Putin and Immigrant Babies

This is the content of a post this morning at a liberal blog I read: 

My only question: If you're not having nightmares over what is happening at the border, why not?

This amazes me.  Of all the problems in the world, this is the one that should be giving me nightmares?  

I can only attribute this perspective to desperation.  A large segment of the Dem/liberal population views issues on the basis of their potential appeal to the mainstream American.  One issue where Trump has caved in the past was that of separating families of would-be-immigrants at the border.  The mainstream media was flooded with images and stories have little children being separated from their parents, and eventually this was too much even for Trump.  So there is encouraging precedent on this issue for the liberals.

I see this as similar to the focus of many liberals on Putin as the bad guy.  The military/intelligence "deep state" is also anti-Putin, for the most part, so liberals see this as a winning position -- uniting liberals and conservatives against Trump.

These attitudes strike me as both inauthentic and counterproductive for Democratic success.  The scale of human suffering of the would-be-immigrants is a drop in the bucket compared to the suffering caused by U.S. policies related to Venezuela and Yemen, or the risk to all human civilization from the renewed Cold War.  Climate change, species extinction, and plastic pollution are all existential threats. 

With regard to Putin, I believe that he is on the right side of the conflicts in Venezuela, Syria, and Iran, just as he was right about Iraq in 2003.  As veteran Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen says, 

Who Putin Is Not -- Falsely demonizing Russia’s leader has made the new Cold War even more dangerous.

In today’s Russia, apart from varying political liberties, most citizens are freer to live, study, work, write, speak, and travel than they have ever been. (When vocational demonizers like David Kramer allege an “appalling human rights situation in Putin’s Russia,” they should be asked: compared to when in Russian history, or elsewhere in the world today?) ...

Putin has adopted a number of “anti-corruption” policies over the years. How successful they have been is the subject of legitimate debate. As are how much power he has had to rein in fully both Yeltsin’s oligarchs and his own, and how sincere he has been. But branding Putin “a kleptocrat” also lacks context and is little more than barely informed demonizing...

Viewed in human terms, when Putin came to power in 2000, some 75 percent of Russians were living in poverty. Most had lost even modest legacies of the Soviet era—their life savings; medical and other social benefits; real wages; pensions; occupations; and for men, life expectancy, which had fallen well below the age of 60. In only a few years, the “kleptocrat” Putin had mobilized enough wealth to undo and reverse those human catastrophes and put billions of dollars in rainy-day funds that buffered the nation in different hard times ahead. We judge this historic achievement as we might, but it is why many Russians still call Putin “Vladimir the Savior.”

Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as “a KGB thug,” regularly orders the killing of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a “mafia-state boss.” This should be the easiest demonizing axiom to dismiss, because there is no actual evidence, or barely any logic, to support it...  According to the American Committee to Protect Journalists, as of 2012, 77 had been murdered—41 during the Yeltsin years, 36 under Putin. By 2018, the total was 82—41 under Yeltsin, the same under Putin. This strongly suggests that the still–partially corrupt post-Soviet economic system, not Yeltsin or Putin personally, led to the killing of so many journalists after 1991, most of them investigative reporters.

 I strongly recommend the entire column by Cohen.  I think he makes a good case that the demonization of Putin by American liberals is misguided.

My opinion is that the U.S., not Russia, is the biggest threat to global peace.  Moreover, as demonstrated in the 2003 Iraq War, this is often a bipartisan failure of American politics.  Rather than confront our own deep state, many liberals find it expedient to blame an insidious foreign power.

Similarly, the U.S. has been an ineffective global leader in responding to problems such as global warming, pollution, financial inequality, and human rights.  Our support for international institutions and initiatives to deal with these problems has been inconsistent at best.  This is the real abomination of the Trump presidency -- pushing American exceptionalism at the expense of authentic global problem solving.  

National exceptionalism is inherent to our system of democratic nation states.  It's not surprising that both Republicans and Democrats often favor national, as opposed to human, rights.  The attention being given to immigrant detainees in the U.S. is admirable in this respect.  Each human life deserves respect -- the millions of suffering Venezuelans and Yemenis as much as the thousands of detained would-be immigrants; the victims of bipartisan policies as much as the victims of partisan policies.

The immigration issue is founded on the failure of U.S. sponsored states in Central America.  Hillary Clinton, for example, intervened as Secretary of State in support of a military coup in Honduras:

In 2009, when a military coup deposed President Manuel Zelaya at the insistence of the country's Supreme Court, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton supported the government that was installed by the coup. While Clinton was running for president, she argued, especially to Democracy Now's Juan Gonzalez, that the coup was at least nominally constitutional, and that supporting the deposing of Zelaya was the least-bad option. That remains debatable, but what does not remain debatable is that Honduras subsequently descended into the present chaos.

I support the Democrats as the more reasonable of our two major political parties.  I want the Democrats to focus on the real problems and avoid the cheap shots at Putin and at Trump for detaining would-be-immigrants.  These are distractions from serious problems, and will ultimately backfire, in my opinion. 

We have already witnessed the Democrats expending extreme amounts of energy in supporting the Mueller investigation and, now impeachment, on the basis of that investigation.  Since this is not going anywhere, the turn to immigrant rights is seen as a shortcut to getting rid of the despised Republican president.  But this risks playing into Trump's hands.  Illegal immigration is not a politically winning position.  Protecting minority rights is important, but works best when accompanied by concern for what benefits the majority.  That, after all, is the essence of democracy.