Bun. Chapter Eight: Kamala Harris for President

The Hinternet Offers Its Endorsement... Over Our Founding Editor’s Protests

Previous Chapter: “Hurricane Hélène Is Back!”
Next Chapter: “The Boötes Void”
Caput sequens: « Boötis vacuum »

Several of the Americans on the Editorial Board of The Hinternet have long and deep ties to the Democratic Party. Hélène Le Goff, a Franco-American binational, was for a time, after Trump’s 2016 victory, a trinational, as she eagerly and proudly joined up with her millions of sister-citizens in the Pantsuit Nation (which now, as far as we can determine, only exists as a sagging and diminished, um, rump state). Kenny Koontz, for his part, can briefly be seen (at 1’12’’) in the iconic video of the Macarena, performed in a Dionysiac swirl of lanyards and Dockers following Bill Clinton’s re-nomination at the 1996 DNC:

The truth is, today, those of us at The Hinternet with a record of Democratic party activism cannot return to these images and memories without experiencing a near-fatal dose of “cringe”. We are grown-ups now, and we can only see the spectacle of electoral politics as the perpetual theater of the absurd that it is. We often feel as if it’s all grown so much stupider in recent years, but the silver lining may be that this is really just an illusion caused by the fact that we ourselves are getting smarter. It was always stupid as hell, stupider by far than the effusions of any other domain of American popular culture, from Full House to New Coke. The Murphy Brown affair. The Sister Souljah affair. The aircraft-carrier landing with the “Mission Accomplished” banner and the padded groin. Obama’s annual announcements of his throughly mediocre tastes in books and music. None of this is for serious people. None of this is for dignified people. No self-respecting rational adult should devote a single droplet of affective commitment to these grossièretés. And at least to this extent we do understand where our convalescing colleague JSR is coming from.

Speaking of whom, we have taken a somewhat unusual tack in choosing to exclude our own Founding Editor from the deliberative process that led to the present endorsement. In our honest view, JSR has simply drifted too far from the mainstream of political debate to warrant a place at the table. That said, we remain eternally grateful to him for the work he has done in building The Hinternet, and for that reason we believe it is a matter of basic decency to allow him, before we proceed any further, to share his dissenting view. Here is an e-mail we received from him yesterday, in reply to our query about whether he would like to join us in making our endorsement:

No, I will not be able to lend my voice to any endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. Let me say a few words as to why this is so.

A recent article in The New Yorker makes the case that the British Empire’s various crimes were far worse than most of us imagine. Its author, Sunil Khilnani, offers a passing remark that has left me reeling since I read it last week: he describes Britain as being “the sole imperial power that remained a liberal democracy throughout the twentieth century”. This shows, I think, how well the United States has mastered the art of “hiding an empire”, to use Daniel Immerwahr’s phrase. Has Khilnani, I wonder, ever studied a political map of the Pacific Ocean? What is American, for example, about “American Samoa”? Or, to put the point comparatively, is there anything about American Samoa that makes it more American than, say, New Caledonia is French or the Falkland Islands are British? Of course not. If anyone fails to recognize the United States for the globe-spanning empire it is, this can only be because they are duped by the propaganda of custodianship that portrays our country’s expansion beyond its borders —which borders themselves have also done quite a bit of expanding since 1776— as the fulfillment of a duty of care that the US reluctantly accepts when it finds other peoples in other lands unable to care for themselves. But this is the same propaganda empires always use. Even the “anti-imperialist” Soviets described the Russification of the Indigenous nations of Siberia in essentially the same terms.

The US is an empire; more than that, it is the Empire, such that any region of the world that does not submit to its will is not so much “doing its own thing” as resisting. It is clear that this is what our country aspired to be almost from the very beginning, or at least by the time of the Jefferson administration. It was Jefferson who sent the new American navy to quell the Barbary pirates already in 1801, beginning the first of our endless conflicts with the Arab world; he sent his scouts to Oregon three years later, seeing clearly that the US could never hope to dominate the world if it did not straddle an entire continent with coasts on the world’s two largest oceans. California was made a state well before the great expanse between it and the East Coast was subdued, which from the point of view of a neutral observer circa 1848 was plainly a matter of securing a strategic foothold in a disconnected part of the world no less than had been the case for earlier European bases along the Molucca Strait.

Nor was there any plan to stop when we reached the water. Hawai’i was annexed in 1898, in betrayal of an earlier treaty between the US and Great Britain. That same year the Spanish-American War resulted in the transfer of Guam and the Philippines to US control, leading, in the latter country’s case, to a drawn-out and ugly conflict pitting Kansas farm-boys against jungle guérilleros — and not for the last time in our country’s history. What were those Midwestern hayseeds doing in the far-away Philippines in 1900, besides getting disembowled, crucified upside down, and buried in the sand up to their necks with honey smeared over their faces, only slowly to be devoured by poisonous ants? They were, mostly unknowingly, executing their country’s designs upon the world.

We all feel bad for those boys. I confess I feel more gut-level sorrow thinking about them, than I do about the Moros they slaughtered in far greater numbers. I don’t think this is a sign of lingering racism on my part; I think it has to do rather with the great success of the story America tells about itself, that makes its actions appear somehow an exception to the ordinary run of imperial affairs, and indeed that makes it, again, so uncannily good at hiding its empire.

Another recent article also left me stunned. After the killing of Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqeel, the New York Times interviewed some of the relatives of the victims of the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut that Aqeel had helped to organize. Elisa Camera of Daytona Beach, whose brother was killed in the attack, “described him as a kindhearted man who ‘never had an enemy’.” Every single life lost to violence is an incalculable tragedy, yet I still cannot but wonder what this woman could have been thinking that would lead her to say such a thing. Her brother absolutely did have enemies: the same people, namely, who killed him, and whose situated political commitments gave them the distinct impression that in doing so they were striking the legitimate enemy target of something like an occupying army.

That’s just how things work in this damned world, and it’s a tragedy on top of tragedy, beyond the loss of human life, that the American state propaganda machine is able to sign up new soldiers without these young men and women ever having to confront the reality that in their chosen path in life what they are doing is precisely taking on enemies — “taking on”, that is, both in the sense of acquiring, but also, perhaps, of encountering on hostile territory. So often, Americans are like Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down (1993), who goes on a wanton shooting spree, and who asks confusedly when he is finally taken down: “Wait, I’m the bad guy?” The confusion is as sincere as the delusion is astounding.

Back in August I was watching the DNC with my old mom in California. Kamala and Tim and Michelle and Barack and all the others kept talking about our reasons for aiding Ukraine in its fight against the Russian occupation of its eastern territories. They consistently appealed to the apparently essentialized fact that the Ukrainians, like the Americans, “love freedom”, and that it is only natural and right to help other peoples who share this love with us. There was zero acknowledgment of the complexities of geopolitics and historical legacies, or of the situated perspective a Russian might non-crazily come to have, according to which parts of what is now Ukraine seem naturally and justly to fall more into the sphere of influence of the Russian Empire than of the North Atlantic one.

I know a lovely man in his 60s, an outstanding member of the vanishing breed of the Homo Sovieticus, whose father is Ukrainian and whose mother is Russian, and who grew up in Kazakhstan. He tells me his parents waited to get married so that the celebration would take place on the 300th anniversary of the 1654 Pereyaslav Agreement, in which the Cossack Hetmanate in control of much of Ukraine made a ceremonial pledge of loyalty to Moscow. This friend of mine is in exile, and is no admirer of Putin. He greatly regrets the 2022 invasion. But he could never make any sense of any claim to the effect that Ukraine rightly belongs to NATO and not to Russia in virtue of some mysterious essential trait of the Ukrainian people, that they “love freedom” while the Russians do not.

We made a huge mistake a generation ago. We were in such a hurry to get Gorbachev into our Pizza Hut ads, and were so convinced that such powerful symbolism as this would settle matters permanently, we never stopped to think what might happen after even a partial recrudescence of the power the Soviet Union had enjoyed at its peak. It was in a moment of great Soviet strength that Crimea was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, on the presumption, as the anthem went, that this was a союз нерушимый (an “indissoluble union”). Quite apart from the question to whom Crimea “actually” belongs —I personally think it should go to the Tatars—, it is not at all clear to me that a Russian claim to it should be countered with force on the part of an international US-led alliance.

Nor is it clear to me that the standard truism, which holds that if we do not stop the Russians there, they will continue all the way to the Atlantic coast of Western Europe, has any real truth to it. We are supposed to take this as a given, but one problem I have with it, beyond its implausibility, is that it is what leaders always say about the people they are fighting. During the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s Serbian officials were sometimes heard to remark that if we don’t stop the Bosnian Muslims here, soon enough there will be “camels drinking from the banks of the Seine”. And yet in that case the Americans stepped in on the Bosnian side, against the Serbs. “If we don’t stop them here” talk is a scare tactic, and nothing more.

And here we arrive at what really gets me about the Democrats. If we are going to risk direct conflict with another nuclear-armed superpower, let us not be lulled into it by bullshit and platitudes. Why do the Democrats have to talk that way? It’s as if the Republican tactic of portraying “the libs” as effeminate hyper-woke safe-spacers has really only caused the Democrats themselves to double down with absurd displays of hawkish masculinity. We’re supposed to love Kamala because she’s a tough-on-crime prosecutor, and that therefore corrects for the slip-ups of the past years when some in the progressive wing of the party have suggested, on the contrary, that all cops are bastards. Tim Walz, meanwhile, seems to have been chosen primarily because he wears flannel shirts, and has been put on display in the most implausibly kayfabe campaign ads purportedly fixing his own pick-up truck. One almost expects them next to come out with an ad depicting Walz in the act of dressing a deer, looking every bit the caricature of the Minneapolis goy neighbor in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (2009). He’s a hunter and a football coach, but he’s also a faculty advisor for the LGBTQIA+ club! What a model of enlightened masculinity! She’s a prosecutor and a foreign-policy hawk, but she’s a she and she brings “joy”! The problem is that none of the rest of the world cares about any of that childish stuff. They all know that for all the equally kayfabe retrograde masculinity of Trump, that man is an absolute pussy, and it is in fact the Democrats who represent the greatest threat to any hot-spot of resistance to the US’s arch-imperial ambitions throughout the world.

I don’t know what the alternative is, but I just know it all makes me sick to my stomach and I really do not feel I can participate in this process in good conscience. I have lived outside of the United States for a long time now, and I now mostly see it, I think, as a foreigner would see it. I dwell in the “outer empire”, and from here it seems to me that my relationship to the inner empire is best maintained not through voting, but through sustained criticism and lucid, historically informed analysis, such as I am attempting to offer in this present e-mail.

In light of all the above, I would greatly prefer that you not use The Hinternet, which I have worked so hard to build up as something of a reflection of my interior life, with all its qualms and contradictions, to offer an endorsement. But as I’ve told you privately, chère Hélène, I’m not even looking at the site —sorry, the “magazine”— during this period of convalescence, and really you’re free to do what ever you decide.¹

Tibi addictissimus,
—JSR

Well, that was a spirited volley! We on the Editorial Board like to think we share much of that same spirit, and we largely agree with the diagnosis JSR offers of America’s actual role in the world and of the actual significance of its elections. But we part ways with him when it comes to determining the best way forward. We find, in fact, that our Founding Editor fails utterly, by retreating into the proverbial woods, to offer any way forward at all.

Our way, even if bestrewn by very serious, possibly civilization-ending risks, and even if unfamiliar and even shocking from the point of view of the great majority of Democratic voters, is this: We acknowledge forthrightly, with JSR, that the United States is an empire, just like the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and indeed the Soviet Empire. But we rush to add that at present, in spite of all the challenges to its hegemony in recent years, the US remains the empire that has come closest to full universalization in the entire history of humanity, which is to say that if there is any truly cosmopolitan order to emerge in the future, it is most likely to emerge through the expansion and consolidation of American power, and through the reduction to mere grousing of all the counterhegemonic efforts on the part of all of history’s preterites. Eventually, even that grousing will, we hope, grow inaudible, and future generations will finally be able to live in a world not of competing factions and contested hegemony, but of perpetual peace, threatened at most by the bids other species, both micro- and macroscopic, might make for planetary supremacy, or perhaps by the arrival of extraterrestrials.

What are the odds that we can pull this off? The Editorial Board currently places them at around 38%. What are the odds that a world in which the American Empire is beaten into desperate retreat would be any sort of world our children and grandchildren might want to live in? Those odds, we are afraid to say, are much, much lower. Trump, in a second term as president, is practically guaranteed to assume the role of overseer of American imperial retreat, in favor not of a global community of equals such as some naïve progressives might have hoped for in the early years of the League of Nations, but of nationalist isolation and at most pragmatic cooperation with other self-sequestering nation-states, somewhat along the lines of what Marine Le Pen envisions for Europe in the phrase “association des nations libres”. That phrase might sound innocent enough, but nations that are free to dispense with any idea of reciprocal obligations are unlikely to remain in a stable “association” for long, and Trump, at least, hardly gives any indications of knowing how to guide the ship of state as it weathers the inevitable storms that will whip up unstable waters in our years of decline. Far better, far surer, we believe, to have a party in power that understands and accepts the nature of the that power: imperial power, namely, which might aspire in the years ahead not only to face off with steely resolve in our current global showdown, but, eventually, to emerge as its undisputed champion.

We confess that we do not have much attention span here at The Hinternet for such matters as child tax credits, school vouchers, or even gun control or abortion. Quite frankly, we do not think these things are important, at least not relatively speaking, when weighed up against the great geopolitical competition for global dominance of which the great majority of American voters are scarcely even aware. As far as we can see, the US is a fairly messed-up place, when compared to Western European democracies; and yet it is at the same time a fairly average place when you compare it to what may well be its true class of peers, namely, the other countries of the Western Hemisphere that were likewise built on slavery and the annihilation of Indigenous populations. Gun crime is worse in Baltimore than in Copenhagen, but not worse than in São Paulo. To this extent we on the Editorial Board are atypically sanguine about, even heartened by, what happened on January 6, 2021, when US democracy proved to be much more resilient than one might expect among our true peers. If Trump had been Venezuelan, you can be fairly sure he would have declared himself, by now, our autocrat-for-life, and no checks and balances would have been able to stop him.

Most of us on the Editorial Board, even the Americans among us, do not live in the United States, and from our respective vantages it is pretty hard to concentrate on any aspect of American political life that does not have to do with its role as a globe-spanning empire. Just manage your domestic affairs however you see fit, we are tempted to say; our overwhelming concern is with what you get up to beyond your borders. We therefore have rather little patience for that current of Democratic partisan discourse that would like for American politics to sound more or less like, say, Danish politics. Denmark, if we may be blunt, and all of the Scandinavian countries with such high marks on all the usual tests, is able to focus on maintaining its robust welfare state primarily because its defense is entirely outsourced to the American Empire. The American Democrats who fawn over European national health systems seldom realize that by seeing to the defense of other NATO members, the United States is at the same time freeing up European national budgets for other more humane uses. Americans pay for European defense rather than paying for their own welfare; Europeans get health care in turn, but only through de-facto vassalization.

We would like to see this arrangement continue, at least for now, at least until NATO can be expanded to include all of those states that currently set themselves up in opposition to it, a prospect even Russia’s own leaders in the early post-Soviet years were able to entertain with some seriousness.

You might think our reasons for voting for the Democrats are not good ones, or that we are merely “joking” when we give them. We can only reply that your reasons really do not matter. You might well imagine you are voting, for your part, for “decency”, or “joy”, or sane gun-control laws or a woman’s right to choose. But the only way to vote for any of these things is to cast a vote for American empire. That’s the bargain. We here at The Hinternet, minus our Founding Editor, believe this is a bargain worth accepting, but that is only because we believe it is the United States under Democratic leadership that offers us the single best shot at subduing all the planet’s lingering zones of discontent, and delivering us into a future of perpetual peace. This is what we at The Hinternet want. Do you?

Previous Chapter: “Hurricane Hélène Is Back!”
Next Chapter: “The Boötes Void”
Caput sequens: « Boötis vacuum »

1. Just as we were going to press, we received a follow-up message from JSR, which we feel obligated to append here:

Look, the truth is I’ll probably wimp out and vote for Kamala myself. When I try to understand why I’m leaning in that direction, the only answer I can come up with is that I don’t want to disappoint my mom, who sincerely believes voting is a solemn duty; who buys the Democratic establishment’s messaging hook, line, and sinker; who loves Joy Reid’s “spunk” and Rachel Maddow’s great air of authority; and who would be so happy to see a woman as president, to cap off a life begun around the same moment the US was boldly declaring its new planetary supremacy by annihilating the precious lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians — to end the war once and for all, no doubt, but also, plainly, to send a signal to the Soviets and to any future contenders. I’ll probably do what infinitesimal bit I can and help make my mom’s wish come true.