[Peace-discuss] Rob Urie appeals to my confirmation bias

[David Green]

The Rise of the ‘Rise of the Global Right’Posted By Rob Urie On August 30,
2019 @ 1:59 am In articles 2015 | Comments Disabled
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/30/the-rise-of-the-rise-of-the-global-right/print/#comments_controls>

Photograph Source: Palácio do Planalto – CC BY 2.0
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/>


*While I'm generally critical of SPLC data, I think in this context it
works to prove an important point. - DG*

In the U.S., Donald Trump remains among the least popular presidents
<https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx>
in
modern history. Given the buoyant state of the U.S. economy, at least
relative to the widespread misery of the prior decade, this unpopularity
reinforces the political disillusion reflected in the 2016 election
results. Only Jimmy Carter, who engineered a vicious recession in the midst
of a colonial rebellion in Iran, was less popular than Mr. Trump at this
point in his tenure.

This makes ongoing assurances that the U.S. is in the midst of a fascist
insurgency led by Mr. Trump perplexing. There seems little doubt that he
(Trump) would be comfortable were such an insurgency to arise. But the
available evidence only supports that conclusion when it is parsed using
dubious methods. In fact, the establishment data supports conclusions
decidedly inconvenient for the neoliberal left.

The other major players in the ‘rise of a global right’ storyline— Jair
Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Viktor Orban in
Hungary, have mixed results in terms of their ongoing political support.
Only Mr. Duterte has anything approaching majority popular approval for his
policies. Left widely unconsidered is how this political consolidation by
‘strongmen’ mirrors economic consolidation in Western economies.

In the U.S., neoliberal framing of the rise of Mr. Trump— that his election
represents a reactionary response to Barack Obama’s liberalism and race,
follows a similar argument
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/05/its-not-just-obama-militia-groups-thrived-under-the-last-democratic-president-too/>
used
to explain the rise of a reactionary right during Bill Clinton’s first
term. As argued below, in both instances ideology was put forward by
political reporters to describe events that more closely fit social
responses to economic dispossession.

Graph: To the extent that GDP represents economic wellbeing, cyclical
variation has hidden a long-term trend lower in world GDP. In the U.S.,
economic recessions led to electoral losses by Jimmy Carter and George H.W.
Bush, generally considered to have represented differing ideological
perspectives. Presidents Clinton and Obama entered office during
recessions. This was coincident with the rise of a reactionary right in
both cases. The GDP decline that started in the mid-2000s preceded the
ascendance of global right-wing politics, if not necessarily broader
political movements that support them. The data is annual,
inflation-adjusted, GDP to which a five-year moving average was applied as
a noise filter to help make trends visible. Source: worldbank.org.

The recently merged worldviews of American liberals, the radical left, the
establishment press and the CIA, NSA and FBI vis-à-vis the ideological
roots of current political discontent, emerged from the neoliberal project
launched shortly after WWII. A central goal then was to dissociate American
capitalism and the Great Depression from the rise of European fascism. In
fact, the rise of European fascism ties directly to American history,
capitalism and the Great Depression.

In the U.S., the early-mid 1990s saw a rapid rise in the number of
right-wing militia groups (graph below). This is claimed
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/05/its-not-just-obama-militia-groups-thrived-under-the-last-democratic-president-too/>
by
political reporters to share cause with the rise in racist hate groups that
began with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The movement in the 1990s
culminated with the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma
City in 1995. The perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, killed 168 people and
injured around 700 more.

The popular explanation
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/05/its-not-just-obama-militia-groups-thrived-under-the-last-democratic-president-too/>
for
the rise in militias was of a reactionary response to then president Bill
Clinton’s liberalism. In fact, Mr. Clinton won election on a liberal
platform. But like Barack Obama, he governed from the neoliberal right from
the day he entered office. Nevertheless, the ideological dividing line
posed by political reporters was Mr. Clinton’s liberalism versus the
conservatism of the Reagan / (George H.W.) Bush years.

Graph: apparently unconsidered by establishment political reporters is that
the rise and fall of militia and explicitly racist groups follows the state
of labor markets fairly well. The U.S. labor market recession of 1989 –
1995 was quite brutal by post-WWII standards, It persisted much longer than
the Federal Reserve engineered recessions on which unemployment
compensation was based. At any rate, it isn’t clear why ideological and /
or racial loathing would fall, as illustrated by the decline in militia
groups, as economic recovery takes hold. (1996 is the start date of the
available data). Source: Washington Post / Southern Poverty Law Center.

The data only superficially supports the hypothesis of a reactionary
response to presidential politics. In both cases the number of white
supremacist and / or militia groups rose in the first term, and then
followed economic recovery lower in the second. Were ideological opposition
the motivating factor for the rise, there is no obvious reason why it would
reverse in both men’s second terms. What did change was the state of the
economy.

Although Mr. Clinton remained president until 2000, the militia groups
experienced a rapid decline from 1995 forward. In fact, in 1995 the U.S.
job market began to recover, with finance and finance-dependent companies
boosting hiring for the first time since 1989. The dot-com bust of the
early 2000s was brutal for stock issuing corporations, but it didn’t result
in mass layoffs that persisted. The next recession that did, the so-called
Great Recession, began in 2007.

To flog the proverbial dead horse here, the labor market recession that led
to Mr. Clinton’s electoral victory in 1992 was caused by the S&L crisis— by
bank looting and over-leverage. It was the first ‘modern’ recession in the
sense that 1) it was caused by finance and 2) it led to a very long period
of labor market weakness. The next recession of this type was the Great
Recession.

With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the number of militia groups
once again began to rise. When Mr. Obama entered office, unemployment was
increasing, and millions of people were losing their homes to foreclosure.
Mr. Obama made his primary focus restoring banker bonuses
<https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15AIG.html> and ‘smoothing the
runway
<https://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/this_man_made_millions_suffer_tim_geithners_sorry_legacy_on_housing/>’
with foreclosure prevention programs whose purpose was to slow home
foreclosures to manageable levels for the benefit of bankers.

Following a milquetoast stimulus bill loaded with Republican devices like
tax cuts, Mr. Obama quickly shifted his political energy to cutting public
spending. As unemployment reached a bit over 17%
<https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE>, Mr. Obama was working with
Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare
<https://thehill.com/policy/finance/268857-showdown-scars-how-the-4-trillion-grand-bargain-collapsed>.
The first hint of popular rebellion was the 2010 mid-term election when
Republicans took control of the House and Senate away from Democrats.

During this back-and-forth the number of militia groups (graph above) grew
rapidly. When economic decline slowed and then began to reverse, so did the
number of militia groups. When economic growth slowed again in 2015 – 2016
<https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP#0>, the number of militia groups
again rose. In fact, in the two modern labor market recessions caused by
excessive growth in private debt—1989–1995 and 2007–2016, the growth and
decline of militia and racist groups closely followed the state of the
overall economy.

Enter Donald Trump, who launched his 2016 presidential as a caricature of
the European fascist leaders of the early-mid twentieth century. His racist
and xenophobic slanders combined with a populist critique of neoliberal
economic policies 1) would have put Democrats on the defensive if they had
knowledge of what he was talking about and 2) enticed liberals and an
erstwhile political left to recreate neoliberal explanations of the rise of
European fascism.

In fact, the logic of the rise of militias and racist groups in response to
the Clinton and Obama presidencies seems weak. If true, why did they begin
to dissipate during the second terms of both men— and coincident with
economic recovery? In other words, why would reactionaries become less
reactionary the longer that liberal governments are in office rather than
more reactionary?

Next, and related, why weren’t these movements ascendant when being so was
conducive to achieving political goals, rather than when it wasn’t? The NOW
(New World Order) crowd of the early 1990s hated George H.W. Bush as much
as they did Bill Clinton. Why did the militias wait until Mr. Clinton took
office— in the midst of a vicious recession, to form?

This gets to the thesis of an ascendant right following Donald Trump’s
election. According to establishment news sources and radical left
rhetoric, neo-Nazis, racists and assorted and sundry hate mongers are
ascendant. Never mind that the primary sources for this thesis are
Democratic Party operatives and the CIA, FBI and NSA. Why did the
reactionary right choose the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama to amass in numbers?

Given Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, the thesis of white nationalist ascendance
makes intuitive sense. But amongst the racist groups identified by the SPLC
<https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map> (Southern Poverty Law Center) — the
official source for establishment reporting on the matter, most of the
growth has come from Black Nationalist groups, who now outnumber White
Nationalist groups by about two to one. I detail problems with the official
reports here
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/21/race-identity-and-the-political-economy-of-hate/>
.

Graph: the neoliberal explanation of the rise of German fascism is that
mysticism— theories of ‘blood and soil,’ combined with centuries old racial
animosities, were used by devious and opportunistic leaders to create an
irrational and destructive political movement. That the Nazis came to power
through perceptions of unfinished business from WWII, based much of their
program on American political relations, and that Adolf Hitler was
appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the very pit of the Great
Depression, suggest that truth may be more complicated than ideological
explanations allow for. Source for original graph: Wikipedia.

Following WWII, the problem that neoliberals
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society> faced was explaining
the rise of European fascism while avoiding mention of American slavery,
genocide and the Great Depression. Neoliberal economists— Milton Friedman,
Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig on Mises, already worked with psychic desires
(‘utility’) to explain the human motivation behind their economics. The
shift from lived history to psychic speculation helped shed the unpleasant
details of history. Ideology, e.g. psychic conceptions of freedom and
slavery, were put forward in support of capitalism.

As was at least partially understood at the time, the Nazis based their
racial theories on American
<https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10925.html> eugenics,
Jim Crow laws and the systematic extermination of the indigenous
population. And they studied the managed capitalism of the New Deal
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb1LaIEQ240> as a model for the Nazi
economy. In contrast to modern perceptions, Jim Crow and the American
genocide were still underway in the years immediately prior to, and during,
the ascendance of the Nazis.

Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, at the very pit
of the Great Depression. The Great Depression itself was the last of a
seemingly interminable series of crises of capitalism that preceded the New
Deal. The role of Wall Street lending to finance the expansion of American
capitalism joined with war debts from WWI to exacerbate the economic
tensions that were a subtext of WWII. See Charles Kindleberger’s The World
in Depression <https://archive.org/details/worldindepressio00kind_0>.

As it relates to current circumstances, the idea that racist ideology was
the motivating factor behind the rise of Nazism is a self-serving
explanation developed after the fact by capitalist ideologues. Not only
were American atrocities and ideology every bit as destructive and vile as
those of the Nazis, but the Americans were several centuries into it when
the Nazis were getting started.

As if to prove itself unbowed by moral considerations, the American
leadership went on to commit new genocides after WWII in Korea, Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia. In the 1980s the Reagan administration committed
atrocities across Central America and armed both sides in the Iran-Iraq
war. In the first Gulf War, George H. W. Bush buried upwards of one hundred
thousand Iraqi conscripts (troops) in the desert after they had surrendered
— an atrocity by any standard.

The Clinton administration used economic sanctions to starve and deny
medical supplies to ultimately kill half a million Iraqi women and children
while spending the decade of the 1990s bombing civilian populations in Iraq
on a daily and weekly basis. This was the run-up to George W. Bush’s
illegal war of aggression against Iraq which led to the deaths of a million
or more Iraqis— overwhelmingly civilians, as it lit the wider Middle East
on fire with displaced Iraqi refugees.

The conceit that liberal practice is morally defensible— the position of
liberals, much of the American left, the establishment press, the CIA, NSA
and FBI— in other words, the alliance that formed following the election of
Donald Trump, requires parsing internal from external history while
ignoring the human consequences of both. Does this coalition not know
American history? Or does it know the history and justify its conclusions
by drawing careful distinctions between differing slaveries, genocides,
atrocities and war crimes?

Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, herself the
architect of policies that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bntsfiAXMEE>, is currently warning
that fascism
is ascendant
<https://www.vox.com/world/2019/2/14/18221913/fascism-warning-madeleine-albright-book-trump>.
Hillary Clinton, who as Secretary of State convinced Barack Obama to bomb
Libya into oblivion, causing one hundred thousand plus civilian deaths
<https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/25/how-many-millions-have-been-killed-in-americas-post-9-11-wars-part-3-libya-syria-somalia-and-yemen/>
and
a revival of open-air slave markets
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/11/27/clinton-ponders-2020-run-lets-not-forget-her-real-libya-scandal-glenn-reynolds-column/895853001/>,
argues that white supremacy is the cause of racism, if not her and her
husband’s racist policies.

The point here isn’t guilt by association— to link particular political
views to atrocities. But it is that the greater monsters of liberal
modernity see themselves as the answer to imagined atrocities. Elie Wiesel,
the author of Night <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(book)> and lucid
moral critic of the Third Reich, supported the American war against Iraq as
a moral crusade led by moral people
<https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-11-oe-wiesel11-story.html>.
At the time he did so, both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld has their names
on every substantial mass grave in the Middle East.

Through what filter of the universe do those who have factually murdered,
killed, caused the deaths of— choose your descriptor, hundreds of thousands
of human beings, get to offer moral opprobrium? And by what filter is it
granted? The history of the twentieth century suggests that the stakes are
high indeed. But aren’t the stakes high *because* of these people, rather
than in spite of them?

The great dangers of the moment— aggregating environmental crises, nuclear
weapons that serve as an ever-present threat of extinction, militarism
whose moral calculation is based on the profits to be earned, and the
incapacity to recover government in the public interest, are consequences
of liberalism, not the problems it exists to solve.
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