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I Am Now an Isolationist Republican
I was struck while reading Paul Gigot’s Opinion piece, “The Return of the Isolationist Republicans“, with the realization that I recognize myself and do not think I am wrong.
He lays out his premise with typical skill:
What is most striking is how much this isolationism of the right resembles the traditional isolationism of the left. Isolationists in the Vietnam era argued that America wasn’t good enough for the world. We were baby killers and imperialists. This is the view of today’s pro-Hamas left.
As Charles Krauthammer pointed out 20 years ago, the conservative isolationism that flourished in the 1930s argued the opposite—that America was too good for the world. Our republican values shouldn’t be tarnished by the bloody intrigues of Europe or Asia. But the new isolationists on the right now agree with the left that the U.S. doesn’t deserve to lead the world. They say we are too degraded culturally and too weak fiscally to play the role we did during the Cold War. They say we are too woke and too broke.
Yes, we are. My youthful enthusiasm for spreading the “American Way” to improve the world was based on my belief that our ideals as a nation and capitalist markets were better than the alternative. I am not a “my nation, right or wrong” kind of guy. When we are in the right, we should try to spread the wealth and principles to people less well off. When we are lost and looking for ways to right the ship, we should not be proselytizing our fads through the force of markets.
I have a few years to go before I will have lived half my life in this century, and it doesn’t seem much of an improvement. Cell phones are tiny and powerful, and I can use them to summon a bag of birdseed or a muffler to my doorstep. At the same time, we haven’t passed a federal budget this century and declarations of war have given way to a limit on how many days a President can attack a random country before he has to give a speech before Congress.
This “perfect war” in Ukraine is a sad harbinger of things to come. We now fight wars with other people’s lives, using accumulations of weapons long paid for (requiring new contracts to replenish!), financed by dilution of the global money supply. Everyone wins! Except for the Ukrainians, suckers relying on Social Security or 401(k)s, and any manufacturing companies remaining in Europe.
I am now an Isolationist Republican.
Published in General
and your desire for inaction ( indistinguishable, functionally, from acquiescence in totalitarian expansion) will ensure the blaze consume our house quite rapidly….
Oh, that’s convenient. Just summon up a bogeyman and apply it to the ideas you hate whether it makes logical sense or not.
Air flight guidance is to put on your own mask before helping others.
Why? Because a dead person is useless.
It’s worse when we are discussing collectives.
For one man to sacrifice himself for another, this is good and is called self-sacrifice and demonstrates love.
In collective units – like a family – a man helping with the raging fire next door when his porch has just caught fire and he has wife and kids is neglectful of those he has promised to protect. He must ensure THEIR safety before helping others.
In nations and countries? There is no virtue in neglecting your responsibilities to play hero for someone who is not your responsibility.
He who does not care for his own is worse than an unbeliever. And unbelievers go to hell.
Better for whom? The Russian occupiers? Or for the Ukrainian children kidnapped and deported to Russia?
Autarchy leads to national poverty.
There is no reason to resort to false dichotomies.
I am not an isolationist.
I just have trouble starting wars we don’t win.
It was helpful to have the Russian navy assist the North during the Civil War. Friends are good. Dependent nations are not.
What in the world is this?
Has the ideology of the left so infected us that we’ve made self-sufficiency into a bad thing?
Yes.
Same on economics: debt, inflation, consume, repeat. I’ve heard some doozies here on Ricochet concerning conventional wisdom of free market ideology. All contribute to hollowing out a once-prosperous, once-free, once-healthy nation.
Same on cultural issues.
Britain, France, the rest of them… they INVITED the muslims in to basically take the place of the children they couldn’t be bothered to have themselves.
Part of Mark Steyn’s “America Alone” is that eventually the muslims can just walk into Europe and take over, because the Europeans will have died out.
Moderator Note:
Do not put words into another member's mouth to make them look bad.[redacted by moderator]
That’s a fine sentiment once his own porch has caught fire. But when that hasn’t yet happened, helping put out the fire next door is valid and may even prevent his own porch from catching fire. Just keeping watch on his own porch while the fire next door burns out of control is not right.
I suppose the difference is whether you believe his own house has already caught fire, or is just at risk because of the fire next door.
That’s why the debate isn’t actually about helping Ukraine and Israel, as much as the interventionists want it to be and accuse the detractors in unkind ways.
The debate is actually are we on fire or not?
And the two sides vehemently disagree on that point.
It’s at least plausible to argue that we aren’t ourselves actually on fire YET, and it would be far easier, cheaper, and better if we can avoid ever actually becoming on fire by helping the neighbors put out THEIR fires.
Although many of the people making similar arguments may not have such magnanimous reasons behind their arguments.
Better to live in a city rebuilt for propaganda purposes than to wait thru the 27 genders sermon in kiev before collecting your daily ration of rat strudel.
Perhaps I undervalue the attraction of “two tail Tuesdays” and “whiskerless Wednesday”.
Your view on Ukrainian resistence to Russia is not in allignment with the average Ukrainian. Ukrainians are willingly fighting for their own existence (including hundreds of thousands of American Ukrainians who have returned to fight), against the country that implimented the Holodomor upon them. It sounds like you’ve decided they deserve to live under the yoke of Russia.
To say the United States is no longer prosperous is objectively obsurd. Economically speaking we exist in a much more prosperous state than 50 years ago. Culturally id agree with you. Thats where our true rot lies.
It sounds like you’ve decided they deserve unlimited blank checks from the U.S. Treasury. Which is to say, from every U.S. Citizen.
I disagree. The role of the U.S. in this war should be not to encourage its continuance, but to bring it to a halt. As we’ve learned, the war could have been over 16 months ago, but the neocon scum in the State Department rejected every peace effort and told Ukraine to keep fighting and they’d ensure the cash would keep flowing.
There are no “good guys” here. How much more death and destruction do you require?
My poor family can’t take much more of this “prosperity.”
True
GDP is around ~$25 trillion. Federal debt is 119% of that, private debt is 75% of that, according to St. Louis Fed. That’s not counting state and local debt, nor is it counting unfunded liabilities from SS, Medicare, pensions, etc. We’re dependent to a dangerous degree on foreign imports from unfriendly places. Growing debt is an indicator of fundamental unsoundness when there is no amortization schedule eventually zeroing out. We’ve exported not only jobs but whole industries along with the supporting jobs and industries which go with them. As I say, we’re being hollowed out. If there comes a time when we’re unable to borrow then we’ll see how this game of musical chairs ends, if the industrial powerhouses of the day don’t get restless and aggressive before then. Otherwise so many places in our country are on a road to serfdom ruled by the “elites”, without means to do much about it – except our guns.
Anyway, “we” is a relative term. So is your comparison period. More prosperous than the 70’s? Probably. Are we more prosperous than the 80’s and 90’s? Doesn’t feel like it.
We are living on seed corn. There’s a lot of seed corn because we were prosperous, but that ends eventually. There’s been no investment in any of the things that made us prosperous. There’s only been investment in inflating the value of our assets by creating demand and financing it with debt.
You obviously weren’t alive in the 70s….
No investment? Silicon Valley Anyone? You sound like a buggy whip manufacturer in 1919…
It is probably some flaw in my character – and I expect the “flaw finders” will point it out quickly, but this entire thread makes me want to get one of the red baseball hats with the logo “Trump was right about everything”
He’s always the elephant in the room, isn’t he?
So is Ukraine; in both cases, the issue is whether materially supporting them is in our national interests, and if so, to what extent we can support them without an unacceptable amount of costs or risk. Reasonable people can disagree on the latter evaluations while remaining dedicated first and foremost to the interest of the United States, while simultaneously believing that institutional and ideological corruption have rendered our nation unfit to intervene on grounds of democracy promotion abroad. In neither situation is the United States suckering people into fighting on our behalf against their own perceived interests. There is a vast stretch of contested middle ground between ‘isolationist’ and ‘neo-con’ positions.
There is only one poster on this forum who would qualify as ‘anti-American Right’; western ideals that were the foundational ideological basis of the country are worth protecting*, not the ideological monstrosity wearing the unquiet corpse of ‘America’ as a skinsuit. Even in our degenerated state, however, we still have immediate and long-term security interests, and that is where the debate is.
*To the extent that this does not involve unacceptable costs or risk on the home front, such as occupying unsuitable countries for the purpose of democratizing them.
The quote you pulled was a response to another comment. The comment claimed that Israel was fighting for its “freedom”
Israel is not really a ‘free’ country and neither is Ukraine. I question whether we are at this point.
Anyway, there is a difference between the fight against jihadis worldwide intent on the destruction of Israel – and it looks evident that Hamas would not stop murdering after any agreement , and a political dispute that could be resolved much more easily.
I agree that Israel is fighting for its survival, rather than its freedom, and that there are qualitative differences between Hamas and Russia.
The ‘free’ issue is complicated; Israel is in a better overall state than 1940s United States (and even the similarities that exist are due primarily to existential and security concerns rather than institutionalized bigotry), but on a relative basis we still qualified as a ‘free’ country at the time. On the other hand, America now is probably no more free than 1940s America, with the persecution and institutional suppression diffused in (currently) milder form against a wider range of targets, rather than concentrated (in purpose and intensity) against a single minority. Either way, neither of us are as free as America was a generation ago, and America has almost completely lost elite and institutional support for the principles and cultural foundations that promote freedom (which is why the events of 2020 were far worse in impact than radical movements from the 70s, even if the violence level was less).