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.
Published in 2015 to tell how Putin’s power manipulates media and through it information in Russia, the same may be applicable today on the Far Wrong Right in what is still, for a while, Donald J. Trump’s now perverted pseudo-democratic America.
HE lies.
HE has lied to his business associates, his followers, and his wives.
HE has lied about Americans and about The Press.
HE has lied about America’s Democracy and Freedom by making up enemies out of whole cloth and by demanding from defense and security officials (and possibly military officers — remember Colonel Vindman — as well) loyalty not to the Constitution of our nation, but to himself.
Yeah, well, a couple of days ago, HE had his minions hot on dead voters with mail-in ballots.
Since yesterday: rigged voting machines!
Whatever.
The main thing for Trump is that HE bend reality (for HIS fervently hopeful faithful) to make itlook like HE — and THEY — were cheated and HIS seizing office through THEIR violence (with help from HIS government’s forces) would be just.
Enough with “HE”, “HIS”, “THEY”, and “THEIRS” — you get the diabolical picture.
While Trump may develop his own private media empire, he would have other options as a Putinesque dictator. He could, for example, simply have an assign mention to a publisher — or a publisher’s confidante — a preference for the hiring of one editor or journalist over another. Word gets through (from The Boss), and that’s that.
In the fashion of television drama, Trump’s kind of slick underhanded power (remember–and give it your best smoked gravel voice: “it’s only business”) might help an ambitious journo miss a career (and potentially history-altering) meeting (“you know what I mean?”).
Peter Pomerantzev’s book tells of a world in which Power designs and orders “reality” — or its perception — sufficiently to keep Putin & Co. in loot while the public has its thoughts, which then matter not so much.
If you’re in with power, life’s good!
Or at least it will look good.
If you’re out of the “systema” — as Russia’s hoodlums refer to it — not so great . . . and the reality on the outs ain’t about looks.
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.
The talk’s off the wall as one to some want an officer of the law to march into the Oval Office, pull him out of his chair, and subject him to a psychiatric evaluation.
The thought may inspire smiles, but I believe there are very few officials or officers warranted to intervene in what has become an absurdly surreal defiance of the Constitutional and cultural principles of the American state. Barr? White House Physician? Pence? Who else?
From the Awesome Conversation
There is no authority stepping up (yet) to do it — and we’re about to watch his minions march nationwide with themselves invalidating the election.
In a democracy, power rests with the will of the people as represented through elected assigns, and then it flows through legislatures and courts and is enforced by dutiful, honorable, and loyal military, paramilitary, and security forces. Well, we might see those forces tested in relation to their loyalty — as sworn — to the Constitution.
Trump appears so far to be pushing for the feudal or medieval solution: he’s the Great Leader; power is to revolve around himself and will be held together by the familiar carrots and sticks: patronage for those favored; threat and punishment for those inclined to resist his will.
How history may remember Trump’s Republican Zealots (to the extent that reasoning modern patriotic Republicans fail to find his behavior alienating) –>l
Sixteen federal prosecutors specially assigned to monitor 2020 election malfeasance told AG Barr in a letter today they saw no evidence of substantial voting irregularities, & asked him to rescind his recent policy change. w/ @thamburgerhttps://t.co/ncFQmpjn2Q
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate . . . .
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”.
All kinds of people are unhappy with Trump’s loss of the American election — valid substantial and outcome-changing complaint has yet to surface in the courts — but none more so than in the camp that has brushed away “Trump-Russia” and now embraced “Biden-China”.
Well, for Trump’s Mob at least, welcome to Orwell’s world.
For everyone else, there may be some questions worth asking for the long-term (because the short-term may be shaping up ugly).
Excerpt From the Awesome Conversation
So to fix everything that has gone wrong since, oh, the 15th Century, you would like to take away self-determination — self-concept; pursuits of autonomy and competence along one’s own selected career and leisure paths; multicultural, multiracial, multi-religious tolerance — and replace that freedom for the person (“pro-choice”) with bureaucratic organization and force. ?
Re. Renmembi (or Ruble): I think the dollar will be fine if or when what’s bothering America finds its way back to integrity.
So-called “secular progressive atheists” comprise but one segment of the nation, but one might suggest that many like the late Christopher Hitchens (“Do you need God to be good?”) may well be forward of our national culture, and no less so than Thomas Paine was forward of his surrounding political culture in his day.
Re. Roe v Wade. I try to stay out of the trap, it has so many thorny questions, but much in its day had to do with coat-hanger abortions, health of the mother, justice in the shadow of rape, and all that. Why do we believe that “back there” is always and somehow (mysteriously) better than forward of the present?
“Capitalism” and “Communism” (and “Socialism”) have become dogma and successful political policy is (or perhaps should have been [the world’s been looking different to me lately]) is a thing well argued and hammered out into cooperation and greater integration across any given unit of geopolitical space.
What is the difference between a Free Man and a Slave?
Or a Citizen and a Loyal Subject?
Do most of the world’s political leaders believe that the most awful of medieval horrors (slogan-driven mobs; vast public ignorance; a nobility clouded in the contents of pressed sachets; pestilence for all on the streets; that sort of Monty Pythonesque thing) should be out ahead in our global future, or might some prefer to disagree?
There should be a chat somewhere online about the look of a good global tomorrow.
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