An Open Letter to Donald Trump

Dear President-Elect:

I am a New Deal Liberal. More accurately, I was a New Deal Liberal when such a thing existed. Several decades ago, the Democratic Party began turning away from the New Deal foundation built by FDR, Truman, LBJ and others. That foundation included: the regulation of banks and financial institutions so that they operated for the benefit of the public, recognition that the government could and should play a constructive role in reducing unemployment through meaningful public works projects, legal support of the right of members to collectively bargain through their unions, and the setting of baseline labor standards like the minimum wage and 40 hour work week. Most of the Republican Party never embraced New Deal reforms. Thus, today I am registered non-partisan, a man without a party.

I seriously considered voting for you, but in the end, voted for the Green Party candidate Jill Stein.  I am writing to explain why I considered voting for you and why I believe you are in a position to do significant good for the country.  I heard strong, in some cases unthinking, criticism from some liberal and Democratic friends reacting to my explanation of why you could be a better choice to advance what I value (and in many cases what they value) than Hillary Clinton.  Having endured the word “stupid” being applied more than once to my view of the possible benefits of your presidency, I think you owe me a reading.

By way of background, I was born and raised in New Jersey.  I am Catholic and aspire to be a good one.  I graduated from Columbia University in New York City with a degree in Political Science, and from Seton Hall University Law School in Newark, New Jersey.  I live in Eugene, Oregon where I have been an attorney for over thirty years and Executive Director of a 40 employee Catholic social service agency for over eight years.

To the issues:

USE OF MILITARY FORCE

Image source: Downtrend.com

Less than two weeks before the South Carolina Republican primary, during a Republican debate, you forcefully stated that the war in Iraq was “a big fat mistake,” that it cost thousands of lives, that we should have never been there, and that it was based on lies.  You implied that the last Republican President, George W. Bush, should have been impeached for pursuing that invasion.  In a seven person field, in conservative, pro-military South Carolina, you still won the primary with a significant plurality, 33% of the vote.  Registered Republicans in South Carolina voted for a candidate who suggested that the last Republican president should have been removed from office because of his unjustified invasion of another country.  Putting aside the issue of whether or not you were opposed to that war in 2002-2003, your current opposition was a huge departure from present Party leadership and from the other Republican candidates.  In many respects, your victory in the South Carolina primary was the single event in the entire presidential campaign season offering the most optimism for our future use of military force.  That you maintained your position on Iraq throughout the primaries and still received the votes of over 12,000,000 registered Republicans underscored that optimism.  You became the closest thing to a presidential peace candidate that the Republican Party has produced in my lifetime.

Unfortunately you have made statements suggesting you can be militarily irresponsible – on nuclear weapons, the use of torture, and the harming of family members of suspected terrorists, for example.  Which Trump shows up in the Oval Office remains to be seen.  Your opponent, however, had a clear record as senator, secretary of state, and candidate of supporting and implementing policies that lead to death and destruction all over the Middle East and Northern Africa:

For example:

She supported the US military invasion of Iraq that:

1. Lead to the death of hundreds of thousands of human beings in that country, virtually none of whom were a threat to anyone in this country.  In short, the US is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents.
2. Lead to the death of more Americans than were killed on 9/11.  I am saying that the American politicians who brought us that “big fat mistake” of a war ultimately did more harm to the people they were sworn to protect, that is the citizens of this country, than either Osama Bin Laden or Khalid Sheik Muhammad did.
3. Contributed to the creation of an expansionist version of Radical Islam worse for the region and the world (including our country) than al Qaeda had been.  Prior to the US response to 9/11, what can be called “Violent Radical Islam” in the form of al Qaeda was largely confined to a small tribally dominated area of Eastern Afghanistan with the primary goal of getting US troops out of Saudi Arabia.  Today there is what can be called “Violent Expansionist Radical Islam”  in the form of ISIS in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Afghanistan and in other forms throughout the entire Middle East and much of Africa, with the goals of creating a caliphate and, for some in ISIS for example, of spreading their version of violent expansionist Islam throughout the western world.
4. Expanded the influence in American politics of the military-industrial complex, to borrow a phrase from Eisenhower and C. Wright Mills.  Military spending has been ingrained in our economy in ways that ultimately deaden the moral sensitivity of those making decisions about the use of military force.  We have a system where the people with the least-formed consciences, operating from the worst motives (the pursuit of vague “American interests” which reduce to dominance of a region and the pursuit of profit for certain companies/industries) make life-and-death decisions for millions of people.  Generally those decisions are made casually based on a variety of domestic concerns that are inflated to matters of national survival.

Her statements regarding Iran reflect that she was ready to apply the same wisdom she did toward Iraq to Iran.

Her statements regarding Israel reflect an unthinking deference to the current Israeli government’s view of what the region should look like, and an absence of recognition that Palestinians are actually human beings with rights conveyed by that humanity.

Her comments regarding Qaddafi are repugnant:  “We came. We saw. He died.” — cackle, cackle, cackle. For those of us who believe our task is to recognize the humanity in everyone, including those labelled enemies of the state, Hilary Clinton is the continuation and solidification of what has become a US political normalcy that is anti-human, anti-Christian, anti-every major religion, anti-informed secular humanism — essentially sociopathic in its disregard for the value of life.

I do not assume you to be the morally-aware, wise statesman, well-read in history and political thought that I would prefer.  But you appear to represent a change in direction regarding the use of military force—a change from your party and from the Hillary Clinton neoconservative strain of the Democratic Party.  The very reasons that prominent Republican neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Kagan announced their support for Hillary Clinton and that other neocons like Bill Kristol and the National Review Editorial Board were utterly apoplectic about the prospect of you being president are the reasons I thought you could be preferable.

Both the Republican and Democratic Party leaderships criticize your isolationism.  A little isolationism, particularly when contrasted with the destructive, self-defeating military adventurism in the Middle East and Northern Africa of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Hillary Clinton, and other neocons, would be a remarkably healthy development.

Your calling for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country is not a perfect solution, but it needs to be viewed with a little perspective.  The website iraqbodycount.org, as of the day I am writing this, Dec 28, 2016, lists the number of civilians killed as a result of the US invasion of Iraq at 168,997. They are predominately Muslims.  Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in a 1996 interview, remarked that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children caused in part by US sanctions (which means by starvation, dehydration, untreated infections—my parentheses) was “… we think, the price is worth it” to curtail Saddam. (Ms. Albright became a surrogate in Hillary Clinton’s campaign).

The taking of these Muslim lives, and many others, is largely not commented upon in this country.  Yet, Party establishments and most major media commentators are incensed when you speak of a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country.  What?  Are we supposed to think that Muslims are unaware and unconcerned with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and the destruction of predominately Muslim countries like Iraq and Libya as a result of US actions over what is essentially a policy driven by the desire for ready access to Middle Eastern oil?  Muslims are fine with that.  It’s the temporary ban that is the great injustice.  One has to be morally unenlightened and detached to overlook the consequences of recent decades of US policy in the Middle East, yet display outrage over your statements, which, though imperfect, are moderate by comparison.

IMMIGRATION

The business class has always been a proponent of liberalized immigration: the US Chamber of Commerce, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, owners and managers of capital, Wall Street financiers and the like.  Those groups have tended to be active within the Republican Party. They always hated the New Deal programs that were geared to enhance the lives of working men and women.  Those reforms were remarkably successful as more Americans moved into the middle class from the end of WWII until the mid-1970s than during any other period in US history.  Nevertheless, the business class preferred the internationalization of the labor force.  Make American workers compete with non-skilled workers from poor countries all over the world.  That drives down wages and enhances the ability of capital to generate a profit.  That has been the view of the Republican establishment despite the strange fact that a significant majority of registered Republicans have preferred tight immigration laws.

Democrats for decades were opposed to liberalized immigration because it would result in lowering wages for American workers.  Increase the supply of labor, lower demand and reduce wages.  It is not particularly complicated.  The Democratic opposition to immigration was frequently and forcefully stated.  For instance, in his 1995 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton stated:

Image source: Office of the Historian

All Americans, not only in the States mostly heavily affected, but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.  The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants.  The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.  That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.  In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.  We are a nation of immigrants.  But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.

The President’s comments reflected a widespread view across the Democratic Party, certainly among Democrats who were aligned with working men and women, unions, and the lower and middle economic classes.  In addition, there was, and probably still is, substantial support within the environmental wing of the party for reduced immigration because it results in a reduced demand for natural resources.  The pro-labor, pro-environment support for minimal, controlled immigration applied, without regard for race or ethnicity, to Hispanic agricultural workers named Juan, Swedish models named Olga, and Indian computer programmers named Rahul.  In short, the motives behind this popular view within the Democratic Party had little to do with racism or xenophobia.

Pages: 1 2