Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Our current money is rife with slaveholders, sexists, and racists. I suggest a clean sweep:

$100 – Martin Luther King Jr.
$50 – Rosa Parks
$20 – Harriet Tubman
$10 – Frederick Douglass
$5 – W. E. B. Du Bois
$3 – Harvey Milk
$2 – Carrie Nation
$1 – Barack Obama

$1 coin – Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Half-dollar – Abigail Adams
Quarter – Thurgood Marshall
Dime – Cesar Chavez
Nickle – Booker T. Washington
Penny – Malcolm X

* The “natural-born citizen” clause was introduced into the Constitution mostly to keep out the West Indian-born Hamilton, whom none of the other Framers could stand.

Guy was a genius, though.

* Rootless, illegitimate, ruthlessly ambitious, willing to run huge debts, spend lots of a military with an idea to self-aggrandizement, sexually amoral, good with figures- Hamilton would be seen as a sensible, moderate pol, a real statesman, by the NPR, CNN crowd and their audiences and the Chamber of Commerce sorts.

* Of all the great men depicted on present-day US currency, Hamilton is one of two who never owned slaves (the other, of course, is Abe Lincoln). That Washington, Jefferson and Jackson were slave owners is common knowledge. Less well known, however, is that Franklin and Grant were also slave owners. Grant owned slaves through his wife Julia (who was from Kentucky) and kept them until they were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment. Ben Franklin owned slaves as a young man but later freed them and became an abolitionist in his old age.

So clearly, anyone who wishes to remove the plutocratic Hamilton from the currency is in favor of slavery. But if he is to be replaced by a woman, I would suggest Julia Dent Grant, a distinguished First Lady. BTW, Grant’s family refused to attend their wedding because the Dents were prominent slave owners.

* To comport with the essence of American culture, why not just use movie stars?

* I would rather use great American directors:

DW Griffith*

Buster Keaton

Howard Hawks

John Ford

Orson Welles

* 1/ I’m surprised that Steve didn’t mention that Hamilton was closer to being an immigrant than any of the other founding fathers having not only been born outside the 13 colonies, but having been born on an island that at one time wasn’t even British.

2/ Given this website’s current fondness for meritocracy you would think that Hamilton, born a poor bastard, would be lauded, certainly over his many rich born contemporaries. Indeed I see more than a few parallels between him and say Clinton (Bill not DeWitt), a favorite of the NY crowd.

* Alexander Hamilton brought central banking to the United States.

He didn’t wake up one morning and think “Wow, European-style central banking is exactly what this incipient republic needs!”

I’m sure Hamilton was well-compensated for his role in the establishment of the FBOTUS.

* Cuckservatives and libertardians have for almost a generation been flirting with the idea that inner city drug dealers- go-getting entrepreneurs trading in a product there is clearly a demand for but which a meddling nanny state has outlawed- are the REAL Americans, not those clock-watching, pink-complexioned stiffs working in auto plants or the Oakland docks for $65/hr. This is the implicit rationale behind Rand Paul’s claim that the justice system is unfairly incarcerating too many young, black males (too bad, BTW, since Paul seems like one of the smarter candidates; loved it when in one of the debates he pointed to Christie and said, “If you want WWIII, you have your candidate.”)

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996(?) was white America’s last great act of self-assertion; but then Michael Jordan hugged every single last white man and high-fived every single last white boy in the country, and we’ve been living under this dopey illusion of racial comity ever since. Actually, no, he didn’t hug or high-five them, he sent them a complimentary pair of sneakers made in a Third World sweat shop with his image on them. And actually, no, those sneakers weren’t free, but marked up like 2000%.

* There used to be only one face on American coinage, and that face happened to be female. She was Lady Liberty. If we need to put a woman on the folding green, I propose her. Besides, she’d focus attention on a rather neglected principle (at least in this day and age) instead of a individual person, and nobody would be able to argue that she’s not an appropriate selection.

* My wife and I have a running bet on how long one can be at a social event in Manhattan before talk turns to Hamilton. Usually it’s somewhere in the 5-10 minute range, but it can be as low as 2 minutes, and it almost never fails to happen.

* Seeing as how we are probably never going to get another (besides Franklin, of course) American man* who did significant work in the arts and the sciences on our money, I’m still going to plunk for putting one of these ladies on US currency:

Emily Dickinson

Edith Wharton

Willa Cather

Mary Cassatt

Hamilton as immigrant hero: Interesting reversal. American historiography used to see that as Hamilton’s weakness. It was thought that that prevented him from truly understanding the American mind.

Pop culture and Hamilton: Hamilton was depicted as something of a villain in the John Adams HBO miniseries. Wonder if that will be the last time that we will see a negative version of him.

Falling liberal idols: Who’s in bad odor these days: Jefferson (whole slavery thing), Madison (ditto), Jackson (slavery plus Amerinds),Woodrow Wilson (the vile racist who lauded Birth of a Nation), FDR (father of redlining, didn’t do enough to stop Hitler, Japanese internment), etc.

*Although I still think that it’s positively criminal that people like Edison, the Wright Bros, Mark Twain, William James, Poe, Melville, Howard Hawks, etc, have never been on US currency.

* I nominate Monica Lewinsky for the currency.

Nothing epitomizes the character of the postmodern U.S. better than Clinton getting a blow job in the Oval Office…

* It’s the work of one man, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who born into a upper-middle class Puerto Rican family in New York and educated at Wesleyan. He looks mostly, but not wholly, white, slightly less white than, say, Marco Rubio. You’d probably identify him as Latin-looking.

* For the same reason movies set in the past always involve sympathetic characters with modern 21st century US values. Most people don’t seem to have the imagination to hold it in their heads that many perfectly good people didn’t think like them, and indeed historical “heroes” usually had ideas not unlike those of their surrounding society.

I suspect that Donald Trump will take a more skeptical view of the benefits of a close relationship with Israel than any other candidate in the race. Trump is a realist. He’s an American-firster like Charles Lindberg.

From Politico, Jan. 20, 2016:

One of the most common misconceptions about Donald Trump is that he is opportunistic and makes up his views as he goes along. But a careful reading of some of Trump’s statements over three decades shows that he has a remarkably coherent and consistent worldview, one that is unlikely to change much if he’s elected president. It is also a worldview that makes a great leap backward in history, embracing antiquated notions of power that haven’t been prevalent since prior to World War II.
It is easy to poke fun at many of Trump’s foreign-policy notions—the promises to “take” Iraq’s oil, to extract a kind of imperial “tribute” from U.S. military allies like South Korea, his eagerness to emulate the Great Wall of China along the border with Mexico, and his embrace of old-style strongmen like Vladimir Putin. But many of these views would have found favor in pre-World War II—and even, in some cases, 19th century—America.

In sum, Trump believes that America gets a raw deal from the liberal international order it helped to create and has led since World War II. He has three key arguments that he returns to time and again over the past 30 years. He is deeply unhappy with America’s military alliances and feels the United States is overcommitted around the world. He feels that America is disadvantaged by the global economy. And he is sympathetic to authoritarian strongmen. Trump seeks nothing less than ending the U.S.-led liberal order and freeing America from its international commitments.
Trump has been airing such views on U.S. foreign policy for some time. He even spent $100,000 on a full-page ad in the New York Times in 1987 that had a message remarkably similar to what he is saying today.
With his background and personality, Trump is so obviously sui generis that it is tempting to say his views are alien to the American foreign policy tradition. They aren’t; it is just that this strain of thinking has been dormant for some time. There are particular echoes of Sen. Robert Taft, who unsuccessfully ran for the Republican nomination in 1940, 1948 and 1952, and was widely seen as the leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Taft was a staunch isolationist and mercantilist who opposed U.S. aid for Britain before 1941. After the war, he opposed President Harry Truman’s efforts to expand trade. Despite being an anti-communist, he opposed containment of the Soviet Union, believing that the United States had few interests in Western Europe. He opposed the creation of NATO as overly provocative. Taft’s speeches are the last time a major American politician has offered a substantive and comprehensive critique of America’s alliances.
Trump’s populism, divisiveness and friendliness toward dictators is also reminiscent of Charles Lindbergh, once an American hero, who led the isolationist America First movement. In some areas, Trump’s views go back even further, to 19th-century high-tariff protectionism and every-country-for-itself mercantilism. He even invokes ancient Chinese history, telling Bill O’Reilly last August that his idea for a wall across the U.S.-Mexican border is feasible because “you know, the Great Wall of China, built a long time ago, is 13,000 miles. I mean, you’re talking about big stuff.”
***
Trump’s starting point and defining emotion on foreign policy is anger—not at America’s enemies, but at its friends. In a lengthy interview with Playboy magazine in 1990, Trump was asked what would a President Trump’s foreign policy be like. He answered: “He would believe very strongly in extreme military strength. He wouldn’t trust anyone. He wouldn’t trust the Russians; he wouldn’t trust our allies; he’d have a huge military arsenal, perfect it, understand it. Part of the problem is that we’re defending some of the wealthiest countries in the world for nothing. … We’re being laughed at around the world, defending Japan.”

He then elaborated on his skepticism of allies. “We Americans are laughed at around the world for losing a hundred and fifty billion dollars year after year, for defending wealthy nations for nothing, nations that would be wiped off the face of the earth in about 15 minutes if it weren’t for us. Our ‘allies’ are making billions screwing us.”
Trump has long believed the United States is being taken advantage of by its allies. He would prefer that the United States not have to defend other nations, but, if it does, he wants to get paid as much as possible for it. No nation has come in for quite as much criticism from Trump as Japan. “It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan and others who can afford it pay,” Trump said in an open letter to the American people in 1987. “Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours.”
In the intervening years, he found new targets but he never let go of his antagonism toward the Japanese. On the campaign trail recently, he took the unusual step of promising to renegotiate the 1960 U.S.-Japan Treaty. “If somebody attacks Japan,” he said, “we have to immediately go and start World War III, OK? If we get attacked, Japan doesn’t have to help us. Somehow, that doesn’t sound so fair. Does that sound good?”
He has also criticized other allies. In 2013, he said, “How long will we go on defending South Korea from North Korea without payment? When will they start to pay us?” He has made the point again on the campaign trail. In an interview with NBC, he said, “We have 28,000 soldiers on the line in South Korea between the madman and them. We get practically nothing compared to the cost of this.”
Trump doesn’t let Europe off the hook, either. Several years ago, he wrote, “Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually. The cost of stationing NATO troops in Europe is enormous. And these are clearly funds that can be put to better use.” On the campaign trail, he complained that Germany is not carrying more of the burden of NATO and asked why the United States should lead on European security…

If he did get elected president, he would do his utmost to liquidate the U.S.-led liberal order by ending America’s alliances, closing the open global economy, and cutting deals with Russia and China.
He would find this hard to do, not least because the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment would be opposed to him and he needs people to staff his National Security Council, State Department and Defense Department. But there is real power in the presidency, especially if there is clear guidance about the chief executive’s wishes. In any event, the mere fact that the American people would have elected somebody with a mandate to destroy the U.S.-led order might be sufficient to damage it beyond repair…

Lindbergh led a national movement that was divisive, xenophobic and sympathetic to Nazi Germany…

Some, like Ted Cruz, tried to deal with the shift in sentiment by cozying up to pro-American dictators and abandoning support for democracy promotion. Cruz even used the isolationist term America First to describe his foreign policy. But Cruz seems to have thought little and said even less about America’s global role outside the Middle East. Ironically for someone with the reputation of being exceptionally smart, he lacks Trump’s detail and substance.
It is in this vacuum that the long-dormant Taftian foreign policy has made an unexpected comeback in the hands of Trump. What happens next is anybody’s guess. It is hard to see how the Republican foreign policy establishment, which is steeped in American primacy and a U.S.-led international order, endorses an isolationist strain of thinking that has long been presumed dead. A split seems more likely than reconciliation.
In any event, if Hillary Clinton secures the Democratic nomination, as expected, and Trump maintains his huge lead over the GOP field, a Clinton-Trump race would present two starkly different views about America’s global role. For the first time since World War II, Americans will be asked to give their view on the most fundamental question of U.S. foreign policy: Do they want a U.S.-led liberal order or not? Internationalists will have to explain all over again why the United States flourishes and benefits from a healthy international system. Taft and Lindbergh lost before, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the messenger this time.

Professor Daniel Drezner writes for the Washington Post:

The big story, however, is that Trump and his advisers think of themselves as stone-cold realists:

Trump’s narrow definition of “national interest” does not include things like democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to protect people from atrocities or the advocacy of human rights abroad. Trump believes that economic engagement will lead to political opening in the long run. He doesn’t think the U.S. government should spend blood or treasure on trying to change other countries’ systems.

“This is a long game; it’s not a short game,” Clovis said. He faulted neoconservatives who “think you can go out there and in three weeks after Iraq collapses you can create a constitutional democracy over there.”

The Trump campaign thinks of this approach as pragmatic and realistic. Like classical realists, Trump wants to deal with states and governments, not non-state actors or international organizations. That, according to his advisers, is why he sometimes seems to praise strongmen who lead their states as executives with absolute power. Trump sees Putin and other dictators as businessmen doing what any CEO would do, fighting for their organization.

So would, say, respected academic realists such as John Mearsheimer or Stephen Walt or Barry Posen approve of these sentiments?

If they’re being intellectually honest, they would. Trump’s team hits on the major realpolitik talking points with respect to American foreign policy in these sentiments: a reluctance to expend U.S. blood and treasure overseas, an assumption of other states as rational unitary actors maximizing their interest defined as power, a reluctance to export American values, and a deep disdain for neoconservative approaches to the world. We also know from Tom Wright that Trump evinces a strong relative gains view of great power politics, checking another realist box. And a lot of what Trump is saying resonates with American attitudes on this subject.

So here’s my question to academic realists: After reading complaint after complaint after complaint that realism has been marginalized, it turns out that the leading candidate for the GOP nomination for president this year is a budding realist. He certainly sounds more realist than, say, Marco Rubio or Hillary Clinton. And yet questions have been raised about his foreign policy gravitas.

This is the perfect moment for realists to intervene in the marketplace of ideas and publicly endorse Trump. Sure, he’s not a perfect realist, but that candidate doesn’t exist (much like the perfect neoconservative or perfect liberal internationalist doesn’t exist). Sure, he has said some controversial things, but academic realists have not shied away from controversial pronouncements either. If realists really want to have some skin in the American foreign policy game, they will not find a better vessel than Trump.

For all I know, academic realists are secretly advising Trump. But this is about the marketplace of ideas and speaking truth to power. The public, particularly the GOP public, is anxious about American national security. They deserve to know whether what Trump is saying is consistent with a viable foreign policy worldview. For a school of thought that believes it lacks influence, this is the perfect moment to marry its rigorous, severe logic with the emotive language of a flesh-and-blood candidate for president, and possibly help to reduce that candidate’s massive unfavorables in both the country and the foreign policy community.