{"id":20368,"date":"2024-08-29T09:12:16","date_gmt":"2024-08-29T13:12:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=20368"},"modified":"2024-08-29T09:12:16","modified_gmt":"2024-08-29T13:12:16","slug":"will-kamala-make-idealism-great-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/08\/29\/will-kamala-make-idealism-great-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Kamala Make Idealism Great Again?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>

Former President Barack Obama hugs Vice President Kamala Harris during an Affordable Care Act event with President Joe Biden, Tuesday, April 5, 2022, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)<\/p><\/div>\n

Counterpunch, August 29, 2024<\/p>\n

Will Kamala Make Idealism Great Again?<\/a><\/h1>\n

by<\/span> James Bovard<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

As the presidential race enters the final stretch, politicians are recycling the usual scams to make people believe this election will be different. At last week\u2019s Democratic National Convention, idealism had a starring role, accompanied by ritual denunciations of cynicism.<\/p>\n

But idealism has a worse record in Washington than a thieving New Jersey senator.<\/strong> \u201cIdealism is going to save the world,\u201d President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed shortly after World War I left much of Europe in ruins and paved the way for communist and Nazi takeovers. Wilson\u2019s blather provoked H.L. Mencken to declare that Americans were tired \u201cof a steady diet of white protestations and black acts\u2026they sicken of an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same verdict could characterize today\u2019s political rogues. On the closing night of the convention, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised that \u201cwe will choose a better politics, a politics that calls us to our better selves.\u201d And how can Americans know they are fulfilling their \u201cbetter selves\u201d? By swallowing any hogwash proclaimed by their rulers in Washington.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kamala Harris is being touted for bringing idealism back into fashion after the supposedly tawdry Trump era.\u00a0But we heard the same song-and-dance with Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

Obama declared that America\u2019s \u201cideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake\u201d in his first inaugural address. But one of Obama\u2019s most shocking legacies was his claim of a prerogative to kill U.S. citizens labeled as terrorist suspects without trial, without notice, and without any chance for the marked individuals to legally object. Obama\u2019s lawyers even refused to disclose the standards used for designating Americans for death. Drone strikes increased tenfold under Obama, and he personally chose who would be killed at weekly \u201cTerror Tuesday\u201d White House meetings which featured PowerPoint parades of potential targets.<\/p>\n

Year by year, Obama\u2019s lies and abuses of power corroded the idealism that helped him capture the presiden<\/strong>cy. As a presidential candidate, he promised \u201cno more illegal wiretaps\u201d; as president, he vastly expanded the National Security Agency\u2019s illegal seizures of Americans\u2019 emails and other records. He promised transparency but gutted the Freedom of Information Act and prosecuted twice as many Americans for Espionage Act violations than all the presidents combined since Woodrow Wilson. He perennially denounced \u201cextremism\u201d at the same time his administration partnered with Saudi Arabia to send weapons to terrorist groups that were slaughtering Syrian civilians in a failed attempt to topple the regime of Bashar Assad. Obama helped establish an impunity democracy in which rulers pay no price for their misdeeds. As The New York Times<\/em> noted after the 2016 election, the Obama administration fought in court to preserve the legality of defunct Bush administration practices such as torture and detaining Americans arrested at home as \u201cenemy combatants.\u201d\u00a0 Actually, Obama\u2019s audacious hypocrisy knew no bounds. A few days before he effectively pardoned all CIA torturers and torture policymakers in 2009, Obama visited CIA headquarters and boasted: \u201cWhat makes the United States special, and what makes you special, is precisely\u00a0 the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and ideals even when it\u2019s hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Donald Trump won the 2016 election, idealism was temporarily roadkill along the political highwa<\/strong>y. After Trump was defeated in November 2020, the media scrambled to portray Joe Biden as a born-again idealist and to put the federal government and Washington back on a pedestal. A Washington Post<\/em> headline proclaimed, \u201cWashington\u2019s aristocracy hopes a Biden presidency will make schmoozing great again.\u201d The Post<\/em> quickly changed its initial headline to \u201cWashington\u2019s Establishment\u201d but \u201caristocracy\u201d remained in the body of the article, which assured readers that \u201cthe classic friendly-rivals dinner party will be back, likely bigger than ever.\u201d That same aristocracy hoped that idealism would provide the magic words to make the peasantry again defer to their superiors.<\/p>\n

But Biden\u2019s idealism was difficult to distinguish from his rage at anyone who resisted his powe<\/strong>r. Rather than a new Camelot, Biden\u2019s reign vindicated historian Henry Adams\u2019 assertion that politics \u201chas always been the systematic organization of hatreds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regardless, the same media outlets that slapped a halo over Biden\u2019s head are now hustling to saint Kamala Harris. Amazingly, the prime evidence of her idealism is the fact that she was a prosecutor. And since prosecutors claim to work \u201cfor the people,\u201d her record of<\/strong> wrongful prosecutions, tormenting parents of truant children, and detaining convicts after their sentence ended (California needed extra firefighters) is automatically expunged.<\/p>\n

Idealism long since surpassed patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel<\/strong>. Idealistic appeals were used by Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon to vindicate the Vietnam War, by President Bill Clinton to sanctify the bombing of Serbia, and by President George W. Bush to dignify the devastation of Iraq. The mainstream media is almost always willing to help presidents shroud foreign carnage with pompous claptrap. Washington Post<\/em> columnist David Ignatius declared in late 2003 that Bush\u2019s war on Iraq \u201cmay be the most idealistic war fought in modern times.\u201d<\/p>\n

The federal government is rarely so dangerous as when politicians promise to be leading the nation to a promised land. Idealism encourages citizens to view politics as a faith-based activity, transforming politicians from hucksters to savior<\/strong>s. The issue is not what government did in the past\u2014the issue is how we must do better in the future. Politicians\u2019 pious piffle is supposed to radically reduce the risk of subsequent perfidy.<\/p>\n

Soviet Union dictator Vladimir Lenin used the term \u201cuseful idiots\u201d to describe foreign sympathizers who dutifully repeated Soviet propaganda. Nowadays, we have \u201cuseful idealists\u201d\u2014pundits who mindlessly praise politicians as if they were more trustworthy than other serial perjurers.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The more deference that idealists receive, the more deceitful idealism becomes. Ideals become character witnesses for the politician who tout them. No matter how often a politician has been caught trashing facts, he is still credible on idealism. One freshly-flourished ideal expunges a decade of perfid<\/strong>y. The media exalts: \u201cHe has seen the light! He invoked an ideal!\u201d In Washington, idealism is an incantation that expunges all past warnings about political power.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, idealism is often positive thinking about growing servitude. Americans cannot afford to venerate any more Idealists-in-Chief hungry to seize new power or start new wars. Any doctrine that begins by idealizing government will end by idealizing subjugation. One hundred and five years ago, Woodrow Wilson promised that \u201cidealism is going to save the world.\u201d Hasn\u2019t the world suffered enough from idealism already?<\/strong><\/p>\n

An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

James Bovard<\/em><\/strong> is the author of <\/em>Attention Deficit Democracy<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>The Bush Betrayal<\/em><\/a>, and <\/em>Terrorism and Tyranny<\/em><\/a>. His latest book is Last Rights: the Death of American Liberty<\/a>. Bovard is on the USA Today Board of Contributors. He is on Twitter at @jimbovard. His website is at <\/em>www.jimbovard.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Counterpunch, August 29, 2024 Will Kamala Make Idealism Great Again? by James Bovard As the presidential race enters the final stretch, politicians are recycling the usual scams to make people believe this election will be different. At last week\u2019s Democratic National Convention, idealism had a starring role, accompanied by ritual denunciations of cynicism. 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Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20368"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20370,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20368\/revisions\/20370"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}