In the United States and the United Kingdom, the new right has broken with the old fashioned Burkean small-c conservatism that is suspicious of rapid change in all its forms. Although they hate the phrase, the new right is more Bolshevik than Burkean: these are men and women who want to overthrow, bypass, or undermine existing institutions, to destroy what exists.
If you’re feeling at sea with America’s now dramatically confused, polarized, and shifting political landscape, this book may offer a steady deck and a good look around at how we humans have organized ourselves and where forces may be taking us faster than we know.
The most essential difference between Moscow and Washington and between Trump’s Republicans and both Republicans and Democrats that voted for Biden is the difference between the political methods known to feudal/medieval realms accustomed to political absolutism and the liberal modern and open democracies that really do try to expand inclusion in the distribution of power.
President Trump has long signaled his character through his choice of Paul Manafort as his first campaign manager and not much has changed to this divisive point at which he has been refusing to concede America’s 2020 Presidential Election. Trump and his now delusional Far Wrong Right component well mirror Putin’s church & defense nationalism. I find it difficult as an American to see our domestic politics so degraded by division and reduced to vacuous dogma and slogans promoted by zealots.
With Trump’s election lost — a premise now accepted by all but those who lie about it and those dumbed-down, deluded, and duped by lies — the most egregious of political attitudes and beliefs to have come from this nearly Orwellian farce has been the reinvention of the threat of the Communist Party in the United States and, of course, the great bogies that have been made of so-called “Antifa” and “Globalists“. Anarchists, communists, and globalists (even “Antifa”) may be out there, but it would seem the Trumpian rallying cries and crowds appear more real — frighteningly so — than their nearly phantom targets.
My conversational partner, a Canadian, fervently believes in the latest medieval rumor “Hammer and Scorecard” — a “Deep State” plot to pervert the election via the computing machinery — launched by the now surreal President Donald J. Trump.
From the Awesome Conversation
You should hate the kind of people who lie to you in order to keep you seduced for THEIR — not YOUR OWN — political purposes.
Trump and his cronies know that YOU cannot check out his claims yourself, and by attempting to derail the most dedicated and professional workers in his own government and in the press, he can get you to believe anything HE wants while delivering not very much at all to America’s working men and women.
Remember, our small business community and voters in all of the communities of labor across the land voted for Biden too.
I would love to have you reason critically about beliefs that have become familiar to you but have no basis in reality.
Fear mongering; rumor mills; accusations in a mirror — what HE would do himself, he accuses his opposition of doing to him . . . such have become the medieval tactics now being launched through Donald J. Trump’s political machinery. The victims of President Trump’s false claims and myriad lies are not his critics or America’s journalists or his business rivals — those most exploited are his own and most devoted fans who must turn their backs on the truth and swim into the chaos and darkness he prefers to have swirling around him.
Start with Paul Manafort and ask why an urbane and sophisticated American businessman with his eyes on the Presidency would choose him for a campaign manager.
Raise that eyebrow again over Trump’s pressuring James Comey for personal loyalty as opposed to embracing him in the common project of defending America’s Constitution and Rule of Law.
Pause at the Helsinki Moment with Putin.
Revisit Trump’s impeachment and those who comported themselves and spoke truth to power like the American patriots they were — and those fired or sidelined for doing so.
Here’s today’s problem: those most enamored of America’s most cherished democratic principles and traditions, including the running of fair and free elections, have been methodically removed from powerful positions and placed beyond the President and Command in Chief’s direct sphere of control. The same may enjoy accolades and publish books, but absolute direct and personally loyal power now serves at the President’s discretion and pleasure, at least until the first official or officer refuses his order.
My fellow Americans — prepare to welcome Donald J. Trump’s New “American” Nobility as the power representative of our United States IF he continues consolidating what he believes is his grip on the Presidency. In the near term, at least, it won’t matter that Trump didn’t play fair — or behave like an American gentleman and patriot — but that on January 22, he arrived for work with military, paramilitary, all associated security forces, officials, and officers tied up behind him.
Well that was a bit of a rant.
I wonder what others think may happen if the President “pulls rank” and invalidates Joe Biden’s win by confronting the same with raw absolute command of America’s defenses leveraged and perverted to serve himself.
Inspiration: a word image: “Imagine being a Democrat and having to pretend Joe Biden is competent, Hillary Clinton was innocent, and Barack Obama did a good job.”
From The Awesome Conversation
Joe has just won America’s toughest election; Hillary has no indictments pending; Obama didn’t do a good job: he did a terrific job.
Imagine waking up as an aristocratic deluded narcissistic head-nodding Republican incapable of a moment’s reflection on the distribution of power in a democratic society devoted to rule of law as opposed to unquestioning obedience — oaths of loyalty appreciated — to a “great leader”.
WHAT IF the United States of America were returned to aristocracy?
WHAT IF Americans less connected were returned to obedience to absolute authority?
Along the way, the Trump-hated Left has been off on its liberation trip with its eyes on universal basics and trashing of white male this and patrician that. What if the White Male Kingdom and America’s Old Money were gambling on some powerful representation themselves with the cooperation, of course, of police and military forces?
What if Trump’s World was primping to look like Putin’s World ordered by his loyal New Nobility and bounded by a corrupt faked up marriage between Church and State?
It took a century and a democratic revolution invoked by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) — a coalition of conservatives, reformed Islamists and Islamists that came to power in 2002 — for Turkey’s “Kemalist Occident,” or dalliance with the West, to end. With the mass resignation of Turkey’s military leadership last month, the last standing Kemalist institution, the army, has succumbed to the AKP’s decade-long political tsunami.
This political bookend for Kemalism suggests that AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is Turkey’s “new” Ataturk. He doesn’t have the cachet of being Turkey’s liberator, but he enjoys as much power as Ataturk once had.
The firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper kicked off a rapid-fire series of high-level departures at the Pentagon on Tuesday, setting off alarms on Capitol Hill that the White House was installing loyalists to carry out President Donald Trump’s wishes during an already tense transition.
In quick succession, top officials overseeing policy, intelligence and the defense secretary’s staff all had resigned by the end of the day Tuesday, replaced by political operatives who are fiercely loyal to Trump and have trafficked in “deep state” conspiracy theories.
@AOC Know they Civil War history, especially Lincoln's instructions to Grant https://t.co/HT1yexi17x This is to defend the inclusion of Confederate generals in the preservation of America's military history and endowment without revisionism. We have black generals and heroes too.
The “they” should be “thy”. 😦 I don’t know how I missed “typos” and apologize for such errors. Fresh eyes? Proofing? I try.
@EsperDod My father worked for McNamara and wrote for LBJ, Dr. Esper, and I have not been exactly Right of his hero Ronald Reagan 🙂 , but on this matter, I believe in truth, warts and all. We should just say no to revisionism and instead update our inventory of noble statues. https://t.co/T2fdHGVkBe
Advice to Black Lives Matters and others who have taken up the cause of destroying American memory in its totality: let the past remain where it fell and where it has been remembered, but while attending to that preservation of memory, let’s build a better nation now and for the future. Since the Civil Rights Era — and from before it and far after — American political activists have confronted prejudice and sought corrections. Well, we are all still on it.
No truth (clear, complete, accurate, valid, reliable)?
No justice ever!
America’s Civil War ended the institution of slavery in America and affirmed the Federal government as sovereign throughout. It didn’t erase evil; it didn’t fix the more venal of hearts; it didn’t redress wrongs: what it did was set a much, much better course in and through our collective democratic modernity.
Related Online
Trump in June stunned NATO allies and senior DoD leaders when he directed the withdrawal of thousands of troops from Germany. Days later, he blindsided the Pentagon yet again by tweeting his opposition to the removal of Confederate leaders’ names from Army bases, just two days after Esper opened the door to doing so.
A fellow said to me last week that he took up law because there was no money or point to having taken a degree in philosophy.
He was wrong.
Are the humanities the “icing on the cake” of civilization — or the yeast that gives rise to civilization?
If you are American — or modern as opposed to feudal or medieval — you are part of a great western experiment and experience that has for its foundation Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman history, both beautiful in parts and in some horrendous (the signals of the end may be read in the inhumanity of Caligula and Elagabalus).
E Pluribus Unum
However arrived or stanced, we may all agree on our commitment to our Constitutional mission and the reshaping of so many fears and passions in the face of changing demographics and the presence of advancing and revolutionary communication and other technologies.
We have been witness to at least two NATO states marching forward into the past — Hungary and Turkey — and we should wonder why WE should have wanted to do that ourselves.
Well, that was a bit Hyde Park, wasn’t it?
🙂
Here’s a glimpse into how I believe we got here and became so temporarily given to an autocratic/authoritarian and medieval old nutty soul.
It takes a little patience to get the Moscow-in-America story and what it portended — or still portends — for authentic dignity, freedom, and security in America as well as a compassionate and working politics that adds to our national — and natural — political cohesion and coherence.
In consideration of present and future generations, a little intellectual exploration into the greater and more accurate image of our working democracy might be worth it.
