Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz criticized the Biden administration’s dangerous escalations against Russia on the House floor on Monday, not because he thinks needlessly ramping up cold war brinkmanship with a nuclear-armed nation is an insane thing to do, nor because he believes the US government should cease trying to dominate the world by constantly working to subvert and undermine any nation who disobeys its commands, but because he wants US aggressions to be focused more on China.

“While the Biden administration, the media, and many in congress beat the drums of war for Ukraine, there is a far more significant threat to our nation accelerating rapidly close to home,” Gaetz said. “Argentina, a critical nation and economy in the Americas, has just lashed itself to the Chinese Communist Party, by signing on to the One Belt One Road Initiative. The cost to China was $23.7 billion — a mere fraction of a rounding error when compared to the trillions of dollars our country has spent trying to build democracies out of sand and blood in the Middle East.”

While the Biden Admin, the media, and many in Congress beat the drums of war for Ukraine, there is a far more significant threat to our nation.

China is a rising power. Russia is a declining power. Let us sharpen our focus so that we do not join them in that eventual fate. pic.twitter.com/VUQwfUFCZ7

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) February 7, 2022

“China buying influence and infrastructure in Argentina to collaborate on space and nuclear energy is a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine and far more significant to American security than our latest NATO flirtation in the plains of Eastern Europe,” Gaetz continued. “China is a rising power. Russia is a declining power. Let us sharpen our focus so that we do not join them in that eventual fate.”

For those who don’t know, the “Monroe Doctrine” refers to a decree put forward by President James Monroe in 1823 asserting that Latin America is off limits to European colonialist and imperialist agendas, effectively claiming the entire Western Hemisphere as US property. It essentially told Europe, “Everything south of the Mexican border is our Africa. It’s ours to dominate in the same way you guys dominate the Global South in the Eastern Hemisphere. Those are your brown people over there, these are our brown people over here.”

That this insanely imperialist and white supremacist doctrine is still being cited by high-profile politicians to this day says so much about what the US government is and how it operates on the world stage. This is especially true given that Biden himself just articulated the same idea in so many words last month when he declared that “Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.”

U.S. maintains its Monroe Doctrine as Biden assures that Latin America is “America’s front yard” pic.twitter.com/VhNxIVdV4Z

— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) January 20, 2022

So on one hand Gaetz is opposing warmongering against Russia and condemning the trillions spent on US wars in the Middle East, which by itself would normally be a good thing. But the fact that he only opposes doing that because he wants to focus imperialist aggressions on another part of the world to preserve US unipolar planetary domination completely nullifies any good which could come from his opposition to aggressions somewhere else.

This is a very common phenomenon on the right end of the US political spectrum; you’ll hear a politician or pundit saying what appear to be sane things against the agendas of DC warmongers, but if you pay attention to their overall commentary it’s clear that they’re not opposing the use of mass-scale imperialist aggression to preserve planetary domination, they’re just quibbling about the specifics of how it should be done.

Tucker Carlson has been making this argument for years, claiming that the US should make peace with Russia and scale back interventionism in the Middle East not because peace is good but because it needs to focus its aggressions on countering China. He inserts this argument into many of his criticisms of US foreign policy on a regular basis; he did it just the other day, criticizing the Biden administration’s insane actions in Ukraine and then adding “Screaming about Russia, even as we ignore China, is now a bipartisan effort.”

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp summarized this dynamic well in response to a recent Reason article making the same “Make peace with Russia to focus on taking down China” argument, tweeting “Unfortunately, a lot of the opposition to war with Russia is rooted in this idea that the US needs the resources to eventually fight China. We need more people to view war for Taiwan as dangerous and foolish as war for Ukraine.”

Unfortunately, a lot of the opposition to war with Russia is rooted in this idea that the US needs the resources to eventually fight China. We need more people to view war for Taiwan as dangerous and foolish as war for Ukraine. https://t.co/MDUBYCN9dY

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) January 27, 2022

Do you see how this works? Do you see how wanting to refocus US firepower on a specific target is not actually better than keeping that firepower diffuse? The difference between “Let’s have peace” and “Let’s have peace with Russia and stop making wars in the Middle East so that we can focus on bringing down China” is the difference between “Stop massacring civilians” and “Stop massacring these civilians because you’ll need your ammunition to massacre those other civilians over there.”

And it’s especially stupid because it’s the exact same agenda. One imperial faction believes it’s best to preserve US hegemony by focusing on bringing down the nations which support and collaborate with China, while the other imperial faction wants to go after China itself more directly. They both support using the US war machine to keep the planet enslaved to Washington and the government agency insiders and oligarchs who run it, they just manufacture this debate about the specifics of how that ought to happen.

This is what Noam Chomsky was talking about when he said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

Liberal NPCs Hate Russia, Conservative NPCs Hate China

“The frenzied, shrieking hysteria I’m witnessing right now among Trump’s base regarding China looks and moves in the exact same way the mental zombification of Russia hysteria looked and moved”https://t.co/QdUl2canc8

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 19, 2020

That strictly limited spectrum of debate is known as the Overton window, and imperial narrative managers work very hard to keep shoving that window further and further in the favor of the oligarchic empire they serve. In order to prevent us from arguing about whether there should be a globe-spanning capitalist unipolar empire in the first place, they keep us arguing about how that empire’s interests should best be advanced.

The longer the drivers of empire can keep us debating the details of how we should serve them, the longer they can keep us from turning toward them and asking why we should even have them around at all.

caitlinjohnstone.com

The embrace of political extremism by the Republican Party in the United States has Constitutional historians worried about the drift towards fascism. If that’s the case then the hapless Biden administration may go down in history as the imitation of the Weimar Republic before the rise of American fascism.

This week saw two examples of how the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln has descended into something of an extremist cult.

A Republican congressman, Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), was formally sanctioned for posting an edited cartoon video depicting him murdering another lawmaker, Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York City). The video also showed Gosar wielding swords in a bloody attack on President Joe Biden.

The Republican politician remained unapologetic about the incitement of violence. Most of his congressional party members refused to vote for the censure.

This is not simply about a silly video that can be easily dismissed as a poor-taste joke.

There is an increasing endorsement of violence by Republican members towards political opponents. That is in line with GOP lawmakers openly taking public positions in support of extreme far-right militia groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Such groups are best described as fascist, promoting white supremacist ideology.

The other development this week was the formal indictment of Steve Bannon in connection to his alleged role in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC. Bannon is believed to have coordinated with then-President Donald Trump in a bid to overthrow the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election as the new president. On that eventful day, Trump and his acolytes incited thousands of supporters to violently assault the Congress building. It was a coup attempt carried out by far-right extremists fired up by spurious claims of election fraud.

Trump is still lurking in the shadows of the U.S. political process. Despite an impeachment over the January 6 debacle, he has never been held to account for what was an audacious fascist attack on the democratic institutions. Trump continues to spout the Big Lie about election fraud and being cheated out of the White House. He rails against how Biden is destroying America, accusing Biden with baseless slogans of “radical socialism” and “cultural Marxism”. Such labels are politically illiterate in the narrow spectrum of America’s two-party system. But they are handy for distracting voters from the real class war that is being waged ruthlessly against the majority of working Americans by the oligarchic system, a system in which both parties are loyal servants.

From the defiant, truculent demeanor of the Republicans dismissing charges of political violence, it is plausible to view the party as gravitating towards fascism. Combined with that drift is the espousal of racist enmity towards ethnic minorities and immigrants who are denigrated as “illegal aliens”. Republicans promote divisive conspiracy theories such as “white replacement” which claims that white Americans are deliberately being marginalized by people of color.

The political language is becoming ever more dogmatic and hateful whereby anyone not in agreement with the Trump-dominated Republican Party is liable to be vilified as a traitor and enemy. Among 13 GOP lawmakers who voted for passing Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill, most of them were harassed by party supporters whipped up by extremists like Representative Majorie Taylor Greene. Some were even sent death threats.

Here’s the rub: the crisis in American society stems from capitalism and its oligarchy. Vast inequality, poverty, unemployment, crumby social welfare and healthcare, housing and education, and so on, are all rooted in the historic failure of U.S. capitalism. People like Trump and other GOP grandees, as well as Democrats, are the beneficiaries of the capitalist racket. Yet Trump and his ilk, as well as clueless media pundits, grossly mislead the public by telling them that their problems all stem from the “radical socialism” and “cultural Marxism” pushed by the Biden administration.

Trump and the Republican Party are pushing fascist politics as a panacea under the guise of “Saving America”.

Biden and his effete Democrat administration are aiding and abetting the rise of fascism in the U.S. because they are too timid in challenging the capitalist system and the entrenched oligarchy. The Democrat Party is too busy pursuing superficial “identify politics” rather than taking on the class politics that really impact most Americans.

Biden and Democrats are merely tinkering with the system in a vain attempt to make it softer. As the old quip goes: what’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats? The Dems use lube when they are screwing you.

By this stage, however, the entire rapacious system is destroying the fabric of U.S. society and impoverishing tens of millions of Americans. What is needed is a formidable, full-on socialist program that transforms the system of private profit and wealth for a tiny minority. The irony is that most Americans, including ordinary Republicans and Democrat voters, would probably support such a radical policy.

But radical policy is not going to happen under the Democrats. They will only prolong the system that is crushing society under a false veneer of “progressive reform”. In such futile circumstances, the Trump fascists can prey on vulnerable people looking for seeming quick fixes.

Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919-1933) tinkered with capitalist failure and in so doing thereby created chaos and fomented extremism and fascism which culminated in the Nazi Third Reich. The soaring economic inflation and social woes under the Biden administration, as well as increasing disillusionment alongside the burgeoning of extremist politics, point to a similarly disastrous outcome awaiting the United States.

By Paul STREET

Who can ever forget the brilliant oratory of Joe “Nothing Would Fundamentally Change” Biden two nights after Election Day last November? “Democracy is sometimes messy,” Joe “No Empathy, Give Me a Break” Biden said two months before Donald Trump’s wild-eyed marauders would descend on the US Capitol. “It sometimes requires a little patience. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance that’s been the envy of the world.”

What wise counsel! “Patience, underlings, your globally unmatched democracy will hear your cries!” What came over those Hunger Marchers and Sit-Down Strikers in the 1930s? What was Rosa Parks thinking when she refused to get up from that bus seat? Surely the great Black American escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass needed to be more patient and feel more rewarded when he offered these bitter and impetuous reflections on July 4, 1852:

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them…At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival

Will we ever break the taboo that protects the United States’ absurdly venerated 18th Century United States slaveowners’ charter – the national constitution that William Lloyd Garrison, accompanied by Sojourner Truth, and Henry David Thoreau, called “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell” and then burned along with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act outside Boston on July 4, 1854 – from the radical democratic criticism and replacement it has long deserved?

Blocking a “Marxist” Reform

The examples are endless of why Garrison’s “covenant with death” needs to be transcended if the nation is going to have any chance of achieving popular sovereignty, the US Founders’ ultimate nightmare.

Two among many possible instructive lessons are staring us in the face right now: the blockage or dilution of Biden’s moderate Build Back Better bill (B4) and the likely coming Supreme Court undoing of women’s constitutional right to an abortion (already abolished in the giant state of Texas and seriously rolled back in many other Bible, Lynching, and Gun Belt states) next spring.

A super-majority, 66 percent of the American citizenry supported the original $3.5 trillion B4, which can’t get through the “Tear Down Better” Congress without some major amputations.

The measure’s high popularity made sense. Absurdly denounced by the ridiculous Republifascist Senator Mark Rubio (Rf-FL) as an attempt “to create a socialist, almost Marxist-type economy”[1], the measure may have fallen far short of socialist requirements but even an unabashed Marxist like myself has to admit that it contained many desirable benefits for ordinary Americans: :

+ A large infusion for Pell Grants (federal college tuition grants for low-income Americans).

+ Childcare and universal pre-K, including a provision to keep the cost of childcare at or below 7% of most families’ income.

+ Two years of free community college for all students, regardless of family income

+ Extended child tax credits.

+ Medicare expansion to include coverage of dental, hearing and vision services.

+ Slashing prescription drug prices by permitting Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

+Comprehensive paid family and medical leave

+Climate change mitigation, including a “clean electricity performance program” to expand renewable energy, enhanced forest conservation, incentivization of electric vehicles and residential weather-fitting, among other things.

While the corporate media and right-wing and centrist politicians constantly chirped about different dollar figures – Biden’s original $3.5 trillion, $2.3 trillion, Demublican Joe “Party Boat” Manchin’s $1.5 trillion – the truth is that the measure would have cost the public nothing: it was to be paid for with modest increases in taxes on the nation’s absurdly under-taxed rich. And, as few in the “mainstream” imperialist media will mention, the B4’s ten-year so-called price-tag was less than half the vast corporate welfare largesse the federal government grants on a cost-plus basis to opulent high-tech “defense” (war and empire) firms in the form of the giant Pentagon system.

There’s no mystery about why the measure was so popular. It advanced real and desperately needed help for tens of millions of Americans and would have paid for these benefits with an overdue (if historically small) increase in taxes on the nation’s parasitic upper classes in a grotesquely unequal nation where the top thousandth had nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent even before the pandemic increased the insane upward concentration of American net worth.

So NOT a “Democracy”

So why can’t the B4 be enacted in its original and modestly progressive form in “the world’s greatest democracy”? The first thing smart liberals and Democrats who pay attention to the news will tell you is that (nominally” Democratic US Senators Manchin [$-WV] and Kyrsten “What Not to Wear” Sinema [$-AZ] are opposed to the bill’s so-called price tag (unmentionably only for the rich) and the Democrats only have a one-vote margin in the Senate. The second thing such informed Americans will say is that the Manchin (the #1 collector of political money from the coal, oil and gas, and mining industries in the 2021-22 election cycle) and the major Big Pharma funding recipient Sinema garner giant campaign contributions from corporate interests (led by Big Carbon and Big Pharma) opposed to the bill’s “big government” provisions.

Both observations are true. But Manchin’s corruption goes deeper than political finance: a recent report shows that he “earns” $500,000 a year from coal stock dividends. Like many members of the “permanent political class” today [2], he’s not just a whore – he’s an oligarch. (One really must wonder how to calculate the carbon footprint of this planet-cooking parasite’s coming eternal damnation: it promises to be one of the hottest on record.)

At the same time and more to the point of this essay, there’s a deeper historical and institutional problem that rarely receives proper attention from commentators and activists: the nation’s “system of governance” – to use Biden’s phrase – isn’t democratic.

It isn’t democratic at all. And this goes back to the beginning of the country, decades before Frederick Douglass delivered his brilliant and righteous 1852 speech on “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.”

Democracy is not what Biden’s beloved 240-year-old “system of governance” was ever about. And this is not just because the nation’s plutocratic political rulers are corruptly enmeshed with 21^st century corporate and financial lobbyists and bankrollers. Much of the difficulty goes back to the nation’s aristo-republican Founders and their purposefully and brilliantly democracy-crippling slaveowners’ charter.

The Absurd House

Look at the US Congress. Its lower body, the House of Representatives, is so badly gerrymandered rightward that the Republicans have a good shot of becoming the majority there again in 2023 even though the Republican Party is viewed with approval by just a little over a third (37%) of the populace while the Democrats are approved by nearly half (48%).

That’s absurd. Forget for a moment that neither of these capitalist and imperialist parties deserves support from any decent human being. One of the nation’s two major and viable political parties gets a thumbs up from nearly half the citizenry and the other such party is endorsed by just more than a third of the populace and the least popular (by far) of the two organization is poised to take back the House of Representatives in 2022/23. Ridiculous, right? But it cannot be understood without factoring in the anti-democratic role of gerrymandering and racist voter suppression conducted at the state level under the rules of a national charter and government that have long granted states remarkable autonomous power to set state and national district lines and other key election and voting rules.

The Absurd Senate

It gets more pathetically idiotic – from a democratic perspective at least – in the upper branch of Congress. How do the Republicans happen to control half of the extremely powerful US Senate and enjoy a good chance of regaining a majority there in 2023 or 2025 when their party is approved by just a bit more than a third of the populace? And how are the malignant, fossil-fueled reptile Manchin and the sartorial comedian (and onetime Naderite-turned corporatist) Sinema (who had the mind-blowing chutzpah to fly back to her home state for a fundraiser to vacuum up contributions from companies who oppose the B4 even as the measure was being deliberated upon in Washington DC last week) able to become darkly pivotal historical actors in the first place?

It isn’t just about campaign finance, corporate media, and other forms of political class corruption. Almost nobody talks about a big sick historical elephant in the room here: the further extreme violation of the elementary democratic principle of one person, one vote by the assignment of two US Senators to every state regardless of population size. This “democratic” absurdity is fully constitutional, for the nation’s revered 18^th Century Covenant with Death grossly exaggerates the Senate voice of the nation’s whitest, most reactionary, Republican, evangelical, patriarchal, armed, racist, and proto-fascistic regions. Get this: if bright blue California had the same population-to-US Senator ratio as bright red Wyoming, it would have at least 130 representatives in the upper body of Congress. If progressive Brooklyn were a state and US Senators were apportioned there with the same populace-to-Senator ratio as red Wyoming, the New York City borough would have 9 U.S. Senators.

Due to “a growing population shift from the agricultural interior to crowded corridors along the coast,” the brilliant left constitution critic Daniel Lazare noted five years ago, it had by 2018 become mathematically possible to “cobble together a [Republican] Senate majority with states that account for just 17.6 percent of the popular vote.” (And, by the way, the bright blue District of Columbia is home to more people of Wyoming.  It is absurdly denied voting representation in either the House or the Senate.)

The US Senate is loaded with giant de facto “rotten boroughs” that abhorrently inflate the power of the nation’s most reactionary sections. If the Senate were apportioned in accord with the nation’s popular geography, a bill far more progressive than the 4B would pass the Senate with ease and “centrist” snakes like Manchin and Sinema would be beside the point.

(Wild iconoclasts might further ask why we have a bicameral legislature, with an “upper house,” in the first place. What is that about? Most at least nominally democratic countries are quite naturally unicameral. The US Senate, like the British House of Lords, functions as originally designed: an aristocratic check on the more plebian lower house of congress/parliament.)

“The Peculiar System That Emerged”: The Absurd Slaveowners’ Electoral College

The absurdity bleeds over into the nation’s preposterous, Monty Python-esque Electoral College method of installing imperial, ruling class presidents. Two hundred and forty-three years into its “envied” experiment in “democracy,” the United States does not elect its chief executive on the basis of a national popular vote! Because it is weighted heavily by the slaveowner constitution’s reactionary Senate apportionment regime, and because it rewards Elector slates on an all-or-nothing state-by state basis (if a candidate wins Texas by a single popular vote he or she gets all of the state’s 38 Electors), this democracy-flunking “college” requires a Democratic presidential candidate (incumbent or not) to significantly out-perform his or her Republican opponent in the popular vote to win (or keep) the presidency. Since it is technically irrelevant to win California by five million instead of five hundred votes under the winner-take-all formula, that candidate must give far more heed to right-wing and “moderate” opinion than would be required if the nation’s presidential elections were based on (imagine!) a popular vote. Along with other factors, including of course political finance and corporate control of the mass media, the undemocratic Electoral College tilts presidential candidates (including incumbents who want a second term) to the right and away from majority progressive public opinion. Demented Republican maniacs who lost the popular vote have occupied the world’s most powerful office for 12 of the last 22 years thanks to this idiotic regime. One of those maniacs was an at least instinctive fascist and a vicious pandemicist. He may come back for a second, potentially terminal reign of destruction in 2025, his re-matriculation coming in no small part thanks in part to the august Founders’ brilliant 18^th Century college.

(Try to explain the Electoral College to someone from another country, my fellow US-American – it’s hilarious. “How absurd,” foreign correspondents say: “And they call that democracy? Seriously?” Envy indeed!)

The Electoral College traces back to the holy Founders’ need to keep the early republic’s southern slaveowners on board. As law professor Wilfried Codrington III noted in The Atlantic two years ago:

‘The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.

But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.’

As historian Carol Anderson shows in her important new book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, “The [slave] South had no problem in walking away from the [1787-88] Constitutional Convention and the United States” if it didn’t get what its ruling slaveowners wanted, including the right to count three-fifths of their slaves’ populations towards the determination of how many representatives they could send to the lower house of Congress and an amendment guaranteeing state militias designed and managed to crush slave rebellions. (Even during the so-called American Revolutionary War, Anderson shows, southern slaveowners were willing to sacrifice national independence if necessary to block the military enlistment of Black Americans for fear that armed Blacks might take up their weapons against slavery.)

Designed to appease southern slaveowners, the US Constitution (William Lloyd Garrison’s “agreement with Hell”) and the rest of the nation’s astonishingly archaic governance structure, inherited from the time of Louis XVI, now helps appease neofascism and is setting us up for a remorseless return of the white nationalist Amerikaner Party of Trump to full national power in 2023 and 2025.

Judicial Review

It is true of course that the morally criminal conduct of reptilian politicos like Joe “Coal Stock” Manchin and Kyrsten “Drug Lobby” Sinema is related to the political dollars they rake in from capital – from corporate interests, business lobbyists, and other deep-pocketed political investors. But this money-politics corruption is inexplicable without reference to Joe MBNA Biden’s treasured 24-decade “system of governance.” Noxious prostituted real or wannabe dollar Dem oligarchs like Manchin and Sinema can only become swing-vote policy royalty and thereby boost their political finance profiles (election investment is all about impacting policy in the funders’ interest) because of the absurd level of disproportionate minority rule power the reactionary Senate apportionment system grants the nation’s rightmost major party.

At the same time, the Slaveowners’ Constitution grants an absurdly high level of Simon Says policymaking (and policy-breaking) “judicial review” power to the US Supreme Court, an aristocratic appointed-for-life body that has ruled in two key decisions (Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and Citizens United in 2010) that there can be no serious government limits placed on the “free speech” right of concentrated wealth to influence (purchase) American elections and thereby shape (dominate) US policy. What current House member Jamin Raskin (D-MD) and his onetime fellow Harvard Law student John Bonifaz once cleverly labeled “the wealth primary” – the requirement that one either possess great wealth or access to it to run a viable campaign for higher office – is not an act of God. It’s an act of policy enforced by the absurdly powerful US Supreme Court, invented by the US Founders as one of many aristocratic checks on the menace posed by their ultimate enemy, democracy.

The Supreme Court, endowed with God-like powers of judicial review – the sacred high temple of democracy that ruled in 1857 that African Americans were not and never could be citizens of the United States. What a glorious and sage example of benevolent wisdom that was, clear proof that Joe “Come on, Man” Biden is right about the wonderful rewards that accrue to those who patiently let the glorious American “system of governance” work its egalitarian wonders. Just what was it about that marvelous system of popular self-rule that Frederick Douglass couldn’t wrap his mind around five years before the Dred Scott decision?!

So What if 62% Percent Support Roe?

Speaking of the Supreme Court, it seems likely that it will soon reverse Roe v. Wade and thereby eliminate women’s constitutional right to receive abortions. This will impose forced motherhood and de facto female slavery across the United States (The ridiculously powerful high court has recently signed off on the full abrogation of Roe in Texas by refusing to intervene against a toxic Christian fascist bill with national mercenary and vigilante reach analogous to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act). So what if 62% of Americans want to keep Roe intact? The Supreme Court has an absurd 6-3 Republican majority, far to the right of the US populace, achieved through fully constitutional means: the appointment of high court justices (including three selected by the malignant pandemo-fascist beast Donald Trump) by right-wing Republican US presidents who were installed by the Slaveowner Constitution’s anti-democratic Electoral College system and approval by a US Senate that badly overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary regions and states. Constitutional Simon Says! Yet more reward for patient faith in a glorious democratic “system of governance” that has made the world green with envy for 240 years!

Still Slaves to the Constitution

The US Founders’ holy Covenant With Death was only passed through a grotesque series of bargains struck with the South’s merciless, arch-racist owners, exploiters, and torturers of Black slaves: the putrid Three-Fifths Compromise (letting the slaveowners count three-fifths of their slave populations towards the size of their delegation in the US House of Representatives), the Fugitive Slave Clause (granting slavery extra-territoriality by stating that fugitives from slavery must be sent back to the South if captured in the North), continuation of international slave trading for two decades, the Senate apportionment regime (which significantly over-represented slave states relative to the nation’s free population and electorate), the Electoral College, and the Second Amendment, upon which slaveholders insisted to assure themselves of a fighting force willing and ready to suppress slave insurrections.

Two hundred and thirty-three years after its ratification, we are still slaves to the undemocratic US Constitution in a very concrete institutional sense, with disastrous outcomes for ordinary people and livable ecology at home and abroad. The story of how and why this crippling aristo-republican slaveholders’ document has survived as the nation has moved from merchant capitalism to industrial and corporate capitalism, through America’s rise to global hegemony, and into the current neoliberal (and perhaps neofascist) era is a topic worthy of further investigation. The astonishing, highly atypical durability of this 18^th Century charter has yet to find its critically inclined historian, but it seems clear that the nation’s underlying class dictatorship of capital has seen fit to retain this horse and buggy era deed with the Devil since it is still paying dividends.

Don’t get me wrong. The class dictatorship of capital compromises and indeed crushes genuine popular sovereignty in all “bourgeois democracies” (an arguably oxymoronic phrase unless it is understood to mean democracy for capital), regardless of form. But the American constitutional order –Joe Biden’s “system of governance” that has supposedly been “the envy of the world” for 240 years (89 of which were marked by Black chattel slavery) – is quite distinctively reactionary, canceling even modest reforms considered mainstream and centrist in other rich capitalist nations. It ought to be considered long past its expiration date. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema richly deserves the worst imaginable earthly and spiritual punishments and capitalism must be radically replaced with ecosocialism on the path to communism, but national charters and governance structures matter and the US-American charter and structure is now and has long been an indefensible and authoritarian atrocity leading us to disaster in numerous ways I have only partially touched upon here.

Special Nullification Measures Still Required for Republifascists

And yet all this is not enough for the Nazified Republicans of 2021. Future US historians, should they exist, may someday marvel at how determined the nation’s rightmost major party, the neofascist Republicans, are to rig the constitutional game even further in their own favor through next generation gerrymandering, voter suppression, and (now) blunt election denial and nullification. The forefront of the Trump party’s current assault on bourgeois electoral democracy is the constitutional art and science of not counting votes, throwing out votes, overthrowing elections, and preventing the certification of Electoral College slates that don’t go Republikaners’ way. Red states are currently and all-too constitutionally moving not just to suppress and gerrymander Democratic votes but to cancel, deny, de-certify, and nullify them. It’s all meant to be done “constitutionally” with no street thugs, repression, and bloodshed required – at least not until people take to the streets to protest the coming theft of the 2024 presidential election.

Republican plotters see January 6^th and the broader multi-pronged attack on the 2020 election (the Capitol Riot was a last-ditch Hail Mary in this assault) as an exhibition game, a practice run, and a warm-up. It’s just a prologue to something far more sophisticated and serious in 2024-25. No more Beer Hall Putsches for these openly authoritarian white nationalists. They are getting all their legal and constitutional ducks in a row, coordinating election-theft and vote-nullification strategies between the state and federal levels. The table is being set for a new shot at fascist consolidation, American style, all quite “constitutional” in design. The fascist mob and gendarme violence will come after the election is expertly pinched by red state governments, the US Congress (which should be back in Republican hands), and perhaps the disproportionately right-wing federal courts.

Clearly the Amerikaner Party of Trump (the Republican Party) does not see the Founders’ charter as sufficient to guarantee the final solution they crave. Extra vote-suppressing and (worse) election-nullifying measures are required in their view because of demographic changes underscored by the 2020 Census – non-Hispanic white Americans’ declining share of the US population on the road to become a minority of the nation by 2050 if not before. Having moved from the neo-Nazi margins to the mainstream center of Republican media-politics culture, Fascist Replacement Theory (FRT) [3] is intimately linked to the Big 2020 Election Lie in fueling the coming right-wing coup of 2024-25.

“We Need the Storm”

Slavery was ended and basic civil and voting were first constitutionally (and inadequately) extended to Black Americans only through the revolutionary war and southern reconstruction that southern slaveowners’ intransigence forced on Abraham Lincoln, 180,000 Black Union Army soldiers, Ulysses S. Grant, and Congressional Republicans between 1861 and 1877. Frederick Douglass’s 1852 words were born out: “We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” It took a Civil War that claimed 750,000 lives to amend the Founder’s holy slaveowners’ charter in some all too historically incomplete and transient accord with democratic principles. Here we are now on the precipice of final societal and ecological collapse being inflicted on the nation and world by capitalism-imperialism, a system with no single greater national headquarters than the imperial United States. Calm patience with “our” (their) 240-year-old “system of governance” should be the very last thing on our political and moral agendas

There are no non-radical resolutions of the dilemmas facing this fatally unequal nation. The current trajectory is toward the radical right path of constitutionally consolidated and then repressively enforced and ecologically disastrous neofascism that imposes ruinous capitalist oppression. The only viable alternative is a radical people’s eco-socialist revolution that fully confronts the underlying class dictatorship of capital and struggles to put humanity on the path to many-sided liberation from all forms of oppression other than those imposed by natural existence itself.

We don’t need kayak-paddling beggars trying to speak truth up to Manchin’s power yacht. We need the storm that sinks his vessel in the turbulent seas of an actual revolution. We need the whirlwind. We need the earthquake. We need “the radical reconstruction of society itself” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., identified as “the real issue to be faced” shortly before his execution. Maybe the attempted imposition of neofascist female slavery (forced motherhood) in the world’s most powerful state can be a spark.

Endnotes

+1. This led Paul Krugman to cleverly quip that the Communist Manifesto called for “Workers of the world [to] unite to spend 1.2% of GDP on popular programs over the next decade!”

+2. University of Kentucky history department chair Ronald Formisamo’s latest book is titled American Oligarchy: The Permanence of the Political Class (University of Illinois, 2017). By Formisamo’s detailed account, U.S. politics and policy are under the control of a “permanent political class” – a “networked layer of high-income people” including Congressional representatives (half of whom are millionaires), elected officials, campaign funders, lobbyists, consultants, appointed bureaucrats, pollsters, television celebrity journalists, university presidents, and executives at well-funded nonprofit institutions. This “permanent political class,” Formisamo warns, is taking the nation “beyond [mere] plutocracy” to “the hegemony of an aristocracy of inherited wealth.”  It: “drives economic and political inequality not only with the policies it has constructed over the past four decades, such as federal and state tax systems rigged to favor corporations and the wealthy; it also increases inequality by its self-dealing, acquisitive behavior as it enables, emulates, and enmeshes itself with the wealthiest One Percent and .01 percent …[It engages in] the direct creation of inequality by channeling the flow of income and wealth to elites [while]… its self-aggrandizement creates a culture of corruption that infects the entire society and that induces many to abuse positions of power to emulate or rise into the One Percent …[and as it] contributes to continuing high levels of poverty and disadvantage for millions that exceed almost all advanced nations.”

+3. Special thanks to the clever English professor Clark Iverson for this play on the white nationalist right’s bogeyman “CRT” (Critical Race Theory).

counterpunch.org

Steve Bannon, a political guru for Donald Trump’s Republican political base, is hooked up with a Chinese billionaire whom China wants the U.S. to extradite over corruption charges. It may seem a strange pairing for Bannon given his rabid anti-China views. A few years back, Bannon was predicting the U.S. would be soon at war with China.

Together, their ventures are a mix of financial embezzlement and peddling conspiracy theories that are winding up fears and misapprehensions about the Covid-19 pandemic as well as fueling an anti-China public climate in the U.S.

Bannon and Guo Wengui are double-act scam artists who are not only ripping off hapless Republican voters for money. The pair and their shady media ventures are adept at spreading spurious notions about the last presidential election, the pandemic, vaccines, and China.

Guo’s media businesses were fined earlier this month $539 million by U.S. authorities for illegal stock market trading. The companies had been accused of fleecing thousands of investors with unregulated digital securities known as G-Coins or G-Dollars. As part of the settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, three media businesses belonging to Chinese-born billionaire Guo Wengui are compelled to return funds to investors and desist from further trading business.

“Thousands of investors purchased GTV stock, G-Coins, and G-Dollars based on the respondents’ solicitation of the general public with limited disclosures,” said Richard Best, Director of the SEC’s New York regional office. “The remedies ordered by the Commission today, which include a fair fund distribution, will provide meaningful relief to investors in these illegal offerings.”

Welcome to the scam world set up by Guo and Steve Bannon. Guo fled from China in 2014 to avoid a crackdown against business corruption under President Xi Jinping. An international arrest warrant has been issued by Beijing based on a litany of charges for fraud and other serious crimes. Several of Guo’s former associates have been jailed in China.

While living in exile in the United States, Guo has established himself as a prominent critic of the Chinese government, accusing it of corruption and abuse of power. As an anti-China mouthpiece, this is no doubt why the U.S. government seems to tolerate Guo and has declined to facilitate Beijing’s requests for extradition.

Guo’s profile and media businesses took off after he teamed up with Steve Bannon, the right-wing former aide to Donald Trump. Bannon received a $1 million fee as a media and political consultant to Guo. Bannon has a huge following among the Republican base and is still influential in Trump’s inner circle. By enlisting Bannon, Guo was able to bring his media companies and business scams to a much wider audience.

Bannon, as with many other Trump acolytes, has shown a flair for scamming the public over dodgy fundraising projects. In August 2020, he was arrested while on Guo’s 150ft luxury yacht off the Connecticut coast. He was charged with embezzling millions of dollars by promoting a fund to build a border wall with Mexico on private land. The case didn’t go to court because Trump pardoned Bannon in his last days as president.

Guo and Bannon have openly declared that their mission is to bring down the Chinese Communist Party. In June 2020, they set up a “New Federal State of China” whose overt purpose is regime change in Beijing. A so-called “embassy” has even been opened in New York.

To mark the one-year anniversary of the declared Chinese government-in-exile, a major media event in New York was sponsored by Guo. Speaking at the gala were Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn and other Trump associates. Among the rallying themes were claims that Donald Trump is the rightful president of the United States as well as impending war with China. This seditious cabal is strangely tolerated by U.S. authorities.

To harbor an enemy, self-declared government on U.S. soil is a provocation to the People’s Republic of China as well as a violation of international law. We can be sure that if the shoe was on the other foot, the United States would be fulminating against an “act of war”.

Guo and Bannon have a lucrative symbiotic relation. Guo’s billionaire funds pay for Bannon’s Neo-fascist political projects to get Trump re-elected. And Bannon brings millions of Republican voters into Guo’s media web that up until recently when the SEC caught up, had succeeded in embezzling billions of dollars.

To keep the whole snake-oil show on the road, Guo and Bannon whip up the Trump base with all sorts of conspiracy theories. Thus, it goes, the 2020 presidential election was a steal, Joe Biden is a radical leftist, Trump is going to be reinstated one day soon as rightful president, the Covid-19 pandemic is a hoax, vaccines are poisonous and are part of the Chinese Communist Party takeover of American society. Guo and Bannon overlap with the QAnon crazy conspiracy network. They reinforce one another in an evil vice of ignorance, delusion, and fear-mongering.

Meanwhile, Republican voters are dying in droves because they refuse to get vaccinated or wear protective masks which the Republican snake-oil salesmen refer disparagingly to as “face diapers”. Even right-wing radio talks show hosts are dying disproportionately from the disease that they have been dismissing as “fake news”.

Tragically, many ordinary U.S. citizens have not only been cheated out of their money and life savings through fraudulent fundraising by Guo and Bannon; they’re being cheated out of their very lives as the scam artists peddle one false claim after another.

The biggest worry, however, is the poisoning of relations between the U.S. and China by these scam artists and their cultic influence.

On U.S. domestic politics, Covid-19, vaccines, and other issues, the Biden Democratic administration may be at odds with Bannon and the right-wing Trump base. But in terms of foreign policy towards China, there is bipartisan convergence. Biden is pushing an equally hostile agenda tantamount to beating war drums. The new American military pact with Britain and Australia – unveiled last week known as AUKUS – is but the latest provocation.

Unlikely as it might seem, Bannon and the Guo scammers and a host of know-nothing, bigoted Republican politicians and pundits are fueling public acceptance of Biden’s warmongering towards China.

We need to clear some things up before they get any further out of hand, as the Dems insist on making this stuff every day’s front page. For starters, please stop saying “Reichstag moment.”  Also there was nothing even close to a coup on January 6, and those who fan the flames claiming we were “close” to a coup, overthrow, losing our democracy, etc., have evil designs on freedom and we should not listen to them. Done.

If the aliens flying around Navy ships were to stop long enough to listen to a couple of hours of “news,” they could easily believe Trump is still president, or at least still running against Biden. The MSM has him dominate the news, typically by recycling stories from his time in office, even recently reviving that he is a Russian asset. When Grandpa Simpson and Kamala “Silent Shadow” Harris tottered into the White House, they became president. Done.

Some 500 protestors taking selfies inside the Capitol building is a tantrum not a coup. Among other things, a coup must have some path towards success, in this case, preventing Joe Biden from becoming president. The rioters at best might have delayed the largely ceremonial counting of the Electoral College votes until the next day which would not have been a coup, or forced Congress to meet at Starbucks to do its job, also not a coup. Done.

Not done. The latest addition to Coup Cannon comes from then- and somehow still- Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley, apparently auditioning for a retirement job as a CNN analyst. Milley was so shaken Trump might attempt a coup or take other illegal measures after the election he and other top officials planned to stop Trump. Neither Milley nor any of the others actually spells out what Trump might have realistically done in some Calvinball-like way to make said coup happen. Milley’s Strangelovian performance art is based on nothing but the spittle running down his chin. American soldiers have been required to refuse illegal orders at least since Biden wore diapers, so Milley’s histrionics are just that.

Milley nonetheless felt “growing concern” after Trump placed “loyalists” in positions of power after the November 2020 election, replacing both Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Attorney General William Barr. He feared based on his own sizable gut these moves “were the sign of something sinister to come” (Update: Nothing sinister came.) Milley failed to recognize all presidential appointees are “loyalists” and somehow Trump did not replace Milley, who clearly had not read his oath recently, especially the part about taking orders from the civilian head of government.

In fact, if anyone is a threat to democracy it is nutjobs like Milley, who feel free to weave in and out of answering to the Commander in Chief based on their personal “concerns.” The general’s tough love for the Constitution apparently did not include the right to assemble, as he referred to a pro-Trump march protesting election results as “the modern American equivalent of brownshirts in the streets.” Dems now want to make a hero out of a man who feels his judgment is superior to the Constitution.

While Milley was rewriting 230 years of military prudence in late 2020, Paul Krugman of the NYT wrote there were “substantial odds America as we know it will be damaged or even destroyed” by the election (Update: it was not.) He told us to “expect violence from Trump supporters, maybe lots of it, both to disrupt voting on Election Day and in the days that follow” until Trump “stops counting of absentee ballots, claims massive fraud, and probably tries to get the Supreme Court to overturn the result” (Update: that did not happen.)  Elsewhere in the Times’ bunker, Thomas Friedman said America today reminded him of the Beirut at war with itself he covered as a cub reporter (Update: Beruit was way worse.)

Over at The Nation they simply assumed Trump would illegally remain in power. The writer’s real concern was “we have the moral high ground. But we don’t have, frankly, the military leadership in place to direct a guerrilla campaign against an illegitimate regime. We don’t have a government-in-exile waiting to take power. We don’t have international allies. We don’t have an underground network of spies and saboteurs. . . but we can lay our bodies down in front of the tanks.” Any hope for the rule of law? Nope. “The Supreme Court too is, fundamentally, an anti-democratic institution run by people who are not subject to the popular will of our diverse society.”

The Nation should not have worried about having to go Red Dawn unarmed. General Milley said “They may try [a coup] but they’re not going to f**king succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.” An interesting take on where power lies in a nation whose founding document begins with We the People…

Milley’s real plan was to prevent Trump from using the military in a coup by using the military in a coup against civilian leadership to gun down American citizens. CNN reports after January 6 Milley feared an attack on the presidential inauguration, telling senior military leaders: “Here’s the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they’re Boogaloo Boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II. We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”

But Milley is also a liar, claiming publically at the same time “I foresee no role for the U.S. armed forces in this election process. We will not turn our backs on the Constitution of the United States” while planning his Ring of Steel (it sounds better in the original German, Ring aus Stahl.)

Our observer from Mars might be confused. As far as a threat to democracy, it is General Milley who was preparing to disobey the Constitution and take a patriot-sized dump on his chain of command. It is progressive porn rag The Nation telling their readers they will fight a guerrilla war against other Americans, and that the Supreme Court, the third branch of government, is an antidemocratic institution. Who again is the threat? Trump’s out of office; Milley still holds command of the entire U.S. military.

And so to the Reichstag. With as little knowledge of history as they have of coups, the MSM turned the Reichstag fire into shorthand for everything they fear Trump would do but somehow never did. The 1933 Reichstag fire was a false-flag arson attack on the home of the German parliament in Berlin. The Nazi Party used this as a pretext to claim communists were ready to overthrow the elected government. Left out of the current misuse of the analogy is Hitler had already become Chancellor before the fire. More importantly, missing when trying to connect 1933 to modern America, is a full lack of context.

Hitler had already achieved power, transparently on promises to conquer the world, implement the Final Solution, and all sorts of other Mein Kampf stuff. He had announced plans to abolish democracy via the Enabling Act, which gave him power to pass laws by decree without the involvement of parliament. That next step needed an excuse, a trigger, to crack down, not a prime mover to seize power. The Germany around him was also over ripe for change, having been humiliated in WWI and suffering near-crippling unemployment and inflation. Historically Germany had had only a few years’ taste of a wimpy democracy, and a long history of autocracy. No matter how dramatic someone wants to portray Trump’s non-actions, none of what never happened came within miles of what the real Nazis did.

If there was no coup on January 6, and no possible road to a coup, why are we still talking about all this? We should be mocking those who have no basic understanding of current events, never mind history. But we are still talking about all this (with Nancy Pelosi’s deck-is-stacked “investigation” looming) because the Biden agenda is stalled. He has decreed a few things that undecreeded a few things Trump decreed, but is unlikely to make much progress on all those promises of infrastructure, immigration reform, or student loans. Inflation is at a 13 year high even as gas prices eat away at what’s left of our middle class. There is no vision to end the COVID panic. The social justice and culture war issues which dominate Democratic mindspace seem even more flaccid with Trump out of office. So what do Democrats have left to run on?

Trump. The Democratic message for the midterms and beyond is Trump, coups, January 6, white supremacy, racism-a-go-go, militias, domestic terrorism, a veritable Nazi renaissance. Dems have little else but fear of things that never happened to work with, and hope to milk the “But at least we’re not Trump” cow one more time. So get ready to party like it is 2020. And just wait for #Reichstagification to start trending.

wemeantwell.com

“The retreat of the West began with the fall of communism in 1989”, the political philosopher, John Gray, writes. “Our triumphal elites lost their sense of reality, and in a succession of attempts to remake the world in their image [… they have brought about] the result that Western states are weaker, and more endangered than they were at any point in the Cold War”.

The West’s decomposition, Gray outlines, is not only geo-political; it is cultural and intellectual. Western countries now contain powerful bodies of opinion that regard their own civilisation as a uniquely pernicious force. In this hyper-liberal view, which is heavily represented in higher education, Western values of freedom and toleration are now understood to be little more than code for White racial domination.

Whether Western élites are now capable of transforming their vacuum-sealed zeitgeist is questionable. Rather, the underlying, deeply moralising approach of this hyper-liberalism limits discourse to moral stances that are simplistic, held to be self-evident, and morally-impeccable. Arguing realpolitik pros-and-cons today is not far from being a prohibited enterprise. Indeed, shifts in the global strategic paradigm, or indeed of the wider challenges that it faces, are not addressed in any serious fashion. For, that would demand a realism and a strategic grasp, which mainstream western opinion-leaders reject as defeatist – if not immoral.

The U.S. Metro-élite has converted cultural attainment into economic privilege and vice versa. It controls what Jonathan Rauch describes in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, as the epistemic regime—the massive network of academics and analysts who determine what is true. Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed.

Just to be clear, this dynamic is on course to become the biggest dividing line in global politics – as it already is in U.S. and EU politics. It is getting worse both in the U.S. and Europe, and it is going to leach out into geo-politics. It already has. “It’s not what you want; but it’s coming anyway”. And if the long drift of history is any guide, it will bring increased tensions and the risk of war.

Here is one sample (taken from Ishaan Tharoor’s daily column in the Washington Post):

It’s one of the least surprising convergences on the planet. Fox News host Tucker Carlson — arguably the most influential voice on the American Right, absent a certain former president — is in Hungary. Every episode of his prime-time show this week will be televised from Budapest.

Carlson, as my colleague Michael Kranish charted in a probing profile last month, has become the “voice of White grievance”… the most well-known proponent of a brand of far-right, nativist politics, popularized by Trump, and now pushed further by a coterie of pundits and politicians who are steadily taking hold of the Republican Party … They are virulently anti-immigrant and sceptical of free trade and corporate power … They embrace an often religious and implicitly racist brand of nationalism, while waging a relentless culture war against the perceived threats of multiculturalism, feminism, LGBT rights – and liberalism writ large.

The Fox News host is hardly the only right-wing American pointing to Orban’s example. In a recent speech, J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist campaigning on a folksy, nationalist platform in the Republican Senate primary in Ohio, derided the “childless left” in the United States as agents of “civilizational collapse”. He then pushed for Orban’s agenda: In Hungary, “they offer loans to newly married couples that are forgiven at some point later if those couples have actually stayed together and had kids,” Vance said. “Why can’t we do that here? Why can’t we actually promote family formation”?

Our point here is not political. It is not about the Washington Post’s or Orbàn’s perceived merits. It is about ‘otherness’. It is about the refusal to concede that the ‘other’ may hold an authentic alternative view (and identity) – even if you disagree with it, and do not accept its premise. In short, it is about absence of empathy.

The ‘creative class’ (a term coined by Richard Florida), didn’t set out to be an élite, dominating class, David Brooks, the author of Bobos in Paradise, (himself a liberal NY Times columnist) claims. It just happened. The new class was supposed to foster progressive values, and economic growth. But, instead birthed resentment, alienation, and endless political dysfunction.

The ‘bobos’ didn’t necessarily come from money, and they were proud of that; they had secured their places in selective universities and in the job market through drive and intelligence exhibited from an early age, they believed. But by 2000, the information economy and the tech boom were showering the highly educated with cash.

Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class lauded the economic and social benefits that the creative class had brought – by which he meant, more or less the ‘bobos’ of Brooks’ earlier christening (the Bourgeois Bohemians – or ‘bobos’. ‘Bohemian’ in the sense of coming from the narcissistic Woodstock generation; and ‘bourgeois’ in the sense that post-Woodstock, this ‘liberal’ class later evolved into the mercantilist top echelons of cultural, corporate and Wall Street power paradigms).

Florida was a champion of this class. And Brooks admits that he looked on them benignly too: “The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste”, he wrote in 2000. “Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.”

That turned out to be one of the most naive sentences he had have ever written, Brooks admits.

Every once in a while, a revolutionary class comes into being which disrupts old structures. In the 19th century, it was the bourgeoisie, the capitalist merchant class. In the latter part of the 20th century, as the information economy revved up and the industrial middle class hollowed out, it was Creative Class people, Brooks argues. “Over the past two decades, the rapidly growing economic, cultural, and social power of [this class] has generated a global backlash that is growing more and more vicious, deranged, and apocalyptic. And yet this backlash is not without basis. The creative class, or whatever you want to call them, have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying Brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech”.

This class, who were accreting enormous wealth and were congregating into America’s large metro areas, created gaping inequalities within cities, as high housing prices pushed middle- and lower-class people out. “Over the past decade and a half,” Florida wrote, “nine in ten U.S. metropolitan areas have seen their middle classes shrink. As the middle has been hollowed out, neighbourhoods across America are dividing into large areas of concentrated disadvantage – and much smaller areas of concentrated affluence”.

This class also came to dominate left-wing parties around the world that were formerly vehicles for the working class. “We’ve pulled these parties further left on cultural issues (prizing cosmopolitanism and questions of identity), while watering down or reversing traditional Democratic positions on trade and unions. As creative-class people enter left-leaning parties, working-class people tend to leave”.

These polarising cultural and ideological differences, now precisely overlay economic differences. In 2020, Joe Biden took the votes of just 500 or so counties, yet together these 500 account for 71 percent of American economic activity. Trump, by contrast, won more than 2,500 counties. Yet, those 2,500 together generate only 29 percent of GDP. This is why the Dems taunt Republicans, who decline the Covid vaccine as ‘parasites’ – as those Blue counties are the ones that overwhelmingly pay the bills that result from infection.

An analysis by Brookings and The Wall Street Journal found that just 13 years ago, Democratic and Republican areas were at near parity on prosperity and income measures. Now they are divergent, and getting more so.

If Republicans and Democrats talk as though they are living in different realities – it is because they are.

“I got a lot wrong about the bobos”, Brooks says. “I didn’t anticipate how aggressively we would move to assert our cultural dominance, the way we would seek to impose elite values through speech and thought codes. I underestimated the way the creative class would successfully raise barriers around itself to protect its economic privilege … And I underestimated our intolerance of ideological diversity”.

“When you tell a large chunk of the country that their voices are not worth hearing, they are going to react badly—and they have. The working class today, vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls … This dominance however has also engendered a rebellion among its own offspring.

“The members of the creative class laboured to get their children into good colleges. But they’ve also jacked up college costs and urban housing prices so high that their children struggle under crushing financial burdens. This revolt has boosted Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, and so on.

“Part of the youth revolt is driven by economics, but part is driven by moral contempt. Younger people look at the generations above them and see people who talk about equality but drive inequality. Members of the younger generation see the Clinton-to-Obama era—the formative years for the creative class’s sensibility—as the peak of neoliberal bankruptcy”.

The resonance with Russia in the 1840s and 1860s, with the radicalisation of the offspring generation from their Liberal parents, is apt.

The wider geo-political point is that if Orbàn, the leader of a EU member-state is dismissed so peremptorily as a ‘Trumpist’, backward nativist bigot – we may easily predict the absence of empathy and understanding for other world leaders: whether they be Xi, Raisi or Putin.

We are dealing here with the ideology of an aspirant ruling class that aims to hoard wealth and position, whilst flaunting its immaculate progressive and globalist credentials. Intractable culture wars, and an epistemic crisis, in which key factual and scientific questions have been politicised, is essentially nothing more than a bid to retain power, by those who stand at the apex of this ‘Creative Class’ – a tight circle of hugely wealthy oligarchs.

Even so, schools are pressured to teach a single version of history, private corporations sack employees for deviant opinions, and cultural institutions act as guardians of orthodoxy. The prototype for these practices is the U.S., which still proclaims its singular history and divisions as the source of emulation for every contemporary society. In much of the world, the woke movement is regarded with indifference, or – as in the case of France, where Macron has denounced it as “racialising” society. But wherever this American agenda prevails, society is no longer liberal in any historically recognisable sense. Knock away the myth, and the liberal way of life can be seen essentially, to have been an historical accident.

What accident?

“In 2007, Alan Greenspan, the former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, was asked which candidate he was supporting in the forthcoming presidential election. “We are fortunate that, thanks to globalisation, policy decisions in the U.S. have been largely replaced by global market forces,” he replied of the contest between Barack Obama and John McCain. “National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces.”

(It was Greenspan’s policies that propelled the bobos to become the global elect, and which made them fabulously wealthy.)

“The complacency of Greenspan represented the apex of neoliberalism, a term often misunderstood and overused, but which remains the best shorthand for the policies that have shaped the global economy as we know it: privatisation, tax cuts, inflation targeting and anti-trade union laws. Rather than being subject to democratic pressures – such as elections – these measures were portrayed as irreversible. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” Tony Blair declared in his speech to the 2005 Labour Party conference: “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

But this proved a false dawn. “I’ve found a flaw [in my ideology],” Greenspan told a Congressional hearing during the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. “I don’t know how significant, or permanent it is.

This is a critical moment in American history, where 75% of Republicans and 30% of Democrats agree that the 2020 Election was stolen from Trump, as our cited polling data below makes clear. Confidence in American institutions also continues to decline, while a new Trafalgar poll shows that Harris inspires no confidence at all among 60% of Americans.

The July 23 and 13 Trafalgar/Convention of States poll surveyed more than 1,100 likely voters for the 2022 midterm election with a startling 64 percent of respondents expressing little confidence that Harris is ready to be president. The bulk of these, close to 60 percent, said they were “not confident at all.” Mind you, a Vice-President is elected on the basis that they would be ready to serve as president whenever conditions may come to pass where the sitting president was unable.

In a parallel universe where Democrats don’t steal elections, this would be a disconcerting poll result.

The DNC needs to be building post-Biden energy now, as they enter the mid-term election cycle. Especially so now with MAGA activists pushing on every state legislature where they can, to push back against the Dominion/Smartmatic electronic voting systems and other voting integrity matters.

An election worker checks Dominion systems in Miami-Dade County in this uncredited photo from November 2020

MAGA voters are motivated by the de facto leader of the newly reformed Republican Party, Donald Trump. They are acting against election fraud, critical race theory, open and wanton double standards from the DOJ in handling the January 6^th protestors compared to the leniency given to Antifa/BLM, the movement against lockdowns with no basis in science, and more.

The DNC doesn’t have an answer. They appear to keep offering up Harris and Buttigieg. All of their gas was spent in an anti-Trump message that lacked a positive message.

Well, to the extent there was a message, promises made by Biden, most of these have been broken.

Elections – Why bother?

Post-Biden energy would, in that parallel universe, be very important for the Democrat Party considering how much organic energy the MAGA movement continues to generate. Back during the DNC convention in 2020, Joe Biden himself said he was just a placeholder, inferring that he realized he would be a one-term president if elected. The future of the party sits with Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris according to DNC insiders and their Trans-Atlantic corporate and bankers masters.

As unbelievable as that sounds, keep in mind that this is a party that only was able to come into the White House based upon what Biden himself called the most “extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization” ever assembled. Some may say this was a slip, others would retort that it was a Freudian slip.

At least 1/3^rd of Americans believe that Biden occupies the White House as the result of election fraud, according to late June 2021 Monmouth University poll. Looking at the methodology, it’s possible this number is tremendously higher.

Another reason this figure is probably many times higher, is a parallel Rasmussen Poll from late November 2020 that showed that 20-30% of Democrats, yes Democrats, believed that the election was stolen from Trump.

The picture becomes clearer when we look at the YouGov poll which asked Republican voters how accurate the statements:

“millions of fraudulent mail and absentee ballots were cast”, and whether; “voting machines were manipulated to add tens of thousands of votes for Joe Biden.”

Lastly YouGov asked for respondents’ responses to the statement;

 “thousands of votes were recorded for dead people.”

As even the liberal WaPo reported: For each of these false statements [sic], more than 50 percent of Republican respondents said it was “very accurate”; over 75 percent of Republican voters said each one was “very accurate” or “somewhat accurate.”

This is not a matter that will go away. Many Americans historically felt that differences between Republicans and Democrats at the level of the Executive Branch were not decisive. But as times have gotten harder, Americans have look less to private enterprise and more to executive action to deliver on endemic and now multi-generational problems.

A Pro-Trump ‘Stop the Steal’ protest, in this unsourced image.

The MAGA movement is one that largely connects geopolitical and geo-economic issues of the trade imbalance with China and the outsourcing of key production to the intolerable conditions and uncertainty that prevails across the heartland. Much of America still hadn’t recovered from the 2007/2008 financial crisis, and we should note that real wages had been falling against growth for decades before.

Provocations and Hardships

It’s almost as if congress isn’t aware of this economic decline now more than forty years in the works. But we think they are, since they’re the ones who had an in depth Congressional Research Service report which highlights the fact of continued declining wage trends for the past forty years in the opening summary.

One of America’s fast growing “Tent Cities” – Nov. 10, 2017 photo, Stephanie Beasley, 36, foreground, a former resident (AP Photo/Mike Cardew/Beacon Journal/Ohio.com)/Akron Beacon Journal via AP)

It’s almost as if all of this is a provocation, intended on provoking the kind of ‘uprising of the deplorables’ that January 6^th wasn’t. The open abuse of institutions, fraudulent elections, growing unemployment and uncertainty, the grotesque rising trend of medical bankruptcy, and the eventual rolling out of vaccine passports (whether governmental or de facto as a condition of employment and travel) are indeed horrific. And they would be all the more horrific if these were intentionally being orchestrated to provoke a reaction from the American people which would then be used as a pretext to double-down harder on the rising police state.

Given Biden’s state of mental deterioration, there is no possibility he is really developing policy, foreign or domestic. That’s what cabinets do anyhow, but historically there has been some notion that the ship has a captain other than the IMF, CFR and the World Economic Forum’s Nicolas Berggruen. It was he who financed John Podesta’s terroristic and secessionist war-game to oust trump, the Transition Integrity Project. There is also someone clearly telling Biden what to say through his earpiece, and his executive orders are signed in what appears to be his wife’s handwriting.

And with Pete Buttigieg showing off some decree of election theft acumen himself back in the Spring of 2020, guaranteeing a win against Bernie Sanders in the Iowa straw poll by using a crooked app made by Shadow Inc. (you can’t make this stuff up), we see a clearer picture. Biden’s role is to break every promise made, promises necessary to get those 50 or 60 million Americans who actually voted for him to turn out.

The future of the DNC relies on printing fake ballots, ballot harvesting, and media censorship if anyone tries to raise these facts. The announcement that the White House would be coordinating with Big Tech to further censor and repress Americans is most definitely a violation of the 1^st Amendment, given that this is now an act of government deciding which political speech will be allowed.

And with all of that, it looks very much like the end-game here is to have a Harris and Buttigieg ticket for 2024. Having Harris and Buttigieg forced onto a majority pro-Trump America, would be a hardship and a provocation that could finally push America over the edge into disintegration.

Liars Do Their Work

Buttigieg and Harris rank very high on what the decidedly unlikable people in charge think likability looks like.

What’s more, there’s a very good chance that Biden won’t even finish his term, word on the streets is that foreign leaders and diplomatic missions have bet pools on which month in 2022 or 2023 that Biden steps down for one reason or another.

Because the DNC pretends also to be the party of organized labor and more, imagines that it represents the interests of the most vulnerable and socioeconomically oppressed strata, it can make these betrayals seem to be a step above what ‘Orange-man-bad’ would have been able to offer. Most American workers won’t believe it; they didn’t in 2016 or in 2020. But with voter fraud, election theft, social media censorship, and let’s throw in cyber-terrorism and a magical pandemic, food shortages and black-outs, the idea may very well just be to simply pummel and demoralize American workers into submission.

These deep state games are being played on very shaky ground, with Americans institutions suffering a growing loss of confidence among the public. An early July 2021 Gallup poll shows a continued decline in confidence since 1973, and this trend has been a consistent one.

This strongly suggests that Atlantic Council claims, used to justify censorship and repression, that Russian misinformation vectors are responsible for the loss of confidence are false. Instead, we can see that the loss of confidence parallels both the growing income inequality (Pew Research) and gap between economic growth and real earnings over the same exact period of time.

Despite this, there is a profound disconnect between DNC loyal professional ‘activists’ and pundits and the public at large, a special class that continues to have faith in the system they are paid to have.

The quacking pundit class of policy wonks and university graduate NGO ‘specialists’ living in a fantasy-land where there is some viable progressive strategy to ‘win back’ the DNC from the corporations will do their job in 2022 and 2024. Their job is to create a hyper-reality simulacrum of hope, so that big-hearted progressives continue to vote Democrat.

This all comes together beautifully. So long as these professional pundits on both mainstream and DNC backed ‘alternative’ media sell the story, then the rapidly diminishing strata of baby-boomer and older Gen X progressives might actually think that the ‘Democrat Landslide’ electoral outcomes in 2022 and 2024 were legitimate.

Restoring Democracy in America?

The election results continue to inspire incredulity still eight months after the November election. Once people lose confidence in that system, and as confidence in institutions erodes, people start to dig. Then they discover stock price manipulation, and start to pull out investments from there. Once the system loses buy-in from the public, then there’s very little left they can squeeze from the public. This is a basic question of the social contract.

Between big questions about election integrity, and a ‘Great Reset’ being forced onto the U.S. and the world by a banking class trying to hold on to power in a post financial world, a growing percentage of Americans – about 20% of all Americans – want the U.S. military to take matters in their own hands, and conduct military tribunals that would see large swaths of ‘elected’ officials, leaders of intelligence agencies, and even celebrities (thought to be involved in ritual child abuse), tried and possibly executed at Gitmo.

There are simple solutions to voter integrity issues, and genuinely open and fair elections could go a long way not only in restoring faith in institutions, but electing representatives that can do the kind of ‘reset’ that Americans actually want.

Historic voter disenfranchisement suffered by Black Americans is a provable phenomenon, caused by the prison-industrial complex and recidivism, DMV offices being used to issue state ID’s despite these being located hundreds of miles away in some states larger inter-county systems.

But the work-arounds proposed by Democrats to solve disenfranchisement are actually just covers for election fraud.

An undated Alabama State House disenfranchisement protest endorsed by the NAACP – source NYT

Those ‘solutions’ also simply treat Black Americans as default Democrats – and so ballots are stuffed ‘on their behalf’. That’s likely what poll workers who stuffed ballot boxes thought they were doing it in the name of justice. It’s understandable on a certain level, the existing injustices can certainly inspire a type of vigilantism at the counting tables. But this was used to take the election from Trump, who also earned more votes from Black America than any Republican since Reconstruction after the Civil War.

But it’s this half of the story that many conservatives are loath to appreciate. Their demands are pretty straight forward and rational: end electronic voting, return to a paper ballot-only system. Require a state ID to vote.

Election fraud effects all Americans, but what’s often not considered is the particularly negative impact it has on the historically disenfranchised black community. This is because election fraud is also used in Democrat primaries, meaning that Democrats that offer no real solutions for Black America can win primaries, leaving this vulnerable community without a working electoral system. Election fraud, because of who is behind it, benefits corporate America which perhaps counter-intuitively for old liberals, backed Biden and worked very hard to take the election from Trump.

Caitlyn Jenner’s rise in California shows that we are confused not just about gender, but about the nature of liberty.

By Matthew SCHMITZ

Conservatives are lining up behind Caitlyn Jenner. Jenna Ellis, former senior counsel to Donald Trump, says that Jenner’s campaign for the governorship of California shows “how non-inclusive and intolerant the leftists really are.” Paul Gosar, the firebrand Arizona congressman, approvingly notes that the “left is triggered” by the candidate. John Fund, the national affairs reporter for National Review, tweets: “Caitlyn Jenner’s new video for CA governor is SUPERB. As a Californian, I actually cried.”

It should not be surprising that conservatives have come to regard Caitlyn as stunning and brave. Despite its residual reputation as the party of family values and Yankee modesty, the GOP has long relied on celebrities who deviate from established standards of taste and propriety. Donald Trump, with his gold-plated aesthetics and “locker-room talk,” is only the most recent example.

In this sense, Jenner’s candidacy is less novel than it may seem. Jenner wears makeup. Reagan did too, at least professionally. Jenner has reshaped his body and taken hormones. So did Arnold. Keeping up with the Kardashians is vulgar. So is Conan the Barbarian, and so is the governor’s mansion Reagan built, as Joan Didion memorably observed.

One need not be overly concerned with respectability to regret this dynamic. Divorce, which Reagan did much to normalize, has produced untold agony. There is no reason to be more optimistic about Caitlyn Jenner’s campaign to normalize transgenderism.

Yet his own attitudes are more complicated than might be expected from an avatar of the transgender movement. Under the new orthodoxy, anyone who uses the wrong name or pronoun risks being cast out of respectable society. Jenner takes a more tolerant view. He wants the transgendered to be accepted on their own terms, but he seems uncomfortable when that aspiration leads to the policing of speech. After Joy Behar was denounced for referring to Jenner as “he” on The View, Jenner told her not to worry: “I’m not about cancel culture. I know where your heart is. California has bigger issues than pronouns.”

Jenner has been surprised to find how utterly members of the transgender movement reject his live-and-let-live philosophy. “For a community pushing for acceptance,” he writes in his autobiography, “we can sadly be brutally judgmental of each other. We insist upon tolerance, but only to an extent. We want inclusion, but aren’t as inclusive at times.”

Despite this tension, Jenner shares the basic convictions of transgender activists. Jenner visited the parents of one transgender teen who had committed suicide and reflected on his death. “It wasn’t just depression and repeated cyberbullying that made life such hell for him,” he writes. “It was also adults who refused to accept Kyler or address Kyler by the correct pronoun.” When a transgender woman wrote to Jenner saying that a bill in South Dakota limiting transgender bathroom use was harming her, Jenner concluded that “she was right to think the atmosphere was toxic.”

In Jenner’s view, the transgender movement is guilty of inconsistency. But it is hard to see how his own beliefs about transgenderism are compatible with the freedom he seems to prize. If misgendering is the cause of transgender suicide, we need restrictions on speech. If socially conservative bills harm people who would otherwise be healthy, then social conservatism must be stamped out. Jenner’s easygoing instincts are winsome, but they cannot be reconciled with what he has come to believe about his identity.

He is not the only one who suffers from this confusion. A number of well-intentioned writers have protested the illiberal effects of transgender activism while insisting that we should affirm transgender identity. They suffer from an acute form of the illusion that freedom need not be tied to some idea of the good and the true. A society that regards transgenderism as normal and healthy will inevitably sanction those who disagree. Caitlyn’s rise shows that we are confused not just about gender, but about the nature of liberty.

theamericanconservative.com