An excellent Politico article from one of my favorite writers!
Why Am I Moving Left?
I used to be right down the middle. But America’s changed, and so have I.
By THOMAS E. RICKS July 23, 2014
In my late 50s, at a time of life when most people are supposed to be drifting into a cautious conservatism, I am surprised to find myself moving steadily leftward.
This is unexpected. It comes even as I am financially comfortable and enjoying my work. (I’m writing this from my summer home in Maine.) I’m not a natural progressive—I spent the last quarter century covering the U.S. military, first for the Wall Street Journal and then for the Washington Post, and now for Foreign Policy magazine. I have written five books about the Marines, the Army and our wars.
I am puzzled by this late-middle-age politicization. During the time I was a newspaper reporter, I didn’t participate in elections, because I didn’t want to vote for, or against, the people I covered. Mentally, I was a detached centrist. Today I remain oriented to the free market and in favor of a strong national defense, so I have hardly become a radical socialist.
But since leaving newspapers, I have again and again found myself shifting to the left in major areas such as foreign policy and domestic economic policy. I wonder whether others of my generation are similarly pausing, poking up their heads from their workplaces and wondering just what happened to this country over the last 15 years, and what do to about it.
The things that are pushed me leftward began with the experience of closely watching our national security establishment for decades. But they don’t end there. They are, in roughly chronological order:
Disappointment in the American government over the last 10 years. Our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were the first big shocks. I thought that invading Afghanistan was the right response to the 9/11 attacks, but I never expected the U.S. military leadership would be so inept in fighting there and in Iraq, running the wars in ways that made more enemies than were stopped. I believe that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, not only launched on false premises but also strategically foolish in that ultimately it has increased Iran’s power in the Middle East.
Torture. I never expected my country to endorse torture. I know that torture has existed in all wars, but to my knowledge, its use, under the chilling term “enhanced interrogation,” was never official U.S. policy until this century. In fact, until our recent wars, the American military had a proud heritage of handling its prisoners better than most. During the Revolutionary War, Gen. George Washington reminded his men of the need to “Treat [captives] with humanity, and Let them have no reason to complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army.”
How we fought. I never thought that an American government would employ mercenaries in a war. And yet we did this in Iraq by hiring thousands of armed “security contractors” who in practice were subject neither to local law nor to the American military justice system, and so could and often did treat Iraqis badly. In September 2007, I remember, American officers, who by then understood the need to treat Iraqi civilians well, were outraged when Blackwater employees shot 37 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square—the rough equivalent of opening up on the lunch crowd in Dupont Circle. Yet to my knowledge, the U.S. government has not studied how the use of mercenaries poisoned the conduct of the war. Indeed, it gives every indication of planning to operate the same way in the future.
Intelligence officials run amok. I think that American intelligence officials have shown a contempt for the way our democracy is supposed to work in turning a vast and unaccountable apparatus on the citizens it is supposed to be protecting. I remain wary of Edward Snowden’s motivations and connections, yet still am worried by the intrusive surveillance by the National Security Agency he has unveiled. At the very least, in a democracy, we should be able to be informed about the actions that have eroded our privacy but supposedly were taken in our name.
Growing income inequality. I also have been dismayed by the transfer of massive amounts of wealth to the richest people in the country, a policy supported over the last 35 years by successive administrations of both parties. Apparently income redistribution downward is dangerously radical, but redistribution upward is just business as usual. The middle class used at least to get lip service from the rich—“backbone of the country” and such. Now it is often treated like a bunch of saps not aware enough to evade their taxes.
Bailouts for bankers. When the economic bets made by the wealthiest Americans soured in 2008, the taxpayers picked up the tab. Bankers who got government bailouts continued to award themselves multimillion-dollar bonuses. “Too big to fail” was the term of art favored by Wall Street and its regulators but really it is simply a polite way of bankers saying, “Heads we win, tails you lose.” In economic terms, we have seen our system gamed by investment bankers so that their risks are socialized but their gains remain private. In the American system, janitors shouldn’t be paying taxes to support the bad decisions of billionaire financiers.
Democracy for sale. The wealthy, abetted by the most out-of-touch Supreme Court in many decades, also have been permitted to purchase an outsized voice in American politics. I am a First Amendment fundamentalist, and I do not think there should be many restrictions on what individuals do and say in the realm of politics. Yet I do not think that corporations are people, or that they should enjoy the full array of rights bestowed by the founding fathers on American citizens. But because of a series of disastrous Court rulings in recent years, that’s what we’ve got, a system that is not only resulting in hyper-empowered rich people but is actively undermining the two-party system. The Democratic Party, which in the last century compromised its ideals in order to placate segregationist Southern Democrats, now peddles itself in the same way to Republicans’ traditional financial base on Wall Street.
Gun massacres. I am just sickened by our tendency to accept disturbingly more frequent gun massacres as the price of being an American. I don’t know what more has to be said about this. More than any other issue, this makes me despair. It just strikes me as insane to let it go on.
This has all made me shift my thinking, not so much about partisan politics but in feeling a sense of disquiet about both major political parties—and about our entire system. I suspect there are others who feel the same way. I certainly found it striking when earlier this week, retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who in 2003 was the first American administrator in occupied Iraq, told a Florida audience: “I grew up absolutely in love with this country and believing everything the government said . . . . In the last 10 years, I’ve gotten so disenchanted with the government, so disappointed with it.”
Not long ago, when I mentioned my unease to an old friend who is a Pentagon official—not in a political job but a professional one—he surprised me by confessing that he was feeling the same way. Exploring the thought, he mentioned in particular how disturbed he had been by the trend of “stand your ground” laws that seem to permit angry white men to gun down black youth who frighten them.
Where might this all lead? I am no better at predicting the future than anyone else. I think there are many others like me who are just as puzzled about where our country is at now, and how we got here. No doubt there are many reasons, though I believe there are clear signs that the Reagan Revolution, which made incentive-oriented, free-market solutions the default mode of both parties, is now finally petering out. I anticipate calls for more federal intervention, especially in areas where the public good is suffering, such as transportation and the cost of higher education. We may yet see a leftish generation of senior citizens, a group of aging Baby Boomers who can make common cause with a squeezed middle class and a generation of millennials whose careers have been damaged by the Great Recession while the top 1 percent have grown even wealthier.
If so, we can hope that our new Gilded Age will lead, as the last one did, to a new era of Progressivism when reform and reinvention take hold to restore a democracy gone complacent. But maybe that is asking too much for the new leftie I now seem to have become. At the very least, I hope we will cease to be a nation at ease with torture and inequality, a country that once again steers by its ideals.
Thomas E. Ricks is author of five books about the U.S. military, including Fiasco and The Generals.
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Why Am I Moving Left?
