The agony of being a Blackhawk fan with Stan Bowman as GM

There is no planet in this or any galaxy in the known universe in which Seth Jones is worth Adam Boqvist and an eight-year contract totalling $77 million, let alone the draft choices my Blackhawks gave to Columbus in Stan Bowman’s latest genius-level trade. It’s kind of hard to rebuild without draft choices. This year alone, the Seth Jones trade cost us not only Boqvist, but three players more highly rated in the draft than the guy we took with the last pick in this year’s first round. And we will continue to hemorrhage future talent in drafts yet to come for a guy who may or may not be able to return to the level of play he showed himself capable of before last year.

Please, Rocky Wirtz. Fire Bowman now, before he ruins the team for a generation. I really want at least one more Stanley Cup before I die, and preferably more than one. We’re just not going to get there with this guy as GM.

Is China actually a paper tiger?

Just heard a very interesting podcast by Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark. It was interview with commentator and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. Much of it is about the nature of fascism, and the degree to which that label can be accurately applied to the movement Donald Trump started and still heads. It’s worth listening to, if only to sharpen one’s own thinking about what fascism is and is not, and how it historically has functioned. Spoiler: both men agree that it actually has less to do with ideology or even policy than with style and attitude.

But the part of the interview I found the most interesting comes at the very end. Frum makes the case that China is, excuse the expression, a paper tiger. The Chinese, he argues, are not going to overtake the United States in any of the ways we fear. They’ve been faking their economic statistics for years. No university in China- not even Bejing University- ranks among the great universities of the world. You do not build great universities by putting shackles on the human mind.

The United States, and not China, continues to be the place from which new ideas and scientific discoveries come. Even their COVID vaccine doesn’t work as well as ours. Like the Soviet Union before it, China gives every indication of being a hollow shell, very big on appearances but more menacing in rhetoric and posturing than in fact.

I would argue that it’s still worth taking seriously. It’s the only nation in the world that even might rival us economically, militarily, or geopolitically. I would argue that we need to be taking Putin’s Russia seriously, too, even though it’s a less formidable threat. It may no longer be the superpower it once was, but it is neither the toothless relic Barak Obama seemed to think it was nor the cute, friendly puppy Donald Trump pretended. The Russian bear still has claws and teeth, and it is neither our friend nor the friend of freedom.

In any case, we seem to be losing our mojo. We, as a nation, seem to be resigned to decline and stagnation. Certainly we’re doing nothing ourselves to avoid that path. Slogans like “Make America Great Again” are used to advocate the abandonment of the very ideals that made our nation great in the first place. A large part of the American population and a great many of our leaders seem to have stopped believing in our country and its ideals. The very slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that it is not great at the moment. Many of our people and politicians want to run away from the world instead of engaging it, as if that were even an option in the 21st Century. We live in a post-truth society in which ignorance is weaponized for political purposes and what we want to believe seems to have a stronger influence on policy than what the evidence says is true.

But maybe it’s time to stop being so quick to believe it when other nations and even voices within our own borders with agendas of their own talk trash about the United States. The whole podcast is worth hearing. But that bit at the end is especially worth taking to heart.

It seems quite likely that rather than being the nation to whom the future belongs, China is, in Mao’s phrase, a “paper tiger.”

Trump’s ‘authenticity’ should repel Christians

Bob Vanderplaats, one of the most prominent leaders of Iowa’s “evangelical” community, says that if the Former Guy doesn’t run in 2024, his churchgoing supporters here will be looking for someone with his “authenticity,” but without his “demeanor.”

But how does one seperate the two? It’s a revealing- and disturbing- statement. A notoriously unethical businessman, a lifelong bully, a self-confessed serial molester of women who has been accused by one of them of having raped her as at a Jeffrey Epstein orgy when she was 13 (and has an eye-witness to the event), who is a serial adulterer, an apologist for racism and bigotry who continues to lie about having been cheated out of a second term, and above all the most prolific liar, slanderer, and libeler in the history of American politics is virtually the antithesis of the values of Jesus. Yet he claims to be a devout Christian. He is hardly a paragon of authenticity, and the fact that so many conservative Christians miss that point is, one might say, a scandal of biblical proportions.

What does it say to those outside the Church when those inside it praise the “authenticity” of such a man? To be blunt, the fact that they can both praise his “authenticity” and support him casts Jesus Christ and the Gospel in a bad light indeed. As a conservative Christian myself, I have to wonder how many souls will be lost because of “evangelical” support of Donald Trump. Beyond that, it suggests that a great many American Christians may be confusing a deal with the devil- a blind eye to evil in exchange for political power and support for a political agenda aimed at winning its victories by legal compulsion rather than the changing of hearts- with the advancement of the Kingdom of God.

Martin Luther, in commenting on the corruption of the medieval Church and its mistreatment of the Jews, wrote early in his career that if he were a Jew, he would rather be a pig than a Christian. It’s time contemporary American Christians began asking themselves what message they are sending the people whose primary mission is supposed to be the spreading of the Gospel when they can give the “authenticity” of such a man as their reason for supporting him.

Or are the negative things what Vanderplaats means by Trump’s “demeanor?” Strange term to use for established personality characteristics. And strange personality characteristics for a politician so strongly favored by “evangelical” Christians!

The GOP moves to enable the spread of COVID-19

In a move of moral perversity ignoring the logic of every public health effort ever undertaken, Republicans nationally are pushing legislation granting protection against discrimination to- wait for it- unvaccinated Americans.

Yes, that’s right. Republicans are on record as supporting the granting of special rights to potential carriers of the COVID-19 virus, and effectively adding sociopathy to race, religion, sex, national origin, and sexual orientation as legally protected characteristics meriting special status under civil rights legislation. It continues to become clearer and clearer that the GOP believes that there is a constitutional right for ethically depraved narcissists to selfishly risk spreading a deadly virus among the rest of us.

Well, no. I should retract that. The logic of the general Republican position would not discriminate. It would grant legal protection to all viruses. Logically, it would mean that people who might be infected with smallpox could freely mingle with the rest of us, and their movements could not be consistently restricted. Folks potentially exposed to Ebola could jostle us in the subway, and there wouldn’t be a thing the government could do about it. Ain’t freedom wonderful?

How do people become so preoccupied with their own supposedly unbounded and unlimited “rights” that they fail to see that for a person who might be a carrier of a potentially deadly and highly contagious disease to mix freely with the rest of the population deprives everyone else of their right to remain healthy and alive? I guess that’s what happens once we elect a narcissist president. All of a sudden, a movement arises to make narcissism our national ethos forevermore.

You can’t make this stuff up. It can’t be emphasized strongly enough that this is not a debatable matter about which reasonable people might disagree, any more than Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority voters (well, except for sociopaths and the willfully ignorant, whom they apparently want to make protected categories). This simply nuts. The position that sees lockdowns, masks, and strong incentives to be vaccinated as somehow violations of individual liberty is pure, unadulterated moral and intellectual perversity, and if we let the sociopathy from which it springs prevail (which I’m confident that we won’t), we all deserve the consequences natural selection will inflict upon us.

As well it may. At this very moment, a new flare-up of the Delta variant is occuring in the states with the lowest vaccination rates. What we’re experiencing now is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” If the consequences were restricted to them, one could argue that they would simply be the result of decisions the newly-infected had made for themselves. But some people are becoming infected because for one practical reason or another they can’t be vaccinated. And as long as Missouri, Mississippi, and the other hotbeds of resistence to vaccination remain, the virus will have a chance to mutate in their midst and produce new variants- variants against which the vaccines may no longer be effective. It is not an exaggeration to say that those who willfully refuse to be vaccinated are responsible for keeping the pandemic going not only in their own midst, but potentially elsewhere. They are putting us in danger of losing a golden opportunity to put COVID-19 behind us. They are not only endangering the lives of those in their midst who cannot be vaccinated. They are potentially also endangering the lives of those of us who have, but who can’t assume that Missouri and Mississippi and the other vaccine-resistent states will not be statewide Petrie dishes, breeding variants of COVID-19 against which the vaccines will be useless.

The rhetoric to the contrary, nobody is advocating compulsory vaccination. But it seems only reasonable to treat vaccination against COVID the same way we’ve historically treated vaccination against smallpox, polio, and other diseases. It’s not simply reasonable that unvaccinated people be prevented from participating in activities through which they might potentially spread the disease to others. “Vaccine passports” stand firmly in the mainstream of the way in which ours and other democratic societies have always dealt with situations like this.

It’s not merely the entire history of Western political theory and of constitutional law that tells us that one’s right to swing one’s fist ends at the point of the next guy’s nose. It’s common sense. But common sense seems to have entirely vanished from a conservative movement increasingly dominated by the fruitcakes these days, and there seems no limit to the absurdities it can unabashedly embrace.

A covenant with death

From CPAC.

This is what conservatism has become: paranoid fantasies about life-saving vaccines and an active alliance with a deadly virus against humanity. Cheers for the fact that we have thus far failed in this country to vaccinate enough people to achieve herd immunity and put the pandemic behind us. The alliance with ignorance that lies at the heart of the Trump revolution has clearly and frankly become a covenant with death.

There is blood on these people’s hands, and no sane or decent person should have any illusions about it. To discourage people from being vaccinated, to keep the pandemic going, to stop us from reaching herd immunity, to give COVID a chance to mutate further and undo a golden opportunity to end a scourge that has killed over 600,000 Americans already is simply evil.

The issue when it comes to vaccination is not a mere difference of opinion. The anti-vax position is not simply an alternative viewpoint, any more than resistance to lockdowns, masks, and other common-sense public health measures were differences of opinon. Given the amount of misinformation the radical right has spread about COVID, the pandemic, and the vaccines, to be confused and a little hesitant is certainly understandable. But to actively promote that disinformation is barbaric.

Tens of thousands have already died unnecessarily because of the misinformation spread by these extremists. At this critical moment when COVID could be dealt a decisive blow and the pandemic put behind us, nobody should be confused about the fact that the product being sold by people like this guy is not merely confusion and ignorance, but death itself.

As “pro-life” as a MIRVed ICBM

Appropos of yesterday’s post on the incredibly bad logic behind the radical right’s anti-vax rhetoric, Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark had a piece today on the “depraved indifference” of #TeamVirus’s campaign of disinformation and sociopathic posturing in opposition to the efforts of the Biden administration to get us to herd immunity and end this pandemic once and for all by getting enough people vaccinated.

This all started because Donald Trump a) popped off about another lunatic conspiracy theory that struck his fancy and, of course, refused to back down when it was shown to be nonsense, as usual; and b) recognized the economic impact of common-sense public health measures to control the pandemic, realized that it would destroy the healthy economy that was the only real argument for re-electing him, and placed a greater value on his own re-election than on human life.

The willingness of such a great percentage of American Christians to show themselves to be hypocrites by casting aside the very “pro-life” values they used as an excuse to support Trump if that was the cost of getting him re-elected is one of the great scandals of church history. This is not to say, of course, that every pro-Trump Christian is a conscious hypocrite about the sanctity of innocent human life. A great many just got carried away with the “us vs. them” mentality that permeates both sides of the political divide these days, and failed to think the matter through.

But there it is. This issue is a perfect illustration of why I cannot be a Republican any more, and why I have a difficult time understanding how anybody with a conscience and the ability to reason can go along with #TeamVirus, now that it doesn’t even have the excuse of saving Donald Trump’s political hide anymore.

Tens of thousands of Americans are dead who would otherwise be alive because of this depraved, performative pretense that enabling the spread of a deadly virus is somehow a protection of “individual liberty.” One wonders how many unneccessary deaths will be necessary before people with an iota of ethical sensitivity wake up and smell the decomp.

Look. It doesn’t matter that COVID seems only to have a fatality rate of one percent. This is one of the most contageous viruses we’ve even had to deal with. Even with that comparatively low a fatality rate, it’s killed 600,000 Americans in a little over a year.

This isn’t rocket science. And it isn’t just a tragedy. It’s an ethical stain on a large percentage of the American people, and a cause of scandal for American Christianity,

One wonders how many more have to die.

The fallacy that’s driving #TeamVirus

One of the amazing things about the idiotic controversies surrounding lockdowns, masks, vaccines, and practically every other aspect of the pandemic is the degree to which the extreme right fails to understand the purpose of public health measures.

Let me be blunt: There is a difference between libertarianism and sociopathy. When people claim that compulsory lockdowns, mask-wearing, and so forth violate their individual rights, they are operating out of the erroneous and self-centered assumption that their purpose is to protect them. They point out that they’re capable of making their own decisions about the risks they take with their health. And if that were the issue, they would be right.

But it’s not the issue. Admittedly, the CDC, the WHO, and the public health establishment generally have failed miserably to communicate the fact that while masks, for example, do seem to provide protection for their wearers from contracting COVID-19 (while the pores are big enough to allow the virus to pass through, they are not big enough to let the droplets through which the virus is spread get through, and people who wore masks in public throughout the pandemic seem to have contracted the virus half as often as those who never wore them) that has never been their primary purpose. Remember back in the beginning of the pandemic, before we knew as much about the transmission of the virus as we know now and masks were not recommended by Dr. Fauci and others except for people who actually had been exposed to the virus? The purpose of masks is not primarily to protect their wearers. It’s to protect others with whom the wearers come into contact.

Nobody- literally nobody– knows for certain that they are not carriers of the virus, spreading it everywhere they go. A huge percentage of infectious carriers- perhaps most– are asymptomatic and don’t realize that they have the virus! And that is why we’ve all been encouraged to wear masks- not for our protection, but for the protection of others! There has never been any doubt that even paper masks are effective in preventing people from spreading the virus. And that is, and always has been, the point!

Lockdowns weren’t mainly intended to protect people from being exposed to the virus. Again, if they were, those who have opposed them on the grounds that they are capable of deciding what risks to take with their own health and that their individual rights were being violated by being forced to stay home would have a point. But they weren’t. Again, the purpose of lockdowns was primarily to prevent carriers- including carriers who might well not even know that they were carriers- from mixing with people who didn’t have the virus and giving it to them!

The rate at which people are getting vaccinated against COVID is lagging. There is worrisome evidence that it may be reaching its ceiling. The idea that both the government and private entities have both the right and the responsibility to require vaccinations against infectious diseases as a condition of participating in activities through which various viruses might be spread (including going to school and serving in the military) is both well-established and simple common sense. In a pandemic, there is an additional factor in play.

Obviously, there are a small number of people who for one reason or another- sometimes medical, sometimes logistical- cannot be vaccinated. They clearly are not to blame for circumstances beyond their control. But herd immunity- the percentage of the population that is immune to a virus at which the virus ceases to spread from person to person for lack of available new hosts- is somewhere between 70% and 90%. Nobody knows exactly where the critical percentage falls with COVID. But the virus will continue to spread until the percentage of the population who as either been vaccinated or has had COVID and recovered from it reaches that point.

A refusal to be vaccinated, again, is not a matter of individual freedom. It affects all of us, not just the person who isn’t vaccinated. It prevents us from reaching herd immunity and keeps the pandemic going. And the longer the virus is circulating, the more it will mutate. The available vaccines continue to be effective against the rapidly-spreading Delta variant of COVID, but to a lesser degree. The Pfizer vaccine, for example, is 90% effective in preventing people from becoming infected by other strains. But against the Delta variant, its effectiveness drops to 65%. At this point, the chances of a vaccinated person coming down with specifically the Delta variant remain small. But the longer it’s circulating, the greater the chances will be. Worse, the longer the virus continues to spread, the more it will mutate. It’s entirely possible that new variants may arise against which the vaccines are less effective.

The percentage of the population that has been vaccinated varies from state to state. States such as Missouri or Mississippi, for example, in which relatively low percentages of the population have been vaccinated, are breeding grounds for new variants. It’s not only the populations of those states who are endangered. It’s all of us. If a new variant that is resistant to the vaccine develops, say, in Missouri, it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to the states where the majority of people have been vaccinated. There is no question of individual freedom involved here. People who decline to be vaccinated are putting all of us in danger.

The situation is complicated, obviously, by people like former President Trump, Tucker Carlson, and the far right media, who continue to spread misinformation about the virus, the vaccines, and the danger. #TeamVirus is large and influential. Ignorance ceases to be a private concern when it endangers others. And the resistence to vaccination is driven by ignorance and misinformation, just as resistance to lockdowns and mask-wearing have been.

Freedom is never unlimited. To paraphrase a famous statement by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, freedom of speech does not protect someone who falsely shouts “Fire!” in a crowded theater. John B. Finch once described a hypothetical conversation that might well have been about face masks or the refusal to be vaccinated:

“Is not this a free country?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have not I a right to swing my arm?”

“Yes, but your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins.”

The right to exercise one’s personal freedom when one’s own safety is one thing. But there is no right to endanger other people.

There is no right to spread a deadly virus.

There has never been a question of prudent public health measures being a violation of individual rights simply because they restrict or mandate behavior that otherwise might be a matter of individual choice. The argument to that effect is simply silly. This is not a matter of freedom. For most of us, it’s a matter of personal responsibility.

It’s a matter of obligation. Nobody is saying that anyone should be forced to be vaccinated. But the government would be derelict in its responsibilities if it didn’t protect the rest of us by restricting the activites of those who refuse to be. And resistance to that premise isn’t libertarianism. It’s sociopathy.

#TeamVirus can believe what it wants to believe. But facts are facts, lies are lies, and #TeamHumanity has the right to protect itself from those who confuse individual liberty with selfish indifference to the consequences of their behavior for the rest of us.

THE ONION is eerily prophetic

It’s not often that The Onion accurately predicts a news story. But there’s a first time for everything.

The United States is literally sneaking out of Afghanistan in the middle of the night.. Our forces abandoned Bagham Air Force Base, a major hub of our operations in that country, under cover of darkness and without telling our Afghan allies that they were going to do it. They left behind huge caches of supplies and equipment, supposedly for the Afghans- who eventually found out that the Americans had left through the grapevine, shrugged, and moved in. But the Afghan army will have to make do with what the looters left for them.

The Biden administration’s Afghan policy seems to be identical to that of the Trump administration’s: get out of Dodge just as fast as our legs will carry us; do not pass go, do not collect $200. Our armed forces can’t be blamed, of course; they take orders from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But our latest abandonment of our allies- something that is becoming a regular part of American foreign policy, and understandably causing them to conclude that the U.S. can’t be relied upon- is in some respects making the fall of Saigon look like the Alamo by comparison.

At least in Vietnam our final withdrawal came because we had lost the war and the enemy was attacking our ally’s capital city. But in the case of Afghanistan, we’ve yawned, stretched our arms, said “I’m tired and I’m going home,” and are in the process of letting the enemy win. Few doubt that they will- and given Taliban gains since we began a withdrawal that is now 90% complete, it will probably be rather quickly.

True, we have been fighting this “forever war” for twenty years. True, it’s been very expensive. But it’s cost us fewer than three thousand lives. By comparison, Vietnam cost us 57,000.

Contrary to what many people have claimed down through the years, it was not the great North Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of Communist victories over both France and the United States, who was the source of the statement below. It was North Vietnamese Col. Bui Tin, who made it in a 1995 interview with the Wall Street Journal. But it’s hard to miss their significance both for our involvement in Afghanistan and in the future:

Q: How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?

A: By fighting a long war which would break their will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said, “We don’t need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out.”

Bui goes on to explain that given the roles dissent and protest play in democracies, they cannot win protracted wars. Even though Bui doesn’t say so, that isn’t necessarily the case when everyone can clearly see that their own immediate welfare and that of the nation are on the line. But when the war is on the other side of the globe, and it’s hard to see the immediate consequences of failing to prevail, when a war begins to drag on and on- even if, as in Afghanistan, casualties have been minimal- the citizens of democracies tire of them. And in the long run, democracies will never be able to summon the will to see a lengthly foreign war to a successful conclusion unless the nation itself would be put in immediate danger if it failed to do so.

That, ultimately, was the lesson of Vietnam. We can win short, decisive conflicts. But in a war like Vietnam or even one like Afghanistan, in which casualties have been light, it is a built-in weakness of countries in which the people finally call the shots that unless there are obvious and fairly immediate consequences to losing, democracies simply cannot and will not stay the course..

That is a fact of life history has taught us at a considerable cost in lives and treasure. Both Donald Trump-style isolationists and George H.W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson-style internationalists should take it as a fundamental law of nature and govern their policies accordingly.

We forget that we went to war in Afghanistan originally because the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden and al Queda in Afghanistan. The war was enormously popular in the United States at the time, and jolly well should have been. We kicked the Taliban out. The trouble is that Afghanistan, like Iraq, is an ancient and relatively undeveloped region, rather than a nation in the modern sense. Like Vietnam, and like Iraq, it is essentially an artificial nation cobbled together by outsiders. We defeated the Taliban, and removed them from power. But as in Iraq, we then faced the dilemma of lacking any abiding sense of mutual identity or a generally recognized central authority to install in power in place of our defeated adversary. The “forever war” has been a struggle to prevent the Taliban- which, like the Viet Minh and its successors in Vietnam, was the only truly unified force capable of forming a stable government, from stepping into what amounted to a vaccum and seizing power again.

The rule of the Taliban- a misogynistic outfit of religious fanatics intent on ruling by strict Sharia law- was a nightmare for the people of Afghanistan. It is a nightmare into which they are about to be plunged once more.

An aside: If you haven’t seen the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, based on the book by George Crille III, I highly recommend it. It’s a funny but also an important film, somewhat fictionalized but preserving the essense of what actually happened when a lovable and rather blatantly corrupt congressman combined with a bizarre collection of marginal characters inside and outside the CIA to get the Mujahideen- the Afghans fighting the Russians- Stinger missles and other military support which they could use to repel the invaders. Afghanistan was a far different experience for the Russians than it was for us. It’s misleading to call it the “Russian Vietnam,” as some do; we lost 57,000 soldiers and sailors in Vietnam, whereas the Soviet Union lost only 15,000 (our own loses in Afghanistan total 2,376). But it was enough to convince the Kremlin that the war was unwinnable, and get them to pull out.

The movie ends with a sad postscript about how, having won the trust and friendship of the Afghan people, we squandered them by losing interest and forgetting about Afghanistan. The result was the Taliban coming to power. History, it seems, repeats itself. But I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if our interest in a stable Afghanistan that wasn’t going to be a playground for bad actors had continued. Perhaps the “forever war” might never have been fought at all.

Effective and empathetic foreign aid when possible, and covert operations to support our friends, or even short, decisive military encounters when they are necessary, can and should be undertaken when they’re in our interests, and in the interests of freedom and stability. But not twenty-year wars, even when they result in fewer than 3,000 casualties over that entire period.

How do you avoid quagmires like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, in which we can keep the bad guys out of power only if we stay involved at a level we cannot sustain in the long run? First and foremost, you try to help avoid the circumstances in which they develop. But contrary to the paleocon/Trump/Buchanan/Paul isolationist instinct, we can’t simply shut ourselves within our own borders, behind the ramparts of two oceans, and cry “America First!” World War II proved how badly that works. Throughout history, there has always been a leading world power that has lent stability to world affairs. The Brits played that role for a long time. We are their successors. The alternative is a global power vacuum in which Hitlers arise. The days of “Fortress America” are far in the past. The world has become too small. We are too deeply effected, economically, culturally, and in many other ways by what happens on the otherside of the globe to curl up in a ball and hide.

And above all else, we can be mindful of our limitations. I’m not sure what the answer is when our military presence is or might be the only thing keeping tyrants and monsters from filling power vacuums on the other side of the world. But the Butterfly Effect is real in modern international affairs. It may be very indirectly, but we in the United States will be affected by the impending descent of Afghanistan back into the dark medieval night of Sharia law, misogyny and tyranny. And like it or not, history has cast us in the role the British played for so long, not necessarily as a world-bestriding empire but as a strong anchor for peace and order, a rallying point around which the nations can gather to protect the interests of peace and even civilization. 9/11 is a chilling reminder of what happens when we lose interest in what happens beyond our borders.

Multilateralism is part of the solution, to be sure. But then, our effort in Afghanistan has been multilateral; it’s been a NATO operation. And our NATO allies, too are democracies, subject to the short attention span of their voters.

I suppose the best we can do is to encourage enlightened people and movements non-militarily, and on a limited and even covert scale when military action must be taken, again unless it’s possible to bring overwhelming force to bear to bring about a clear, quick, decisive, limited, and well-defined outcome, as was the case in the First Gulf War.

We dare not run away from our responsibilities in the world because we cannot. The world will not let us. The fruit of any prolonged effort will be bitter indeed; as it is, the damage done to our posture in the world and our relationship with our allies by four years of Trump isolationism will probably take decades to repair. But there are limits, as a practical matter, to what even a democracy as mighty as ours can do. We need to learn those limits, stay within them, always keep a clear and limted goal in mind, and do the best we can. Reality is a harsh mistress, and we have no choice but to obey it. And in our misadventures around the world since the 50s, reality has spoken clearly, and keeps repeating itself, it seems.

We should not mishear it. We dare not respond to Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan by withdrawing from the world, or by failing what we can do to lead the world order in staving off chaos and disaster. If we won’t do it, China will- and the consequences won’t be pretty.

The Biden administration is doing its best to avoid a reprise of the disaster we experienced in the fall of Saigon. But there will be Afghans who have put their lives on the line to be our friends, and who will lose those lives because we have abandoned them. And that is a cause for deep shame.

We have lost only 2,367 lives in Afghanistan. Each of those lives is a universe for the friends and family of the casualties. But those are far fewer losses than we’ve experienced in previous wars. We are not leaving Afghanistan because the cost of staying would be too high. We are leaving, yes, because it seems unlikely given the nature of Afghanistan itself that we can finally prevail, unless perhaps we stay there for 50 or 75 or a hundred years. But fundamentally, we’re leaving because democracies can’t summon the political will to fight protracted wars unless they’re invaded, or in immediate danger of being invaded.

But leaving means that while no life lost in the defense of freedom and decency is ever spent in vain, those 2,367 lives will have been lost in a cause that failed. Perhaps if we’d paid more attention and done our nation-building in peacetime, the war would never have had to be fought and those men and women would still be alive. As it happened, we find ourselves in a situation in which final victory in Afghanistan is probably impossible. Yes, there is a case to be made for getting out before more lives are lost. But while on the whole I’m a supporter of the Biden administration, it ought to be a cause for shame that our withdrawal is not happening more thoughfully and deliberately, over a far longer period. It’s not the MRI’s and DVD’s and ordnance we’re leaving behind that bothers me.

It’s the people.

We hold these truths to be what?

Suzanne Garment has an interesting post in today’s American Purpose on what may be the central issue of our political life at this moment in history: whether the (supposedly) shared convictions upon which our nation has built can survive the current onslaught of authoritarianism from both the left and the right.

From the rigidity of politically correctness to the attempt to stifle academic freedom and limit the right to vote, it seems that we all believe in freedom for those who agree with us, but not for those who disagree. “Cancel culture” is a phenomeon on the right as well as the left, and it’s often impressed me that while the far left and the far right alike are filled with distain for the other’s attitude toward the standards of freedom and civility upon which our system depends, they resemble each other quite closely in their apparent conviction that those standards only apply when it’s convenient for “the good guys.”

A student activist violently disrupting a speech by a conservative on campus and the selectively conservative populist taking a swing at a protester at a Trump rally are nothing more or less than mirror images of one another. It’s striking how similar the rhetoric of MAGA-world and the fashionably progressive often can be. It almost seems as if Jesus had America at this moment in its history especially in mind when he spoke the words recorded in Matthew 7:1-5. And yet folks on both ends of the political spectrum quote that passage when criticizing those who disagree with them freely and with no apparent sense of irony.

One’s dedication to freedom of speech is best tested by one’s attitude toward the expression not of thoughts we agree with, or even with which we agree to disagree. The test is whether we’re willing to defend the freedom to express the very thoughts we find most repugnant. By that standard, our dedication to the values of the First Amendment these days doesn’t pass muster no matter which side of the spectrum we inhabit.

Can the Founders’ vision survive? Can our system? It’s hard to say. Voltaire never actually said, “I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the experiment that began on July 4, 1776 can only survive if we as a people become considerably more willing to live by that principle.

Disapprobation of ugly ideas and of what we consider less than perfect rhetorical manners is one thing. There is nothing wrong with disapproving of what other people say. But except where a clear and present danger of violence or other great public harm exists, we belie our dedication to the principles we all claim to share when we try to suppress it.