Iran, Slopulism, and the Eternal Innocence of the American People

Joe Kent resigned his position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center on Tuesday, citing his objections to the ongoing war with Iran. But, as many observers were quick to point out, Kent’s resignation letter was far from a brave dissent against an illegal and aimless war. Rather, it was leavened with antisemitic implications, putting the central blame at the feet of Israel and, implicitly, nefarious Jews. Here’s an excerpt:

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

[…]

Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.

Antisemitism is a running theme in right-wing opposition to the Iran war. And it’s one that should make us dubious of embracing MAGA and post-MAGA critiques of Trump’s foreign policy. But it’s also reflective of a tendency across the political spectrum to absolve the American people of any real responsibility for what is unfolding under the second Trump administration. 

Monday, former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene went on CNN and presented the ongoing conflict in Iran as a fundamental betrayal of Trump’s base and the wider American public:

I do completely disagree where the president has led the country…Why would an American president lead his political party into the midterms waging a full-scale, major war, completely unprovoked, on Iran, on behalf of Israel? And that’s the way most Americans see it. They see this as for Israel, not for America. Why would an American president do that?…American people did not vote for this. This is not what we campaigned for, Pamela…This is a complete betrayal of his campaign promises.

Greene’s argument here manages to, like Kent, put most of the blame on Israel. Considering Greene’s long history of antisemitism, I don’t think there’s any reason to view this as a measured bit of foreign policy analysis. But, more importantly, Greene paints the American people as hapless dupes. 

Yes, the Trump/Vance campaign ran relentlessly on the message that Kamala Harris would take America to war while a Trump administration would maintain a policy of peace. They lied. They lied shamelessly and with abandon. 

But why should this lie have worked? We are well aware, first and foremost, that Trump is not an honest man. His first administration culminated in a pandemic mismanaged in part because Trump was unwilling to provide reliable information to the American public and an attempted coup premised on his claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Moreover, we had extensive evidence from Trump’s previous time in the White House that he views war generally as a means of expanding his executive authority and conflict with Iran specifically as a good unto itself. 

As I wrote last April for Liberal Currents:

We no longer have to ask if Trump is a Caesarian figure. His aspirations are clear. His malice for representative government and disdain for laws and customs are beyond question. He is other things, too—a brute, a fascist, a maniac.

But we put him here. And we did so this past November after he’d already shown us his fangs. 

So, as Greene seems to suggest, are the American people truly so soft-headed that they credulously believed Donald Trump to be a man of peace whose sole interest is the well-being of the average American? Instead, I think it’s fair to say that Americans liked Trump’s rhetoric on immigration and felt angry about prices and so took a risk on a man they already knew to be of the most violent and venal impulses. 

Aside from prejudice, what unites Kent and Greene here is a sense that people ultimately have no obligation to honestly assess their own lives and actions, that one's successes flow directly from one’s own virtue and defeat always comes at the hand of nefarious forces beyond your control. This is an archetypical populist formulation. And we encounter this style of politics everywhere now. This tendency toward promising easy fixes on things like healthcare and affordability, often uninformed by basic facts and diligence, has earned the epithet “slopulism.” 

There is, in reality, often little daylight between populist politics and the fantastical claims of “slopulism.” But the core conceit remains that the American people are ultimately not responsible for the consequences of their own electoral decisions, nor are they really capable of enacting change in the face of corrupt and tyrannical elites. It’s true that democracies in general and American democracy in particular have long histories of legal oppression and public manipulation. Still, it’s a dangerous thing to elide the sovereign agency of individuals living in a free (or even mostly free) society. The American people may oppose the war with Iran—all the polling shows this to be the case. But they’ve hardly taken to the streets en masse to register their displeasure. 

This is the same kind of politics that allows current Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner to dodge responsibility for his totenkopf tattoo and to claim that Susan Collins voted to “send [him] to Iraq,” despite his having apparently enlisted in the Marines after the war began. To quote Platner in a recent interview with Zeteo:

Plus, I'll just be upfront: The more they talk about [the tattoo], the more | get to talk about the fact that I got that because I was a combat Marine.

That's why I had that. Susan Collins voted to send me to Iraq. It was the fighting I took part in, in Iraq, that resulted in me and other machine gunners getting a skull-and-crossbones tattoo. If we want to continue talking about my military service, I'm more than happy to, but I don't think it's going to have the impact they are envisioning.

Our crisis is vastly more severe on the right wing of American politics, but Platner’s success is a reminder that the appeals of slopulism and a kind of irresponsible, conspiratorial politics work across the spectrum. Democracy is premised on the rule of the people, but the people often prefer a scapegoat to the complexities of popular sovereignty. 

This week, Silicon Valley billionaire and aspiring Professor Robotnik Marc Andreessen went on David Senra’s podcast to discuss his life and career. During this appearance, Andreessen declared his contempt for the very idea of introspection, saying,

If you go back, four hundred years ago it never would’ve occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like, the whole idea, all of the modern conception around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are manufactured in the 1910s and 1920s…It’s all a new construct. 

I cannot think of many things more anathema to civic virtue and a free society than to try and do away with introspection. And, in a way, that’s what slopulism offers: external enemies, shadowy machinations, and very little interiority. 

In the coming years, as the villainies of Trump and his collaborators continue to mount, we will have to see if the American people still have the capacity for self-interrogation. We will have to see if we are willing to take some responsibility for where we have steered our country. We will have to be willing to do away with scapegoats and easy narratives. We will have to face unsparing truths and welcome nuance if we want to again enjoy the full fruits of self-government. 

Featured image is Donald Trump Supporter, by Gage Skidmore