Are We the Good Guys? Were We Ever?
The New York Times isn't mourning the dead. They're mourning the manners.
I’ve been watching this war for 38 days. Iranian hospitals hit. Water systems destroyed. More than 30 universities gone. 110 children killed at an all-girls school in Minab.
American bombs, American military, no real goal, no real purpose. Just destruction. Just power. And the dumbest kind of power.
The pundits at the NYT and on CNN are losing their minds. Not about the killing or carnage. About the tone.
The New York Times is beside itself because Donald Trump went on social media and promised to blow up Iran’s water supply. He celebrated the destruction of a bridge near Tehran like he’d won a fantasy football matchup. The White House is running propaganda reels, real footage of airstrikes cut with video game clips and movie scenes, set to guitar riffs. Michelle Goldberg is writing about the lost veneer of American morality. Other columnists are lamenting that we’ve lost our standing, our credibility, our ability to lead.
I think the veneer was harmful. It prevented us from being confronted with our actions. The veneer didn’t protect the 7,000 American soldiers who came home in flag-draped coffins or the 60,000 who came home missing pieces of themselves. It didn’t protect the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died after we invaded a country that had nothing to do with September 11th. It didn’t protect the Libyans after we helped turn their country into a failed state. It didn’t protect the Yemenis. It didn’t protect the Iranians whose scientists we’ve been assassinating for years. The veneer didn’t protect anyone other than American elites, our own arrogance, our own sense of moral superiority.
I’m 45 years old. In my lifetime this country has gone to war in Afghanistan after 20 hijackers, most of them Saudi, attacked us. We invaded Iraq. We bombed Libya. We ran illegal drone programs that killed civilians in countries we weren’t even at war with. We’ve overthrown legitimately elected governments. We’ve blockaded Cuba for decades because apparently a small island nation 90 miles off our coast is an existential threat to the most powerful military in human history. We have now bombed Iran for 38 straight days.
None of that is new. What’s new is that Donald Trump won’t dress it up. He says he wants the oil. He says he wants to blow up the infrastructure. He says his own morality is the only thing that can stop him. And the people who spent their careers providing the intellectual justification for all of it are horrified. Not because of the killing. Because he won’t pretend.
The argument from the establishment isn’t that the wars were wrong. The argument is that the wrong wars should have been conducted with more tact. We should have issued a polite press release about spreading democracy before we took the oil. We should have couched the civilian casualties in the language of precision targeting and collateral damage and the difficult choices made by serious people in positions of grave responsibility. We should have maintained the fiction.
Because that’s what it was. A fiction. One that protected the conscience and prestige of the empire, not the people living under it.
When the International Criminal Court moved to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes in Gaza, in a Senate hearing Lindsey Graham said “if they do this to Israel, we are next.” He didn’t say they were innocent. He said we’re next. Chuck Schumer called the warrants reprehensible, profoundly unfair, and outrageous. Not the genocide in Gaza. Not the killing of tens of thousands of civilians. The warrants charging the people doing it.
The veneer wasn't protecting America's reputation. It was protecting theirs. Biden and Gaza, Obama's drone program, Bush and Cheney and Iraq, Clinton and Serbia. The list is long and every one of them knows exactly how long it is. That's why the ICC never gets real power over Americans. Not because they believe in sovereignty or international norms. Because they'd be on the list.
Last week, I was walking to the coffee shop when a convoy rolled past me. A massive police van, multiple cop cars, and one of those military vehicles, 15 feet long, 10 feet tall, the kind you’d expect to see rolling through Fallujah. I followed them. Drug bust.
A house full of meth heads in my town, hit with a dozen guys in full desert tactical gear, silenced weapons, flash bang grenades. I know it was an overreach because those people were back home later that same day. If you need to blow through a door with that kind of force to arrest someone, that person probably shouldn’t be sitting on their porch six hours later.
We don’t know how to reach for anything except the gun anymore. Not here, not abroad. It’s the only tool we’ve kept sharp.
I don’t fear Iran. The people who have more direct control over the daily conditions of my life and my kids’ lives than the Iranian government ever has or ever will are not in Tehran. They’re here.
Trump is a clarifying force.
He didn’t create our system. He just makes lying about it harder. His selfishness, corruption, cruelty, and vulgarity strip away the rituals of denial. He is not a departure from American history. He is a caricature of it. America without the niceties. America without the pretense. America without the patience for the stories that help us feel righteous.
We have always known how to speak the language of liberty while practicing domination. The founders talked about freedom while enslaving human beings. We talk now about justice and righteousness while arming genocide and threatening to bomb whole societies into ruin.
We cannot become something different by pretending Trump is something other than America. He is America. Just the version that has lost respect for the system of denial.
We can be different and we can do it quickly. In 1932 Republicans had a trifecta. The economy collapsed. The country nearly fell apart. In two cycles Democrats built a supermajority that lasted a generation. Not because they had better consultants. Because they had a vision big enough that people believed in it and showed up for it.
Can we look honestly at what we are and decide to be something different? Not redeemed. Different.
The people who need the veneer are counting on our cynicism. They’re counting on us to look at that chart and find a reason it can’t happen again.
It can.
Corbin Trent
PS
If you’re wondering what we can do about it, A Fight Worth Having is being built to answer that question. We are working to find candidates who understand what this moment requires. Not just candidates who can win, but candidates who know winning is the beginning.
We put them through a real process before we back them because the filter determines the fuel.
Are they ready to challenge Democratic leadership, not just Republican villains?
Are they willing to stand alongside candidates in other states and districts around a shared mission?
Do they understand that their victory matters more if the person running three states over wins too?
I’ve was on calls all last week. Here’s who’s passed so far.
Oliver Larkin in FL-23
Melat Kiros in CO-1
Graham Platner, US Senate Maine
Saikat Chakrabarti, CA-11
With many more to come.
If you’ve been reading this and asking what do we do, this is what we do. Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and help us help them.
Corbin, unfortunately your article is accurate. The USA is a hostile nation as it was even before our founding. The fruit never falls far from the tree so we should not be surprised.
Can we change the ethos of our nation and live up to the ideals of freedom, free speech, liberty and justice for ALL and not just the wealthy white?
It will take a radical change of direction and the leadership of uncorrupted youth guided by sage uncorrupted elders. Let's see if this can be done.
With Iran, if you don't go back to 1953 you won't understand it. With our governance you have to understand the tension between a centralized, unitary system and a decentralized divided governance. It is a system of compromise, but when dominated by liars, at least from Nixon, but perhaps way before that, it is corruptible. You are correct, the only difference between now and then is the present transparency and stupidity dominating the executive branch. We have long used a big stick, sometimes with soft talk, sometimes not, but the victims of our big stick are both internal (blacks, people of color, native peoples) and external. Iran is just the latest victim, and the clarity about our unjust action more broadly held.