Trump's response mixed positive facts with a horrifying normative implication for the United States: “There are a lot of killers, we’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”
There is important factual truth (shocking, I know!) in Trump's words: the United States government has overseen, directly or indirectly, operations that have killed innocent people in foreign lands--and our country--for years. The most recent example is the raid in Yemen last week that killed civilians, including children--perhaps as many as nine children. Such murderous operations have gone on under Democratic presidents like Barack Obama, with drone-strikes that involved frequent civilian deaths, and Republican presidents like George W. Bush whose misguided judgment led our country into wars that seem endless, and involved the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of innocents at the hands of agents of our government.
But every president before now has lamented such outcomes, and given us a moral example that these were either mistakes, or at the very least that they were the unavoidable results of dilemmas where the greater good of American lives and security, or the human rights of others (as in 1999 when President Clinton bombed Serbia to force a halt to ethnic violence being carried out against Kosovars), had to be weighed more heavily than the lives of innocent people. The worthiness of the results and wisdom of these decisions can be argued by those who sit on the sidelines of power (and I've certainly argued against them in the case of the attack on Serbia, the Iraq war, etc.), but the basic moral vision that innocent life ought not to be taken unless truly necessary, has been fundamental to American values, at least as we explicitly embrace them, and recommend them to our countrymen, our children, and the world. Republican Senators like majority leader Mitch McConnell and Ben Sasse of Nebraska referred to this in their push-back against the president declaring things like "America is exceptional" and “There is no equivalency between the United States of America, the greatest freedom loving nation in the history of the world, and the murderous thugs that are in Putin’s defense of his cronyism. There’s no moral equivalency there.”
Trump, though, would have us not only look upon what evil America may have wrought in moments of confusion, foolishness, or cold-blooded utilitarianism for what we believe is good, but reject the idea that these evils are to be avoided. He seems to assert not only that we are no better than Putin, but that Putin's mercenary approach to rulership is laudable, to be embraced. This moral stance is horrifying, for the killing in Putin's Russia is about his own political gain--from the devastating way that he prosecuted the 2nd Chechen War that helped catapult him to power in 2000, with murders in torture internment camps1 to the killings of dozens of journalists2 and opposition figures,3 including that of former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov two years ago on a bridge right across from the Kremlin, to the proxy-war he's backing in Eastern Ukraine that has already cost ten thousand lives in just two years. If Putin is a killer, as O'Reilly and others on the right who are uncomfortable with Trump's embrace of the Russian leader well know, it's by design, by his choice against morality, for his own gain; it's not accidentally, in spite of making efforts to provide the "moral leadership" upstanding Americans like Senator Sasse hope for.
But even while Sasse and other prominent old-guard Republicans still adhere to such values beyond politics, that "the US celebrates [a] free press . . . . celebrates political dissent," Trump's new politics of the right is about stopping at nothing to get what you want. This is not exclusive to the group in the White House, but is growing in the grassroots. Here in Lubbock, "one of Lubbock's most well known radio personalities," Chad Hasty, broadcasting on KFYO radio, argued in his morning show on January 27th that people should not be allowed to move to Texas if they'd ever been involved with the Democratic Party. If Trump would make a religious test for the immigration of people to the United States, his grassroots supporters seek to avoid dissent and open electoral competition with political tests to determine how people can move around within it.
If Trump would re-make America as a place where human life is routinely placed below not only national interest, but political expediency, as a place where those outside of the single ruling party do not have the same freedoms and privileges of its adherents, a place where we are impressed by Putin's "toughness" and shrug at the brutality and unfairness of his regime because no moral rules ought to constrain us from "getting ahead," and if Trump's allies in places like Lubbock are already cultivating cadres willing to jettison all the basic tenets of democracy to perpetuate one-party rule, then principled Republicans will soon have no place in such a party.
Meanwhile, those of us on the other side of the political spectrum must not stand around hoping for a moralizing revolution inside the Republican party that would change its current trajectory.
Instead, we must stand up, wherever we are--even here in the most conservative part of Texas--and threaten and punish the Trump machine at the ballot-box, because that is the only way to be listened to: by displacing the Republican monocracy that Trump is constructing to resemble Putin's Russia.
Notes:
1Emma Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)
2Nadezhda Azhgikhina, “The struggle for press freedom in Russia: reflections of a Russian journalist” in Europe-Asia Studies v. 59, no. 8 (Dec 2007), pp 1245-1262
3Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012)
