Anxieties about the Future of my Country- and Theses

  

  Trump did not initiate a crisis of democracy in America. He is only the latest form this crisis takes. Since 1980 corporate power has increased to the point where they are a de facto branch of government, and not the weakest branch. Wealth has been concentrating at the top while people who work for a living have been getting squeezed and have had to deal with real insecurity - while the situation for those at the bottom has only gotten more hopeless. The corporate concentration in media and its takeover of the Internet - started long before Fox as a matter of policy both of Democratic and Republican administrations - is itself a crisis in democracy. The flaws in our constitution prevent facing this reality and indeed have only eased this symbiosis between corporate power and government. This situation could not even be articulated in our politics before the advent of Bernie Sanders. 

 In the present, I struggle with this: there are two camps of Americans; these two camps of Americans see each other as enemies and threats – not just political opponents, not just as Americans who disagree, but as enemies such that Vladimir Putin is an ally against these other enemy Americans. In fact, only one of these camps sees the other as an enemy, but given that they have declared war on the other camp – a Cold War – the other camp has no choice but to see them as enemies. Within these two camps, there are factions, but they don’t matter now.

   And this Cold War is in the head. It results from a set of ideas about what is real. It is in the soul as well. It results from a spiritual disease. Here are some random thoughts or theses on this situation, which I will try to understand using the analogy of Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s and insights of Karl Marx and Hermann Göring.

 

 

Thesis One

  Hermann Göring said in an interview with an American psychologist names Gilbert after the war:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. [emphasis mine]

 

That works not only with countries as a whole, but also in factions within a country. Since Clinton became President, a host of TV and radio propagandists, led by Rush Limbaugh, labored to get working Republican voters to see Democrats not as political opponents but as unpatriotic enemies of the people. They denounced Republican politicians who were willing to compromise on policy issues, portraying them as compromising with the devil. A group of pragmatic, patriotic Republicans did persist – John McCain and Mitt Romney being the two most prominent examples. But their position within the party became increasingly precarious. Under Trump’s control, such pragmatists who cared about policy results and were committed to the country have all but disappeared.

    One way to understand their “achievement” was that they tapped into working men’s (mostly white men) resentments and created both an epistemological bubble that featured the Democrats being utterly corrupt perverters and destroyers of everything America was supposed to stand for, every that made America “great” in their minds. ‘Democrat’ became almost synonymous with ‘traitor.’ Fox News came along to nourish this epistemological bubble. The bubble was protected by constructing an echo chamber – an echo chamber that discredited information from any source other than the now official sources of Fox, Limbaugh & Co. The mainstream media was reduced to being the propaganda mouth of the enemy. [The corporate media has been problematic for democracy for many reasons, but that is beyond my purpose here to discuss. See Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times, 2000. A bit dated, but details the corporate takeover of media and the interpretation of the 1^st Amendment.]

 

The fruit of this pre-Trump attempt to demonize the enemy was the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party.

The enemy was the Democrat, the Liberal, i.e. who are really “socialist.” Like the West Europeans.

Part of the demonization was motivated by the need to stay blind to the fact that working people have it incomparably better in European states because the states actively work to patch up the worst effects of capitalism. In Germany, for example, I and my family are completely insured and even supported in ways that are unimaginable for working Americans. There is no college tuition so I don’t have to worry about being ruined by my children’s education. There is a wonderful public transportation system so those who can’t afford or who don’t want a car can live a normal life. Etc. Thus Bernie Sanders was such a threat. Trump was put up to counter that threat, to demonize people for wanting in the US what working people take for granted in Europe.

    These propagandists, aided by the loss of the USSR as the prime enemy, prepared the way for the Trump takeover.  They broke with the post-War consensus that framed political disagreement between the two parties and between factions within the parties.

   Now the two camps live in alternate universes, and the MAGA universe is completely untethered to facts. With their own active complicity, the MAGA faction has become epistemological equivalents of flat earthers or creationists or  astrology believers. No common-sense evidence can refute their views.

‘Trump won the election. He has proof.’

‘But his own Attorney General, head of Homeland Security, and FBI all stated unequivocally that the election was fair. He presented his evidence, such as it was, to the courts in 61 cases and lost every case – many overseen by judges he appointed. Massive evidence of his conspiracy to steal the election was presented to the Jan. 6 committee by his own people.’

‘The courts are part of the deep state. His AG and other folks sold out to the Democrats. The Jan 6 was a partisan propaganda circus.’

‘Use your common sense!’

‘I am. It makes no sense to me that a great man like Trump would lie about such things!’

Etc.

 

Thesis Two

  How can that be? What made so many people susceptible to irreality? Here some random suggestions.

·        Deplorables: many people have been made to feel ashamed for holding views – about sex, family, marriage, etc. – that not long ago were taken for granted. Many were made to feel ashamed of latent racism or being seen as racist for opposing particular policies like affirmative action. (I don't think the 'culture wars' were started by the right; the right just pounced on them and used them.)

·        Inferiority complex: in our DNA there is a suggestion: whoever is not rich and famous is a loser, and being a loser is your own fault. A kind of primitive nationalism is opium for this: ‘OK, I am a loser, but I am an American (white American); America is the greatest country; therefore, I am great.’ Or liberals who flaunt their college educations rub salt into this inferiority complex: ‘Trump will show them!’ etc.

·        More objectively, the uprooting and insecurity that has attended the near total destruction of rural farming life as well as the traditional manufacturing base – largely seen as a result of ‘globalization’ and ‘internationalism’ (American first!).

·        The squeezing of the middle class by the super-rich and corporate America – something MAGA has to camouflage and blame on the Democrats.

·        The evangelicals have always been a group apart. The Southern Democrats used to get them. After the Civil Rights Movement, they fell into the lap of the Republican Party. Their interests consist of laws banning abortions, protections for religious schools against public schools to keep their children in their bubbles - which I can partly understand, being not uncritical of the culture of the Great American Funhouse myself - and otherwise to be left alone. They have become politicized because they see secular society threatening their families and belief systems – somewhat like the Amish fear of ‘America.’  They tend to be single-issue voters indifferent to public life (except when it infringes on their lives). But now Christian Nationalism is a big part of MAGA. It’s like: we can only be safe from secular society if we control or have a veto over government policy. Many of these people see Trump for what he is, but see him as a tool to gain control over the government.

·        The absence of roots. We are the most rootless people that have ever existed on earth. If roots are a deep human need – and I agree with Simone Weil that they are (see her Need for Roots) – then we suffer emotional damage for the lack of roots. This is partly what explains the insanity of ‘identity politics.’ The deep need to latch onto some external category, whether be of race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever. Thus politics transforms from (ideally) debates about what is just or what serves the common good to who a person happens to be – which as a question of ‘identity’ is beyond debate. That is a recipe for fanaticism. 

 

At some level, we are creatures of ego. We are drawn to what elevates or consoles the ego, repelled from what lowers it or makes it feel bad. These things are mediated by ideas of what is real and good. What I see is a massive system designed to elevate and comfort the egos of a portion of the population that suffers most from the economic regime they are de facto supporting and protecting.

There is something wrong. They sense that. As Umberto Eco has his enlightened monk (i.e. his nominalist monk), Brother William, say in The Name of the Rose: "The common people feel a truth that is perhaps truer than that of the theologians [the pundits] but they waste this feeling in ill-considered actions.” These people have chosen to live in a comforting, in an ego-elevating fantasy, and thus have become a threat to anything good that can come of the country. They have chosen to wallow in self-pity and victimhood rather than act according to their true interests and situation.

 

Thesis Three

   What interests did the new Republican propaganda machine serve? Where did the resentments come from that this machine fed? Complex questions to which I can only suggest directions for research.

   Marx wrote:

  The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.

 

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

 

What were the economic conditions following the end of the Cold War? Both Democrats and Republicans agreed on the corporate capitalist structure of the economy. The situation was not, as it was in Germany during the Great Depression, whether a communist revolution that would end capitalism would succeed, and force capitalists (as it did in Germany) into a choice between surviving under Hitler or losing everything under the German Communist Party (they had given up on the ability of the Weimar Republic to protect capital). Capitalism was the agreed-upon foundation for the country. To criticize capitalism put you outside the mainstream on the fringes (where I have spent most of my adult life).

     The ideological conflict was between Roosevelt’s New Deal – largely but not completely abandoned by the Democrats themselves until Bernie Sanders came along – in which capitalism would be forced to make compromises for the sake of working people and the good of the country as a whole. Corporations and the super-rich would have to pay their fair share of taxes, be subject to regulation from the state, etc. It was not an existential question of their survival but rather one of sharing power (e.g. as is taken for granted in German capitalism today). As opposed to this is the corporate drive – under pressure from corporate raiders in the form of hedge funds – to remove all barriers to profit maximization, to minimize or eliminate paying taxes, to regulate themselves, to be free to buy influence in government (money = free speech in the Supreme Court’s corporate-friendly ruling).

      It is not a question of capitalism versus socialism (i.e. public ownership of the means of industrial production and finance) but unfettered turbo-capitalism versus the control over capitalism that Roosevelt achieved to save it from itself during the Great Depression. That is the main (not only) underlying structural reality that has given rise to the Cold Civil War, as sections of the capitalist class finance ideological campaigns that seem remote from its main interest but in fact serve to protect their freedom and power over government policy at every stage.

   What is good for the corporate or billionaire bottom line is good for the country vs. the corporate capitalist class is one part of society that must, like the other parts, make compromises for the common good – those competing principles underlie the conflict. And a big part of the economic elites are willing to change the regime of the country to protect their interests if they have to.

   Within this complex, different industries – banking and finance, oil, military-industrial, pharmacy, etc. – have different and sometimes competing interests. But what unites them all is the agenda of maximizing control over the State in terms of policy and the minds of the public ideologically.

   Given the fact that the devasting effects of ‘globalization’ could no longer be denied, that they had given rise to a serious national candidate, Bernie Sanders, it is no surprise that a Trump followed soon thereafter, mirroring the much more existential decision of German capital to support Hitler as a protection against communist and socialist opponents. Not that all of American capital has thrown its lots in with Trump. Some see his type of fascism as a threat to their autonomy. Others are hedging their bets, waiting to see who comes out on top.

 

Thesis Four

   Not that this underlying structural power dynamic forms the motives of most individuals. These fight it out in the realm of ideas – ideas that often mirror the underlying conflict in distorted ways but are sometimes unconnected to it. The main ideological areas in which “the base” fight it out are the following:

·        Immigration and the replacement of white Americans by ‘minorities’

·        So-called ‘Woke’ progressivism

·        The legitimacy of the State and the rule of law

·        Abortion

·        The meaning of “America” and “democracy”

·        The legitimacy of the international liberal order erected and held up by American power since the end of WWII

 

In all these areas the issue is not one of policy differences. Each area is seen as part of a Democratic attempt to control the state and dominate and oppress the other camp. So the complexities of immigration policy give way to a Democratic conspiracy to replace the hard-working white majority with reliable voting blocks of lazy Hispanics, Muslims, or whatever, cementing the Democrats' power over the state and the “real Americans.” The same for all the other issues.