Made to be Ruled
Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It’s the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.
The big news in the United States has been the firing of FBI Director James Comey by President Donald Trump. At first Trump attributed his dismissal to Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton, but no one (except maybe FiveThirtyEight.com) was buying that explanation. After a day or two of differing stories from various members of the White House staff, it became clear that Trump had consulted very few of them before the announcement. Even Steve Bannon found out via a news broadcast.
Soon it was asserted that Director Comey had recently requested more funding and resources for the FBI’s investigation of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. And just before the weekend, NBC’s Lester Holt interviewed Trump, who said that he had actually fired Comey because:
“And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”
To the propaganda arm of the Deep State, meaning most of the mainstream media, Comey’s firing and Trump’s admission meant that there was definitely something to the allegations that have persisted since the election. In this youtube video, a power panel of the supposedly independent The Young Turks (Ben Mankiewicz, Cenk Uygur, Alonzo Bodden, John Iadarola) was predicting Trump’s imminent perpwalk: Trump Administration ADMITS Comey Was Fired To Kill Russia Investigation
But we’ve heard news of Trump’s imminent demise over and over. In, Has The Trump/Russia Conspiracy Been Proven True? Michael Tracy (also of The Young Turks) makes the case that Trump’s interference does not prove collusion, but may well constitute obstruction of justice. (It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.)
While Cenk Uygur dismisses Trump as a bumbling man-child, and joked that Michael Tracy was wearing blinders on this issue, I think Tracy, and reporters at The Intercept are correct to wait for solid evidence. It seems clear to me that the resistance has been looking for an easy way to rid themselves of this populist president, and is more than willing to make up the facts as they go along.
Does that mean I support Trump. No. But I was watching some youtubes from a podcast called Trending locally and from a presentation called, Globalization and the Backlash of Populism. In the podcast, Mark Blyth discussed the French Election and Comey ; in the Q&A after the Backlash presentation, he discussed the situation before the election.
Blyth pointed out that Populism is by definition, “popular” and probably isn’t going away. Marine Le Pen, he observed, did get one-third of votes cast, and she or someone in her family will run again next time. The resistance, he noted, has to offer more than just rickety coalitions against populist candidates. They have to offer workable alternative solutions.
I’m not sure that Progressives and Liberals even qualify as a rickety coalition nowadays. There are at least three broad camps, but not much solid ground in any of them. The first is the establishment, neoliberal Democrats, who are hoping that Trump’s failures will propel their party to being relevant again without changing a thing. Seriously, not a thing. A few days ago the Washington Post published an opinion letter claiming that Hillary Clinton would obviously be the strongest candidate in 2020. As they did during the campaign, they are trying to leverage the popularity of Bernie Sanders without really adopting any of his campaign platform. Sanders is touring the country carefully shepherded by new DNC chairman Tom Perez. Sanders has gotten so much applause and Perez so little that Perez has taken to introducing Sanders at the beginning of his vague speeches.
There are two challenger groups, Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, that appear to be working together to primary and replace establishment Dems with more progressive alternatives that eschew PAC money and large donors. Cenk Uygur and much of the Young Turks team are promoting Justice Democrats. California Congressman Ro Khanna has officially joined them, and Paula Swearengin, an environmental activist and a real coal miner’s daughter, has joined JD to take on Joe Manchin in the WV primary.
But there groups for whom some progressives Democrats just aren’t progressive enough. One is of course, the Green Party. Another is the People’s Party, which hopes to lure Senator Sanders into being their candidate. And in an online battle of podcasts, a number of uber-progressive journos have attacked both Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna. Some consider Sanders too much of a hawk; others are put off by his failure to address the vote-rigging reported by Greg Palast. Khanna is unsuitable because his campaign manager once wrote a memo to John Podesta offering a deal for Hillary Clinton’s endorsement, and more recently has received a lot of $2,700 dollar donations from Silicon Valley types instead of smaller donations from regular people.
It is difficult to know where the search for purity leads, though, because in my recollection, every revolutionary that survives either becomes establishment themselves, or a murderous despot.
Classical Gas Attack
I wrote about the possibility of a false flag operation during the Ukraine situation, but had been holding off on the recent Syria gas attack.
A few sites, Yournewswire, Antimedia, ShadowProof and the like, went false flag immediately, as did The Sane Progressive. They also noted that two previous Sarin attacks attributed to Assad had been later shown to have been carried out by rebels. Senator Rand Paul pointed out on camera that we didn’t know who was behind the Syria attack, and was roundly criticized in the mainstream media. Many liberal bloggers, like Juan Cole, pointed out that the US had just killed innocent civilians in a drone strike, and had used tear gas on its own citizens at the DAPL protest, but these bloggers seemed to go along with the assumption that Assad was probably culpable.
A few outlets urged us to be cautious in assigning the blame to Assad. On The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur felt that the timing seemed suspicious, with Assad mostly having what he wanted and peace talks looming.
But from his office away from the office at Mar-a-Lago yesterday, President Trump ordered that the military fire over 50 (to confuse Russian defense systems) Tomahawk cruise missiles at the suspected Syrian airbase in retaliation. After the attack, Common Dreams put out, Without Proof or Cause or Consent, ‘Impetuous’ Trump Bombs Syria:
Though Trump claims there is “no dispute” that Assad was responsible for the horrific deaths earlier this week in the town of Khan Sheikhoun, he is widely regarded as a serial liar and someone whose own FBI and top intelligence officials have had to discredit recent public accusations he has made.
Common Dreams quoted Sam Sacks on Twitter:
Guest after guest is gushing. From MSNBC to CNN, Trump is receiving his best night of press so far. And all he had to do was start a war.
Many pundits observed that George W Bush rescued his deeply unpopular presidency by attacking Iraq after 9/11 (based on false data about weapons of mass destruction), and worried that the even more unpopular Trump might resort to the same tactic. Assuming that the Deep State wanted Hillary Clinton to initiate a proxy war in Syria, I would say that National Security Adviser McMaster’s edging out of Steve Bannon and our subsequent attack on Syria represent a clear victory for the neoconservative/neoliberal Deep State over the anti-interventionism expressed by Trump during his presidential campaign.
Updates, from the Jimmy Dore Show, on Youtube:
Out Like Flynn
“Come at the king, you best not miss.” – Omar
President Trump came into office, promising:
From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.
Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.
It isn’t too hard to interpret his inaugural speech and his first flurry of appointments, executive orders and memoranda as an attack on the current regime, deep state, shadow government or whatever you want to call that combination of oligarchs, lobbyists, bureaucrats, media and spooks that run the government behind the scenes, and enjoys the lion’s share of the spoils.
Trump may think he is the king, but his close staff has to know that they are coming at the deep state, and can’t afford to look weak. Likewise, the deep state has to know that they aren’t going to get that many shots at Trump. They have one now, but is it good enough?
Trump lost in the courts, which may have been expected, but has had to ask Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, to resign, which he probably did not expect. Bill Moyers wants the government to investigate all Trump’s connections with Russia, as he writes in, We Must Know the Truth:
Why was nothing done until the media broke the story? And why did Trump lie? As the National Lampoon joked back during the Watergate era, rephrasing the crucial questions aimed at Richard Nixon: “What did the president know and when did he STOP knowing it?”
Is it possible Trump and Flynn had been talking all along and keeping it to themselves? Who authorized Flynn to speak with the Russian ambassador on Trump’s behalf in the first place? The president himself or chief strategist Steve Bannon? Or someone else? Was Flynn a lone gun? Who can tell with all the lies?
And another thing: if the White House has known what was going on for weeks, why was Flynn still attending intelligence briefings as late as Monday? …
Cenk Uygur thinks taking down Flynn is just a warning shot, and that it all boils down to that 500 billion dollar oil deal with Russia that was put on hold after Obama’s sanctions. Another theory is that Trump was forced to borrow from shady lenders with ties to Russia. In any case, the media is hitting the Russian connection hard, and we can expect to see Beck Bennett’s bare-chested Putin on SNL next weekend.
I ran across John Robb’s blog, Global Guerrilla, a few days ago. Robb is an Air Force Academy graduate, who has specialized in social networking and the future of warfare. “I spent last year working for the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff on his vision for how AGI (artificial general intelligence) and robotics would transform how the Joint Force fights in 2035.”
In a post called, Political Networking (how social networking is changing politics forever), Robb notes that Trump’s team leveraged what he calls an open source insurgency to win the election, but is having trouble adapting it to govern. The resistance (or what he calls the Orthodoxy) however, is well-positioned to attack Trump with it’s own open source insurgency, which:
- arose out of the ashes of the political parties and is growing without any formal leadership.
- is ALREADY firmly in control of nearly all public forums.
- enforces opposition to Trump
- uses social networking to exert pressure on people to accept the orthodox position (in this case: #resistance to Trump).
- grows through peer pressure and disconnecting deviants from the network. It doesn’t innovate. It rejects, cajoles, and pillories.
- is growing at an accelerated pace because Trump feeds the outrage that fuels it.
I can already see the peer pressure on Facebook and some blogs, but I also see it hardening support from Trump’s followers and increasing divisions between working and technocratic classes. Robb hopes for some sort of participatory network arising to overcome both sides, but believes we are actually prepping for a civil war.
Deep Trump
In previous posts I have included some quotes about what an American Deep State might look like. Many thanks to Felicity for linking to DONALD J. TRUMP AND THE DEEP STATE by Peter Dale Scott on Who.What.Why. Part 1 is mostly about what constitutes the Deep State, and how at least two factions are in opposition:
… those who saw the election as a contest between outsider Trump and a “deep state” tended to give two different meanings to this new term. On the one hand were those who saw the deep state as “a conglomerate of insiders” incorporating all those, outside and inside the traditional state, who “run the country no matter who is in the White House…and without the consent of voters.”[8] On the other were those who, like Chris Hedges, limited the “deep state” to those perverting constitutional American politics from the margin of the Washington Beltway — “the security and surveillance apparatus, the war machine.”[9]
But both of these simplistic definitions, suitable for campaign rhetoric, omit the commanding role played by big money — what used to be referred to as Wall Street, but now includes an increasingly powerful number of maverick non-financial billionaires like the Koch brothers. All serious studies of the deep state, including Mike Lofgren’s The Deep State and Philip Giraldi’s Deep State America as well as this book, acknowledge the importance of big money.[10]
It is important to recognize moreover, that the current division between “red” and “blue” America is overshadowed by a corresponding division at the level of big money, one that contributed greatly to the ugliness of the 2016 campaign. In The American Deep State (p. 30), I mention, albeit very briefly, the opposition of right-wing oilmen and the John Birch Society “to the relative internationalism of Wall Street.”[11] That opposition has become more powerful, and better financed, than ever before.
It has also evolved. As I noted in The American Deep State, (p. 14), the deep state “is not a structure but a system, as difficult to define, but also as real and powerful, as a weather system.” A vigorous deep state, like America, encompasses dynamic processes continuously generating new forces within it like the Internet — just as a weather system is not fixed but changes from day to day.
In Part 2, Scott links the often-bankrupted Trump to lenders with ties to Russian financial interests, making a better case for Russian hacking of the recent election than I have seen elsewhere.
The existence of a Deep State is dispiriting, and makes me feel like a rat in a cage. It is one thing to talk about opposing conservatives, or electing progressives, but that seems like throwing rocks while the apparatchiks of the deep state are targeting drone strikes.
A Silly Idea
Your revolution is a silly idea, yeah
All your friends are feeling sad
Hopes that Ivanka and Jared Kushner would be a moderating influence on President Trump seem to be fading as the machinations of adviser Steven Bannon dominate the news cycle. Anyone who is, is related to, or is friends with immigrants, persons of color, women using birth control and even sick people hoping to use medical marijuana has to be dismayed by the current direction of the Trump administration, in particular the latest Supreme Court nominee. Their hopes and dreams probably won’t stand for much under the new regime. And though Trump has extended an order banning discrimination against LGBTQ federal workers, that community is not very reassured.
An article, rebuttal and reply in Dissent Magazine go back and forth on whether social progress was just a carrot used by financial interests to promote neoliberal globalism:
The End of Progressive Neoliberalism
… Trump’s victory is not solely a revolt against global finance. What his voters rejected was not neoliberalism tout court, but progressive neoliberalism. This may sound to some like an oxymoron, but it is a real, if perverse, political alignment that holds the key to understanding the U.S. election results and perhaps some developments elsewhere too. In its U.S. form, progressive neoliberalism is an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. However unwittingly, the former lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once middle-class lives.
There Was No Such Thing as “Progressive Neoliberalism”
… Fraser’s argument carries an undercurrent of blame toward feminism and other social movements for having participated in what she dubs “progressive neoliberalism.” It was, she argues, a revolt against progressive neoliberalism that led to Trump’s victory over Clinton. By shifting the analysis away from the capitalist class offensive that ushered in the neoliberal order, and which is primarily responsible for the U.S. political drift to the right, Fraser ends up attacking “identity politics” in favor of “class politics.” While her conclusion is that of course the left must embrace anti-sexism and anti-racism, her analysis implies the opposite—she’s clearly suspicious of multiculturalism and diversity.
Against Progressive Neoliberalism, A New Progressive Populism
Johanna Brenner’s reading of my essay misses the centrality of the problem of hegemony. My main point was that the current dominance of finance capital was not achieved only by force but also by what Gramsci called “consent.” Forces favoring financialization, corporate globalization, and deindustrialization succeeded in taking over the Democratic Party, I claimed, by presenting those patently anti-labor policies as progressive. Neoliberals gained power by draping their project in a new cosmopolitan ethos, centered on diversity, women’s empowerment, and LGBTQ rights. Drawing in supporters of such ideals, they forged a new hegemonic bloc, which I called progressive neoliberalism. In identifying and analyzing this bloc, I never lost sight of the power of finance capital, as Brenner claims, but offered an explanation for its political ascendance.
In a broader take, an article in the NY Review of Books looks grimly at the European Union, and what is called populism. In, Is Europe Disintegrating?, Timothy Garton Ash imagines his reaction had he been frozen in 2005, when the Eurozone was robustly expanding:
Cryogenically reanimated in January 2017, I would immediately have died again from shock. For now there is crisis and disintegration wherever I look: the eurozone is chronically dysfunctional, sunlit Athens is plunged into misery, young Spaniards with doctorates are reduced to serving as waiters in London or Berlin, the children of Portuguese friends seek work in Brazil and Angola, and the periphery of Europe is diverging from its core. There is no European constitution, since that was rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands later in 2005. The glorious freedom of movement for young Poles and other Central and Eastern Europeans has now contributed substantially to a shocking referendum vote by my own country, Britain, to leave the EU altogether. And Brexit brings with it the prospect of being stripped of my European citizenship on the thirtieth anniversary of 1989.
Ash and the authors he cites lend credence to the Mark Blyth prediction that the EU will collapse very soon. He goes on to express fear about populists invoking “the people”:
Populists speak in the name of “the people,” and claim that their direct legitimation from “the people” trumps (the verb has acquired a new connotation) all other sources of legitimate political authority, be it constitutional court, head of state, parliament, or local and state government. Donald Trump’s “I am your voice” is a classic populist statement. But so is the Turkish prime minister’s riposte to EU assertions that a red line had been crossed by his government’s clampdown on media freedom: “The people draw the red lines.” So is the Daily Mail’s front-page headline denouncing three British High Court judges who ruled that Parliament must have a vote on Brexit as “Enemies of the People.” Meanwhile, Polish right-wing nationalists justify an ongoing attempt to neuter Poland’s constitutional court on the grounds that the people are “the sovereign.”
The other crucial populist move is to identify as “the people” (or Volk) what turns out to be only some of the people. A Trump quotation from the campaign trail captures this perfectly: “The only important thing is the unification of the people,” said the Donald, “because the other people don’t mean anything.” UKIP’s Nigel Farage welcomed the Brexit vote as a victory for “ordinary people,” “decent people,” and “real people.” The 48 percent of us who voted on June 23, 2016, for Britain to remain in the EU are plainly neither ordinary nor decent, nor even real. Everywhere it’s the “other people” who now have to watch out: Mexicans and Muslims in the US, Kurds in Turkey, Poles in Britain, Muslims and Jews all over Europe, as well as Sinti and Roma, refugees, immigrants, black people, women, cosmopolitans, homosexuals, not to mention “experts,” “elites,” and “mainstream media.” Welcome to a world of rampant Trumpismo.
Is Trump another Carter?
Corey Robin is a professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. According to online CVs, he has majored in studying both Conservatism (from Burke to Palin), and Neoconservatism, and has minored in the failures of the New Left (neoliberals I suppose) in running the American Empire.
On his blog he admits to having expected a Clinton victory:
In the last chapter of The Reactionary Mind, I argued that conservatism, at least in its modern, twentieth-century American incarnation, had essentially succeeded in its goals. That is, it had destroyed the New Deal, had effectively stopped the civil rights movement, and had significantly slowed the feminist movement. Its great success was its defeat of the left. And because I understand conservatism as an inherently reactionary movement, as a movement that mobilizes against movements of emancipation on behalf of subordinate classes, I argued that its success would prove, long-term, to be the source of its defeat. We could already see the signs, I argued throughout the book, of this coming conservative crack-up. That was in 2011.
But in writing about the election of 2016, I was also influenced by Stephen Skowronek’s The Politics Presidents Make. In that book, which came out in 1993, Skowronek argues that presidents come into office not as sovereign creators of a new world, but as the beneficiaries or burdens of an established regime. That orientation to the regime—is the president opposed to or aligned with the existing way of doing things—plus the strength or weakness of the regime, gives us a sense of how a president might govern. My sense, based on my reading of conservatism and the George W. Bush presidency, was that the Republican free-market regime of Ronald Reagan was becoming weaker, and that Trump would prove to be the equivalent of the George McGovern of the right: that is, the most outré expression of the regime’s principles, at a moment when the regime has begun to decline in popularity.
So I was obviously wrong about Trump being the McGovern of the right. The question is why?
One possibility is that I was wrong about the weaknesses of the Reagan regime. Rather than being weak, perhaps it was strong, which would make Trump an ideal candidate for election. In support of that possibility, people will point to the widespread control the Republicans have over state legislatures today, though as I said at the time this McGovern issue came up, the Democrats also had widespread control over state legislatures in the 1970s, and their control over Congress, particularly the House, was legendary and long-standing.
Another possibility is that I wasn’t wrong about the weaknesses of the Reagan regime but that I was wrong about Trump. Unlike conservatives or Republicans, he was doing something different: he was populist, he was revanchist, he was racist, he was outrageous, he was a demagogue, he reached out to the white working class. He was, in other words, the expression of an utterly new formation, not captured by the nostrums of conservatism. For a thousand different reasons, most of which I explore in my book, I think that argument couldn’t be more wrong. Virtually all the things that people point to that supposedly make Trump not like your typical Republican or conservative are, from my point of view, the emblematic features of what it means to be a conservative. And nothing anyone has said has convinced me otherwise.
Robin continues these thoughts for N+1 Magazine in, The Politics Trump Makes, comparing Donald J Trump to, of all people, James Earl Carter.
Robin alludes to the theory that breaks up American government into six regimes:
1789 – 1800 Federalist regime: Washington, Adams and Hamilton make America an organized state.
1800 – 1828 Democratic-Republican regime: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe try to decentralize.
1828 – 1860 Democratic regime: Jackson led the populist wing of the D-Rs, the rest became Whigs.
1860 – 1932 Republican regime: Lincoln led a coalition of Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats
(Some insert a Progressive regime, starting with McKinley or Teddy Roosevelt)
1932 – 1980 Democratic New Deal regime: FDR promised two chickens in every pot.
1980 – 2016 Republican Free-Market regime: Reagan promised wealth would trickle into the pot.
Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR and Reagan were “reconstructive” leaders, “creating the terms and conditions of politics for decades to come.”
Later in a regime were either potent, “articulating” leaders, building on a still vital regime, or weaker, “preemptive” leaders, trying to overthrow a still strong regime. LBJ was the former; RMN was the latter.
As a regime fails, there may be a, “disjunctive” leader that attempts to keep the regime going. Like Carter, these are usually the most hated Presidents. Or, there will be a, “reconstructive” leader that begins a new regime. It might be that Obama was the final, “disjunctive” leader of the free market regime, which would explain why such an outwardly affable, reasonable man was so widely vilified for trying to please everyone.
It might also be that Trump will be “disjunctive.” Trump is officially of the same party as the current regime, but he has also challenged the deep state that supports that regime. Trump ran as a populist, but has stocked his cabinet with both members of the current regime and amateur billionaires that stand to benefit from Free-Market precepts.
We are now reaching the end of the fourth decade of the Reagan regime. Whether Trump will prove to be a reconstructive, articulating, or disjunctive President—that is, whether we are nearing the end, entering the middle, or about to double down on the Reagan regime—remains to be seen. Skowronek’s model is not predictive; it sets out possibilities rather than prophesies. Trump may launch a reconstruction or founder in disjunction, and over time the distinction between reconstruction and disjunction can begin to blur. The outcome will depend on Trump, his party, international events, the economy, and his opposition, both inside and outside the Democratic Party.
Which sort of President Trump becomes will depend on whether the neocon/neolib regime has figuratively, and literally, run out of gas. As I noted in a previous post, Andrew Bacevich expects Trump to be a transitional figure; what Robin would consider “disjunctive.”
We’re in Deep State, Man
I’ve recently read a few articles that allude to a Deep State in the United States of America. That term seems to be derived from a collusion between drug traffickers and the military in Turkey, but has been expanded to describe organized behind-the-scenes political activity in other countries, including the US.
Essentially, outside observers suspect that some combination of the military–industrial complex, intelligence community, too-big-to-fail bankers, monopolistic corporations, lobbyists, plutocrats, oligarchs and sometimes the mainstream media, secretly and effectively determine public policy. The more conspiratorially-inclined think the deep state is a very organized secret Politburo; others think it is loose and factional like the rest of the government, but responds only to the desires of the wealthy and influential. I tend towards the latter view.
In, Trump Aims to Cut the Neocon Deep State Off at the Knees, Charles Hugh Smith opines that while one cannot prove the existence of a shadow government, one can sorta, kinda read what is going on. Smith sees a deep state power struggle as evidenced by a public disconnect between the CIA and the FBI over the course of the recent election.
I have long held that America’s Deep State–the unelected National Security State often referred to as the Shadow Government–is not a unified monolith but a deeply divided ecosystem in which the dominant Neocon-Neoliberal Oligarchy is being challenged by elements which view the Neocon-Neoliberal agenda as a threat to national security and the interests of the United States.
I call these anti-Neocon-Neoliberal elements the progressive Deep State.
Smith, John Michael Greer and others consider Trump to be a better option because they feared that Clinton would lead the US into wars of hegemony with Russia or China. To that extent they would be cheering any challenger to the neoliberals. They generally admit, however, that they have no idea whether Trump will be an effective President.
In, America Versus the Deep State, perennial kollapsnik James Howard Kunstler sees just the one, neocon-neoliberal, deep state:
The story may have climaxed with Trump’s Friday NSA briefing, the heads of the various top intel agencies all assembled in one room to emphasize the solemn authority of the Deep State’s power. Trump worked a nice piece of ju-jitsu afterward, pretending to accept the finding as briefly and hollowly as possible and promising to “look into the matter” after January 20th — when he can tear a new asshole in the NSA. I hope he does. This hulking security apparatus has become a menace to the Republic.
Kunstler also thinks/hopes that Trump’s changes may turn out to be a better alternative to continuing the neoliberal hegemony.
In, The Age of Great Expectations and the Great Void, which is posted on TomDispatch, Truthdig and CommonDreams, historian Andrew Bacevich doesn’t invoke a deep state to make his case for why America is changing course. Bacevich feels that after the collapse of the USSR, America’s leadership (mistakenly) bought into three themes:
1 Globalization of the American business and financial system
2 Preeminence of American military power
3 Expansion of Personal Freedom
Regarding #3, Bacevich is a social conservative, to whom too much personal freedom is a recipe for failure. We did eventually see some laws changed to reflect greater personal freedoms, but after the good feelings of the early 1980s, Middle America’s confidence was rocked:
… During the concluding decade of the twentieth century and the first decade-and-a-half of the twenty-first, Americans endured a seemingly endless series of crises. Individually, none of these merit comparison with, say, the Civil War or World War II. Yet never in U.S. history has a sequence of events occurring in such close proximity subjected American institutions and the American people to greater stress.
During the decade between 1998 and 2008, they came on with startling regularity: one president impeached and his successor chosen by the direct intervention of the Supreme Court; a massive terrorist attack on American soil that killed thousands, traumatized the nation, and left senior officials bereft of their senses; a mindless, needless, and unsuccessful war of choice launched on the basis of false claims and outright lies; a natural disaster (exacerbated by engineering folly) that all but destroyed a major American city, after which government agencies mounted a belated and half-hearted response; and finally, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, bringing ruin to millions of families.
Bacevich feels that Americans who elected Trump were simply ready for a change – any change – from the status quo, but that Trump will be a transitional rather than a transformational leader – if only because he and his party seem bereft of any ideas other than consolidating their own power.
The Autonomous Government
Every two years, we elect parts of the government, and then sit back as they drive the country around and around, hither and yon. Sometimes we try to comment or protest about where we are headed, but it seems pretty clear that the government only changes direction for people with money. Even votes don’t matter all that much any more.
Almost forty years ago, the government began deregulating large financial institutions. About eight years ago, those institutions almost drove us off a financial cliff, and into the great recession.
One reaction was the Tea Party movement, named after the Boston Tea Party, which rose in early 2009 in protest of bailouts like the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and even the auto industry reorganizations. But the Tea Party eventually morphed – or was morphed – into a more fiscally and socially conservative wing of the Republican Party.
Another reaction was the Occupy movement, which echoed the Arab Spring and overseas anti-austerity student protests in the UK, Spain, Chile, and Greece. Hordes of young Occupiers railed against Wall Street and corporations as the 1%, but were never completely on board with their anarchist organizers, and were eventually dispersed by local governments.
One might see the presidential campaigns of Donald J Trump and Bernie Sanders as later echoes of the Tea Party and Occupy, respectively. Sanders’ campaign was undermined by the Democratic National Committee, but he now seems to be a major voice in what is left of the Democratic Party.
Trump ran as the anti-establishment voice for the forgotten working class, but seems to be surrounding himself with “experienced” staffers from the ranks of the same swamp he promised to drain. It remains to be seen exactly how Trump governs, but I suspect that he will end up as another passenger in the autonomous government.
Splainin’ Trumpism
The presidential race has tightened. On a Young Turks snippet, Cenk Uygur cited a number of reputable polls putting Trump ahead in various swing states, and even Nate Silver has lowered Hillary’s chances from 87% a few weeks ago, to about 67%. Some attribute the Trump surge to James Comey investigating more of Hillary Clinton’s, “damn emails,” others cite a staggering recent increase in ACA (Obamacare) premiums. I have doubted all polling since FiveThirtyEight blew the Michigan primary.
Since Donald J Trump became a credible candidate, just about every pundit or blogger – myself included – has taken a stab at explaining why voters might support such a strange duck. I understand that Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo plans to write a book on the subject. I’ve already posted about the comparisons to Brexit, and the disaffected working class voters, and the pundits that have gone there. Most don’t go there.
A lot of mainstream media prefer to focus on Trump’s appeal to angry, white, male voters. The Awl makes that into quite the joke: The Only Article You Need To Read About Why Trump Voters Are Angry.
On a more serious note, one of my stepdaughters, who walks the walk at the Southern Poverty Law Center, facebook-posted an article from Dame Magazine, Why I Have No Sympathy for Angry White Men:
Their disillusionment needs to be heard since these feelings are why Trump’s racist and sexist appeals have found a large audience. Their plight, from the declining life expectancy to the heroin epidemic, from poverty to mass shootings, requires intervention because if White men are struggling, we are all doomed.
America is founded on the belief in the American Dream—for White men. … I’d like to welcome them to the world that people of color have lived in for centuries, with no hope of reprieve and no resources for reprisal. Let the salt of their tears season their brains to see beyond all the traps that they have laid for themselves in the minefields of White supremacy and entitlement.
I agree that Trump supporters would have a stronger case if they had been out marching for Trayvon, Tamir and at Standing Rock – but there are a lot of people of all ethnicities sharing in the working class decline. Many were heartened by Bernie Sanders, but can’t stomach Clinton or Trump. Most, though, will choose one or the other.
In, Donald Trump and the rise of white identity in politics, The Conversation supports a more charitable thesis of White Identity politics:
Many political commentators credit Donald Trump’s rise to white voters’ antipathy toward racial and ethnic minorities. However, we believe this focus on racial resentment obscures another important aspect of racial thinking.
In a study of white Americans’ attitudes and candidate preferences, we found that Trump’s success reflects the rise of “white identity politics” – an attempt to protect the collective interests of white voters via the ballot box. Whereas racial prejudice refers to animosity toward other racial groups, white identity reflects a sense of connection to fellow white Americans.
We’re not the first to tie Trump’s candidacy to white identity politics. But our data provide some of the clearest evidence that ongoing demographic changes in the United States are increasing white racial identity. White identity, in turn, is pushing white Americans to support Trump.
When we talk about white identity, we’re not referring to the alt-right fringe, the white nationalist movement or others who espouse racist beliefs. Rather, we’re talking about everyday white Americans who, perhaps for the first time, are racially conscious.
Of course ‘white’ is a fairly elastic term. George Zimmerman, half-Peruvian, looks Latino, but was white enough after he shot a black youth. Barack Obama, half-AngloEuropean, will never be white enough because his skin is obviously dark. I’m hoping this analysis is wrong because what we need are everyday Americans who are more class-inclusive, and less susceptible to racial division.
Torpedoing Trump
My news-watching habits have changed a lot during this election cycle. I’ve dropped my NY Times subscription, and I’ve stopped paying much attention to evening news, Meet the Press, Face the Nation or This Week. I’ve been watching Democracy Now! for almost fifteen years, but now DN and The Young Turks have become my primary sources, along with progressive sites like Truthdig, Common Dreams and Counterpunch.
I’ve been criticizing Clinton and the mainstream press so much that a lot of my Facebook friends probably think I’m pulling for Trump. Actually I’m appalled that the establishment media is so openly in the bag for the establishment candidate. It was fairly clear that most of the media, including so-called new media, sandbagged Bernie Sanders, declaring the race over long before it was over; now, there is no doubt that they are doing their best to torpedo Donald Trump. He certainly deserves scrutiny, but all pretense of objectivity has vanished and the election coverage has become strictly a matter of competing identity politics.
Richard King discusses some of the reasons in a persuasive article, MEDIA CULPA: JOURNALISTS TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR TRUMP, MANAGE TO MISS THE POINT which he has posted to 3 Quarks Daily:
To observe the rather pompous way that certain newspapers and magazines have broken with their traditional “neutrality” by endorsing Clinton or disendorsing Trump is to see this ideology in action. The implication is that a careful poise of detached objectivity has been momentarily abandoned in order to meet a political crisis the like of which the US has never seen. But there is a difference between “objectivity” and merely acting as the referee between two kinds of conservatism: the Democratic kind and the Republican kind.
King pokes fun at media “self-aggrandizement” but skips over the point that establishment media is going to bat for the establishment candidate. And like the mainstream media, King dismisses Trump’s politics as, “protectionist, parochial, paranoid.” Yes, many of his supporters are protectionist, and yes, they are parochial, but as the joke goes, they aren’t paranoid if someone really is out to get them. America’s hinterland economies have been sold out by the oligarchy in a way that the coastal and urban elites have (so far) avoided. Whether you like them or not, America’s white middle class electorate is actually staring into deep decline, and no longer expect any help from establishment government.
You don’t have to be a Trump supporter to wonder who will get sold out next.
Update: Alternet warns, We Are Ignoring the Worst Dangers of Trumpism at Our Own Peril
History shows that the support base for right-wing extremist movements tends to be primarily the petty bourgeoisie—small businesspeople, professionals at the lower levels—but populism never gets far without the support of large numbers of the permanently unemployed. The official economic statistics would have us believe—and Trump vigorously contests this—that we are at or near full employment. In fact, this is a gross deception, because there are tens of millions of Americans who have given up looking for employment, who for various reasons are not employable in any meaningful sense of the word. Trump claims it is 30 percent of the population, but whatever number it really is, experience shows that it is pervasive, outside a few humming urban centers that give the illusion of high employment. As a matter of policy, the U.S. has not been committed to full employment since the 1970s, as part of the anti-inflationary monetary policy inaugurated by Paul Volcker and carried on by other committed neoliberals.
It is interesting to read bemused articles by correspondents at elite magazines like the Atlantic and the New Yorker, wondering who the Trump supporters really are (as they do after every populist upsurge), acting as though they were writing about aliens from another planet (which they are in a sense, since the elite commentators cannot understand why the Trumpists take such a dire view of the economy, since everything, from their point of view, seems pretty decent, with a 5% unemployment rate, the stock market doing well, and the evidence of their own booming urban areas).
Update: Robert Scheer and Thomas Frank on Democrats’ Shift Away From Addressing Inequality (Audio)
In their conversation, [Thomas] Frank tells [Robert] Scheer how the [Democratic] party has become class-based, now representing primarily the “professional” or upper socioeconomic class. Frank also talks about the Clintons’ role in this shift and why he believes people who might have earlier voted for Democrats are now flocking to Donald Trump.
When Scheer suggests that Bill and Hillary Clinton may not represent a lesser evil—when compared to Republicans—but merely a “different kind of evil,” Frank responds: “You could make the argument that Bill Clinton did things in the 1990s that no Republican would have been capable of doing. … Reagan couldn’t push bank deregulation as far as Clinton did. Clinton did things that Reagan would never have dared to do: welfare reform … [and] NAFTA. George Bush couldn’t get NAFTA passed. … So you start to think that the game that the Clintons play with us, where we vote for them because we have nowhere else to go. … There’s a sort of political economics of how we the voters are manipulated in this situation, and they’re very, very good at playing that game. And so people like you and me who are on the left are captured, basically. We don’t have anywhere else to go. And they play us in a certain way.”
He continues: “I have a lot of friends who say you can’t criticize the Democrats because you’ll just weaken them and then the Republicans will get in. But I say that we can’t give up our critical faculties just because of the ugly historical situation that we’re in.”
Frank also adds that while he is no fan of Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner for the presidency leaves “no uncertainty in the minds of his listeners, after they’ve sat through one of his speeches, that he is a guy that is gonna get tough with American companies that want to move their factories to Mexico or China or anywhere like that. Left parties the world over were founded in order to give voice to and to help and to serve working people. That’s what they exist for. And those people are now flocking to Donald Trump, who is railing against things like NAFTA. We’re in this situation now where thanks to the Clintons and thanks to Obama, the social dynamics of the two-party system have been … mostly turned on their head.”
Donal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.