America stands at a turning point, the biggest one in fact since 1948. WWII caused a profound global realignment and the very concept of U.S. foreign aid was redefined. George C. Marshall, a war hero who was subsequently named Secretary of State, came up with a sweeping plan which would change foreign policy and aid in a manner never before seen. He outlined this plan in a Harvard commencement address. Charlie Pierce gives a brilliant analysis, but first you need to see Lindsey Graham sell what’s left of his soul out. This is not just a commentary on Graham, it is what’s wrong with politics in America at this point in history. Graham, and this iteration of the Republican party, are flushing America down the drain to stay in the good graces of a lunatic while toying with the world order. They have no idea the damage they are doing. There’s a lot more at stake here than appeasing a madman.
Lindsey Graham represents everything wrong with our politics.
pic.twitter.com/25obiJpefD— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 2, 2025
That is one hell of a turnaround. What Graham doesn’t get is that he is part of the nullification of the way America has operated in the world since the late 40’s, when George Marshall proposed “a partnership between the United States and its European allies to rehabilitate the entire fabric of their economies,” and began dispensing aid to right the listing ship of a war torn Europe. This made America the preeminent keeper of the peace in the world. Now a trust fund baby game show host with a cult has seen fit to destroy all that, virtually overnight — because he doesn’t know it exists. The meshes of his mind are too coarse to read or understand history, and all he knows about politics is money.
It has become known to history as the Marshall Plan, and it represented a sea change in America’s attitude toward the rest of the world. Foreign aid, which always was misunderstood and, therefore, never popular, was repurposed as a weapon against godless, atheistic communism. Was America buying allies with grain and medicines? Well, yes. They were for sale… and at a bargain, too.
Giving a speech at Harvard was the easy part. Congress was quite another story, even with Truman pitching it in a special message to Congress that December.
The United States has taken the lead in world-wide efforts to promote industrial and agricultural reconstruction and a revival of world commerce, for we know that enduring peace must be based upon increased production and an expanding flow of goods and materials among nations for the benefit of all.
Since the surrender of the Axis powers, we have provided more than $15 billion, in the form of grants and loans, for aid to victims of the war, to prevent starvation, disease, and suffering; to aid in the restoration of transportation and communications; and to assist in rebuilding war-devastated economies. This assistance has averted stark tragedy and has aided progress toward recovery in many areas of the world.
In these and many other ways, the people of the United States have abundantly demonstrated their desire for world peace and the freedom and well-being of all nations.
We must now make a grave and significant decision relating to our further efforts to create the conditions of peace. We must decide whether or not we will complete the job of helping the free nations of Europe to recover from the devastation of the war. Our decision will determine in large part the future of the people of that continent. It will also determine in large part whether the free nations of the world can look forward with hope to a peaceful and prosperous future as independent states, or whether they must live in poverty and in fear of selfish totalitarian aggression.
Our deepest concern with European recovery, however, is that it is essential to the maintenance of the civilization in which the American way of life is rooted. It is the only assurance of the continued independence and integrity of a group of nations who constitute a bulwark for the principles of freedom, justice and the dignity of the individual.
The economic plight in which Europe now finds itself has intensified a political struggle between those who wish to remain free men living under the rule of law and those who would use economic distress as a pretext for the establishment of a totalitarian state.
The debate on the Marshall Plan ran for months in 1948. Historian Harold Hitchens described the debate as being “marked by a variety of arguments on all sides.” Among other things, the plan splintered the Republicans in Congress. Hitchens quotes a speech from Rep. John Vorys of Ohio, who had been an opponent of military aid to the combatants before the U.S. had entered the war.
I want to speak to my Republican colleagues. Brethren, this is it. For years we have thundered against the piecemeal, stopgap foreign policy of the New Deal. We have demanded a long-range, world-wide policy, and we have got it, here, now formally set down, carefully framed and limited, and largely written by Republicans; and what happens? We find Republicans on this floor who want to go back to the New Deal emergency stopgap year-to-year relief plan.
It was the congressional Republicans who were critical to the passage of the plan, partly because their party’s history of isolationism ran deeper and because memories of it in Congress were still fairly fresh. Again, from Hitchens:
In the case of the Marshall Plan, as James Reston has written, the Republicans were originally in a dilemma—how could they maintain the interests of the United States abroad without hampering the political interests of the Republican party at home? It was necessary to achieve peace and prosperity, but they could not support the Administration in everything. Therefore, said Reston, “… partly because they had sincere reservations about some aspects of the Administration’s foreign policy and partly because they wanted to avoid becoming tagged with the “me-too” label… they have found ways of changing programs without killing them, and of supporting the Administration without being tied to it.”
Opponents of the plan found themselves buried by a national campaign to gin up popular support and to prompt a media blitz so powerful that opposing the Marshall Plan was seen as un-American, with all that entailed in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
All of this is being unraveled right now by the aforementioned game show host and his vice president, whose government experience is all of two years as a junior senator. And let’s just say that Marco Rubio is not cut from the same bolt of cloth as George Marshall and leave it at that, shall we? We have amateurs steering the ship of state. We have the DOGE and pony show curtailing aid from USAID and literally letting children starve. This is not the America of 1948. This is not the America of Reagan in the 80’s. Back to Rubio, he has joined with DOGE to eliminate USAID aid. Some of that aid is RUTF, Ready To Use Therapeutic Food, which is a peanut and vitamin paste that keeps starving children alive. That’s gone now — along with Ebola prevention — whose funding Elon Musk says he will restore. Color us grateful.
America helped the world rebuild after WWII. It did so because as Marshall pointed out in his Harvard commencement address, economic crisis produces social dissatisfaction and social dissatisfaction generates political instability. And political instability generates armed conflict. And so the cycle ran, endlessly and inexorably. The Marshall Plan got to the root of war, poverty and hunger. Now we have billionaire businessmen with no knowledge of history, let alone a social conscience, destroying what Marshall wrought in the 40’s.
We can only speculate at this point what effect DOGE and the betrayal of Ukraine will have on the world order. It was a massive mistake to slash USAID funding. It was a massive mistake to publicly tear down Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday. And there will be many more mistakes because the people in charge now do not see the big picture and they don’t have America’s history or her identity in any kind of rational context. This crowd understands money and power, period. Not who we are or how we got here.
It’s a sad axiom that it is easier to destroy than to build and that is what we are going to see proven in real time as the wrecking ball (or the chainsaw, take your pick) keeps laying waste to all that great men and women have built and died for. Stupid people, not knowing the big picture, have no problem destroying what they don’t understand.
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Sad pathetic li’l Lindsey Lickspittle’s still trying to ass-kiss his way back into Trumpland, even though it never quite works. Remember when he used to go golfing (or caddying) with Trumpler and Donald said “Lindsey just shows up, I never invite him”? I suspect Lindsey gets off on being humiliated, it’s the only logical conclusion to his despicable actions.
What a shame it was that there was no ‘Marshall Plan’ being considered at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union to steer them like Japan, or Germany. Unfortunately the ‘might is right’ Reaganists and radical right wing were in power and liked the idea of oligarchs, not democracy.
So here we are, with the results.