John Moreschi

“I am a Boomer who has been both a left winger and a right winger and am seeking to add some soothing energy to the inflamed polarization of today's rhetoric.”

At least that is how I started out my blog, demulcents.blogspot.com, back in January of 2011. I can’t say that I was able to be soothing and non-polemic through the five years from 2011 through 2016, especially with the candidacy of Donald Trump for president in late 2015, which has aroused strong emotions in me and the people who agree with me and the people who disagree with me. I have, however, tried to look for a balanced view of America in my thoughts, which are now presented in this book.

This book is a recording of many of my thoughts, as written at the time. They do not have the benefit of hindsight as they were current thoughts of current events.

First, a brief history of my political path:

When I was about 17 or 18, I observed that my parents and their friends had formed their opinions about the world and politics at about the age of 25 and had stayed with those ideas all their lives – at that time they were really old in my eyes, they were in their forties! I decided that I never wanted to get stuck in some ideas and stop thinking. I wanted to study and learn and change as time passed and as I learned about the world.

Indeed, I have made some changes in my thinking, and I know from hard experience that changing your political views if very difficult and painful, primarily because it means challenging and changing your own beliefs, and perhaps more difficult yet, changing your identity.

In the mid ‘60s I went to college, became a liberal, opposed the Viet Nam war, cheered the Civil Rights movement, and thought of myself as a good person because I was a liberal. But, by the late ‘70s I had to face two facts that shook my liberal beliefs – the Vietnamese people were fleeing Communist Viet Nam, and president Jimmy Carter’s economic policies had produced the disastrous double curse of inflation and a stagnant economy – stagflation.

My liberal opposition to the Viet Nam war proved to me to be based upon a false notion – that communism was just an economic system like capitalism and not an evil in itself worth going to war over. I had to admit that communism was more - it was, in its very nature, a totalitarian police state that crushed freedom, thought, and people. I had been wrong. After a lot of reading, I switched to believing in entrepreneurial capitalism. I became avidly opposed to communism, and also opposed to the milder forms of semi-socialist policies of liberalism embodied in the beliefs and policies of President Carter.

I voted for Reagan in 1980. I had become a Reagan Democrat (never stopped being socially liberal, however).

All that was fine for quite a while until President George W Bush invaded Iraq. I supported the invasion whole-heartedly. It was obvious to me that the Islamofascists were attacking American and Western Civilization because we were free, and they were totalitarian. And American Exceptionalism mandated that America spread freedom and democracy around the world, and that this would be the only way to stop the terrorists from further attacking us.

That lasted for about three years into the Iraq war, until it became obvious to me that the American invasion into the Middle East had ignited a much greater islamofascist movement. Indeed, the American invasion was the primary recruiting tool for the islamofascist dream of establishing a caliphate. We had fallen into Osama bin Laden’s trap by invading Iraq. He wasn’t just out to hurt America, he was out to create an Islamic Caliphate that would sweep through the Middle East, and perhaps eventually the world.

And then, September 15, 2008 happened – Lehman Brothers collapsed and the entire American economy came within a hair’s breadth of literally disappearing. This almost destroyed the entire world economy. The world is still reeling today. What happened?

So, I was again in a position where everything that I had believed had been proven to me to be wrong. Just as I had applauded everything that Carter had done in the late ‘70s only to watch it all backfire, I had applauded everything that Reagan through W had done only to watch it all backfire as well.

So, I read, and I thought, and I changed my political beliefs, and changed my political identity. Ouch.

I concluded that the attempt to spread democracy by invading the Middle East was perhaps the biggest foreign policy mistake that America had ever made. It not only failed to establish any real democracies in the Middle East, it had ignited a jihadist crusade against the West that has evolved into ISIL today, destroyed the power of Sunni Iraq, empowered the Shiite Iran, and moved into Syria where the entire middle east has exploded, spewing out refugees (and terrorists) into Europe and, to a lesser extent, into America.

This explosion coming out of the Middle East into the West has set off a right wing, Islamophobic, xenophobic backlash in Europe and America. I believe that the rise of Donald Trump is but one manifestation of right wing desires to close off to the world, build walls, and keep out the Others. It is happening in Europe as well.

At any rate, that is my political roller coaster so far.