It's Not a War

After Charlie Kirk was assassinated, there was loose talk in some sectors of the right about how "they are out to get us" or "we are at war".

Like a lot of right wing discourse lately, this was to a great extent a conscious inversion of rhetoric which some parts of the left have been using for a long time.  From calling themselves "the resistance" to calling their opponents "fascists" to the rather goulish people who within hours of Charlie Kirk's murder were going around comparing him to Horst Wessel -- some on the left have been very eager to describe our current politics as being basically like World War II, with their political opponents cast as the Nazis.

I do understand the "they want us dead" reaction to reading what the least temperate fringe of the left has to say.  Even though it is one of my principles not to be abrasive about my political beliefs, when I read people in my circle of acquaintance taking to social media to declare that the world would be better off without certain groups of people to which I arguably belong (say, "middle aged white guys who support gun rights" or "Christians who don't accept trans rights"), I do have the emotional reaction that they wishing the world to be rid of me.

But no matter how much people on both sides may find this rhetorical war footing to express their feelings, I'm the one here to be annoyingly literal and say we really don't want to think about politics like we think about war.

Not just because it creates a rhetoric which, if taken seriously, would lead to more political violence, though that in itself is worth considering.

If "they" are really out to kill us, it makes sense to fight back against "them".  And if "they" really are Nazis or fascists, then it makes sense to fight them with more than memes that label the soldiers who stormed the beaches on D-Day as "the original antifa".

The fact is that we ended the political power of Nazism by killing hundreds of thousands of soldiers and also hundreds of thousands of additional civilian 'collateral damage'.  If you go around describing one side of the American as Nazis and fascists, at some level you're saying that that is the only way to deal with your political opponents.  And if you're not a psychopath, you don't mean that, so you should stop.  And the "we're at war now" people should stop too.

But there's more than that.

Here's the thing about wars.  Not only are they mass violence at a horrific scale, but in war you are in a truly zero-sum struggle.  One can only win via the other size losing.  And because of that, in war each side makes true devil's bargains in order to find allies who will help defeat their enemy.

So not only was WW2, the "good war" to which our culture so reflexively refers, a war in which we killed many innocent people along the way to victory (and one invariably does in war.) But it was also a war in which we allied with and actively supported Stalin -- a dictator every bit as evil and murderous as the Nazis we were seeking to defeat.

And while the Soviets could probably not have defeated the Nazis without our help, it is also the case that they did more of the dying and killing that defeated the Nazis than we did.  The front on which Stalinists killed Nazis -- and both killed untold millions of civilians caught in between them -- was the decisive front in WW2.  The Normandy landings were the "second front" which Stalin had been demanding for years.

The relevance of which is: because war is a matter of life and death survival, it tends to collapse alliances into a simple two-sided system.  This means that even the "good guys" may in fact be allied with absolutely terrible people because anyone willing to fight the enemy for any reason is an ally.

There's no better example of this than how Finland (aggressively invaded by Stalinist Russia) found itself allied with Nazi Germany in a basically just sense -- something that the US recognized even while allying with Stalinist Russia for completely other reasons.

This is different from politics.

In a healthy politics, alliances are shifting and constantly realigning.

Not so very long ago, an bill limiting abortion might have had had both pro-life Republicans and pro-life Democrats voting for it.  And the same for many other issues.  Many politicians belonged to one broad coalition but also crossed the aisle to support certain issue which might generally be identified with the other side.  

This is healthy in politics because it is a politics in which alliances on specific issues are key -- you can work with people on the "other side" on one particular issue, even if they might not work with you on other issues.  This is a healthier politics than a war-style politics in which destroying the other side is the only goal, even if some people on the "other side" might agree with you on various issues.

It is much better to maintain the cross-hatched, issue driven, dynamics of politics rather than engaging in the "grand coalition for total defeat of the other" dynamic which characterizes war.  We do not want to slip into the other mode, and we are dangerously close.

It's not just that it is a mode of politics which is bent on destruction, it's also that it causes us to make unconditional alliances with people we violently disagree with because it is the only way to achieve the destruction of the enemy.

This is the element of WW2 which is hard to process in the typical "good war" lens.  In World War II we allied with an incredibly evil regime because it was a way of achieving our goal of defeating those fighting us.  This is the sort of thing which happens in war because war is only ended when the enemy is defeated, and so any alliance which results in the defeat of the enemy is successful.

In normal politics, on the other hand, the alliances are issue focused.  Any alliance which results in achieving the political goal is successful -- but those alliances might be different from issue to issue.

Not only are the alliances we make in war focused on destruction, but they may well be alliances which strengthen those who totally oppose our beliefs, so long as they are alliances which help those who are also fighting those who are intent on destroying us.

This is what I do not think we should allow to dominate our politics.  In politics, we should focus on allying with those who will help us achieve policy goals -- not focus on allying with those who also want to destroy the same people we want to destroy.

When our alliances are focused on destruction rather than positive accomplishment, we will often ally with people who do not actually share our beliefs and goals.

This war footing may be suited to war, but it results in perverse alliances when it comes to peaceful politicis.  And it is why we should prefer to pursue politics rather than war -- to focus on positive accomplishment rather than destruction.