The Vietnam War, now viewed as a tragic mistake, was justified by analogies. My father accepted the Pentagon’s claim, the so-called “domino theory,” that the Chinese would gobble up Southeast Asia as the Soviet Union had gobbled up several countries in Eastern Europe if communists were to take over Vietnam. He therefore supported a war designed to prevent the unification of North and South Vietnam under communist rule.
But the analogy was all wrong. Vietnam was historically at odds with China and limited its expansion to the south. A united, strong Vietnam was therefore an excellent force for the containment of Chinese expansion, even though both were communist. To contain China, we should have welcomed Vietnamese unification. Experts on Southeast Asia knew the truth all along, but were ignored. Analogies without sufficient knowledge can mislead us.
Many people today see analogies between Putin and Trump. Are these analogies strong enough to justify claiming that Trump is a liar who seeks Putin-like authoritarian rule? Or does additional information show that the analogies are deceptive?
Neither Putin nor Trump seems interested in democratic elections or the rule of law, both of which are necessary to avoid authoritarian rule. In order to ensure his re-election, Putin violated democratic processes and the rule of law by using his political power to neutralize his main rival, Alexi Navalny, by having him jailed and disqualified from running.
Referring to Hilary Clinton, Trump encouraged the chant “Lock her up” at his rallies. Clinton had used a private computer server while Secretary of State (which wasn’t illegal at the time) and destroyed e-mails that she claimed were private (also not illegal at the time). Like Putin, Trump promoted the extra-judicial incarceration of his political rival Clinton. Trump didn’t succeed, however, because we still have the rule of law.
Trump showed his disrespect for our democratic institutions by claiming before the election in 2016 that if he lost, the vote was fraudulent. He repeated this fear of potential fraud in the 2020 campaign season and then used Twitter more than 400 times after he lost the election to claim that that he had really won. More than a year out of power, he still makes this claim even though no court in our independent judiciary, where claims must be backed by evidence, has found the charge credible.
Putin seems to share Trump’s penchant for self-serving claims made repeatedly without evidence. Putin said he was amassing troupes near Ukraine’s border to forestall an attack by Ukraine. There never was any such attack. Instead, Russia attacked Ukraine. Putin did exactly what he accused Ukraine of doing. Trump has also done exactly what he accused Clinton of doing – improperly handling government documents. Fifteen boxes of government material, some of it classified, was found inappropriately stored at Trump’s residence before being transferred to the National Archives.
Some of the most important lies of Trump and Putin violate common sense. Common sense isn’t always the best arbiter of truth. We all believe that the earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun. But to common sense the earth seems stationary. Common sense is at odds with many truths uncovered by physics, chemistry, and biology. But politics is different. In politics, when something doesn’t make sense, it’s usually because someone is lying.
Putin’s claim that Ukraine was about to attack Russia made no sense. Why would Ukraine, a poor country by European standards with one-third Russia’s population and no nuclear weapons, want to invade nuclear-armed Russia? After invading Ukraine, Putin said he was trying to protect Russian-Ukrainians from oppression by the Neo-Nazi government of Ukraine. He offered no evidence of such oppression, and it makes no sense. The democratically elected president of Ukraine is Jewish.
As already noted, Trump’s claims of election fraud are equally without evidence. In addition, they make no more sense than Putin’s claims about Ukraine. The Democrats lost four or five Senate races that were toss-ups, and quite a few incumbent Democrats lost their seats in the House. If Democrats were altering ballots to favor Biden for the presidency, why didn’t they alter the ballots to elect more Democrats to the Senate and House?
It seems to me than any Trump supporter who can see through Putin’s lies should be able to see through Trump’s lies and conclude that Trump, like Putin, has authoritarian tendencies that are outside the American political system and tradition. But maybe there are important disanalogies that make Trump a patriot who loves democracy. I’m open to being educated.
The important point is that analogies and disanalogies must be justified by facts. If Trump supporters can’t find facts to disprove the analogy with Putin, they should accept that he’s a menace to democracy. Willful ignorance is dangerous, as we saw in Vietnam.
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