There’s a slight possibility 🙂 that Trump understands his job, its duties, and his obligations as an American president.
Whatever his character, whatever he may say, and however he may feel, especially as regards feudal authoritarianism, he seem to err consistently with the greater American program in democracy. We have not left NATO; Ukraine has not been abandoned (and it has been receiving offensive weapons with America’s blessing); and Israel remains as it has for past American presidents, i.e., the persistent bridgehead of the west, an island of democratic processes and liberal values set against the absolutism of surrounding of dictatorships and generally repressive political cultures.
We may grant President Trump credit for doing his duty as the nation’s top elected official despite his many character issues and personal problems.
BackChannels acknowledges the book in which it first encountered the term:
Soldatov, Andrei and Irena Borogan. The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. New York: Public Affairs, 2010.
However, this post is not going to be about powerful and self-enriching KGB/FSB spies and their bureaucracies.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, and Donald J. Trump seem to this blogger more the “New Nobility” that Russian President Vladimir Putin may have had also in mind as he launched his revenge on the western world for the demise of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991 — a very good Christmas morning indeed for the United States of America and in the defunct godless realm then represented by the Kremlin a not very special day at all.
In the 26 years that have passed since that morning (for political purpose, it was over at noon), Russia and her leadership have had to think about what it has meant to be “Russian”.
“Old Vikings”?
Formed of conquest, contracting and expanding through the brutality of feudal wars, unable ever to police — mere civil policing — its territorial writs, Russia has been a state that has better known barbarism and the depths of inhumanity through violence (give a nod for the extra special dose brought by the Mongols) than civility through accommodation and trade. In that regard, the “Vory”, the once brutalized mafia within, may in their inglorious legend represent the pure expression of the heart of the state.
Backing the tyrant in Syria?
Invading a settled Ukraine and baldly lying to the world about its purpose?
Bombing hospitals?
Pursuing feudal absolute power — unquestionable ownership of persons as things — with the Assahola in Tehran?
All of the above: true.
So what good new things has Russia brought to the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?
BREXIT: While Great Britain has been happy to pile on “Asian” labor, it has not been so happy with grooming gangs, suspect neighborhoods, and “Allahu Akbar” explosions, much less the impositions posed by the refugees of war in Syria. Response: the Newest Nationalism expressed in renewed insularity and refreshed Anglican pride.
While it’s good for a state to recall what it’s about, some among the most zealous should factor in how they have been played by Moscow.
Erdogan: Prime Minister, President, and now, apparently, President for Life has never encountered serious resistance for his taking apart what Mustafa Kemal Atatürk bequeathed in bureaucratic and military legacy. The empire’s back, baby, and dig the symbolic significance of the leaders new crib.
Impressed?
Dig this cool new statistic on press freedom in Erdogan’s new estate (italics added).
The 2018 index ranking marked Turkey’s 58 point-decrease over the past 13 years, lagging just behind Rwanda, Belarus and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Nonetheless, the American President’s behavior, personal as well as political, has left him also, as with the Erdogan and Orban, associated with the terms “autocratic”, “narcissistic”, and “nationalist”. While it’s good to take pride in one’s nation and defend her interests with tough negotiations, it may not be so good for the head of a modern democratic state to promote the image of himself as a feudal lord, securing prizes for family and friends on the basis of loyalty, and doing out favors (“You all just got a lot richer”) to surrounding nobility.
President George W. Bush also made light of the “have and have mores”, but for Americans struggling with fixed retirements, healthcare premiums, perhaps the full suite of basic and complex costs of survival, and, for the young, jobs that fail to deliver even a modicum of financial independence and pride, much less security, the implied further reduction to peonage must sting.
The desire for human dignity and freedom exacts a price from all who would have both in security perpetually. In the silhouette, an American Civil War cannon faces southwest in the direction of General Robert E. Lee’s then retreating Confederate army (Sept. 17-18, 1862). In BackChannels’ humble opinion, the one bloody day of battle marked the beginning of the end of absolute power, landed aristocracy, and slavery in the soon to be reunited and reconstructed United States of America. We should wish today not to return — or be returned — to the feudal past, its abuses, criminality, excesses, and inhumanity, however complex, convoluted, and modern the legal, political, and technological means.
Note the dates on these two references, 2012 on transnational crime associated with Mexico, 2018 on corruption. The juxtaposition is fortuitous — accidental, simply observed while gathering information — as one lie — the first to the law — leads to another – the law to the state (in greater proportion over time). The image is chilling.
The simple telling: NAFTA has over time produced the ugly picture in Mexico of lowest wage workers so mixed on the land with criminals that Mexico has all but lost control of five of its states to “transnational crime”.
It’s not always “us”, however — The North, the world, the affluent — that accounts for misery in developing states. The more complex telling may be signaled from just one paragraph conveyed within the pages of The Atlantic:
The reasons for the situation in Chiapas are various. Chief among them is what political scientist Sarelly Martínez, a native of Chiapas, described as an “auction pyramid” in which political parties selectively distribute aid to resolve local conflicts and social leaders protest violently to secure more funding. In rural parts of the state, the blocking of highways and hijacking of municipal buildings are commonplace. Politically motivated assassinations, often barely reported amid Mexico’s drug-related violence, are increasingly frequent. The murder in 2016 of the mayor of San Juan Chamula, an indigenous municipality popular with tourists, was one of the few cases to draw national headlines. Political changes have failed to break the cycle. In 2006, the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party won Chiapas for the first time; debt increased, as did poverty and social strife. The story has been repeated under current governor Manuel Velasco of the Green Party, who, in 2015, oversaw local elections condemned by opponents as among the most corrupt in Mexican history.
Mexican economic desperation x greed and leverage involving even affluent politicians and sports starts x lawlessness — or the states inability to police itself — drives southern migration into America, some smaller part criminal, most of it just the desperation of men and women, some with children, looking for honest work.
American Left v Right Politics and Immigration Policy
To stem the flow of migrants north, The North needs must consider conditions — corruption, crime, insecurity, poverty — in Mexico and figure out how best to ameliorate the worst, which may be the abyss of “transnational crime” that produces its own economy, grows the gangsters, and leverages the politicians. Beyond that, dive in to any of the dimensions noted or suggested because people leave spaces made untenable by the “insecurity” associated with warfare waged by criminals anchored both in narcotics or related politics.
As economically powerful neighbors to the north offering that deadly combination of jobs and rule-of-law, the United States and Canada now face greater challenge in addressing and, one may hope, producing policy toward the repair of dire conditions south of the border.
*Imagination proved wrong! In the article noted, the subjective reporting tells that at least one — perhaps millions — may be more interested in Mexico’s team winning its games than in the integrity and nobility of its sports heroes. Then too, philosophically, who is to say the criminal is not noble for bringing money to family and community? There’s a tough question for the cocktail circuits.
Trump’s support of Israel is about respect for tribal identification and the narcissism related to it. It matches Putin’s views of a renewed and sustained feudal world — a feudal modernity — featuring absolute authority, fated and unquestionable, placed in the future rather than left to history.
Accompanying that vision: a low-intensity war of re-conquest in Crimea, Ukraine and the tragic obscenity that has been made of Syria.
Most of us carry what we value of our pasts with us through life, but we try also to leave our futures open for good things to come.
These “malignarcs” (malignant narcissists), by comparison, wish to force the future forward into the past. Their personal visions — and behavior — have been dreadful, myopic, selfish as have been the habits, in lesser and greater measures, of caliphs, dictators, emperors, and feudal lords through time: for the mafia-type power and wealth, their methods, willful and thuggish, have been more known to history than those of democracy. However, our Mr. Trump has a powerful employer and a job defining his position, and whether he personally likes it or not, he is duty-bound to promote democracy — the systems of checked and distributed power — against the political absolutism known to dictators.
As has been my habit with BackChannels, the titles promise greater and lengthier articles while format and inclination keep the verbiage down to a paragraph bloc.
With the public focused on the air assault of “9/11” (see the gems placed in reference) and numerous “Allahu Abkar” attacks worldwide across many years, the patriotic reaction has permanently altered the west’s political and security societies — and yet we wish to defend authentic democracies against the potential for the rise of the Orwellian police state and with it, indeed, a “new nobility”, an invisible, unimpeachable, unquestionable (“military-industrial”) aristocracy.
BackChannels 