[Peace-discuss] [Peace] News from Neptune #433 notes

[C G Estabrook]

Karen--

In spite of the fact that you’re probably my most attentive audience on UPTV, I’ve apparently failed to make my view of the US political situation clear to you. I think it does not diverge substantially from that of Pepe Escobar, Aaron Mate, or Noam Chomsky.

The problem is the consistent policies followed by all US administrations since the collapse of the USSR (and before) - war and war provocations abroad ( = neoconservatism), and austerity and market fundamentalism at home ( = neoliberalism). Neoconservatism and neoliberalism are complementary, not contradictory.  

Those policies have produced 40 years of growing (and accelerating) concentration of wealth in the US. But that’s experienced by a majority of Americans as the confiscation of the life styles taken for granted in their parents’ generation. The response is an inchoate but growing populism - a popular view that "pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice.” That view is not easily expressed by our usual left/right distinctions, but it produced the Trump presidency.

The abandonment of class politics by American liberals in the 1970s - for fear of where it would lead (i.e., some form of socialism) - led them to substitute identity politics as the content of the liberal/left position. The proliferation of identies masked the bankruptcy of liberalism. That was recognized by many Americans (however obscurely) as the ‘mendacity of hope’ in the Obama administration - the only one in history to be at war throughout two presidential terms, with ever-increasing austerity.
 
Trump was the first major party presidential candidate in 40 years to attack neoliberalism and neoconservatism - and his tapping into inchoate populism (however intuitive) made him president. But the history of his administration is a history of acquiescence to those very policies. It’s been suggested that Trump is in fact the weakest US president since Calvin Coolidge, making up in bluster what he lacks in effectiveness: witness his attempts this month to withdraw US troops from Syria and Afghanistan - attempts frustrated by his own administration (notably Bolton and Pompeo) and the ‘political establishment’ (including the Democrats and main-stream media).

The disingenuous “Resistance” is an attempt to highlight Trump’s obvious personal failings in order to restore the neolib and neocon status quo ante - not to change it - by threatening Trump with replacement: in responce, he fans insofar as he is able those populist flames - and their less attractive features.

The problem is that the populists are correct - the majority of Americans are in fact oppressed by "a set of elites [who are depriving] the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice” - which the American people came to expect in the generation after World War II.   

The populist movement is a fact and Trump is its temporary beneficiary - (and perhaps only partly aware of what it is). To many Americans, to “Make America Great Again” means to restore their confiscated life chances. 

But the American elite is in fact confiscating their chances (and those of others around the word) for its own profit: it’s the program of the American political establishment, who are bothered by the fear that the administration may actually abandon aspects of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, under pressure of the rising populist wave - even if they now show few signs of doing so.

Regards, CGE


> On Aug 17, 2019, at 1:00 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> Glad to see David challenging Carl in relation to Trump. Carl is very good at saying “Trump is not the problem,” and making whatever excuses available for Trump doing what he does, or not doing, what he said he would do as a candidate. 
> The duality/duplicity in relation to Carl’s blaming Obama for everything, is blatantly obvious and kills the credibility of NFN and AWARE, so it does need to be addressed.,, 
>