Believe in standing up to dictators? Vote for Harris
Read my latest at The Ukrainian Weekly
Defending our national interests as our commander-in-chief is the most essential part of the job of the American president. In many past presidential elections, the differences about national security between Democrats and Republicans have been minor. During the Cold War, Democrats and Republicans both supported containment of the Soviet Union. Over the last 30 years, both Democrats and Republicans have valued allies, embraced American leadership in the world and promoted democracy. The differences were in how to achieve our goals and which presidential candidate could do it best.
Not so today. In this election, the differences between Vice President Harris and former President Donald Trump on national security are profound. Vice President Harris believes that active American leadership can keep us safe and prosperous. Mr. Trump hopes naively that we can stick our heads in the sand and the outside world won’t bother us. Ms. Harris thinks strong allies can help the United States achieve its security interests most effectively and efficiently. Mr. Trump is a unilateralist who threatened to withdraw from our alliances when he was president. Ms. Harris promotes democratic values and stands up to dictators, knowing that all of our enemies in the past have been run by dictators and our most loyal and enduring allies have been democracies. Mr. Trump, unlike any other American president in our nation’s history, admires and embraces autocrats.
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Dear Prof. McFaul:
In the book that is entitled "The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the statistician and clinical psychologist Mattis Desmet reports that that for a large group of the citizens of a given country to mistake a "complex" physical system for a "non-complex" physical system is a precursor to totalitarian rule over the people of this country, where a "complex" physical system exhibits one or more "emergent properties," each of which is a property of the whole physical system and not of the separate parts of this system. Harris habitually makes this mistake but Trump does not make it. Thus, for avoidance of totalitarian rule over ourselves, we Americans should vote for Trump and not for Harris.
Cordially,
Terry Oldberg
Engineer/Scisntist/Public Policy Researcher/Los Altos Hills, California