Campism

 The Trump administration is obviously flailing around at the moment to try to find the right formula that will explain away the disastrous failure of their war of aggression on Iran. "There is no war," they say; "war, what war?"; "and anyways, we're winning." 

But yesterday, they seemed to converge on a new line: blame Ukraine. 

Trump, in one of his various unhinged social media rants, suggested that the U.S. is not running out of munitions in its war, and has more munitions than ever, and anyways, if we are running out of munitions, it's because the Biden administration gave so many away to Ukraine...

Another fine display of "kettle logic" from this administration. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent yesterday also took a different approach to the same scapegoat. He said that the reason fuel prices remain so elevated worldwide is not because of an illegal U.S. war that ended up shutting down a major waterway that carries a fifth of the world's oil.

No, the true reason, Bessent says, is because Ukraine is firing back on Russia and disrupting their oil supply. 

And look, I do worry that Ukraine, in its desperation—after four-plus years of a relentless, unprovoked Russian invasion—is starting to succumb to the temptation to bend the laws of war. I worry that some of their recent strikes have deliberately hit civilian infrastructure, for instance. 

But if the U.S. government keeps sending the message that they wish to wash their hands of the conflict and no longer have Ukraine's back, it will only force our ally to resort to more desperate and dubious measures of the same type. 

Yet, heedless of these consequences, the Trump administration keeps telegraphing that—as our now–vice president once put it—they "don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other"—except to the extent that its efforts to defend itself from annihilation cause us some momentary inconvenience, or as a useful scapegoat to deflect blame for their own foreign policy stumbles. 

It's Munich all over again. There is—to quote Arthur Koestler on the subject of Soviet post-war expansionism: "the same impatience with the annoying victim who refuses to be murdered in silence, and the same desire not to antagonize the aggressor; [...] the same veiled admissions that small nations and big principles have sometimes to be sacrificed in the interests of peace between the great powers."  

One expects this sort of thing from the so-called "America First" Right. This kind of betrayal of our allies is very on brand for them. But it is all the more disturbing—as Koestler also argued in the post-war period—to see the same weak arguments coming from the Left, out of some kind of misguided belief that to oppose U.S. imperialism and wars of aggression must entail praising the Russian variety. 

Matt Yglesias gave me a new term for this the other day I'd never encountered before: "campism." 

He used the term in the context of defending Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan from charges of mere reflexive opposition to any U.S. foreign policy positions. El-Sayed, Yglesias argues, is definitely not a "campist," since he supports Western aid to Ukraine. 

But Hasan Piker, who unfortunately got mixed up in that campaign at an earlier stage—probably is one, Yglesias observes. 

Whether he is or not, though, we all have indeed met "campists" on the Left. That old quote from Darializa Avila Chevalier that got dug up in her primary campaign—about the U.S. "bullying Russia" into invading Ukraine—is a fine textbook example. 

The essence of "campism" is the belief that if one is against the abuses of U.S. foreign policy, then one must make excuses for the abuses of Russian and Chinese foreign policy. 

Few have ever diagnosed this basic logical fallacy as aptly as Walter Kaufmann: "The world is full of outrages, and it is easy to sympathize with the indignation of those who paint them black," he once wrote in an essay. "It is less easy to follow such rhetoric when it goes on to paint the other side as white. As a rule, wrong clashes with greater wrong." 

This is essentially what the "campist" left is doing. It is rightly outraged by U.S. sanctions and starvation blockades and neo-colonialism and wars of aggression in places like Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. It is quite right to "paint" these things "black." 

Where it goes astray is when it then turns around and tries to whitewash quite similar Russian and Chinese acts of aggression and saber-rattling and coercion in Ukraine, South Ossetia, Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, or Hong Kong. 

What is bizarre is the fact that this "campism" on the left has managed to outlast even the dissolution of the other "camp." There is no Soviet bloc anymore. There is no "Second World." Russia does not even pretend to be a leftist state anymore. 

The Left just finds itself, then, linking arms with Tucker Carlson to defend an arch-reactionary right-wing Russian nationalist regime, seemingly for no reason other than sheer perversity and contrarianism. 

But really, the Stalinist left bit this same bullet long ago. The Russian government had actually shed pretty much any pretense of being a leftist project long before the formal dismantling of the USSR. 

The "campists" just don't want to see it. They are members of that most perilous species in political life: the ones Hazlitt called "the persons with one idea." They are hedgehogs, not foxes, and the "one big thing" that they know—to borrow Berlin's phrase—is that the U.S. does bad things around the world. 

This one big fact—which I certainly would be the last to dispute—looms so large for them that it eclipses any other truth about bad things China and Russia do. 

And so they will go on until the end of time, it would seem, "joyously sacrific[ing] themselves," as Koestler put it, "in the name of Socialism for the Orthodox Church, for Panslavism, [...] and the glorified traditions of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great."