I recently began Professor Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War: The Rise And Fall Of Empires (2006), and while I’m only a couple of chapters into it, one of his early themes is the importance of asabiya, which
… refers to the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action. [p. 6]
In other words, cooperation, generally in the face of an external threat. Contrariwise, hinted at in the introduction is that the Fall part of the title comes about as divisions appear and are nurtured within the empire. Whether they’re about power or some superfluous definition of Other or, more precisely, the degenerate, they churn the empire and end up breaking it – or so it appears in my early meeting.
Keeping this in mind and noting that the United States is certainly a variety of empire, the actions of President Trump with regard to transgendered military personnel and aspirants certainly falls into the category of division, wouldn’t you say? Defining some Americans as degenerate and denying them the opportunity to serve the country, along with the direct damage done to units dependent on their skills, also damages the country in that it sows dissension and emphasizes what makes us different and labels it as somehow wrong. It’s long been true that often our differences strengthen, rather than weaken us, because, despite the bald exceptions such as the racism displayed in the two World Wars, we’ve learned to ignore the differences that don’t matter, and embrace each other.
Trump’s embrace of the white nationalists, his failure to condemn Rep. King following the latter’s remarks in favor of white nationalism, and now his attacks on American transgendered military personnel and aspirants may just be the cloying maneuvers of a President trying to preserve the political allegiance of a bloc of Americans who’ve lost their moral path, i.e., the evangelical movement, but it’s also congruent with the theory that President Trump is an asset of a foreign power who understands that American ascendancy is dependent on Americans clearly seeing what matters and what doesn’t. By dividing Americans on such trivial grounds due to the demands of an increasingly irrelevant and repellent religious group, our ability to pursue our goals is decreased, and our reputation crumbles in the eyes of the world. Except, of course, Russia.
It’s important to understand that the SCOTUS ruling today is a technical ruling concerning whether or not the Trump Administration may pursue implementation of their anti-transgendered policy while the appeals courts continue to wend their way through the Trump Administration appeal of lower court ruling that the policy is illegal. They rejected some other Administration requests, and therefore we’ll still await the appeals courts ruling, and the inevitable SCOTUS appeal. Let’s hope SCOTUS doesn’t bow to the cries of the irrationally intolerant.
