American Greatness
“Human skin,” Catherine the Great once observed, “is more ticklish than paper.”
I wonder if the people beating the drum to escalate the war in Ukraine have taken that homely wisdom on board. I suspect that the American people writ large are beginning to.
A year ago, soon after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, I saw the beautiful people in my deep blue town, the ones who had posted “Black Lives Matter” signs on their front lawn, substitute (or, if they were really gung-ho, add) a Ukraine flag on the poles they had erected to declare their higher virtue.
Those Ukrainian flags, I’ve noticed, are beginning to come down. Why? In part because of simple economic self-interest. People—the ones not part of the government or its auxiliaries, anyway—understand that the sanctions “against Russia” are just as much sanctions against us. Ordinary people look at the price of gasoline and heating oil and think, “Why should I be paying for this?”
And speaking of paying, you don’t need an advanced degree in economics to realize that there is a connection between sending billions upon billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine and Biden’s demand for higher taxes. How exactly, people wonder, is defending Ukraine and poking a major nuclear power in the eye in our national self-interest?
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