complications that the United States encountered when taking on Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević, Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, and sundry other villains, a rivalry with Russia appears not only familiar and straightforward, but almost welcome.On that score, the issue immediately at hand is as much psychological as geopolitical. After all, if the course of the war in Ukraine has made one thing abundantly clear, it’s that Russia’s heavily armed but strikingly inept armed forces pose no more than a negligible conventional threat to the rest of Europe. Military effectiveness requires more than a capacity to reduce cities to rubble. So if Putin represents the latest reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, he’s a Hitler saddled with Benito Mussolini’s maladroit legions.Yet declaring Russia to be the embodiment of fascism revises the stakes. For Professor Snyder, Russia’s lack of military prowess matters less than Vladimir Putin’s twisted worldview. Centered on a “cult of the dead,” a “myth of a past golden age,” and a belief in the “healing violence” of war, Putin’s outlook expresses the essence of Russian-style fascism. Exposing that outlook as false is a precondition for destroying the Putin mystique. Only then, Snyder writes, will the myths he has perpetrated “come crashing down.”This, for Professor Snyder and for many Washington insiders, describes the actual stakes in Ukraine. Rather than merely regional, they are nothing short of cosmic. Defeating Putin will enable the United States to refurbish its own tarnished myths, while safely tucking away our own sanctification of violence as an instrument of liberation. It will restore America to the pinnacle of global power.There are, however, at least two problems with this optimistic scenario. The first relates to our own ostensible susceptibility to a homegrown variant of fascism, the second to tagging Putinism as an existential threat. Both divert attention from more pressing issues that ought to command the attention of the American people.To the Barricades?Is Donald Trump a fascist? My own inclination is to see him as a narcissistic fraud and swindler. That said, from the very moment he emerged as a major political figure, critics cited the f-word to describe him. Let the testimony of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman stand in for <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/theres-word-what-trumpism-becoming/619418/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">similar commentary</a> offered by so many others. Donald Trump “is indeed a fascist,” Krugman <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/donald-trump-fascism.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">wrote</a> in January 2021, “an authoritarian willing to use violence to achieve his racial nationalist goals.” It was obviously incumbent upon Americans to resist him as “appeasement is what got us to where we are. It has to stop, now.”While Krugman’s counsel is crystal clear, let us consider the possibility that it may already be too late. That Trump or some Trump clone could win the presidency in 2024 looms as a real, if depressing, prospect. Indeed, his supporters may well gain control of Congress (and several statehouses) in this year’s elections as well.Should that occur, will Krugman (and Snyder) find that the United States has followed Russia in succumbing to 1930s-style fascism? If so, with what implications for the legitimacy of the existing political order? Will resistance to Trumpism then become a civic obligation for righteous citizens intent on exercising their own right to bear arms? Paul Krugman’s reference to the dangers of further appeasement would suggest that the answer to that question must be yes. After all, in the American political lexicon few sins are more heinous than appeasement.Yet down that road lies revolution, counterrevolution, and the end of the American republic. Recklessly unleashing charges of fascism could inadvertently pave the way for just such an outcome.As an epithet, fascism retains considerable emotional appeal. As a term of analysis applied to contemporary American politics, however, it possesses limited utility. Talk may be cheap, but baseless talk can also be dangerously subversive — a concern equally applicable to those who level preposterous charges about communists and socialists overrunning the halls of government in Washington.The truth is that we don’t live in the 1930s. Our world is not that world. Whether for good or ill, the United States of that era has long since vanished.Professor Snyder’s assertion that “democracy is in retreat around the world” posits a model of history that has two gears: forward and reverse. In fact, history has multiple gears and moves in various directions, many of them unanticipated and unrelated to the prospects of democracy. So far at least, no algorithm exists to forecast where it will head next.What threatens the United States today is not fascism but the continuing erosion of a domestic political consensus without which democratic governance becomes difficult, if not impossible. Surprisingly few politicians appear willing to acknowledge the extent of that danger. Instead, passions unleashed by issues like critical race theory or guaranteed access to assault rifles take over center stage, shrinking the space left for mutual understanding and accommodation.Considered in this light, embarking on an anti-fascist crusade on the eastern fringes of Europe is unlikely to restore a sense of the common good at home. Waging war on behalf of Ukrainian democracy is more likely to serve as a diversion, an excuse to avoid matters of more immediate relevance to the waning health of our democracy. On that score, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/05/10/house-set-approve-an-additional-40-billion-aid-ukraine/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">tens of billions of dollars</a> that an otherwise gridlocked Congress has appropriated to arm Ukraine speak volumes about the nation’s actual political priorities.Ukrainians need, want, and deserve U.S. support in ejecting the Russian invader. But the fate of the American experiment will not be determined in Kyiv. It will be decided right here in the United States of America. When Joe Biden first announced his intention to oust Donald Trump from office, he seemed to understand that. He presented himself as someone voters could count on to bring Americans together and reverse our all-too-obvious decline. With this country having arrived at an “inflection point,” he <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/20/politics/biden-dnc-speech-transcript/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">vowed to guide it</a> along “a path of hope and light” enabling it “to heal, to be reborn, and to unite.”At some level, Biden surely meant those words, which implied that repairing the domestic disarray Trump had fostered should receive priority attention. But the Biden presidency has not yielded healing, rebirth, and unity – far from it. Now facing the prospect of major losses in this year’s congressional elections and long odds in the 2024 presidential contest, Biden appears intent on employing a familiar tactic in a desperate effort to salvage his political fortunes: using problems abroad to distract attention from challenges at home.Russia poses one such problem, even if one that policymakers and pundits join in exaggerating, as if criminal misconduct automatically connotes existential threat. Hovering in the background is a much larger problem: China. Given a sufficiently loose definition, it, too, can be described as fascist. So the Biden administration’s confrontational attitude regarding Russia finds its <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/world/bidens-trip-to-asia/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">counterpart</a> in an equally <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/23/politics/biden-taiwan-china-japan-intl-hnk/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">hard-nosed policy</a> toward China.Downplaying the realities of Sino-American mutual interdependence and the imperative of cooperation on issues of common concern such as climate change, the administration appears hellbent on conjuring up yet another axis of evil as a rationale for a fresh round of U.S. muscle-flexing. Once again, as when 9/11 provided a spurious rationale for concocting <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/29/bush-axis-of-evil-2002-1127725" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">the previous axis</a> (not to speak of invading Afghanistan and then Iraq), the urge to ignore complexity and downplay risk is sadly apparent.In Washington, the conviction that military might adroitly applied will restore the United States to a position of global primacy has tacitly found renewed favor. The ostensible lessons of an ongoing conflict in which U.S. forces are participating on a proxy basis superseded any lessons of the recently concluded Afghan War where the United States failed outright. Rarely has the selective memory of the national security apparatus been so vividly on display. Much the same can be said about the Congress, where a no-questions-asked enthusiasm for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/us/politics/senate-passes-ukraine-aid.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">underwriting</a> the Ukraine War has provided a handy excuse for simply writing off the entire 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan.The truth is that neither Russian “fascism” nor its Chinese variant poses a significant danger to American democracy, which is actually threatened from within. Joe Biden once appeared to grasp this reality, even if he now finds it politically expedient to pretend otherwise.Our salvation lies not in flinging around the f-word to justify more wars, but in rediscovering a different lexicon. To start with, consider this precept to which Americans were once devoted: Charity begins at home. Charity, as in tolerance, compassion, generosity, and understanding: that’s where the preservation of our democracy ought to begin.</div><div>=
<div>tom d 1219</div><div>
</div><div>With the U.S., the last standing superpower, ultimately victorious in a way never before imagined, history itself seemed to be at an end. The future was ours, forever, and we had every right to grab it for ourselves. The world in which so many of us had grown up was declared over and done with in a wave of self-congratulatory backslapping in Washington. The planet, it seemed, was now our oyster and ours alone. (And if you want to know how that turned out, just think of Donald Trump in the White House and then read Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.)</div><div></div><div>not sure he appreciates regulatory rollback, esp epa tho he does refer to agw:<div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/what-will-happen-america-after-donald-trump">
</a></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/what-will-happen-america-after-donald-trump">https://www.alternet.org/what-will-happen-america-after-donald-trump</a></div><div>
</div><div> Trump’s tenure as the 45th U.S. president may last another few weeks, another year, or another 16 months.  However unsettling the prospect, the leaky vessel that is the S.S. Trump might even manage to stay afloat for a second term.  Nonetheless, recent headline-making revelations suggest that, like some derelict ship that's gone aground, the Trump presidency may already have effectively run its course. What, then, does this bizarre episode in American history signify?Let me state my own view bluntly: forget the atmospherics.  Despite the lies, insults, name calling, and dog whistles, almost nothing of substance has changed. Nor will it. To a far greater extent than Trump’s perpetually hyperventilating critics are willing to acknowledge, the United States remains on a trajectory that does not differ appreciably from what it was prior to POTUS #45 taking office. Post-Trump America, just now beginning to come into view, is shaping up to look remarkably like pre-Trump America. <div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-bottom: 20px;">I understand that His Weirdness remains in the White House. Yet for all practical purposes, Trump has ceased to govern. True, he continues to rant and issue bizarre directives, which his subordinates implement, amend, or simply <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/04/politics/bob-woodward-book-donald-trump-fear/index.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">disregard</a> as they see fit.  Except in a ceremonial sense, the office of the presidency presently lies vacant. Call it an abdication-in-place. It’s as if British King Edward VIII, having <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBn06A-sdok" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">abandoned</a> his throne for “the woman I love,” continued to hang around Buckingham Palace fuming about the lack of respect given Wallis and releasing occasional bulletins affirming his <a href="https://nypost.com/2015/03/01/how-britian-covered-up-the-friendship-between-hitler-edward-viii/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">admiration</a> for Adolf Hitler.In Trump’s case, it’s unlikely he ever had a more serious interest in governing than Edward had in performing duties more arduous than those he was eventually assigned as Duke of Windsor. Nonetheless, the 60-plus million Americans who voted for Trump did so with at least the expectation that he was going to shake things up.And <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37483869" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">bigly</a>. Remember, he was going to “lock her up.”  He would “drain the swamp” and “build a wall” with Mexico volunteering to foot the bill. Without further ado, he would end “this American carnage.” Meanwhile, “America First” would form the basis for U.S. foreign policy. Once Trump took charge, things were going to be different, as he and he alone would “make America great again.”Yet the cataclysm that Trump’s ascendency was said to signify has yet to occur. Barring a nuclear war, it won’t. If you spend your days watching CNN or MSNBC or reading columnists employed by the New York Times and the Washington Post, you might conclude otherwise. But those are among the institutions that, on November 8, 2016, suffered a nervous breakdown from which they have yet to recover. Nor, it now seems clear, do they wish to recover as long as Donald Trump remains president. To live in a perpetual state of high dudgeon, denouncing his latest inanity and predicting the onset of fascism, is to enjoy the equivalent of a protracted psychic orgasm, one induced by mutual masturbation. Yet if you look beyond the present to the fairly recent past, it becomes apparent that change on the scale that Trump was promising had actually occurred, even if well before he himself showed up on the scene. The consequences of that Big Change are going to persist long after he is gone. It’s those consequences that now demand our attention, not the ongoing Gong Show jointly orchestrated by the White House and journalists fancying themselves valiant defenders of Truth.Trump himself is no more than a pimple on the face of this nation’s history. It’s time to step back from the mirror and examine the face in full. Pretty it’s not.The Way We WereCompare the America that welcomed young Donald Trump into the world in 1946 with the country that, some 70 years later, elected him president. As the post-World War II era was beginning, three large facts -- so immense that they were simply taken for granted -- defined America.First, the United States made everything and made more of it than anyone else. In postwar America, wealth derived in large measure from the manufacture of stuff: steel, automobiles, refrigerators, shoes, socks, blouses, baseballs, you name it. “Made in the USA” was more than just a slogan. With so much of the industrialized world in ruins, the American economy dominated and defined everyday economic reality globally.Second, back then while the mighty engine of industrial capitalism was generating impressive riches, it was also distributing the benefits on a <a href="https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/introducing-this-blog/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">relatively equitable basis</a>. Postwar America was the emblematic middle-class country, the closest approximation to a genuinely classless and democratic society the world had ever seen.Third, having had their fill of fighting from 1941 to 1945, Americans had a genuine aversion to war. They may not have been a peace-loving people, but they knew enough about war to see it as a great evil. Avoiding its further occurrence, if at all possible, was a priority, although one not fully shared by the new national security establishment just then beginning to flex its muscles in Washington.Now, by twenty-first-century standards, many, perhaps nearly all, Americans of that era were bigots of one sort or the other. Racism, sexism, and homophobia flourished, lamented by some, promoted by others, tolerated by the vast majority. An anti-communist political hysteria, abetted by cynical politicians, also flourished. Americans worked themselves into a tizzy over the putative threat posed by small numbers of homegrown subversives. And they fouled the air, water, and soil with abandon. Add to this list violence, crime, corruption, sexual angst, and various forms of self-abuse. Taken as a whole, American society, as it existed when Trump was growing up, was anything but perfect. Yet, for all that, postwar Americans were the envy of the world. And they knew it.By 2016, when Trump was elected president, America had become an altogether different country. Without actually disappearing, racism, sexism, and homophobia had -- at least for the moment -- gone underground. Attitudes toward people of color, women, and gays that a half-century earlier had been commonplace were now largely confined to a pathological fringe. Hysteria about communists had essentially disappeared, only to be replaced by hysteria over Islamic terrorists. Pollution, of course, persisted, as did violence, crime, corruption, and sexual angst. New and more imaginative forms of self-destructive behavior had made their appearance.Yet little of that turned out to be central. What had truly changed in the decades since Trump was a babe-in-arms were those three taken-for-granted facts that had once distinguished the United States. New realities emerged to invert them.By 2016, the U.S. was no longer by any stretch of the imagination the place that made everything, though it bought everything, often made elsewhere. It had long since become the ultimate consumer society, with Americans accustomed to acquiring and enjoying more than they produced or could afford. Accounts no longer balanced. The government lived on credit, assuming that the bills would never come due. So, too, did many citizens.By 2016, the U.S. had long since become a <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/income-inequality-continues-to-grow-in-the-united-states.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">deeply unequal</a> society of haves and have-nots. Finance capitalism, the successor to industrial capitalism, was creating immense fortunes <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/22/heres-how-much-ceo-pay-has-increased-compared-to-yours-over-the-years.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">without even pretending</a> to distribute the benefits equitably. Politicians still routinely paid tribute to the Great American Middle Class. Yet the hallmarks of postwar middle-class life -- a steady job, a paycheck adequate to support a family, the prospect of a pension -- were rapidly disappearing. While Americans still enjoyed freedom of a sort, many of them lacked security.By 2016, Americans had also come to accept war as <a href="https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176433/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich%2C_not_so_great_wars%2C_theirs_and_ours/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">normal</a>. Here was “global leadership” made manifest. So U.S. troops were now always out there somewhere fighting, however obscure the purpose of their exertions and however dim their prospects of achieving anything <a href="https://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176463/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_victory_in_our_time/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">approximating victory</a>. The 99% of Americans who were not soldiers learned to tune out those wars, content merely to “support the troops,” an obligation fulfilled by offering periodic <a href="https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175423/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich,playing_ball_with_the_pentagon/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">expressions of reverence</a> on public occasions. Thank you for your service!The Way We AreBut note: Donald Trump played no role in creating this America or consigning the America of 1946 to oblivion. As a modern equivalent of P.T. Barnum, he did demonstrate considerable skill in exploiting the opportunities on offer as the strictures of postwar America gave way. Indeed, he parlayed those opportunities into fortune, celebrity, <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/trump-150-days-presidency-trump-golf-club-1090729" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">lots of golf</a>, plenty of sex, and eventually the highest office in the land. Only in America, as we used to say.In 1946, it goes without saying, he would never have been taken seriously as a would-be presidential candidate. By 2016, his narcissism, bombast, vulgarity, and talent for self-promotion nicely expressed the underside of the prevailing zeitgeist. His candidacy was simultaneously preposterous, yet strangely fitting.By the twenty-first century, the values that Trump embodies had become as thoroughly and authentically American as any of those specified in the oracular pronouncements of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt. Trump’s critics may see him as an abomination.  But he is also one of us.And here’s the real news: the essential traits that define America today -- those things that make this country so different from what it seemed to be in 1946 -- will surely survive the Trump presidency. If anything, he and his cronies deserve at least some credit for sustaining just those traits.Candidate Trump essentially promised Americans a version of 1946 redux. He would revive manufacturing and create millions of well-paying jobs for working stiffs. By cutting taxes, he would put more money in the average Joe or Jill’s pocket. He would eliminate the trade deficit and balance the federal budget. He would end our endless wars and bring the troops home where they belong. He would oblige America’s allies, portrayed as a crew of freeloaders, to shoulder their share of the burden. He would end illegal immigration. He would make the United States once more the God-fearing Christian country it was meant to be.How seriously Trump expected any of those promises to be taken is anyone’s guess. But this much is for sure: they remain almost entirely unfulfilled.True, domestic manufacturing has experienced a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-19/u-s-manufacturing-is-primed-for-another-year-of-growth" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">slight uptick</a>, but globalization remains an implacable reality. Unless you’ve got a STEM degree, good jobs are still hard to come by. Ours is increasingly a “gig” economy, which might be cool enough when you’re 25, but less so when you’re in your sixties and wondering if you’ll ever be able to retire.While Trump and a Republican Congress delivered on their promise of tax “reform,” its <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-final-gop-tax-bill-is-a-recipe-for-even-more-inequality" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">chief beneficiaries</a> will be the rich, further confirmation, if it were needed, that the American economy is indeed rigged in favor of a growing class of plutocrats. Trade deficit? It’s headed for a <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-trade-deficit-climbs-7-still-on-track-to-hit-10-year-high-2018-08-03" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">10-year high</a>. Balanced budget? You’ve got to be joking. The estimated federal deficit next year will exceed a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/deficit-projected-to-top-1-trillion-starting-next-year-1531950742" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">trillion dollars</a>, boosting the national debt past <a href="https://localhost/ttps/::en.wikipedia.org:wiki:National_debt_of_the_United_States#/media/File:US_National_Debt_public_intergovernmental.png" style="text-decoration-line: none;">$21 trillion</a>. (Trump had <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/02/trumps-nonsensical-claim-he-can-eliminate-19-trillion-in-debt-in-eight-years/?utm_term=.207db9d6f0e2" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">promised</a> to eliminate that debt entirely.)And, of course, the wars haven’t ended. Here is Trump, just last month, doing his best George McGovern imitation: "I'm constantly reviewing Afghanistan and the whole Middle East," he <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/defense/403537-trump-battles-sense-of-inertia-a-year-into-afghanistan-war-plan" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">asserted</a>. "We never should have been in the Middle East. It was the single greatest mistake in the history of our country." Yet Trump has perpetuated and, in some instances, expanded America’s military misadventures in the Greater Middle East, while essentially insulating himself from personal responsibility for their continuation.As commander-in-chief, he’s a distinctly hands-off kind of guy. Despite being unable to walk, President Franklin Roosevelt visited GIs serving in combat zones more often than Trump has. If you want to know why we are in Afghanistan and how long U.S. forces will stay there, ask Defense Secretary James Mattis or some general, but don’t, whatever you do, ask the president.On Not Turning America’s Back on the WorldAnd then there is the matter of Trump’s “isolationism.” Recall that when he became president, foreign policy experts across Washington warned that the United States would now turn its back on the world and abandon its self-assigned role as keeper of order and defender of democracy. Now, nearing the mid-point of Trump’s first (and hopefully last) term, the United States remains formally committed to defending the territorial integrity of each and every NATO member state, numbering 29 in all. Add to that an obligation to defend nations as varied as Japan, South Korea, and, under the terms of the Rio Pact of 1947, most of Latin America. Less formally but no less substantively, the U.S. ensures the security of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and various other Persian Gulf countries.As for obliging those allies to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/11/donald-trump-tells-nato-allies-to-spend-4-of-gdp-on-defence" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">pony up</a> more for the security we have long claimed to provide, that’s clearly not going to happen any time soon. Our European allies have pocketed both Trump’s insults and his assurances that the United States will continue to defend them, offering in return the <a href="https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2018/06/07/nato-members-have-turned-a-corner-in-defense-spending-stoltenberg-says/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">vaguest of promises</a> that, sometime in the future, they might consider investing more in defense.By-the-by, U.S. forces under Donald Trump’s ostensible command are today present in more than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_deployments" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">150</a> countries worldwide. Urged on by the president, Congress has passed a bill that boosts the Pentagon budget to <a href="https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2018/08/01/congress-finalizes-defense-budget-authorization-months-ahead-of-schedule/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">$717 billion</a>, an $82 billion increase over the prior year. Needless to say, no adversary or plausible combination of adversaries comes <a href="https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/13/barack-obama/obama-us-spends-more-military-next-8-nations-combi/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">anywhere close</a> to matching that figure.To call this isolationism is comparable to calling Trump svelte.As for the promised barrier, that “<a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-california-campaign-20160602-snap-story.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">big, fat, beautiful wall</a>,” to seal the southern border, it has advanced no further than the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/13/politics/trump-border-wall-prototypes-visit/index.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">display</a> of several possible prototypes. No evidence exists to suggest that Mexico will, as Trump insisted, pay for its construction, nor that Congress will appropriate the necessary funds, estimated at somewhere north of <a href="https://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/apr/28/scott-peters/would-trumps-border-wall-cost-same-one-and-half-us/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">$20 billion</a>, even with Republicans still controlling both houses of Congress. And in truth, whether it is built or not, the U.S.-Mexico border will remain what it has been for decades: heavily patrolled but porous, a conduit for desperate people seeking safety and opportunity, but also for criminal elements trafficking in drugs or human beings.The point of this informal midterm report card is not to argue that Donald Trump has somehow failed. It is rather to highlight his essential irrelevance. Trump is not the disruptive force that anti-Trumpers accuse him of being. He is merely a noxious, venal, and ineffectual blowhard, who has assembled a team of associates who are themselves, with few exceptions, noxious, venal, or ineffectual. So here’s the upshot of it all: if you were basically okay with where America was headed prior to November 2016, just take a deep breath and think of Donald Trump as the political equivalent of a kidney stone -- not fun, but sooner or later, it will pass. And when it does, normalcy will return. Soon enough you’ll forget it ever happened.If, on the other hand, you were not okay with where America was headed in 2016, it’s past time to give up the illusion that Donald Trump is going to make things right. Eventually a pimple dries up and disappears, often without leaving a trace. Such is the eventual destiny of Donald Trump as president.In the meantime, of course, there are any number of things about Trump to raise our ire. Climate change offers a good example. And yet climate change may be the best illustration of Trump’s insignificance.Under President Obama, the United States showed signs of mounting a belated effort to address global warming. The Trump administration wasted little time in reversing course, reverting to the science-denying position to which Republicans adhered long before Trump himself showed up.No doubt future generations will find fault with Trump’s inaction in the face of this crisis. Yet when <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/03/miami-shanghai-3c-warming-cities-underwater" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Miami</a> is underwater and California wildfires <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/california-climate-change-report-wildfires-jerry-brown" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">rage</a>throughout the year, Trump himself won’t be the only -- or even the principal-- culprit charged with culpable neglect. The nation’s too-little, too-late response to climate change for which a succession of presidents share responsibility illustrates the great and abiding defect of contemporary American politics. When all is said and done, presidents don’t shape the country; the country shapes the presidency -- or at least it defines the parameters within which presidents operate. Over the course of the last few decades, those parameters have become increasingly at odds with the collective wellbeing of the American people, not to mention of the planet as a whole.Yet Americans have been obdurate in refusing to acknowledge that fact.Americans today are deeply divided. There exists no greater symbol of that division than Trump himself -- the wild enthusiasm he generates in some quarters and the antipathy verging on hatred he elicits in others.The urgent need of the day is to close that divide, which is as broad as it is deep, touching on culture, the political economy, America’s role in the world, and the definition of the common good. I submit that these matters lie beyond any president’s purview, but especially this one’s.Trump is not the problem. Think of him instead as a summons to address the real problem, which in a nation ostensibly of, by, and for the people is the collective responsibility of the people themselves. For Americans to shirk that responsibility further will almost surely pave the way for more Trumps -- or someone worse -- to come.Andrew Bacevich, a <a href="https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176433/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich%2C_not_so_great_wars%2C_theirs_and_ours" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">TomDispatch regular</a>, is the author of <a href="https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268104863/twilight-of-the-american-century/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Twilight of the American Century</a>, which will be published this fall.Follow TomDispatch on <a href="https://twitter.com/TomDispatch" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Twitter</a> and join us on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/tomdispatch" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Facebook</a>. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorsky's novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608469077/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Every Body Has a Story</a>and Tom Engelhardt's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608469018/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">A Nation Unmade by War</a>, as well as Alfred McCoy's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467732/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power</a>, John Dower's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467236/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II</a>, and John Feffer's dystopian novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467244/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Splinterlands</a>.</div></div></div></div></div>