Ted Grimsrud—March 29, 2019

One of the glimmers of hope for those who were horrified with the installation of Donald Trump as president has been that his presidency would be hindered and perhaps even ended by the investigations into his malfeasance. It has, unfortunately, seemed fairly clear for some time that nothing too bad for Trump was going to come to light—and this week’s completion of the work of Mueller Commission has confirmed that.

Problems with Russiagate

From the beginning of the Mueller Commission’s investigation into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russians, four things have particularly bothered me:

1. I have been concerned that this investigation would heighten tensions between the US and Russia and rekindle Cold War-like dynamics between the two nations.
2. I have a sense that we never actually have been shown evidence that Russia, even if involved, had an impact on the election that went beyond simply helping to publicize the misdeeds of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee in using undemocratic means to tilt the scales in ways that favored Clinton and hurt the chances of Bernie Sanders. I think it was a good thing for those subversions of democracy to be revealed and if blame is to assessed it lies a lot more with Clinton and her campaign for their misdeeds than with the Russians.
3. I have worried that the corporate media would not cover this story with careful scrutiny of all claims and would not practice objectivity and balance and would instead let sensationalism and the need to confirm preexisting biases govern how the story would be covered. I also worried that we would not see balance in the coverage of Russiagate with other elements of Trump’s and the Republicans’ in general corruption and destruction of democracy.
4. I feared that this investigation might be a diversion from the need to create a more wide-ranging movement of resistance to the efforts by Trump and the Republican Party more generally to subvert democracy and aggrandize America’s corporate sector.

Part of why these concerns have been especially alarming is the sense that if indeed the Mueller inquiry did not result in a clear condemnation of Trump’s malfeasance, these four problems (and numerous others) would result in the entire process actually being a positive thing for Trump and his party. And it appears that we will in fact be finding out just how hurtful to the cause of peace on earth this diversion will prove to be.

So far this week, there have been numerous analyses from progressives that have made the kind of points I am making here—Ralph Nader, Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges, Branko Marcetic, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Caitlin Johnstone, Aaron Maté, Jeff Cohen, Alex Shepherd, Abby Martin, Jonathan Cook, and Stephen Cohen are just the few I have noticed. However, even these insightful commentaries have tended not to lift up the issue I am most concerned about—that is, how, shall we say, the mainstream liberal hostility toward Trump has actually significantly enhanced the forces of warism in the US. Continue reading “Russiagate and peace on earth” →

Ted Grimsrud—March 20, 2019

As I continue to read and think about the American Civil War, I find many questions to struggle with. A significant one is on the surface fairly simple: Was slavery the main issue over which the war was fought? Of course, this question turns out to be anything but simple. A lot depends on where one stands in relation to the Civil War itself.

Two different viewpoints

Clearly slavery was a contentious issue during the first half of the 18^thcentury. However, a related issue was also central: How much freedom to pursue pro-slavery policies would individual states and regions have? This question led many, especially in the South, to pose the issues as centering on what came to be called “states rights,” or the relation between the self-determination of specific states and the authority exercised over states by the federal government.

So, in the years after the war ended in 1865, the general take in the South (and by many in the North) was that slavery was kind of a peripheral issue and that the war actually had most of all to do with the need the Confederate states felt to defend states rights and the Southern “way of life” in general—even to the point of defending them against invading forces from the North. This came to be known as the “lost cause of the Confederacy”—the “lost cause” being the just cause of defending those rights and that way of life that, though defeated, was honorable and worthy. This view intentionally marginalizes slavery itself as a reason for the war.

On the other hand, the view I absorbed growing up in my “Yankee” environment was that indeed the Civil War was fought to free the slaves. After all, the key moment came when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 to order slaves freed. That statement made it clear what the stakes were in the war, and it energized the North to make sure to win the war so freedom for slaves would be attained. Perhaps that hard won freedom was compromised a bit in the decades following the end of the war, but the ending of slavery was a sure achievement, one that in fits and starts the country has tried to sustain and expand. Continue reading “Was the American Civil War About Slavery? [Civil War #4]” →