Progressivism and the Plea for War

On March 20, 2003, George Bush and Dick Cheney, on the basis of known lies, invaded Iraq, killed and injured scores of people, and left a country wrecked. Since that date, the US has spent more than six trillion dollars on the “War on Terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria.

A few days before the invasion, on March 4, in a talk titled “Bush’s Dream of a Democratic Middle-East,” delivered before a sizable crowd in the student union at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay—the Plea for Peace teach-in, the progressive students who organized the event called it—I received rousing support from those opposed to war. I told them what the impending war was about. I believed they understood. I now have doubts.

There were conservatives in the audience who thought otherwise, and the College Republicans launched a harassment campaign against me, which included, among other things, the sharing of recordings, either from my talk or from classroom lectures, on right-wing media. The campaign was an attempt to delegitimize an untenured professor with whom they disagreed. Faculty rallied around me and I was awarded tenure two years late.

The night before the invasion, a group of us held a candlelight vigil in the park at the corner of East Mason and Webster Ave here in Green Bay. My eldest son was there, eight years old at the time, wearing his white nightdress (very Swedish) and holding a candle. The next day, he same into the living room and saw the bombs dropping on Baghdad. “Shock and awe,” they called it. He asked me what was happening. I told him. He said, “But I thought we held a candlelight vigil to stop that.” Fighting back tears, I told him a hard truth about the world: warmongers don’t listen to peacemakers.

Here we are twenty-two years later and the warmongers are still at it. And the thing about this reality that’s so striking to me is that those professing the same beliefs as the progressive students who applauded my talk at the teach-in are reacting to Trump and Vance in the same way the conservatives reacted to me when I exposed the forces pushing a nation into war—the desire for a new world order and to feed the war machine with bodies of men, women, and children.

I have watched the progressive movement that called Bush “Hitler” melting as the Obamas embraces that warmonger, now a cute ruddy-cheeked little man who crudely paints landscapes and can’t figure out how to don a plastic disposable raincoat. I watched on a few months ago as they shared videos of Dick Cheney embracing Kamala Harris and his daughter Liz stumping for the Democrat candidate. This is why we need Harris for president, they said.

My principles are the same. I haven’t wavered from my opposition to the Iraq War (either of them), or the PATRIOT Act, or Barack Obama’s drone bombing of civilians, or Hillary Clinton masterminding of the torture murder of Muammar Gaddafi that turned Libya into an open air slave market. I hate war. I hate globalism. What happened to those progressives of 2003? In the 1990s they were violently protesting globalization. Where did those people go?

This is why I have always had an uneasy feeling about progressivism. After all, it was Cold War progressivism that took us into Vietnam and, rebranded as neoconservatism, took us into Iraq. It’s the Party of War. All that “Bush is Hitler” jazz was really about partisan party loyalty. Bush was a Republican, therefore bad. Cheney was “Dr. Evil” until Democrats re-embraced neoconservatism. Cold War progressivism has come home (it came home a long time ago). And, so, Donald Trump is “Hitler” because he opposes neoconservatism and seeks peace instead of war. Today, progressives are praising those who sabotaged Trump’s meeting with Zelensky. They are celebrating the European elites who double down on war.

This is the difference between principled politics and partisan commitments. The former navigates using an enlightened moral compass. A man may be wrong from time to time, but he will course correct and get back on the righteous path. The latter standpoint is amoral. It’s all partisan politics. All the time. This is why it moves from this to that on command. There is no core belief, only following. This is how you can see people who profess the antiwar sentiment within a generation monger for war. You’ve heard it, “Blue no matter who.” That’s the attitude that allows the power elite to lead good people like pigs with nose rings into war. They have emptied the vessels to fill them with just-in-time propaganda.

I just watched video of a march in Beverly Hills. It was thousands strong. The protest line was festooned in yellow and blue. But they weren’t marching for peace. I remember when folks marched for peace. Now the very people who drew inspiration from those images of young American protesting the Vietnam war, who pined for a humanitarian moment of their own, are marching for war. I brought my son to a park to plea for peace. They bring their sons to the streets to march for war.

All this confirms what I have been saying for years. But it still breaks my heart. And it troubles me greatly to think about what this reality brings to the world we are making. Character of this type can never truly choose the right path. It only follows the Party into collective madness.

Such displays are those of Orwellian nightmares. Remember that line from Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia?” The people of Oceania believed that because the Party told them to believe it. Winston Smith knew that Oceania had only recently been in alliance with Eurasia. He suffered terribly for doubting the Party. He could never bring himself to believe that “2+2=5.” I don’t want to believe Winston did that. I always regarded his final act of conversion to be an exercise of bad faith. The Party broke him.

A progressive might object, “We are not a monolithic bunch!” Perhaps. Here and there, sure. But I don’t see progressives standing with Trump and Vance and their plea for peace. If they are, where are they? Why don’t they speak up? What I am seeing across social media instead are progressives gleefully hoping that Xi Jinping brokers a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine and wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Because then Trump won’t.