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GELFAND’S WORLD - On a day marked by the death of Pope Francis, panic in the markets, and continued acts of authoritarianism by the Trump administration, it may seem a bit off to begin by talking about a few moments on Meet the Press, but it is appropriate.
Meet the Press is NBC's long-running political analysis show. It typically hosts a senator or governor followed by a panel of news insiders. On Sunday, I tuned in rather late in the show and heard a panel discussing -- in calm and cool tones -- the respective approaches being taken by the Republican and Democratic parties about the Supreme Court and forbidden deportations. The arguments were about tactics and strategy rather than ethics and morality. And this, I would argue, is inappropriate considering the brutal, dictatorial behavior of the current administration.
At a moment when the Republicans are defending the forced removal to a foreign prison of someone who was previously residing lawfully in the United States -- or at least should have been allowed to make that argument in a court of law -- we are in a situation which is not-unrealistically being compared to 1933.
And yet the discussion on Meet the Press, as led by host Kristen Welker, was whether this was just a distraction from what the Democrats would really like to talk about, which is the economy and the tariffs. Welker even cued up a clip of Gavin Newsome referring to distractions, although there was no additional explanation as to the context.
Something can be a distraction and still be an act of real evil, with real victims accumulating.
And it is the moral and ethical obligation of right thinking people to oppose those acts of evil. Trivial debates about how the Republicans can build support for their behavior should not be considered an acceptable part of our debate. Sure, they can make that argument, but the rest of us should not consider it as being American in the grand old sense of the term.
This failure by the news media to put the Trump administration in the correct context is a common complaint among the pundit class, but needs to be repeated until they get it.
Unintended Consequences
Conservatives love to point out that rash actions sometimes have unintended consequences. Come to think of it, they even love to claim that the best sorts of actions have unintended consequences, which they can then use as an excuse to avoid all change.
So let's ponder for a moment Trump's ongoing efforts to weaken the United States and to damage the western alliance through his attacks on NATO. It seems that there is an unintended consequence which will be huge on the historical scale: the remilitarization of Europe.
Remember that it was a central conceit of American politicians and propagandists that old Europe was unstable and warlike and prone to getting itself into serious conflicts. We had a few facts on our side, such as the Hundred Years War and the two world wars, and all that. (And I've left out the Thirty Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession and a few dozen more.) It was considered a major, enduring victory that the U.S. had taken leadership of the NATO alliance and, in effect, held some level of veto power over European military adventurism. One pundit even referred to this new system as the United States providing "adult supervision."
We might also remember that in the postwar years, the Europeans had the benefit (if you want to call it that) of having a common enemy in the form of the Soviet Union. It was something of a stabilizing force on this side of the Warsaw Pact.
So now there is a common enemy in the form of Russia, which is engaging in an active war against European autonomy in the form of the invasion and continuing occupying of parts of Ukraine. And this is where Trump's adviser Vladimir Putin may have gotten his own unintended consequences. How does Russia view a newly militarized Germany along with a militarily capable Poland? Any Russian historian ought to be getting nervous. Russian generals should be getting even more nervous. (Note: the above linked article uses the name Krasnov to refer to Trump, based on a published claim that Trump was turned by the Russians back in the 1980s and was given Krasnov as his code name.)
Distractions.
That's how the pundits on Meet the Press considered acts of gross evil and attacks on democracy. Let's just remember that it is possible to make our moral objections known, even when those objections have to encompass a broad array of outrages.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
