Bathed in the soothing waters of the Blue Wave, such that it was, a new US Congress will be baptized on January 3rd. But what portends when “Mad Dog” Mattis, arch racist Jeff Sessions, and deep state spooks are canonized by self-identified liberals and leftists as bulwarks against fascism? When all mainstream “opposition” politics can be reduced to a single issue: Trump. And when the midterm elections ignored deepening impoverishment at home, endless wars abroad, and climate calamity – let alone the tax cut for the super-rich – and instead focused on the “threat” posed by (take your pick) immigrants or the Russians.

For the first time ever, the Gallup poll reported that most Democrats favor socialism to capitalism. And for good reason: as the Occupy movement proclaimed, “the system isn’t broken, its fixed.” An observer from the UK quipped, if the midterm elections would have changed anything, they would not have been allowed.

The American body politic is in deep malaise with the current administration. But Trump is the symptom, not the disease, which is neoliberal rule. The conditions that allowed the ascendency of Trump were the result of the neoliberal policies of Obama/Bush and of their predecessors. Trump does not so much represent a break or reversal of Obama era policies. Rather, we are suffering a continuation and intensification of those policies as the body politic lurches to the right.

The Leadup to the New Congress

The good news for US democracy was the largest voter turnout in half a century for the congressional mid-term elections. For the 66% of the US population under 50 years, it was the highest in their lifetime. The more sobering news is that even with this record turnout, the majority of eligible voters didn’t vote. While the pool of eligible voters is diminished by felony disenfranchisement and other laws and practices depending on the state.

Beyond the microcosm of the corporate two-party system, there is a universe out there and even issues that transcend one’s affection or distaste for Trump. What if we had an electoral system like Cuba, where the vast majority of eligible voters are motived to participate?

A glimpse of the smoldering discontent within the US electorate was seen in the vaguely insurgent candidacies in 2016 of Trump, with his fauxpopulist appeal to those dispossessed by an economy that left them behind, and of Sanders with his critique of income inequality in a rigged system. For now, those grassroots potentials for genuine change have been contained and domesticated within the two-party system, dedicated above all to preserve existing power relationships.

Only 30 of 435 seats (7%) in the House were considered truly contested. Fully 74% of the seats were considered solidly safe for their respective parties; 183 for the Democrats and 137 for the Republicans.

In my one-party state of California, senator-for-life Diane Feinstein ran against a fellow Democrat. Our peculiar institution of placing only the top two winners of the primaries, regardless of party, on the general election ballot barred voters from voting for, or even writing in, a third-party choice let alone a Republican.

So, the majority of eligible voters sat out the midterm spectacle, simply not bothering with politicians awash in ever more obscene tsunamis of corporate cash.

Nancy Pelosi, representing San Francisco’s congressional district, spent an astronomical $5,111,387 for her virtually uncontested House seat. Her Republican opponent spent a paltry $12,443, barely enough to place a campaign statement on the ballot and pay for the postage to mail it. Had Pelosi sat out the campaign as did her opponent, Pelosi still would have coasted to victory on party and name recognition.

There is a reason why Pelosi, running in an absolutely safe district, outspent her opponent 410 to 1. Pelosi doled out her millions to other candidates running for the House who will then repay the favor by electing her majority leader of the new Congress. In other words, she served as the bag lady for her corporate donors to gain that position, which is not insignificant. Were Trump to become any more puffed up with ego and explode, taking Pence with him, Pelosi would be the next POTUS paid for by Facebook, Amazon, and the American Hospital Association.

Elections as currently constituted are auditions by politicians performing for the big money interests who cast those best at conning the electorate.

Who Are Our Friends – Who Are Our Enemies?

The present oligarch of the Oval Office is not a friend of working people, even if in his erratic behavior he may on occasion stumble to the left as with his flirtation with détente rather than nuclear war with Russia. Cautionary note: Trump is not about to reverse the US imperial project.

What was shocking about Trump’s intention to withdraw US troops from Syria was not the suddenness of the announcement. In fact, this was a campaign promise made when he was candidate Trump and reiterated since. What shocked and indeed infuriated the establishment was that a politician was actually following through on a campaign promise that would draw down a US military invasion and occupation. For now, at least, Trump has broken with the time-honored US electoral tradition (e.g., Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo) of promising the electorate peace and giving them war.

Remember the Democrats’ promise of a “peace dividend” at the end of the old Cold War in the early 1990s? Now they are the war party nipping at Trump’s haunches from the right, goading him into an ever more aggressive new Cold War. Democrats voted 2 to 1 to increase, rather than cut, Trump’s first military budget. Democrats are vehemently against drawing down US troops in the Middle East and positively apoplectic about the threat of peace breaking out in the Korean Peninsula.

It goes without saying that Trump and the Republicans are no an alternative for progressive social change. Unfortunately, traditional liberalism is also a dead end. There has been no major progressive legislation passed since the mid-1970s. According to Noam Chomsky, the last liberal president was Richard Nixon. Liberals, because they no longer even pretend to have a progressive agenda, are relegated to the role of, on one hand, legitimizing those to the right and, on the other, attacking genuine progressives, especially those representing third parties such as the Greens or the Peace and Freedom Party.

In the Hall of Mirrors Called the Democratic Party, the Lesser Evil Becomes the Other Evil

With brand Obama, the Democratic Party had peddled hope to the masses. That advertising appeal no longer passes the red face test. The new marketing strategy by leftish apologists for the Democrats is to be sophisticatedly unapologetic about the deep corruption of the electoral party of their choice.

+ Noam Chomsky laments “a New Democrat leadership that panders to the donor class.”

+ Author Thomas Frank regrets the Democratic Party going from the party of the people to “the party of the rich elites.”

+ Filmmaker Michael Moore bemoans how the Democrats paved the way for Trump.

+ Writer Paul Street deplores: “Yes, the Democrats are horrible. They make my skin crawl. I’ve documented their record as a pack of ‘lying neoliberal warmongers…’”

And then they all urge us, in the words of Street, “to hold one’s nose and vote ‘for’ the Dems” once again, and again, and again…and forever. Presumably to reward them for bad behavior.

The latest addition to the Democratic Party leadership is party caucus leader Hakeem Jefferies, an African American from New York City. Although a member of the Progressive Caucus, he earned his spurs attacking single-payer healthcare and Bernie Sanders from the right, while being a leading champion of charter schools and the security state. It is difficult to tell left from right in the hall of mirrors called the Democratic Party.

With the realignment of the Democratic Party, it is no longer the “lesser evil” but the “other evil.” Meanwhile, both the economy and the polity have become more concentrated and less democratic with an ever-wealthier elite perched atop of an ever-growing surveillance state, mass incarceration, and censored media on the internet.

Lacking a substantive progressive agenda, Trump is the best thing that could happen to the Democrats whose main platform is the resurrection of the anti-Trump candidate. Will it be Oprah, Hillary, Biden, Beto, or even Bernie? The Democratic Party leadership preferred Trump as the Republican presidential candidate, showing it chose to risk a Trump presidency rather than a Sanders one, which would have been beyond the comfort zone of their corporate funders.

That was the dark secret revealed by DNC emails made public by Wikileaks. Which well explains why the Democrats have been obsessed with promoting Russiagate as a distraction and are so vindictive against Wikileaks editor Julian Assange.

A Political Party of Another Kind

With the Democrats and Republicans feeding from the same corporate trough, how different can the two parties be? The following report on a political party of another kind gives an indication.

Washington Post heiress Lally Weymouth held a swank party in the Hamptons for the ruling elite. In keeping with the virulently anti-Trump/pro-Democrat editorial line of the Post, the guest list included Senator Chuck Schumer, former governor/senator Bob Graham, and other Democratic Party politicians along with billionaire funders of the party such as George Soros, Ronald Lauder, and Carl Icahn.

But, hey, this was a ruling class party. So also attending were Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, a number of Trump’s cabinet secretaries, and fat-cat Republican funder David Koch of the Koch brothers.

As reporter Maureen Callahan observed: “Weymouth’s party is the latest reminder that for all the bruising rhetoric, the constant polls showing a deeply divided America and the most polarizing president in history, our battle isn’t red vs. blue, right vs. left: It’s about the 1% vs. the rest of us. They laugh as we take their political theater for real.”

counterpunch.org

Evil days.

The midterms were bearing down on us like a runaway train with Donald Trump in the driver’s seat and the throttle wide open, the Presidential Special hell-bent for the bottom. “Go Trump Go!” tweeted David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, as if the president needed anyone’s encouragement. There had been no slacking after pipe bombs were sent to a number of his critics; nor after two black people were killed in Kentucky by a white man who, minutes before, had tried to enter a predominantly black church; nor after 11 worshippers in Pittsburgh were murdered at the Tree of Life Congregation synagogue by a man who’d expressed special loathing for HIAS, a Jewish refugee resettlement and advocacy organization. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” Robert Bowers posted on his Gab account hours before the massacre. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

Trump, relentless Trump, went right on raging about “invasions,” left-wing “mobs,” globalists, MS-13, and “caravan after caravan [of] illegal immigrants” invited in by Democrats to murder Americans, vote illegally, and mooch off our health care system. “Hate speech leads to hate crimes,” Rabbi Jeffrey Myers told the president in Pittsburgh several days after the murders. The FBI had previously reported a large spike in hate crimes over the previous two years, and the Anti-Defamation League noted a 60% rise in anti-Semitic incidents from 2016 to 2017. Then there was this, reported in the New York Times on the day before the election: “Advisers to the president said his foes take his campaign rally language too literally; as outrageous as it might seem, it is more entertainment, intended to generate a crowd reaction.” And Trump himself, when asked why he wasn’t campaigning on the strong economy, responded: “Sometimes it’s not as exciting to talk about the economy.”

Not as exciting as, say, hate and xenophobia. And so one was led to wonder: Do countries have souls — with all the moral consequence implied by the concept of soul? If the answer is yes, then it follows that the collective soul can be corrupted and damned just as surely as that of a flesh-and-blood human being. In this election, as in all others, grave matters of policy were at stake, but we sensed something even bigger on the line in 2018 — nothing less than whether the country was past redeeming.

Lower, Smaller, Meaner

“I’m on the ballot,” Trump declared at a rally in Mississippi, and so he was. For the first time in two years, the country would render its verdict on the garish aggressions of his politics, though it bore noting that many members of his party had already voted with their feet. In the preceding months, more than 40 House Republicans had resigned outright or announced that they would not seek reelection, among them the relatively moderate chairs of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Appropriations Committee, and, most significantly, House Speaker Paul Ryan. It was an extraordinary exodus by any measure, especially for a party holding both chambers of Congress and the White House — a party possessed, that is, of the kind of power that pols dream of. Yet here were Republicans bailing out in droves.

The usual reasons were given: the desire to spend more time with family, to confront new challenges, and so forth, but the party’s scorched-earth politics of the past 30 years, the ones that had put Donald Trump in the White House, undoubtedly had something to do with it. The hyper-partisanship championed by Newt Gingrich when he was speaker of the House in the mid-1990s, the embrace of fringe elements like the birther crowd and the alt-right, the systematic trashing of longstanding institutions and traditions (like the weaponizing of the filibuster, to name just one) and now the ultimate scorched-earther in the White House: it’s easy to imagine how the more self-aware members of the Republican caucus could see no viable future for themselves in politics.

Ryan, in particular, furnished food for thought. Like John Boehner before him, he couldn’t tame the far-right beast that was the Freedom Caucus and he had Trump to deal with too. How many nights had the Speaker tossed and turned in his bed secretly pining for rational Obama? And then there was the massive contradiction of Ryan’s own politics. Eager for Republicans to get credit for the economic expansion that began in June 2009 and was now in its 100th month, Ryan studiously ignored the fact that — predicting rampant inflation and worse — he’d opposed Obama’s program of fiscal stimulus and easy monetary policy that had produced the longest expansion in the country’s history. But Ryan’s contradiction cut even deeper. As House Speaker, at the very pinnacle of his career as a supply-side disciple and deficit hawk, he had shepherded into law a legislative agenda that was projected to start producing trillion-dollar-a-year deficits by 2020.

Paul Ryan had played out his political string. To proceed further could only monsterize his psyche, twist it into a Jekyll-and-Hyde-style schizophrenia, a form of madness not unknown among twenty-first-century American politicians. With Trump as their leader, Republicans had no place to go but lower, smaller, meaner — and so they went.

Trump praised and reenacted a Montana congressman’s criminal assault on a reporter, and suggested that U.S. troops open fire on any aspiring immigrant so bold as to throw a rock at them. In Georgia, robocalls described Stacey Abrams, a black woman and the Democratic nominee for governor, as a “poor man’s Aunt Jemima.” Congressman Duncan Hunter put out an ad characterizing his opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, as a terrorist sympathizer. Ron DeSantis urged Florida voters not to “monkey this up” by electing Andrew Gillum, a black man, as their governor, while in Kansas, a Republican official called congressional candidate Sharice Davids (a Native American and graduate of Cornell Law School) a “radical socialist kickboxing lesbian” who should be “sent back packing to the reservation.”

Antonio Delgado, who is black, a Rhodes scholar, and a Harvard Law School graduate, was repeatedly characterized as “a big-city rapper” in ads supporting his opponent for a congressional seat in New York’s Hudson Valley. Representative Kevin McCarthy, jockeying to replace Paul Ryan as leader of the House Republicans, loudly revived the push to fund Trump’s border wall, and Representative Steve King fantasized at a rally that Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor “will elope to Cuba.” Pro-GOP flyers featuring anti-Semitic caricatures were distributed in opposition to Jewish Democratic candidates in Alaska, California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Washington, and elsewhere.

The loudest hysterics were reserved for the bedraggled, footsore “caravan of invaders” inching its way north through Mexico, several thousand desperate souls bringing, according to Trump, crime and terrorists. On Fox Business, Chris Farrell, a conservative activist, promoted the ongoing right-wing allegation that George Soros, who is Jewish, was paying migrants to come to the U.S. Kris Kobach, GOP candidate for governor of Kansas, declared that Democrats had “open-border psychosis.” Ted Cruz, fighting for his political life in Texas, led chants of “Build that wall!” at his rallies.

The final TV ad for Scott Wagner, the GOP nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, asserted that “a dangerous caravan of illegals careens to the border”; this same Scott Wagner had previously urged his Democratic opponent to wear a catcher’s mask because “I’m going to stomp all over your face with golf spikes.” Trump deployed some 5,600 active-duty troops south “to secure the border,” at a cost projected to be as high as $200 million, and his final campaign ad — deemed so blatantly racist that Facebook and major TV networks, including Fox, refused to air it — featured scary music, images of brown-skinned people, and a cop-killing undocumented immigrant with no known link to the caravan. The ad’s final image urged: “Stop the Caravan. Vote Republican.”

It was crude. It was dumb. It was all basically nuts. The question was: how much of America would buy it?

Record Numbers

The day after the election, Trump appeared before the media to proclaim “very close to a complete victory.” Then he proceeded to riff on the size of his crowds.

It would take days — a week and then some — to measure properly the scale of the electorate’s repudiation of Trump. Despite surgical gerrymandering and voter-suppression measures that strongly favored the GOP, Democrats took control of the House by flipping 43 seats, for a net gain of 40. It was the biggest Democratic gain since the Watergate midterm of 1974, when Democrats picked up 49 seats, and the Democrats’ 9.4 million lead (and counting) in raw votes this year was the largest margin ever by a party in a midterm.

Overall turnout was the highest in 50 years: 116 million, or 49.4% of the voting-eligible population, compared to 83 million in 2014. Democrats won women — who are not only the majority of voters but the most reliable of them — by 19 percentage points. Particularly in the suburbs, where 50% of voters now live, white women with college degrees broke hard for Democrats, but House Democratic candidates also increased their national vote margin among white working-class women by 13 points.

Young voters and minorities (think: the future) turned out in unprecedented numbers and voted overwhelmingly Democratic. The Democrats also won independents by 12%, and voters who had opted for a third-party candidate in 2016 by 13%. Trump’s misogyny, racism, and xenophobia helped elect a new House majority that will be nearly half women, a third people of color, and include more Muslim Americans, Native Americans, and LGBTQ members than ever before.

Republicans increased their razor-thin majority in the Senate by two, but even there evidence of the Trump repudiation was strong. Democrats were defending 26 of the 35 seats in play and, in almost every race, the Democratic candidate outperformed the state’s partisan lean (the average difference between how a state votes and how the overall country votes) while racking up a nationwide total of 50.5 million votes, to the GOP’s 34.5 million.

Yeah, Beto lost. He also came within 2.6 points of knocking off a well-financed, highly disciplined incumbent in a deep-red state and was instrumental in making Texas newly competitive at both the statewide and local levels. In governors’ races, Democrats flipped seven states to the Republicans’ one and achieved a net gain of more than 300 legislative seats.

State ballot measures on politically charged issues also trended blue. Arkansas and Missouri voted to raise their minimum wage. Utah, Nebraska, and Idaho voted to expand Medicaid and, with the election of a Democratic governor, Maine will follow through on last year’s winning referendum to expand Medicaid. Florida voters approved a referendum to restore voting rights to former felons. Arizona defeated a Koch brothers-backed measure to privatize public education by a two to one margin.

Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — states crucial to Trump’s Electoral College success in 2016 — swung dramatically back toward the Democrats in 2018.

Putting Real Issues Front and Center

This thing Trump was selling, this white-nationalist-freak-out-throwback special, played well enough to the base to flip Senate seats in North Dakota, Indiana, and Missouri, all states Trump won by big margins in 2016, as well as Florida’s closely contested Senate seat. But here’s the real shocker, the development that made this midterm “transformational,” as reported by Stanley Greenberg in the New York Times, based on a Democracy Corpselection night survey: the Democrats’ biggest gains in 2018 came in rural America. Greenberg also relied on an Edison exit poll for CNN that showed the Republican margin in rural areas shrinking by double digits and a Catalist poll indicating a seven-point shrinkage.

“Exciting” the base seems to have come at a cost: a 13-point swing by white working-class women, a 14-point swing by white working-class men, and a 7-point swing among all men. While Trump’s Twitter account was acting like the social media equivalent of a spastic colon, Democrats were pushing a decidedly non-hysterical message focused on health care (coverage for preexisting conditions, preserving Obamacare, and protecting Medicare and Medicaid) and basic economic fairness. As for Trump’s manifest unfitness for office, smart Democrats assumed the president himself would pound home that message.

Yes, there was a blue wave in 2018, and the “centrist” establishment Democrats who have steered the party for the past 30 years are trying to claim it for themselves. Don’t believe them. These establishment centrists — the ideological heirs of the defunct Democratic Leadership Council who now ply their trade at the Third Way think tank in the capital, along with the big-donor class, the top-dollar Washington consultants, and the data mills that comprise the Democratic election industrial complex — stand for something far different than the blue-wave centrists who powered the party in 2018.

For more than 30 years — ever since the rise of the “New Democrats” and the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s — establishment centrists have practiced the top-down politics of neoliberalism, a politics founded on the free-market gospel: deregulation of banking and finance, friendliness toward corporate monopolies, limited support (at best) for labor unions and workers, the endless “liberalization” of global trade, and reflexive antagonism for the social safety net. As all the numbers show, corporate America and the One Percent reaped the lion’s share of neoliberalism’s benefits, while the Democratic Party’s once-traditional constituencies — poor people, and the working and middle classes — fell further and further behind. The party itself — once the dominant force in national politics, and in the majority of states — gradually slid into minority status, culminating in the wipeout of 2016.

2018’s blue-wave centrists are made of different stuff. This year's energy came from the bottom up, thanks to widespread local activism and grassroots organizing, much of it led by women newly politicized in the wake of 2016. The party’s small-donor base became increasingly powerful, enabling candidates like Beto O’Rourke to run robustly financed campaigns while refusing PAC money and the strings that come with it.

This same small-donor and activist groundswell made Democrats competitive in regions long ago written off by establishment centrists who have long been less focused on the concerns of working people than on cherry-picking just enough Electoral College votes to win the presidency every four years. In 2018, however, we saw Democratic candidates running and winning in deep-red areas while talking up labor unions (Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania), slamming the “rigged system” that neoliberalism produced (Max Rose on New York’s Staten Island), and pushing for common-sense gun control (Lucy McBath in Georgia).

Democrats interested in taking back the Midwest should look to the example of Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, one of Bernie Sanders’s closest allies in the Senate. A strong voice for labor and the middle class and a longtime skeptic of international trade deals, Brown won reelection by seven percentage points in a state otherwise trending Republican. The same was true for Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has prioritized the interests of working people her entire career. She won reelection by 24 points in Minnesota, a state Trump almost won in 2016.

The blue-wave centrists put real issues front and center: housing, wages, access to health care, basic fairness and opportunity for working people. Whatever name you want to put to these issues — centrist, progressive, populist, lunch bucket, kitchen table — these haven’t been the priorities of the establishment centrists of the past 30 years. For a clue, look no farther than the Third Way’s close ties to K Street, the epicenter of corporate lobbying in Washington, and to the investment banking industry.

Trump lost in 2018, but he remains nearly as powerful as ever. He’s a sitting president with a ferociously loyal base, a Senate majority that’s about to get bigger, and a federal judiciary that hews further to the right with each new raft of appointments. In the days since the election he’s shown no moderating tendencies, instead threatening the incoming House Democratic majority with a “warlike posture,” firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, illegally“appointing” a sketchy acting attorney general, further defying the Refugee Act of 1980, banning a CNN reporter from the White House, and defending Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the state-sponsored murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Trump is still Trump, and America is still America. In the days after the election, wildfires raged through northern California, leaving scores dead and many thousands homeless, and in the country’s 307th mass shooting in the first 313 days of 2018, a gunman killed 13 people at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, California.

Welcome to the struggle for the country’s soul. We haven’t seen anything yet.

tomdispatch.com

Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Winston Churchill, even Barack Obama: there are many historical figures who Americans have turned to for inspiration in this political distemper. That’s especially true with the midterm elections only a week in the books. But I’ve recently found an even more surprising leader who offers a number of political lessons worth contemplating: Genghis Khan.

I’m quite serious.

As a former history teacher, I picked up Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World because I realized I knew relatively little about one of the most influential men in human history. Researchers have estimated that 0.5 percent of men have Genghis Khan’s DNA in them, which is perhaps one of the most tangible means of determining historical impact. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Mongolian warlord conquered a massive chunk of the 13th-century civilized world—including more than one third of its population. He created one of the first international postal systems. He decreed universal freedom of religion in all his conquered territories—indeed, some of his senior generals were Christians.

Of course, Genghis Khan was also a brutal military leader who showed no mercy to enemies who got in his way, leveling entire cities and using captured civilians as the equivalent of cannon fodder. Yet even the cruelest military geniuses (e.g. Napoleon) are still geniuses, and we would be wise to consider what made them successful, especially against great odds. In the case of Genghis Khan, we have a leader who went from total obscurity in one of the most remote areas of Asia to the greatest, most feared military figure of the medieval period, and perhaps the world. This didn’t happen by luck—the Mongolian, originally named Temujin, was not only a skilled military strategist, but a shrewd political leader.

As Genghis Khan consolidated control over the disparate tribes of the steppes of northern Asia, he turned the traditional power structure on its head. When one tribe failed to fulfill its promise to join him in war and raided his camp in his absence, he took an unprecedented step. He summoned a public gathering, or khuriltai, of his followers, and conducted a public trial of the other tribe’s aristocratic leaders. When they were found guilty, Khan had them executed as a warning to other aristocrats that they would no longer be entitled to special treatment. He then occupied the clan’s lands and distributed the remaining tribal members among his own people. This was not for the purposes of slavery, but a means of incorporating conquered peoples into his own nation. The Mongol leader symbolized this act by adopting an orphan boy from the enemy tribe and raising him as his own son.

Weatherford explains: “Whether these adoptions began for sentimental reasons or for political ones, Temujin displayed a keen appreciation of the symbolic significance and practical benefit of such acts in uniting his followers through his usage of fictive kinship.” Genghis Khan employed this equalizing strategy with his military as well—eschewing distinctions of superiority among the tribes. For example, all members had to perform a certain amount of public service. Weatherford adds: “Instead of using a single ethnic or tribal name, Temujin increasingly referred to his followers as the People of the Felt Walls, in reference to the material from which they made their gers [tents].”

America, alternatively, seems divided along not only partisan lines, but those of race and language as well. There is also an ever-widening difference between elite technocrats and blue-collar folk, or “deplorables.” Both parties have pursued policies that have aggravated these differences, and often have schemed to employ them for political gain. Whatever shape they take—identity politics, gerrymandering—the controversies they cause have done irreparable harm to whatever remains of the idea of a common America. The best political leaders are those who, however imperfectly, find a way to transcend a nation’s many differences and appeal to a common cause, calling on all people, no matter how privileged, to participate in core activities that define citizenship.

The Great Khan also saw individuals not as autonomous, atomistic individuals untethered to their families and local communities, but rather as inextricably linked to them. For example, “the solitary individual had no legal existence outside the context of the family and the larger units to which it belonged; therefore the family carried responsibility of ensuring the correct behavior of its members…to be a just Mongol, one had to live in a just community.” This meant, in effect, that the default social arrangement required individuals to be responsible for those in their families and immediate communities. If a member of a family committed some crime, the entire unit would come under scrutiny. Though such a paradigm obviously isn’t ideal, it reflects Genghis Khan’s recognition that the stronger our bonds to our families, the stronger the cohesion of the greater society. Politicians should likewise pursue policies that support and strengthen the family, the “first society,” rather than undermining or redefining it.

There are other gems of wisdom to be had from Genghis Khan. He accepted a high degree of provincialism within his empire, reflecting an ancient form of subsidiarity. Weatherford notes: “He allowed groups to follow traditional law in their area, so long as it did not conflict with the Great Law, which functioned as a supreme law or a common law over everyone.” This reflects another important task for national leaders, who must seek to honor, and even encourage, local governments and economies, rather than applying one-size-fits-all solutions.

He was an environmentalist, codifying “existing ideals by forbidding the hunting of animals between March and October during the breeding time.” This ensured the preservation and sustainability of the Mongol’s native lands and way of life. He recognized the importance of religion in the public square, offering tax exemptions to religious leaders and their property and excusing them from all types of public service. He eventually extended this to other essential professions like public servants, undertakers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and scholars. Of course, in our current moment, some of these professions are already well compensated for their work, but others, like teachers, could benefit from such a tax exemption.

There’s no doubt that Genghis Khan was a brutal man with a bloody legacy. Yet joined to that violence was a shrewd political understanding that enabled him to create one of the greatest empires the world has ever known. He eschewed the traditional tribal respect for the elites in favor of the common man, he pursued policies that brought disparate peoples under a common banner, and he often avoided a scorched earth policy in favor of mercy to his enemies. Indeed, as long as enemy cities immediately surrendered to the Mongols, the inhabitants saw little change in their way of life. And as Weatherford notes, he sought to extend these lessons to his sons shortly before his death:

He tried to teach them that the first key to leadership was self-control, particularly mastery of pride, which was something more difficult, he explained, to subdue than a wild lion, and anger, which was more difficult to defeat than the greatest wrestler. He warned them that “if you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t lead.” He admonished them never to think of themselves as the strongest or smartest. Even the highest mountain had animals that step on it, he warned. When the animals climb to the top of the mountain, they are even higher than it is.

Perhaps if American politicians were to embrace this side of the Great Khan, focusing on serving a greater ideal rather than relentless point-scoring, we might achieve the same level of national success, without the horrific bloodshed.

theamericanconservative.com

For months leading up to the midterm elections held last week, we were told that the Kremlin was deviously targeting the ballot, in a replay of the way Russian hackers allegedly interfered in the 2016 presidential race to get Donald Trump into the White House.

Supposedly reliable news media outlets like the New York Times and heavyweight Senate panels were quoting intelligence sources warning that the “Russians are coming – again”.

So what just happened? Nothing. Where were the social media campaigns of malicious Russian-inspired misinformation “sowing division”? Whatever happened to the supposed army of internet bots and trolls that the Kremlin command? Where are the electoral machines tampered with to give false vote counts?

Facebook said it had deleted around 100 social media accounts that it claimed “were linked” to pro-Russian entities intent on meddling in the midterms. How did Facebook determined that “linkage”? It was based on a “tip-off” by US intelligence agencies. Hardly convincing proof of a Kremlin plot to destabilize American democracy.

If elusive Russian hackers somehow targeted the midterm Congressional elections they certainly seem to have a convoluted objective. Trump’s Republican party lost the House of Representatives to Democrat control. That could result in more Congressional probes into his alleged collusion with Russia. It could also result in Democrats filing subpoenas for Trump to finally disclose his personal tax details which he has strenuously refused to do so far.

Moreover, having lost control of one of the two Congressional chambers, Trump will find his legislative plans being slowed down and even blocked.

Thus, if Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin are the purported “puppet masters” behind the Trump presidency, they have a very strange way of showing their support, as can be seen from the setbacks of the midterms.

A far simpler, more plausible explanation is that there was no Russian hacking of the midterms, just as there wasn’t in the 2016 presidential election. Russian interference, influence campaigns, malign activity, “Russia-gate”, and so on, are nothing but myths conjured up by Trump’s domestic political opponents and their obliging media outlets.

Now that all the dire warnings of Russia hacking into the midterms have been shown to be a mirage, the US intelligence agencies seem to be adopting a new spin on events. We are told that they “prevented Russian interference”.

In a Bloomberg article headlined ‘One Big Loser of the Midterms – Russian Hackers’, it is claimed: “Security officials believe [sic] they prevented cyberattacks on election day.” However, they added, “it’s hard to tell.”

In other words, US security officials have no idea if putative Russian hackers were targeting the elections. The contorted logic is that if there were no hacking incidents, then it was because US cybersecurity prevented them. This is tantamount to invoking absence to prove presence. It’s voodoo intelligence.

President Trump has a point when he lambasts Democrats and their supportive media for crying foul only when they lose an election. In various midterm races, it was apparent that Democrats would protest some alleged electoral discrepancy when their candidate lost against a Republican. But when Democrats came out on top, there were no irregularities.

One can imagine therefore that if the Democrats had failed to win control over the House of Representatives, then they and their intelligence agency and media supporters would have been clamoring about “Russian interference” to help Republicans retain the House.

As it turned out, the Democrats won the House, so there is no need to invoke the Russian bogeyman. In that case, it is claimed, Russian hackers “did not succeed” to penetrate the electoral system or pivot social media.

Nonetheless, there was indeed rampant interference in the recent US election. For one thing, some 28 pro-Israeli Political Action Committees and wealthy individuals spent around $15 million to promote 80 candidates in the Congressional elections, according to the organization If Americans Knew. This foreign influence on US voters in favor of Israeli interests is nothing new. It is standard practice in every election.

During the presidential campaign in 2016, the Israeli-American billionaire Sheldon Adelson reportedly donated $25 million to Trump’s campaign. Undoubtedly that legalized bribery is why Trump on becoming president has pushed such a slavishly pro-Israeli Middle East policy, including his inflammatory declaration of Jerusalem as the sole capital of the Zionist state.

But there is no outcry about “Israeli influence campaigns” and “hacking” from the US media or from Democrats over this egregious interference in American democracy. No, they prefer to obsess about the phantom of Russian meddling.

Another evident source of electoral hacking was of the homegrown variety. There seem to be valid grievances among ordinary American voters about gerrymandering of electoral districts by incumbent parties, as well as voter disenfranchisement, especially among poor African-American and Latino communities. There were also reported cases of phone canvassers making malicious calls to discredit candidates, as was claimed by the beaten Democrat contenders in Florida and Georgia.

Clearly, there are huge flaws in the US electoral system. Most glaringly, the gargantuan problem of campaign funding by corporations, banks and other representatives of the oligarchic system.

A further chronic problem is yawning voter apathy. The recent midterms were said to have seen a “record turnout” of voters. The official figure is that only 48 per cent of voters exercised their democratic right. That is, over half the voting population view the ballot exercise as not worth while or something worse. This is a constant massive disavowal of American democracy expressed in every US election.

The midterm elections demonstrate once again that American democracy has its own inherent failings. But the political establishment and the ruling oligarchy are loathe to fix a system from which they benefit.

When the system becomes unwieldy or throws up results that the establishment does not quite like – such as the election of uncouth, big mouth Trump – then the “error” must be “explained” away by some extraneous factor, such as “Russian hacking”.

However, the latest exercise in American democracy, for what it is worth, gave the salutary demonstration of the myth of Russian interference – at least for those who care to honestly see that.

Another valuable demonstration was this: if supposedly reliable news media and an intelligence apparatus that is charged with national security have been caught out telling spectacular lies with regard to “Russian hacking”, then what credibility do they have on a host of other anti-Russia claims, or, indeed, on many other matters?

There is an old ‘rule of thumb’ that when leaders are stymied in their programme at home, they embark on foreign initiatives, which though may seem easier, at first sight, than dealing with their own fractious legislatures, often prove to be painfully ‘otherwise’. Will Trump then, reorient his foreign policy in wake of the elections?

He is known to have been initially frustrated by the Pentagon’s ‘Times Square’ doctrine. This refers to an answer reportedly proffered by General Mattis when Trump asked (at a Situation Room briefing) simply, why the US had so many troops in Afghanistan (after 16 years of failure), why so many in Korea, and why was the US still in Syria? "You guys want me to send troops everywhere," Trump reportedly said: “What's the justification?". Mattis merely told Trump that the US presence in those places was needed "to prevent a bomb from going off in Times Square …Unfortunately, sir, you have no choice," Mattis added; "You will be a wartime president”.

Already Trump has moved to sort out one long-standing frustration: He has sought the resignation of Jeff Sessions. It seems that he intends to put a finish to the so-called ‘Russiagate’ meme. Whilst Trump doubled-down during the campaign on his rhetoric against China’s economic malfeasance – and Xi reciprocated, warning against US hubris – might we see some shift occurring toward Russia and in the Middle East too? Does Sessions’ exit make some new space for détente with Russia in the wake of the midterms?

Dmitri Trenin, writing from Moscow, says:

With a short, high-profile meeting between [Putin and Trump] possibly happening this weekend in Paris and a more comprehensive session later this month in Buenos Aires, many in Russia are asking the question, why meet at all? After all, each of their previous meetings — in Hamburg in 2017 and then in Helsinki last July — seemed to leave Russian-American relations in even worse shape than before. Some are advising the Kremlin to stay clear of Trump’s White House, and not be drawn into America’s fractious and ruthless domestic politics. The operative theory behind that counsel appears to be: Let America’s cold civil war blow over before re-engaging with the winner of 2020. Yet, Putin is determined to continue his face-to-face contacts with Trump. Why such seemingly illogical behavior?

Trenin’s comment is right. Russians are understandably angry and frustrated at what they perceive as an almost daily litany of fantastical allegations of every imaginable type of Russian ‘malignity’ made against them. Patience is exhausted: Why even bother to respond? But, more substantively, the Russian public knows that Trump has his hands tied on sanctions. Sanctions remain the almost exclusive preserve of the now-Democrat ‘House’, and that furthermore, Trump has been – at least until now – boxed in by the Pentagon’s ‘Times Square’ axiom and by a coterie of neo-con advisers obsessed by an historic antipathy towards all things Russian.

Trenin’s answer to this paradox is interesting:

“The Russian leader’s investment in the US president has little to do with Congress, or with the US’s Russia policy, or whether or not the Republican Party gets a drubbing in the midterms. To Putin, Trump represents a new departure in US foreign policy. What Putin considers positive for Russia is the disruption that Trump is creating for the global system that the United States has underwritten since the end of the Cold War.”

In other words, that which Putin appreciates is that Trump – by design – is set on dismantling the full panoply of American ‘empire’, and with it, crucially, the notion of a de-cultured, cosmopolitan, utopian, hegemony. 

The latter represents the antithesis to Russia’s own cultural re-sovereigntisation and Eurasian path, and is therefore, a main obstacle to the Russo-Chinese desired shift toward a multi-polar world. Trenin adds: “Trump, for all his idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies, [therefore] is the most avowedly Russia-friendly American leader Putin is likely to encounter”. But more important than Trenin’s last point perhaps is Trump’s way of achieving MAGA – which is essentially through individual, transactional, power-plays: That is to say, Trump is no longer a purveyor of a global ideology, (as in the Cold War), and ‘national interests’ are always mutable.

So far – so clear: And of course, the Russian leadership cannot have failed to notice that Trump’s twitter ‘missiles’ are also opening up Europe, in a new – as yet undefined – way. So, there we are: Trump and Putin are transactional ‘gents’. But what that does not imply is that there is something or anything transactional to be transacted.

Trump’s foreign policies do not sit at all comfortably with Russian interests: Trump wants to re-establish a US unilateral, power-primacy; he wants to ‘whack-a-mole’ China (a Russian ally); his team wants to trip-up the Belt and Road Initiative, and to set up a rival; Trump’s team wants North Korea to be intrusively invaded, inspected, and its nuclear project, crated and DHL’d, to the US; he wants the Iranian state (a Russian ally) to be overthrown; his advisors seek instability in Syria (whilst Russia seeks stability); his team want Assad removed, and the Kurds to become a western ‘project’ weakening Turkey and Syria; and he wants to use Saudi Arabia’s erstwhile influence with other Gulf and Sunni states to lead a ‘war’ against Iran, and to strong-arm the Palestinians to commit to being second class citizens in an overbearing “Jewish nation-state”. Where are the transactional possibilities in this list?

No? So let’s return to Trenin’s original question: why engage? President Putin certainly knows the score. He may see too that America through ‘sanctioning the world’, and weaponising the dollar, as a neutron bomb of sanction possibilities is, as it were, deliberately risking the burning-down of world trade. 

At risk too, again consciously, is the possibility of a global renunciation of America’s huge, off-shore, dollar sphere (whose existence has served to finance America’s budget deficits, over the last seventy years). All this is being staked in the bid to restitute America as the one player at the table, holding the aces. 

The bet is that tough ‘mafia-style’ talk will cause fear. And, this fear will lead to the flight of dollars held overseas, ‘back home’, to Wall Street, thus weakening, or breaking, firstly emerging markets – with the contagion spreading to Europe (as the effects of dollar liquidity voids), moving from the periphery towards the centre. The point of course, is that America – which commands the worlds currency, and can supply (or, elect not to supply) dollar liquidity – will then hold all the aces in the negotiations for re-framing the world’s trade in America’s favour.

There is an old Chinese story dating back to around 200 BC about a boy who is sent out by his master to catch a hare (for lunch). Well, the boy goes to the woods, and almost as soon as he arrives there, he sees a huge hare running through the woods, at full-pelt. Astonished, the boy watches as the hare slams straight into the tree, knocking itself out. All the boy has to do is pick up the hare, and carry it home triumphantly, to the pot.

The original Chinese moral to the story is this: the boy, then grown to a man, spent the last 50 years standing beside the same tree, waiting for more hares to collide into it (of course, none did: moral – don’t expect history to repeat itself). Well, in a sense, the US had a similar experience. In the wake of WW2, the rest of the world had indeed run at a tree, and knocked itself economically senseless. All the US had to do, was to pick up its lunch, lying there prone on the ground. Now, 70 years later, a US President is standing by the same tree, hoping the world will again run into a tree, and knock itself senseless, butting its head against sanctions and dollar liquidity shortages – only to leave it prone for the US to pick it up, and carry it home for ‘lunch’.

This is just an allegory; it is not to be taken literally. But the point is clear. Presidents Xi and Putin ‘get it’. And if the ‘world’ manages to swerve away from Trump’s tree, then it likely will be America’s fiscal situation that will burn.

And now, in the wake of the Khashoggi murder, we have a new Middle Eastern ‘scheme’ afoot. According to reports, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are on the cusp of normalizing with President Assad’s Syria, (re-opening diplomatic missions in Damascus). Of course, this is good news for Syria. No doubt of that. But there is a twist to the story. The plan reportedly is to form an anti-Muslim Brotherhood ‘front’, consisting of a secular Syria, together with the Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Nominally, this is a front targeted at the Muslim Brotherhood, but in practice, it is clearly aimed at Turkey – and its ally, Qatar. The Turks have been warning about such a plot being hatched for some time, and have vowed to defeat it. Neither will Turkey allow Saudi Arabia, nor the US, to use the Kurds in eastern Syria, as a wedge to be driven into the soft underbelly of Turkey. Erdogan seems ‘on a roll’: He is bidding to take the leadership of the Sunni world away from Saudi Arabia (and Khashoggi’s murder gave him just the peg that he needed to set that ball rolling).

The justification for this new alliance (should it come to fruition) is the usual bromide: The ‘alliance’ will contain and weaken Iran. There are obvious flaws here: Why should such a front with Syria suddenly weaken Iran? Syria has had since 1979 – and still has – very close relations with Iran. Syria has had four rounds of its own bitter war with the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1920s, yet both Syria and Iran have common cause with the Palestinians (a major segment of whose population are sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood). Syria will not turn against Iran (Gulf states have tried before – to bribe President Assad to sever links with Iran, without success); neither will Syria turn its back on the Palestinians; and though Syria’s relations with President Erdogan are fraught, and veering on the confrontational, President Assad of course, recognizes that major players, and close allies such as Russia and China, have vital stakes in any Turkish ‘great game’ to which Syria must pay close attention.

Moscow may welcome the tactical advantages to such a front, whilst at the same time, recognizing its improbable viability. There is however, a deeper meaning to be drawn from this new Gulf initiative. Long story short: Saudi’s ‘leadership’ historically was always only marginally ‘political’. Saudi derived influence more from its possession of the holy sites, and its assertion of the right to interpret the Qur’an according to its own lights.

But the Gulf States’ facilitation of Wahabbist jihadis in the attempt overthrow the Iraqi and Syrian states, by the most barbaric means, forced those Gulf States to distance themselves from ISIS’ bloodshed. But MbS was tied from openly condemning ISIS’ Wahabbism, without linking what was happening in Syria and Mosul, to the Wahabbist principles, by which the Saudi State itself, was founded. And such criticism would have been wholly unacceptable to the Saudi religious establishment.

The Gulf ‘solution’ therefore was never to condemn directly, but rather, to urge on everyone an undefined ‘moderation’. Saudi Arabia under this meme of espousing ‘moderation’, became, in some ways quite secular, yet without embracing secular political notions; or indeed without outlining any new model for the kingdom. Rather than go fully secular, young princes embraced a western business school type neo-liberalism, plus hyper-centralisation of power, underpinned an ubiquitous, intolerant apparatus of repression – a Singapore ‘totalitarian’ model, as it were. For example, in Bahrain it is now ok to fraternise with Israelis, but to say anything positive about Qatar will lead one to a 10-year prison sentence.

Some Gulf States are aware of the dangers inherent in their ‘turn’ towards repression. If Khashoggi’s killing has done nothing else, it has shone an uncomfortable light on political repression in the Gulf. The princes have no other model (as their ‘moderation narrative’ gave rise to fresh ideas on governance) – hence the proposed new ‘Front’. A ‘war’ on the Muslim Brotherhood is popular in Washington (an useful diversion for the Gulf from Trump’s unwinnable war against Iran). An anti-Muslim Brotherhood front can justify the repressive apparatus at home, and also provide a platform for turning the West against Turkey (as patron of the Muslim Brotherhood, together with Qatar).

The deeper meaning then is Gulf anxiety and fear. The Muslim Brotherhood has been made weak and fragmented by the campaign of attrition launched against it – it has been largely incapacitated, yet the Gulf wants a new ‘war’. Plainly the ghosts of the 2011 Arab Awakening which threatened tribal autocracy still haunts the kings and emirs. They are afraid.

Bottom line: President Putin may wonder whether the midterms will bring any foreign policy change. Plainly not in respect to China, but with the neo-cons so dug into Trump’s Administration at many levels, really the only question is ‘what does Mr Bolton want from Russia, now?’.

At the back of minds in Moscow perhaps is the thought that the US may end this phase by finding it is not the global power-hegemon it had hoped to be, but rather has burnt fingers from its dollar supremacy bet – and with Trump’s ambitious hopes for the Middle East vanished into the ether (as many have afore now). Why should Mr. Putin then not patiently keep channels open with Mr Trump, however unpopular that might be in Russia – expecting nothing beyond yet more US sanctions and more calumny. Mr. Putin might patiently await the Fourth Turning when politics can be upended. 

The midterm elections represented a substantial draw for Democrats and Republicans, a defeat for the Trump administration and a clear victory for the “war party” in Washington. The House of Representatives ended up in the hands of the Democrats, who managed to overturn the results of 2016 by winning 26 seats and bringing their majority to 219, with the Republicans with 193 seats. The Republicans, despite the feared “blue wave”, have increased their representation in the Senate, with 51 senators against the 45 of the Democrats. In terms of governors, Republicans remain ahead, with 25 red states against 21 blue. After two years of fake investigations on Russiagate, continuous attacks by the US media (except for the few pro-Trump channels like Fox News), the blue Democratic wave seemed inevitable. Instead, we witnessed a minor repetition of the 2016 elections, with Trump managing to perform above expectations.

The House of Representatives performs functions mainly related to domestic politics, while the Senate is responsible for confirming important appointments such as those to the Supreme Court. The Democrats holding the majority in the House makes Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign an uphill battle. Trump will need to be able to present to his constituents from 2019 with a series of 2016 promises fulfilled. Getting one’s legislative agenda passed with the House in the hands of one’s opponents is difficult at the best of times. For Trump the task becomes almost impossible.

For this reason, we are faced with a scenario that delivers the country to the war party, that faction composed of Republicans and Democrats who respond to the interests of specific conglomerates of power and not to the citizens who elected them. The real winners of the midterms appear to be the intelligence agencies, Wall Street and the banks, the ratings agencies, the Fed, the mainstream media, think-tanks, policy-makers, and the military-industrial complex. Donald Trump has come to discover, in his first two years as president, how little autonomy he has in foreign policy, thanks to the warmongering of the US establishment.

The realist view of foreign policy on which Trump based his election campaign was swept away just a few days after his victory. Hoping to bribe the hawks in Washington, Trump surrounded himself with neoconservatives, who only ended up trying to box him into something that resembles the Washington Consensus, where every attempt at dialogue with opponents is seen as a surrender or sign of weakness.

Washington and its elites live trapped in a unipolar bubble, still convinced that the United States is the only world power left on the geopolitical chessboard. Even the Pentagon's military planners have confirmed in two official documents (the Nuclear Posture Review and National Defence Review) how international relations have shifted into a multipolar reality where the United States will have to deal with peer competitors like Russia and China.

Washington’s neoliberal inner circle views international relations in a very unrealistic and ideologically spoiled manner. This was masterfully explained by Mearsheimer in his latest book, suitably entitled The Great Delusion, where he compares the three most important “isms” of nationalism, liberalism and realism. Those who make up the overwhelming majority of the foreign-policy establishment are convinced that the United States is a benign hegemon that has a moral duty to remake the world in its own image and likeness.

In the process, bombing a country, destroying its social fabric and killing hundreds of thousands of innocents is justified by this supposedly noble end. This is end-justifies-means mentality is behind the overwhelming majority of Washington’s foreign-policy actions. Of course only people who are victims of their own propaganda can really believe that they are acting in the greater good by bringing about so much chaos and destruction. On the contrary, the rest of the world has for decades observed with disgust and dismay the imperialism of a warmongering country committed to consuming the resources of others, vainly hoping, especially since 1990s, that the unipolar moment would be cut short through the counterbalancing effect of other powers. Ultimately, it is not only Russia and China that awaits a multipolar world, but all those countries that do not intend to submit to American diktats over how they conduct their own foreign or domestic policies.

The outcome of the midterm elections could speed up this process. With the House of Representatives in the hands of the Democrats, Trump will have to abandon his realist foreign policy even more so than he has done over the last two years. The accumulation of foreign-policy concessions is starting to become disturbing. Just think of the enmity towards Iran, fomented by Israel and Saudi Arabia, the main partners of the Trump administration. The same goes for China, with the antagonism fomented by Trump himself to justify the impoverishment of the US middle class who voted in force for him to change this situation. And of course there remains the endemic hatred of Russia, a sworn enemy of the Washington establishment.

Trump still seems to possess a bit of Mearsheimerian realism in foreign policy. But following his defeat in the House, if he wants to get anything passed, he will need to grant much more of a free hand in foreign policy to the neoliberals, who are chomping at the bit to revive the Bush and Obama foreign policy. Without any concessions from the House, all of Trump's domestic promises to his constituents will be hobbled.

The permanent political civil war in the United States seems destined to intensify over the next two years, and the prospect of an even less independent administration in foreign policy will impel the rest of the world to rely less and less on Washington and begin to look elsewhere. Even European countries like France, Germany and Italy seem to have understood that an exclusive alliance with Washington is not beneficial and is in fact destined to fail as a result of of the chaos in US politics. In this context, the events of the past few days are particularly important and certainly worthy of elaboration in a future article. While many Eurasian countries like India, Japan, Turkey, Iran, Russia, China, Afghanistan and Pakistan try to overcome their differences by creating international cooperation frameworks, Washington pushes unnecessarily on the accelerator of disorder. A shining example of what Washington's decline means can be clearly seen in Korea. Without the direct involvement of the United States, Seoul and Pyongyang seem to be heading towards peaceful reconciliation. Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un interact every day, and the progress made on the DMZ speaks for itself, such as with renewed railway connections. Such an example, reflecting the global model that tends towards resolving problems, represents the basis on which to build bilateral, direct and negotiated solutions between relevant parties.

Such examples are numerous and concern, for example, the disagreements between India and China, as well as the territorial disputes between Japan and China and Japan and Russia. The goal is always the same: to overcome obstacles that stand in the way of mutual gain. It is a way of approaching international relations that differs from the bipolar past, but above all from the unipolar one where the attention of all international actors has been focused on the interests of Washington above even one’s own.

The continuing division within the American political class will only accelerate the loss of America’s pre-eminence in the existing the world order. The United States finds itself in the middle of an evident decline, without even a united and compact political front as was the case during the days of Bush and Obama. But with Trump in office, the House in the hands of the Democrats, and the Senate in the hands of Republicans, we are facing a situation that is set to downsize Washington's role in international affairs.

There is still an even crazier and more devastating scenario for America’s role in the world. Trump's impeachment, which can be initiated by the House of Representatives, would significantly add to the chaos in the United States and risk bringing the country to the brink of socio-political collapse. While this scenario is very unlikely, it cannot be totally excluded, especially given the ideological folly of the Washington establishment.

A Pence presidency would best represent the interests of evangelical conservatives, who are closely linked to Israeli Zionism. For this reason, the impeachment of Trump could find allies in the Republican minority, not to mention the fact that such a move by the Democrats would open the way for the Republicans to win in 2020, stamping the Democrats as spoilers only able to oppose and unable to build anything. Such a possibility cannot be excluded, and with the victory of the war party in the midterms, a President Pence would represent the greatest effort of the American establishment to impose its will on the rest of the world on the basis of “American exceptionalism”.

Prolonging the unipolar dream seems to be the new goal of the war party, and the reconquest of the House is the first step in this endeavour. Trump can adapt or give battle, but observing how he immediately came to terms after his victory in 2016, it is no surprise that if he stays in charge and tries to win the 2020 election, he will cede foreign policy to the neocons, neoliberals, Zionists and Wahhabis.

Allies and enemies alike must prepare to withstand the shock waves emanating from the struggle between the elites in Washington, understanding that it is not possible to rely on Trump, let alone the war party, especially when the damage produced by both has negative effects on even allies. Europe, for example, suffers from the blowback of a Middle East and Africa sunk into chaos by the war party, and also suffers economically from the sanctions placed on Russia and Iran.

What is more, Trump’s economic warfare, using tariffs and sanctions, has only worsened the international financial economic arrangement, accelerating the complete de-dollarization of world economies.

The midterms were what Washington's allies and enemies had been waiting for in order to understand the direction of US foreign policy in the next few years. The election results present allies and enemies with an even more divided and chaotic United States, suggesting that it is time for them to stop waiting for Washington. Given that Trump does not control his foreign policy, any attempt to engage in dialogue with him is pointless. The sooner allies and enemies realize this, and act accordingly, the better off they will be.

Washington and her elite seem too caught up in domestic dynamics to notice that their behaviour is only accelerating the transition to a multipolar world order

The next two years will settle the question over whether our present reality is already multipolar, or whether the unipolar order remains, with Washington the indispensable nation for friends and enemies alike.

Since their blue wave was not completely beaten back, Democrats now have a chance to block every initiative put forward by the administration, such as the allocations for the fence to protect the border with Mexico and other steps aimed at curbing migration, the “giant tax cuts for Christmas” that will be offered to individual taxpayers to continue the tax-cutting trend, and the moves to  bid a final farewell to Obamacare. A partial government shutdown over spending for the border wall is possible as early as December.

It is true that the Republicans’ failure to hold on to the House is nothing in comparison with what happened in 2010, when the Democrats lost 63 seats there. But a loss is always a loss. The speaker of the House is a very important position that will be used to promote the Democratic Party’s agenda. This could breathe new life into the House Democrats’  attacks against the president over his alleged ties to Russia.

All in all, things have taken a turn for the worse for President Trump and his administration — it is always better to have control over both houses than control over just one of them, even if that one has become stronger. Besides, Republicans lost their races for the governors’ offices in the Great Lakes region — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — states where Donald Trump won two years ago. On the other hand, support for the president was evidently decisive for Senator Ted Cruze who won a surprisingly competitive Senate race in Texas. With the president’s help, GOP candidates won Senate seats in Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota.

The results prove that Donald Trump is apparently much more popular than his opponents believed. Democrats won only a relatively small majority in the House. Despite all of the president’s verbal gaffes and missteps, he clearly has the support of a broad sector of American society. And now this is clear to everyone. By adopting a policy of total obstruction, Democratic lawmakers might be paying only lip service to their party. Many things could change during the next two years, but today Donald Trump is in a strong position to win a second term and lead the Republican Party to success in 2020. The strong economy improves his chances.

How does the outcome of the midterms impact US-Russian relations? Even before the election results were known, the State Department had issued a statement saying Russia was to face “more draconian” US sanctions over the alleged “Skripal poisoning.” It read, “Today, the department informed Congress we could not certify that the Russian Federation met the conditions.” The administration knows that anti-Russian, anti-Chinese, and anti-Iranian sentiments are running high in Congress, on both sides of the aisle. Several sanctions bills that will affect the Russian economy will soon be considered by Congress, including the Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act, which proposes restrictions on both purchases by US citizens  of Russia’s sovereign debt as well as investments in Russian energy projects. These rounds of sanctions will continue to mount.

With a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, “Russiagate” will force the president to adopt a tougher stance toward Moscow. This calls into question the fate of a full-fledged Putin-Trump summit, at least prior to November 2020. It could lower the odds of any progress in arms control.

On the other hand, the president would not be putting himself in any danger by extending the New START Treaty or launching negotiations over a new strategic nuclear-arms agreement. The idea of renewing New START in 2021 seems to be fading, but no one would gain if arms control became a historical artifact. Democratic control of the House does not prevent Donald Trump from addressing this problem. With a Republican majority in the Senate, a new treaty has a good chance of being ratified. Extending New START will strengthen, not weaken, the president’s position.

No summit is needed for doing something as simple as reviving the forgotten 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement or the 1989 Prevention of Dangerous Military Activities Agreement. The impasse in the talks on Ukraine does not prevent a dialog on Syria. The situation in Libya is clearly an urgent problem of mutual concern. The deterioration in the relationship does not rule out the possibility of maintaining unofficial contacts, including between groups of experts. If the two countries continue to cooperate in space, they can cooperate in other areas too. The president has his hands tied regarding domestic issues, but he enjoys even greater foreign-policy freedom than before. He could use it to boost his popularity before the 2020 presidential race. Lowering the threat of war is one sure way to gain more voters’ support. 

The US military’s mission is to prevent the much-talked about “caravan of migrants” from crossing the border. Armed civilians are there to help. Bloodshed appears to be imminent; a negotiated agreement is no more than a pipe dream. It comes to the crunch on the eve of midterm vote. The way the US administration tackles the problem may be decisive for the outcome of the elections and the president’s position. Donald Trump promised to protect the 3,200 km-long southern border during his election campaign. The time is right to show the president is true to his word. Republican candidates are vigorously backing his stance on the issue trying to motivate voters.

Crossing the Rio Grande from the Mexican shore is the way to become an illegal immigrant on US soil. It’s easy enough for someone who can swim. Tires and makeshift rafts are used to help women and children. About 800,000 people use this route yearly.

Not all but many immigrants are involved in criminal business. Criminal gangs help to get to the other side asking for “favors” afterwards. Even if these people have no relation to illegal activities, they take away jobs from US citizens. The wall is being built too slowly, covering only about a thousand kilometers. President Trump has not yet received the funding for Mexico border from Congress. Border guards or checkpoints are unable to stop the uncontrolled flow.

The outcome of the midterm elections is crucial for the ‘wall project”. The Republican win will make the allocation of the required $25 billion possible, if not, the wall’s future will hang in the air as uncertain as the fate of the president himself.

If clashes take place at the border, the chief executive’s opponents will grab the opportunity to use it to their advantage. One can only guess how many people do realize that the “caravan” is a well-orchestrated provocation to deliver a blow against Republicans before the Nov.6 vote.

As a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, the US is obligated to protect refugees who left their country due to well-founded fear of repression. But those who seek asylum have to ask for it first and prove they are really persecuted as well. They have the right to try but they can’t cross the border freely. Asylum can be denied if a person is not in danger but there is no agreement with Mexico on how to return those who have been denied entrance. Let legal intricacies be left alone. What really matters is that Americans begin to choose their views over interpersonal relationships with battles raging between as “us and them.” And those battles are not always verbal.

The end of birthright citizenship proposed by President Trump is another issue to hit headlines and divide Americans. To some degree it is an electoral stunt, but also an effort aimed at drastically changing the migration policy of the country. This is another issue to deepen the divisions tearing up America – the nation that has never been so ripped apart since the Civil War. Angry and often violent protests, clashes, police abuse and targeted attacks involving explosives and firearms are dangerously becoming routine.

Several pipe bombs recently sent to high-profile Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton, demonstrate how dangerous the situation has become. The GOP is getting more conservative, while Democrats are getting more liberal. The society is polarized with the left and right. Liberals and conservatives are unable to find a common language. The partisan divide over issues related to race, immigration and welfare has widened. It exerts impact on the way people talk, who they associate themselves with, and how they view themselves. Can the nation hold together in the long run?

According to a recent Rasmussen poll, one third of Americans strongly believe a civil war is likely soon. Whatever is the outcome of the elections, the nation will remain separated with the trust in the institutions  and politics vanishing at an alarming pace. The idea of the country’s break up does not seem so outlandish anymore.

Foreign policy is no exception to the rule. When people are so far apart, international issues may rather add more fuel to political discord or, on the contrary, bring them together. So many times in history the existence of enemies threatening the nation, true or not, has been used as a unifying factor. That’s the purpose of singling out Russia as a country that "challenges“American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity” as the US National Security Strategy states.

In reality, the United States is posing a threat to itself. Beset by aggravating domestic problems, it is trying to fix them by artificially creating outside enemies instead of trying to go to the bottom of it and understand what causes the woes and how to fix things. The “caravan” problem and the heated election campaign may become sparks to kindle a fire.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been invited to visit Washington in early 2019. The invitation has not been yet formally accepted and the scheduling is still to be ironed out. Before that the Russian and US leaders will meet in Paris at the WWI Victory centenary commemorations on November 11. This meeting will be special. A very important event – the US midterm election on Nov.6 – may change the background. If Republicans win or retain the majority in both houses, President Trump will go to Paris relieved of a heavy load with his position much strengthened. No more talks about an impeachment caused by “Russiagate”. Obstructing him in Congress won’t be an easy walk Democrats hope for. The deep state would be frustrated but it will have to reconcile with reality. The president will have much more wiggle room for achieving his foreign policy goals, especially when it comes to Russia. It does not mean he’ll lift the sanctions or change his stance on the INF Treaty. It means that despite many things that divide them, the parties could have a dialog on major international and bilateral issues. Some of them will continue to be points of contention but some may turn into areas of cooperation. The two powers could have working relations to address the agenda of mutual interest and that’s what they lack at present.

Henry Kissinger had little sympathy for Communists and was no friend of the USSR. Nevertheless, in the capacity of national security adviser and state secretary he pioneered the policy of détente. He is still trying to upend the bilateral relationship. The Soviet Union and the United States were no friends but rather competitors. This fact did not prevent them from being dialog partners to large extent thanks to Mr. Kissinger’s efforts. The worst was prevented, the balancing of the brink of conflict never resulted in real shooting and arms control was effectively in place. Mr. Bolton could do the same. As one can see, he maintains the contacts against all the odds. President Trump and his NSA believe it makes sense. Richard Nixon stood out for his ability to resist outside influence and make independent foreign policy decisions. So is President Trump. There are similarities between the two. Parallels are drawn. President Putin and President Trump both believe in the virtue of the nation state and see a lot of shortcomings of the “supranational globalism” project.

Donald Trump’s opponents realize that. They are trying hard to prevent the undesired outcome on Nov.6. The “migrant caravan” is moving across Mexico to the US southern border to provoke the president into taking decisive steps, such as using the military to hold the migrants’ wave. If force is used, Trump’s opponents will raise hue and cry about it, using it for propaganda purposes. If not, the president will fail to keep his pre-election promises to protect the national borders, frustrating Republican voters. No doubt, the “migrants’ caravan” is a well-orchestrated provocation timed with the midterm election. The NGO People Without Borders claims to be the organizer but obviously somebody is providing funds using it as a cover. The money to feed these people as they were crossing the territories of Honduras, Guatemala and a part of Mexico did not fall from the sky. Nobody of “caravan migrants” was suffering of hunger and thirst.

Some US media are already spreading around the stories to make readers sympathize with the would-be “victims” and see everything President Trump does in a negative light – a plot to deliver a blow at the time of election. Some media believe the “caravan” is linked to Democrat donors. George Soros the ubiquitous is reported to be behind the action along with Brian Roberts, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Comcast. True or not, evidently a group of very influential people is using the “caravan” for political purposes. This is a real national security threat they want the president to turn a blind eye on while opposing the imaginary threat allegedly coming from Moscow. Russia’s experts realize well what the problems the US president has to face with his policies being subverted by powerful opponents. On the other hand, it can’t wait for better times forever. Anyway, the outcome of the Nov.6 election will impact a lot of things, including the prospects for US-Russian relations.

The NPC meme has gone mainstream. Reports by major mass media outlets like the New York Times and the BBC have turned it into a viral sensation, and now everyone and their grandma knows about the meme used to spoof mindless followers of liberal media herd mentality programming. Any venture into the fray of the political Twittersphere now comes with a twist of alternate accounts with gray-faced profile pictures bleating things like “Orange man bad” and “#IMPEACH” in cartoonish mockery of the repetitive lines used by the rank-and-file opposition to Donald Trump.

And it’s great. The foam-brained mainliners of MSNBC and Washington Postpropaganda deserve to have their unquestioning faith in establishment narratives mocked at every turn, and the propagandists who promulgate those lies day after day deserve to be lampooned. One of the most fundamentally profane things a human being can do is turn over their mental sovereignty to the institutions and agendas of the powerful, and by allowing themselves to be indoctrinated into establishment narratives that is exactly what is happening. They abdicate their rightful position as a creative participant in this world and allow their mental processes to be transformed into a looping churn of ideas manufactured in some DC think tank for the benefit of a few billionaires and their lackeys.

Interacting with such indoctrinated minions can be very much like interacting with an non-player character (NPC) in a video game. Read the comments section of any popular social media post about Russia or Julian Assange and you’ll see the same three or four spoon-fed talking points repeated over and over again like the “I took an arrow in the knee” guys in Skyrim. If you begin engaging these mechanical regurgitators you’ll find yourself having the exact same conversations, often verbatim, which just so happen to also be arguments promulgated by Rachel Maddow and Seth Abramson not long before.

This happens because an echo chamber has been carefully and deliberately designed to streamline ideas into the heads of Democratic Party loyalists without any interference from outside narratives causing cognitive dissonance. On November 2, 2007, John Podesta wrote an email to billionaires George Soros, Peter Lewis, Herb and Marion Sandler, John Sperling, and millionaire Steve Bing with a detailed and structured overview of material the group had covered during a meeting they’d had in September. Click ‘Attachments’ and then ‘2008 Combined Fundraising, Message and Mobilization Plan’ on this WikiLeaks release to read the full document, page two of which contains the following passage:

“Control the political discourse. So much effort over the past few years has been focused on better coordinating, strengthening, and developing progressive institutions and leaders. Now that this enhanced infrastructure is in place — grassroots organizing; multi-issue advocacy groups; think tanks; youth outreach; faith communities; micro-targeting outfits; the netroots and blogosphere — we need to better utilize these networks to drive the content of politics through a strong “echo chamber” and message delivery system”.

And on page four:

“Create a robust echo chamber with progressive messaging that spans from the opposition campaigns to outside groups, academic experts, and bloggers.”

Of course, the only reason Democrats and their plutocratic puppet masters have been working so hard to control political discourse is because Republicans have been using the echo chamber dynamic so effectively against them. During the Bush years it was fascinating to interact with American conservatives because of the way all the pundits on Fox and AM radio would all start saying the same thing about a given issue at the same time, and by the next day all the rank-and-file Republicans would be repeating their input word-for-word in water cooler conversations from coast to coast. Right wingers forget this, but the term “echo chamber” was originally popularizedto refer to the way Republicans had successfully streamlined information from think tank to pundit class to rank-and-file conservative media consumer.

Indeed, many of these same right wingers who are going around talking about what hollow, unthinking NPCs liberals are show up in my social media notifications regurgitating think tank-manufactured arguments which have been funneled into their minds by the still very functional GOP echo chamber. It’s beyond me how anyone can see themselves as a sovereign free thinker while believing they’ll be fighting the deep state by voting for Republicans in the midterms or that this administration’s neoconservative warmongering in Iran is perfectly legitimate, but God bless them, they manage.

Both Democratic and Republican party manipulators alike now aggressively control the partisan groupthink within their ranks, because they and their plutocratic owners understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Rank-and-file #Resistance NPCs bleat that Trump is Putin’s puppet and Julian Assange “can leave the embassy whenever he wants” like good little automatons, and MAGA hat-wearing NPCs bleat that their president is “fighting the deep state” and it’s important to elect Republicans because a group of migrants is heading toward the US border right before the 2018 midterms.

In reality, the only people who benefit from Democrats or Republicans controlling the US government are the plutocratic class which owns them both. The #Resistance is an astroturf movement manufactured in DC by establishment manipulators to harness the grassroots energy of the Bernie Sanders movement, and when you strip away the adoring narratives of his supporters and the hysterical narratives of his political opponents, Trump is not significantly different as a president from his predecessors. Both are posing as organic grassroots populism. Both are artificial manipulations staged to herd the public into supporting establishment politics for the benefit of the powerful.

At this point, anyone who still believes either party actually represents their interests is an NPC. No matter what happens in the midterm elections (traditionally a retaking of the House by Democrats and possible gains in the Senate as well, but given Democrats’ fondness for failure lately who knows) the only real winners will be the plutocratic class which holds all the cards and controls all the outcomes regardless of which party is in power. I’m not telling people that voting necessarily makes no difference or that it’s something they should avoid, but I am saying that no real change will come to America until Americans uproot the two-headed one-party system of the oligarchy and replace it with something that serves them.

Until that happens, nobody who believes that giving power to either party will help them is really playing the game. The Democratic and Republican parties are two fists on the same boxer using the same one-two punch combination over and over again, and the person that they are punching is you. You don’t win a boxing match by choosing which fist you’d prefer to get hit with and leaving yourself open to it as often as possible, you win it by fighting the actual boxer. This fight is already currently underway whether you choose to fight back or not. The bell has already been rung and you’ve been eating leather for a long time now.

Don’t be an NPC. Get those gloves up.

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