Lord help me, I've been fighting on the internet again

in which I interact with some people who have views far more leftie than mine and somehow wind up looking like Colonel Nathan Jessup

One of my flaws, it seems, is an inability to take the advice of my matriarchs.

My grandmother: Angry words, O let them never from the tongue unbridled slip.

My mom: There’s never a good time for a fight, but the best places are parking lots and on the subway.¹

As an at-home parent and an avid reader, most of my adult interaction happens in online comments sections—notoriously wonderful places for discourse. No, but really, the couple of blogs I follow and comment on tend to have a group of really civil, funny, and interesting regular commenters. But as you’ll see, we are not a homogenous group of philosophers.

So the hot-button issue of Ukraine came up. A lot of the people I interact with, it turns out, are Marxists—or at least hard leftists—while the rest of us tend to be a mix of liberal and conservative. On the far left, there’s a strong sentiment that the United States backed Russia into a corner and forced Putin’s hand. As a liberal, I take the point, but I disagree. A lot of the conservatives essentially classify that hard leftist perspective as Putin puppetry. I wouldn’t go anywhere near that far, but I was surprised to discover an unwavering anti-American sentiment.

At one point, and I’m paraphrasing, I was essentially accused of gleefully and ignorantly swimming down a river of blood in an American flag bikini while riding an eagle-shaped floatie. Considering my love of pool floaties, this was a particularly low blow.

All the arguing was once again distressing, not least because there were a lot of different threads of thought going at one time. But all of it has certainly gotten me thinking deeply about why I still believe the United States has a teeny sliver of moral high ground, despite the many missteps, bad calls, and downright horrific actions sometimes carried out in the name of We the People.

First, let me explore that: the vanishingly small, but consequential, ledge of moral high ground.

This democracy is obviously imperfect. It’s a representative democracy: we elect people to make decisions for us because it’s not possible for millions of people to vote on thousands of issues every day. So there’s failure point one: Our elected representatives can make bad calls, wrong calls, or be corrupted.

But here’s the two substantial things that we—and every free country—still have that I find more than relevant: the ability to vote out our leaders and vote in new ones²; and the ability for citizens to criticize the government in even the most stringent terms without fear of death or imprisonment. Indeed, there’s a significant number of people who make a comfortable living doing just that.

Here’s where I didn’t express myself properly in my arguments. I do not think that these qualities make us morally superior or beyond reproach.

What I DO think is that leaders who are beholden to an electorate behave differently than leaders who are not.

We can’t have a consistent foreign policy for both the United States and Russia—not because the people of the US are better than Russians; not because on some fictitious Bingo Sheet of Atrocities our democracy somehow wins out—but because there is virtually no limit on the power of Vladimir Putin. Indeed, multiple thousands of Russians have been jailed for protesting this war, and many hundreds of thousands more are openly opposing it.

The same incentives absolutely will not work for a nation whose leader has people to answer to—even if they only do so every few years—and for someone who does what he wants, when he wants, and kills or maims or jails his dissenters.

Point two: War is always bad. Always. War is sometimes necessary.

These two things are both true. What we can argue about is the “necessary” bit. Reasonable people can come to different conclusions.

To return to the most recent war that seems was inarguably necessary, WWII, reasonable Americans DID come to different conclusions about involvement. Not until Pearl Harbor did a large enough portion of citizens embrace the necessity. I’m sure lots of Europeans wished more Americans felt the necessity sooner, but there we are: reasonable people, different conclusions.

So for the record, I don’t think the United States should go to war in Ukraine. I don’t even know if sanctions are right, or providing material weapons support to Ukrainians, or anything. I don’t know enough, and it’s not my call anyway. I also don’t think accusing normal people of “whataboutism” is helpful, or fair. What some anti-war absolutists consider “whataboutism,” other people consider forethought.

Say we don’t do anything in Ukraine except send our thoughts and prayers. Putin takes control—again, I’m emphasizing Putin, because I refuse to discount the many many thousands of Russians who are actively opposing this war—and then what?

Will that satisfy his lust for territorial control?

What if it doesn’t? It seems his own people can’t stop him.

I’m not talking about the many dubious wars or deadly conflicts the United States has started or backed for the purposes of installing puppet governments amenable to our financial interests. That’s wrong, and I don’t support it, and I never will. For the life of me, I can’t understand the refusal to consider nuance by anti-war absolutists. Intent matters. Sowing discord and civil war in various regions throughout the world is bad intent, and that is damning. That is not what I am arguing.

I’m asking: where is the line? If anti-war absolutists say there isn’t a line, we should never get involved in war, then fine. Point taken. But that leads me to my next important philosophical point.

Third thing I’m thinking about: how do reasonable people coming to different conclusions interact?

In my recent online discussions/arguments, I’ve come to feel people view me as Jack Nicholson in the witness box in A Few Good Men.

What a bunch of people on the internet think I look like, apparently

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? …my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.

You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall. … I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

I would rather that you just said "thank you" and went on your way.

For one thing, the citizenry of our nation absolutely gets to question the manner in which our freedom is provided. That’s the whole point of a democracy. And when our leaders make choices we think are reprehensible or wrong, we get to protest it, and then we get to vote them out.

I refuse to be lumped into the camp of apologists for the Iraq War; I never voted for Bush, and I never supported the war. Let it be known: I also had a very close friend who served as an officer in the Iraq War.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll say: there is a kernel of truth in the posture Nicholson’s character represents.

In fact, that’s standpoint epistemology in action in a way that could be really useful to this discussion. (Told you I embraced nuance!) The experience I’ve had as a military spouse totally colors my position here. Absolutely. But it doesn’t make me an Amerikkka first warmonger. On the contrary.

When Noah was in the Navy Reserve for 8 years, the fact that he could be called up at any time was a constant underlying worry. I never wanted him to be sent to war. What we both recognized, though, was that there must be some occasions where war, while always bad, is necessary, and he preferred to be ready to serve than to be wrapped in a blanket of freedom with no personal understanding of the cost.

Through all this, I keep thinking of Captain Winters in Band of Brothers. He didn’t relish war; he hated it. He didn’t engage with the kind of dehumanizing patriotic propaganda that some soldiers used to cope with the ramifications of their actions. But he wasn’t willing to ask anyone else to do what he felt was necessary if he wasn’t willing to do it himself.

There are plenty of anti-war arguments I’m more than open to considering. For instance, should we even have a standing army at all? What I cannot budge on is the rare but real necessity of going to war. And what I can’t get any of the leftists I’ve been arguing with to engage with is: where is that line of necessity?

And if they won’t budge on the stance that there is never a line of necessity, I can’t get them to engage with the reality that people who feel there is a line of necessity are not bloodthirsty warmongers with no empathy for the millions of lives the United States has unjustly taken or made worse.

And I can’t seem to convince anyone who is an anti-war absolutist that the United States did not force Putin’s hand, not least because saying so is proof they’re applying a different standard to the United States than they are to Russia. I can’t make the positions “what Russia is doing is wrong” and “Russia’s hand was forced so what did we expect!” jive in this context; if they can give Russia that level of sympathetic imagination, why can’t they also give it to the US?

Finally, the meta-analysis of the arguments is interesting to me. The framework here seems so very similar to exactly the kind of posture some leftists (certainly liberals) oppose when applied domestically: We have to deal with the effects of what our predecessors chose to do 40, 50, 60+ years ago, but we are not morally culpable for those bad choices—not until time machines are invented anyway.

We have to deal with present circumstances shaped by our ancestors, but just as my generation cannot be held culpable for, say, Andrew Jackson’s choices, neither can my generation bow out of dealing with the fallout. For a nation with as much geopolitical power as the United States, choosing not to act has repercussions we’re responsible for, too. The kind of power our country has amassed can not be given away. With this kind of power, neutrality does not exist. Besides, Switzerland’s neutrality in WWII has not aged well, proving that we cannot absolve ourselves by limiting our participation in geopolitics and international conflict.

War is hell. When one of the actors, in particular, is answerable to nobody, there definitely aren’t any good answers. Only bad ones, and ones that are less bad.

We can and should criticize the manner in which our freedom is provided, and the propaganda used to justify it. To demonize those of us who hate the reality of war but are willing to recognize the rare but real necessity of it is to further polarize our country, which is already brittle with partisanship. Some of us aren’t willing to give up the idea that representative democracy is worth fighting for, however imperfect.

1. Without having to think hard, I can come up with four different parking lots, a subway, and even a bank where my mom has gotten in fights. But full disclosure: we were both involved with the thing in the Home Depot parking lot.

2. This is why the unfounded accusation of election fraud is so damaging.