I had a good time visiting friends and relatives and playing gigs in the northeastern US recently. On one morning at a cafe in western Massachusetts I had a discussion with an old friend where we dwelt for some time on the subject of differences between the Democrats and the Republicans, specifically around the question of "rule of law."
This wasn't the first time we've had this discussion, and as with the other times we've had it, it never reaches any kind of conclusion aside from something like "agreeing to disagree." Each time we have this discussion, I'm taken aback by what appears to me to be my extremely intelligent friend's ability to compartmentalize different aspects of reality in ways that appear to assist his argument, but in the process, also create a warped understanding of how the world works that represents a classic example of what has sometimes been called "false consciousness."
The point my friend makes and the worldview undergirding it is very popular in liberal circles. (I don't mean that as an insult, in particular, but just as a statement of the obvious.) Because of this, it seems like a fine idea for me to put in a little time and effort into exploring the "rule of law" narrative around the Democrats and the Republicans, and why I wholeheartedly reject it.
The basic argument with which any listener to NPR is familiar goes like this: the Republicans don't acknowledge really basic political realities, like whether or not they lost an election, whereas the Democrats do acknowledge such realities, and don't try to hold onto power after losing an election, but rather, they admit defeat and concede. The rule of law, and acknowledging basic realities such as vote counts, is vitally important, and only one of the two parties believes in the rule of law (the Democrats), while the other one openly rejects both the rule of law and reality itself.
On the face of it, with blinders on, this argument seems incontrovertibly true. That is, if we can forget about everything else they have said or done, but focus like a laser on the electoral process in the US with regards to acknowledging the really basic reality of vote counts and election results, one party is in the real world (the Democrats), and the other is in fantasyland, making up their "alternative facts" (the Republicans, specifically the MAGA variety).
My friend -- and many, many other intelligent people -- argue that this question of the rule of law is a fundamental one which clearly differentiates the leadership of the Democrats with the leadership of the Republicans, and that for all their many faults, this question makes the Democrats the obvious choice for anyone that cares about reality and the rule of law.
I hope I have adequately presented the argument here in a way that those who agree with my friend would accept. Now I'll explain, for anyone interested, why I believe the very way this argument is framed is false consciousness, even though it's also correct (at least if it were possible for this conundrum to exist in a vacuum).
First of all, there is no question that the Republican leadership is living on another planet, doesn't believe in the rule of law or acknowledging election results, and seems to be preparing to support Trump as dictator. My argument is not at all with the assessment that the Republican leadership is antidemocratic and disinterested in basic realities such as vote counts, climate change, or any number of other things.
My argument is with the notion that the Democratic leadership is interested in the rule of law. They're clearly not at all interested in the rule of law. This is obvious to me and many other observers of recent events in the world. I'll explain.
But before I explain, let me use another country to help illuminate my point. It's a country that's in the news a lot lately, because it's actively committing genocide right now, with American bombs, American money, American political cover, and bipartisan support.
It is often said that Israel is a democracy. If you arbitrarily chose borders for this country that are not recognized by the country's own leadership, such as where the borders were before 1967, before close to a million Jewish Israelis moved into the West Bank, then you could say this claim to democracy might be true. For those people living within the 1967 borders, along with the many Jewish Israelis living outside of those borders, there is this democracy. But not for the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli military rule.
For the Jewish Israelis and perhaps for the Palestinians living within the 1967 borders, there is what we could call the rule of law -- civilian courts, anyway. But for the actual majority of the population living within the actual borders of the area governed by or militarily occupied by Israel, there is no democracy, no vote, no civilian courts, no rule of law at all.
So, is Israel a democracy? Does it have the rule of law functioning within it? The answer depends entirely on one's ability to put on the right variety of blinders. If you can pretend that Gaza and the West Bank being under Israeli military rule, currently being carpet-bombed, is irrelevant to the question, then you could say Israel is a democracy with the rule of law. However, to say this would be to turn reality on its head, obviously.
The United States, of course, isn't Israel. Rather, it's much, much bigger. It is not only a massive country, but it is an empire, whose military budget is only slightly less than the military budget of the rest of the world's countries combined. The US maintains military bases all over the world, and regularly invades other countries, overthrowing democracies and dictatorships alike, often against the wishes of the United Nations.
If we were talking about a country that kept to itself and did not do any of the things the US does all the time, conversations about which party believes in the rule of law could be perfectly relevant, and the distinctions between parties that do or don't believe in the rule of law could be seen very clearly. But the US isn't that country. Being a global empire, the idea of looking at domestic policy as if it could be separated from foreign policy is just as ridiculous as looking at Israel and calling it a democratic country whose leadership believes in the rule of law.
The illegal invasion of Iraq was popular among the leadership of both parties, and funded by both parties as well. Libya's government was violently overthrown, in large part by the US Air Force, under a Democratic administration. A Democratic administration was responsible for ending the lives of millions of Vietnamese people by burning them alive and destroying their country.
How does supporting the genocide of Palestinians, or carrying out a genocidal war against the people of southeast Asia, or illegally invading Iraq, figure into the rule of law?
The same people who distinguish between the Democratic and Republican leadership on the basis of their support for the rule of law will often also be people who support sending weapons to Ukraine. Once again here their argument centers on the rule of law. The argument is that Russia violated the rule of law by invading another country, and in support of the rule of law and sovereignty of peoples and nations, we should support the Ukrainian struggle against Russian occupation.
Now some people may say that I'm unnecessarily complicating the debate here with the Ukraine example, but really it is at the core of the argument. The belief that the Democrats are more principled, and that this party's leadership believes in the rule of law, is a very dangerous form of confusion, because it can easily lead adherents to then, by extension, support projects that appear to be standing up for the rule of law, such as the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion, and to overlook what's really going on.
Now, if we keep those blinders off and avoid the trap of thinking that the US empire can commit genocide in one part of the world and support the rule of law in another, then the argument that political leaders in Washington, DC are actually concerned with the rule of law in Ukraine falls apart. Something else is going on here, clearly. What is it?
Well, current events and history help a lot to make that pretty clear. US foreign policy has never been globally consistent -- far from it. US policies in former Soviet countries have long focused on wooing the societies in the direction of the west -- especially during the period when the USSR was an actually existing alternative economic model.
In countries where US domination was already established, from Guatemala to Colombia to Indonesia, there was very little of this wooing or supporting allegedly democratic institutions, and a whole lot of military funding and genocidal slaughter used to maintain US imperial hegemony.
We live in one world, and it would be wildly misleading to look at US policies in one region while ignoring US policies everywhere else. The carrot and the stick are both wielded by the same entity, for the same purposes. Sometimes it's convenient to pretend you support the rule of law. Other times it apparently seems more efficacious to just kill millions of innocent civilians.
The US -- very much including the Democratic Party leadership of it -- does both of these things, in different countries, and at different times in the same countries, depending on the situation. If you don't look at reality through this lens -- through the lens of actual US imperial practice, rather than through the lens of its propaganda, or by only looking at what the right hand is doing, while ignoring the left -- then and only then can you fool yourself into thinking that the leadership of either of our political parties actually and truly believes in, or practices, the rule of law.
Note! I gave you mixed messages regarding the time of the show in my last missive. 19:00 GMT is currently actually 20:00 in London, 3 pm in New York, noon in Oregon. That’s when Saturday’s online show will be!
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"The Rule of Law": Myth vs. Reality