Now It's Piracy

 

There is a term for attacking ships on the open seas in peacetime. It is called piracy. That is what Trump is guilty of in ordering attacks on boats or ships of another country in international waters. The excuse is that the vessels that were destroyed were bringing illegal drugs from Venezuela to the United States. If so, there was a legal way to stop them – waiting until they entered American territorial waters and having the Coast Guard board them, arrest their crews, and seize the contraband. This is another case of Trump violating laws and customs and an especially bad and potentially counterproductive one. America is the world’s leading maritime power. Our navy is charged with protecting shipping lanes and enforcing freedom of the seas throughout the world. It is a crucial and honorable job, and Trump has made it harder and once again shown disregard for the moral capital this nation has created for itself over the last two hundred and forty nine years. It figures.

National Conservatives vs. Lincoln

 

Having finished with Jefferson, the national conservatives have moved on to dumping Lincoln. They ditched Jefferson with their rejection of the notion that the United States is based on and made exceptional by ideas – the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the continuing thinking and work to live up to them. Now they have repudiated the idea of America having and being dedicated to a fundamental proposition – fairly clearly choosing the word “proposition” to reject Lincoln’s words that the nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal (probably because Lincoln believed anyone could become an American and that this country was the world’s last best hope because of its ideas).

People should take them at their word and, understand that they are dismissing the country’s founding and basic principles as irrelevant and worse. They think enlightenment liberalism was a mistake and one they plan to correct. Accepting their premises requires rejected Americanism as the term is usually understood and the patriotism associated with it and replaced them with traditionalism and an atavistic tribal/religious sort of patriotism. Critics say the national conservatives want to go back to the American 1950s. That gives them too much credit. Their ideology points to going back much farther to times long before 1776 and places far from here.

It would be a mistake to ignore these people. They are organized, form a powerful faction within the Republican party, and have a president who seems to see many things in their way. Be on the lookout and speak up.

Kaine vs. Jefferson

Recently Senator Kaine of Virginia said that people’s rights are creations of their government. Conservatives then griped that he was denying  the divine endowment of those rights. What they and others should have been objecting to is that what he said is fundamentally wrong and deeply illiberal. Whether one believes in individual rights out of religious conviction or from secular philosophical considerations is irrelevant in the context of rejecting Kaine’s claim. People own their own lives and have their unalienable rights regardless of the actions of their governments. Slaves in Cuba or North Korea have the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as citizens of the United States. They are unfortunate in being subject to tyrannies that violate those rights, while Americans are lucky in having a government that generally respects them. But the rights of human beings are the same everywhere. Better governments respect them. Worse governments suppress their exercise. No government creates them, and governments can justify and legitimatize themselves only by securing them. Better Virginians than Kaine have understood that.

 

Eighty Years

 

Yesterday was V-J Day, the eightieth anniversary of Japanese surrender ending World War II. My father and several of my uncles served in that war, my father and one of his brothers in the Pacific. They are all gone now, as are almost all of the other men who fought. Those of my generation, the generation of those men’s children, are getting old. V-J Day is now as far in the past as Appomattox was on V-J Day. I wonder if we boomers, most of whose fathers fought the war and almost all of whose parents lived through it, will be the last generation for most of whom it is more than somewhat remote history. I hope not, but regardless this is a good time to remember those men and what they did.