Is it 1968 all over again?
The following piece, written over a month ago, is even more relevant today. I have reposted it with some editing and my comments in italics, as usual. I have also attached two other articles, which document one of the fallouts from the massive move to guns, not butter in American society. Everything is connected and in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism."
Biden’s Vietnams, LBJ's Fate, Absolute Zero: A Newsletter from Richard (RJ) Eskow
Israel’s assault on Gaza is already Biden’s Vietnam. Ukraine could become another.
With just a few minor changes, President Biden’s recent op-ed in the Washington Post could have been taken from a half-century-old time capsule. “The United States is the essential nation,” he writes. “The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time. That is the duty of leadership, and America will lead.”
It’s a blast from the past, and not in a good way. The op-ed speaks of wars to fight and enemies to defeat, from Russia to the Middle East, with the US once again serving as global police.
‘Pax Americana’ is back. (I’m not sure it ever left, but it certainly has been more and more evident since the 2020 election.)
“The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time,” the op-ed asserts. Most of the world would be happy if we didn’t create any more problems than we already have.
The op-ed tells us that the president holds an obsolete view of the world as a stage, with the US as chief protagonist in a Manichean struggle between the forces of light and those of darkness. America’s enemies represent “pure, unadulterated evil” who are “fighting to wipe a neighboring democracy off the map’ (as if Israel were a democracy), while the US is a planetary Dudley Do-Right who will “stand up to aggressors and make progress toward a brighter, more peaceful future.”
The word “law” only appears once, and “diplomacy” isn’t mentioned at all.
The Hopes of All Humanity
Biden’s op-ed brought to mind the words of Lyndon Johnson, who said:
“For today we Americans share responsibility not only for our own security but for the security of all free nations, not only for our own society but for an entire civilization, not only for our own liberty but for the hopes of all humanity.”
Those words were spoken nearly sixty years ago. They have not aged well.
“Will Israelis and Palestinians one day live side by side in peace,” President Biden writes, “with two states for two peoples?” But the dream of a two-state solution has been crushed under the weight of 700,000 Israelis on Palestinian land in the West Bank, subsidized by a rightwing government that built illegal settlements under the passive gaze of US politicians like Biden. (I’m not sure that the Palestinians were ever that excited about the “two-state solution”. This proposal should remind us of the Bantustans in another settler state or perhaps the reservations in our country. History repeats, doesn’t it?)
Lyndon Johnson said this about Vietnam in 1965: “We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.”
But in the end, after all the killing, that’s exactly what happened. It will probably happen again.
Biden’s op-ed is another attempt to paint the administration’s multiple military sprees as a single, unified, glorious mission. That mission is failing in its goals and harming US interests at home and abroad. (I think that depends on how one defines “US interests”. The Masters of War at home are doing quite well and promoting US corporate interests abroad is precisely the purpose of US intervention. So yes, we should understand that this is a single mission and it is to promote “US interests” as Biden and the corporate Democrats define them.)
In that way, at least, Biden’s presidency increasingly resembles LBJ’s. Johnson presided over the creation of Medicare and the passage of the Voting Rights Act (as a historian, I’m not sure I would compare Biden’s accomplishments to those of LBJ, much less to those of FDR) but the growing unpopularity of the war in Vietnam forced him to step down rather than face defeat. The result was the presidency of Richard Nixon, whose one-and-a-half terms altered the trajectory of American history.
It’s odd. When we were protesting Johnson in high school, he seemed like an old man. But Johnson was 59 years old when he withdrew from the 1968 race, more than two decades younger than Joe Biden will be next November. This president cannot afford too many missteps.
Biden has won some policy victories, but the public doesn’t seem to be feeling them (true, but it is unclear that the “Biden” economy has improved that much for the bottom 50+ percent of the population who live a precarious existence, often only one unexpected bill of $500 or more away from going further into debt – more on that in a future post). His age also has voters worried. And yet, despite these weaknesses, he’s thrown caution to the winds on military adventurism. In that, he seems to be following in his younger predecessor’s footsteps.
The focus on militarism in defense of empire should be seen in the context of what is happening at home; the criminal neglect of a “silent” crisis in American society. Americans, particularly those between the ages 35 and 64 are dying at unprecedented rates, with the result that US life expectancy is falling (even before COVID. The causes are complex but, as the Washington Post article below indicates, our society is failing, in more and more ways, to keep people alive.
U.S. life expectancy is falling behind peer countries
From the Washington Post
The United States is failing at a fundamental mission — keeping people alive.
After decades of progress, life expectancy — long regarded as a singular benchmark of a nation’s success — peaked in 2014 at 78.9 years, then drifted downward even before the coronavirus pandemic. Among wealthy nations, the United States in recent decades went from the middle of the pack to being an outlier. And it continues to fall further and further behind.
A year-long Washington Post examination reveals that this erosion in life spans is deeper and broader than widely recognized, afflicting a far-reaching swath of the United States.
While opioids and gun violence have rightly seized the public’s attention, stealing hundreds of thousands of lives, chronic diseases are the greatest threat, killing far more people between 35 and 64 every year, the Post’s analysis of mortality data found.
Heart disease and cancer remained, even at the height of the pandemic, the leading causes of death for people 35 to 64. And many other conditions — private tragedies that unfold in tens of millions of U.S. households — have become more common, including diabetes and liver disease. These chronic ailments are the primary reason American life expectancy has been poor compared with other nations. (To get the full picture, check out the graphs from the Post article.)
What happened to this country to enfeeble it so?
There is no singular explanation. It’s not just the stress that is such a constant feature of daily life, weathering bodies at a microscopic level. Or the abundance of high-fructose corn syrup in that 44-ounce cup of soda.
Instead, experts studying the mortality crisis say any plan to restore American vigor will have to look not merely at the specific things that kill people, but at the causes of the causes of illness and death, including social factors. Poor life expectancy, in this view, is the predictable result of the society we have created and tolerated: one riddled with lethal elements, such as inadequate insurance, minimal preventive care, bad diets and a weak economic safety net.
And one aspect of this crisis is spreading. As a recent article in The Economist noted, “Drugs and suicide are no longer killing more working-class whites than they are other Americans.”
Deaths of despair are changing
Also from the Washington Post I think, but I can’t find the original source
In 2020, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published — to enormous acclaim — their research and argument on a phrase they had earlier coined: deaths of despair, from alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide. They concentrated largely on the failed promise of the American Dream among blue-collar whites, seeing an epidemic of despair. Now The Economist is keen to wave goodbye to that daunting challenge to American capitalism, though their survey seems to show the problem is growing not shrinking:
…the devastation has spread beyond predominantly white cities such as Huntington, in West Virginia, to more diverse places like Baltimore, New Orleans and St Louis.
2010 marked a turning-point. Between 1999 and 2010 counties with the highest share of working-class whites saw deaths of despair grow much faster than in the counties with the lowest. Between 2010 and 2022, though (a period that covers Trump’s election), that relationship flipped. Deaths of despair rose by 5.5% per year in counties with lots of high-school-educated whites, but by 7% in the most diverse, educated ones.
A decade ago the mortality rate from alcohol, drugs and suicide was nearly one-fifth higher in conservative counties than in liberal ones. Today, deaths from despair are now as prevalent in Democratic parts of the country as in Republican ones. And because left-leaning counties tend to be bigger than conservative ones, they record 10,000 more deaths of despair per year than the conservative counties.
Indeed, the despair that Ms. Case and Mr. Deaton wrote about can now be found among nearly every demographic group. Black Americans are more likely to die from drug overdoses than whites. Young people are taking their own lives at ever-higher rates. Perhaps most overlooked are Native Americans, for whom the deaths-of-despair mortality rate is at least one-and-a-half times that of white Americans, and rising. Our data show that such deaths are more than three times as common in the 35 counties where Native Americans make up the largest share of the population than they are in the rest of the country.
This phenomenon is exacerbated by the country’s economic, political and racial divides. America is increasingly a country of haves and have-nots, measured not just by bank accounts and property values but also by vital signs and grave markers. Dying prematurely, The Post found, has become the most telling measure of the nation’s growing inequality.
And so to the heart of the matter. Runaway inequality and the lack of an adequate social support system is killing Americans and rather than face this crisis, the current Democratic administration is focusing on the use of force to maintain US hegemony around the world. It is 1968 all over again, and that didn’t end well.
The good news is that more and more young people are coming to the realization that a better world is possible … and necessary … if we are going to address the polycrisis our nation and the world is facing. The worldwide protests against the US/Israeli war in Palestine, the growth of militant movements in response to the climate crises, the ongoing struggle against white supremacy in the US, the growth of progressive and socialist political movements in the Global South, particularly in Latin America, are a few of the indicators that progressives will not succumb to the forces of reaction.
What is even more encouraging is that these movements are, in general, coming out of their silos and seeing the intersectionality of their particular struggles with the issues that other movements are taking up.