I think it's because when you say you're opposed to one bad thing (imperialism), you'll frequently get attacked as supportive of another bad thing (isolationism). Maybe there's a better way to put it, but I can see why it's phrased this way.
Isolationism within the context of US Empire is essentially the only lever leftists here can attempt to push. The imperialists are in power and they don't give you a "just and righteous intervention" lever, or they do so so rarely and when their hands are forced for other reasons that we should treat them as unique, rare, one-off situations. We should consider those unicorn situations cynically, on their merits, and within the specific context of what a self-serving empire, the most violent state on the planet, will do with the situation. The last "just war" by that empire was WWII (in a period where it morphed from British to American) and while it accomplished much immediate good and we can't and never should argue against sparing the Nazis/Imperial Japanese or liberating those they oppressed and murdered, that same empire immediately rehabilitated the pro-Japanese forces in Korea, genocided North Korea in its effort, killed millions of Vietnamese, and supported a genocide killing over a million in Indonesia. In the West, they created NATO to undermine and eventually successfully destroy the first socialist state, set up a brutal sanctions and paramilitary violence regime around the planet to crush and isolate decolonization/liberation movements to prevent that socialist power from having any amount of breathing room. The coups and violence and death on the scale of entire continents, the "this list is too long" Wikipedia article on US coups and similar actions, are a direct consequence of that war and the leverage it gave the American Empire.
At minimum, Western leftists must understand that they are talking about a machine with completely different interests from yours and from that of the vast majority of people on the planet and it will act accordingly, so 999 times out of 1000 we must simply oppose it as best we can and fight for revolution. And that 1 in 1000 time will not be anything like a victory, just harm reduction, and we will probably misidentify it more than we choose "correctly".
Your description of U.S. imperialism is correct, but about the only people who would accept it are already leftists. I think Bad Faith is more intended as a vehicle for pulling non-leftists left than as a platform for preaching to the choir. A message of "what we're doing is imperialism, and here's what some leftist alternative might look like" might land with some non-leftists because it doesn't require you to already have the leftist take on America's long, horrid list of atrocities. A lot of non-leftists don't even know about much of the awful shit the U.S. has done. If you bring that record up, you're going to run up against the foreign policy version of "those were a few bad apples." People really don't want to believe their country is the bad guy! If you push too hard on the "we're an evil empire" argument too early, they're more likely to reject you than they are to reject the idea that America at least has good intentions.
I think the only levers leftists can push on foreign policy are (1) calling imperialism what it is and (2) presenting an alternative that doesn't seem utopian or naive to persuadable people -- and to most non-leftists isolationism comes off as just that. They'll say "but I saw Hotel Rwanda, you're telling me you wouldn't even stop genocide?" Ultimately, all we can do right now is move persuadable people left. We're way too far from any real influence over foreign policy (let alone enough influence to dismantle the empire) for these conversations to mean much else.
Absolutely, I mean my audience is you hexbears and BJG's is the American blurring of the SocDem/DemSoc crowd, of course. But liberals can also be anti-imperialist, just look at our main man Gravel.
Being anti-imperialist to that audience doesn't require meeting them at the falsehood that there are well-intentioned / helpful US interventions, the premise BJG actively chose to spread and treat as legitimate. You can just have discourse in the absence of that premise and keep the show basically the same otherwise. The episode's premise could be the tiniest tweak: The War on Afghanistan and how that "intervention" was incredibly harmful to Afghans for deep systemic reasons, that "fighting terrorism" is not actually accomplished that way and not the real reason the war happened, and hey what if those apply to past and future interventions? They already touched on some of these ideas, or were almost there. One of the guests in particular highlighted that things by context but still tried to be careful about using language that would make liberals more comfortable, an abstract debate about the value of interventionism.
No need to lead with, "Amerikkka must be destroyed" or something, ha. You can drop hard facts with the right framing and some sympathetic characters and let the audience synthesize an emotional conclusion. Citations Needed does a lot of this and it's part of the reason we can recommend it to our liberal friends even though they talk a lot about US Empire and its evils.
Of course, we don't control BJG's podcast in any way. We're not really even in community with BJG, she's a public figure we sometimes follow. But we can formulate a consistent community understanding of imperialism here and how liberal narratives form in support of it even when they make their own attempts to debate generally against it. And with that understanding, we can go out into our orgs and work against that discourse, do our little bit of community vanguardism (while talking like normal people, fingers crossed). The DSA recently had a fuckload of drama regarding many of the people doing good work with the international committee and my read of it is a very direct attack from a combination of social imperialists and a handful of ultras who were very much convinced of US-sponsored propaganda against AES. One of the few things this site could actually do is have a multiplier effect against that kind of crap by simply joining an org and convincing comrades of some core positions of this site.
Starting with the importance of sicko emojis, of course (jk).
Yeah, total agreement on the primacy of being anti-imperialist. That's the big conceptual leap for non-leftists to come around to. I'm a little hesitant to put too much stock in Gravel's approach (I'm trying to remember if he uses anti-imperial framing, or if he's more just a strict anti-interventionist), though, because it's fed into him being portrayed as "crazy idealist who might say some good things but ultimately isn't taken seriously." That's the risk I see from leaving "well what about genocide"?" and similar questions unanswered.
Having some sort of positive policy vision -- rather than simply criticizing what already exists -- really seems to help leftist ideas go mainstream. For example, there were tons of longstanding criticisms of the U.S. healthcare system, but "take Medicare and give it to everyone" galvanized that into a useful political movement. Similarly, there were tons of longstanding criticisms of the criminal legal system, but positive policy suggestions like "stop imprisoning people for marijuana possession" or "end cash bail" have been where we've seen mainstream interest and then actual change.
So I can see the reasoning behind discussing what a leftist foreign policy would look like in addition to talking anti-imperialism. I think it's OK to have that conversation in the abstract, and then oppose individual U.S. interventions as the possibility of them comes up (and criticize every intervention we've done before, outside of WWII). We never have to worry about getting stuck in a position of supporting some sort of anti-genocide intervention because the U.S. will never do that lol. The closest we'd get is when there's some claimed genocide being used as a pretext for imperial meddling, and we can call that out if the situation arises.
I think the only positive policy set that could oppose US imperialism is one of multilateralism that breaks the mould of "the world"'s consent being Europe, Japan, and South Korea. But I can't imagine that this can be motivated as a rallying cry like something like Medicare for All without already doing the work of making people anti-imperialist, which requires making them marginally international anticapitalist and is still a necessarily negative process. The imperial core is in a very different situation than the imperialized, where you can draw a straight line between US interventionism and the difficulties in their lives. It will always have to be motivated in solidarity and working on behalf of shared humanity, not nationalist politics that improve domestic policy. Imperialism actually leverages their position to improve their lives through importing the spoils and keeping their prices down, it's in contradiction of the usual material interest narrative. In addition, the USD's dominance and austerity politics means that government spending is fairly magical already, so decreasing funding for the military or IC does not actually increase funding for anything domestically.
In short, I don't think there's any way for those in the imperial core to move forward on the topic of interventionism without directly attacking US interventionism and the dominant narratives. I don't think we can shoehorn in a positive rallying cry like we can for domestic policy due to the contradiction in self-interest and the strength of capitalist propaganda in lieu of a direct challenge. Indirect challenges could help, but are risky precisely because of how easy it is to convince liberals of cynical human rights narratives, hell even simple narratives about loss of stature. Germans care not just about the cost of war but their place in NATO. This is what they think about Afghanistan. Not the incredible death and destruction of Afghans. NATO narratives handed down by imperialists.
I think it's because when you say you're opposed to one bad thing (imperialism), you'll frequently get attacked as supportive of another bad thing (isolationism). Maybe there's a better way to put it, but I can see why it's phrased this way.
Isolationism within the context of US Empire is essentially the only lever leftists here can attempt to push. The imperialists are in power and they don't give you a "just and righteous intervention" lever, or they do so so rarely and when their hands are forced for other reasons that we should treat them as unique, rare, one-off situations. We should consider those unicorn situations cynically, on their merits, and within the specific context of what a self-serving empire, the most violent state on the planet, will do with the situation. The last "just war" by that empire was WWII (in a period where it morphed from British to American) and while it accomplished much immediate good and we can't and never should argue against sparing the Nazis/Imperial Japanese or liberating those they oppressed and murdered, that same empire immediately rehabilitated the pro-Japanese forces in Korea, genocided North Korea in its effort, killed millions of Vietnamese, and supported a genocide killing over a million in Indonesia. In the West, they created NATO to undermine and eventually successfully destroy the first socialist state, set up a brutal sanctions and paramilitary violence regime around the planet to crush and isolate decolonization/liberation movements to prevent that socialist power from having any amount of breathing room. The coups and violence and death on the scale of entire continents, the "this list is too long" Wikipedia article on US coups and similar actions, are a direct consequence of that war and the leverage it gave the American Empire.
At minimum, Western leftists must understand that they are talking about a machine with completely different interests from yours and from that of the vast majority of people on the planet and it will act accordingly, so 999 times out of 1000 we must simply oppose it as best we can and fight for revolution. And that 1 in 1000 time will not be anything like a victory, just harm reduction, and we will probably misidentify it more than we choose "correctly".
Your description of U.S. imperialism is correct, but about the only people who would accept it are already leftists. I think Bad Faith is more intended as a vehicle for pulling non-leftists left than as a platform for preaching to the choir. A message of "what we're doing is imperialism, and here's what some leftist alternative might look like" might land with some non-leftists because it doesn't require you to already have the leftist take on America's long, horrid list of atrocities. A lot of non-leftists don't even know about much of the awful shit the U.S. has done. If you bring that record up, you're going to run up against the foreign policy version of "those were a few bad apples." People really don't want to believe their country is the bad guy! If you push too hard on the "we're an evil empire" argument too early, they're more likely to reject you than they are to reject the idea that America at least has good intentions.
I think the only levers leftists can push on foreign policy are (1) calling imperialism what it is and (2) presenting an alternative that doesn't seem utopian or naive to persuadable people -- and to most non-leftists isolationism comes off as just that. They'll say "but I saw Hotel Rwanda, you're telling me you wouldn't even stop genocide?" Ultimately, all we can do right now is move persuadable people left. We're way too far from any real influence over foreign policy (let alone enough influence to dismantle the empire) for these conversations to mean much else.
Absolutely, I mean my audience is you hexbears and BJG's is the American blurring of the SocDem/DemSoc crowd, of course. But liberals can also be anti-imperialist, just look at our main man Gravel.
Being anti-imperialist to that audience doesn't require meeting them at the falsehood that there are well-intentioned / helpful US interventions, the premise BJG actively chose to spread and treat as legitimate. You can just have discourse in the absence of that premise and keep the show basically the same otherwise. The episode's premise could be the tiniest tweak: The War on Afghanistan and how that "intervention" was incredibly harmful to Afghans for deep systemic reasons, that "fighting terrorism" is not actually accomplished that way and not the real reason the war happened, and hey what if those apply to past and future interventions? They already touched on some of these ideas, or were almost there. One of the guests in particular highlighted that things by context but still tried to be careful about using language that would make liberals more comfortable, an abstract debate about the value of interventionism.
No need to lead with, "Amerikkka must be destroyed" or something, ha. You can drop hard facts with the right framing and some sympathetic characters and let the audience synthesize an emotional conclusion. Citations Needed does a lot of this and it's part of the reason we can recommend it to our liberal friends even though they talk a lot about US Empire and its evils.
Of course, we don't control BJG's podcast in any way. We're not really even in community with BJG, she's a public figure we sometimes follow. But we can formulate a consistent community understanding of imperialism here and how liberal narratives form in support of it even when they make their own attempts to debate generally against it. And with that understanding, we can go out into our orgs and work against that discourse, do our little bit of community vanguardism (while talking like normal people, fingers crossed). The DSA recently had a fuckload of drama regarding many of the people doing good work with the international committee and my read of it is a very direct attack from a combination of social imperialists and a handful of ultras who were very much convinced of US-sponsored propaganda against AES. One of the few things this site could actually do is have a multiplier effect against that kind of crap by simply joining an org and convincing comrades of some core positions of this site.
Starting with the importance of sicko emojis, of course (jk).
Yeah, total agreement on the primacy of being anti-imperialist. That's the big conceptual leap for non-leftists to come around to. I'm a little hesitant to put too much stock in Gravel's approach (I'm trying to remember if he uses anti-imperial framing, or if he's more just a strict anti-interventionist), though, because it's fed into him being portrayed as "crazy idealist who might say some good things but ultimately isn't taken seriously." That's the risk I see from leaving "well what about genocide"?" and similar questions unanswered.
Having some sort of positive policy vision -- rather than simply criticizing what already exists -- really seems to help leftist ideas go mainstream. For example, there were tons of longstanding criticisms of the U.S. healthcare system, but "take Medicare and give it to everyone" galvanized that into a useful political movement. Similarly, there were tons of longstanding criticisms of the criminal legal system, but positive policy suggestions like "stop imprisoning people for marijuana possession" or "end cash bail" have been where we've seen mainstream interest and then actual change.
So I can see the reasoning behind discussing what a leftist foreign policy would look like in addition to talking anti-imperialism. I think it's OK to have that conversation in the abstract, and then oppose individual U.S. interventions as the possibility of them comes up (and criticize every intervention we've done before, outside of WWII). We never have to worry about getting stuck in a position of supporting some sort of anti-genocide intervention because the U.S. will never do that lol. The closest we'd get is when there's some claimed genocide being used as a pretext for imperial meddling, and we can call that out if the situation arises.
I think the only positive policy set that could oppose US imperialism is one of multilateralism that breaks the mould of "the world"'s consent being Europe, Japan, and South Korea. But I can't imagine that this can be motivated as a rallying cry like something like Medicare for All without already doing the work of making people anti-imperialist, which requires making them marginally international anticapitalist and is still a necessarily negative process. The imperial core is in a very different situation than the imperialized, where you can draw a straight line between US interventionism and the difficulties in their lives. It will always have to be motivated in solidarity and working on behalf of shared humanity, not nationalist politics that improve domestic policy. Imperialism actually leverages their position to improve their lives through importing the spoils and keeping their prices down, it's in contradiction of the usual material interest narrative. In addition, the USD's dominance and austerity politics means that government spending is fairly magical already, so decreasing funding for the military or IC does not actually increase funding for anything domestically.
In short, I don't think there's any way for those in the imperial core to move forward on the topic of interventionism without directly attacking US interventionism and the dominant narratives. I don't think we can shoehorn in a positive rallying cry like we can for domestic policy due to the contradiction in self-interest and the strength of capitalist propaganda in lieu of a direct challenge. Indirect challenges could help, but are risky precisely because of how easy it is to convince liberals of cynical human rights narratives, hell even simple narratives about loss of stature. Germans care not just about the cost of war but their place in NATO. This is what they think about Afghanistan. Not the incredible death and destruction of Afghans. NATO narratives handed down by imperialists.
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