American “Liberty”… what’ll the next four years bring us… God only knows…
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The protests that erupted across the USA in response to Donald Trump becoming the country’s 45th president are unprecedented and could well be a harbinger of a society irretrievably split and polarised because of his election. His detractors firmly attached the label “fascist” to Donald Trump throughout a campaign for the White House that unleashed nativism, bigotry, and xenophobia. His pledge to place a moratorium on Muslims coming into the United States, to deport millions of illegal Mexican immigrants, and to build a giant wall on the US border with its southern neighbour to control immigration was a political hand grenade being let off in a society proud of its respect for freedom of religion, tolerance, and its racial and ethnic diversity.
His critics believe that Trump has, in less than a year of participating in the American political process, succeeded in rolling back progress made by previous generations in a hard-fought struggle against racial, gender, and religious discrimination. He legitimised white supremacy and succeeded in sowing the kind of social divisions consonant with a society teetering on the edge of implosion. However, surely, then we need to ask… if one candidate in one election year is capable of ripping up cultural values considered so entrenched and universal, that Washington decided the rest of the world should also live by those values, up to the point of forcing the issue with cruise missiles, F-15s, and Apache helicopter gunships, how strongly entrenched were they in America in the first place?
Trump represents a backlash against a liberal establishment that become so fixated with identity politics that it refused to tackle a growing ocean of alienation and poverty across large swathes of the country. The likes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton presented themselves as leaders in touch with the needs and struggles of the common man, while in truth worshiping at the altar of the free market, they cosied up to Wall Street and corporate America, in service to the hegemony of neoliberal economics… that extreme variant of capitalism which accords the market a mystical, almost divine-like status. This economic system acts as a tyrant over the lives of the mass of people and not serving their needs, producing a race to the bottom involving workers around the world competing for the crumbs from the table of a multinational corporate dictatorship that in its ability to destroy or raise living standards arrogated to itself more power than most governments have.
The result in the USA was that manufacturing jobs that once provided decent income and a sense of dignity and worth in working-class communities went abroad to China, Mexico, Vietnam, and elsewhere in the Global South. Low-paid jobs in the new service economy replaced them; forcing people to take two, even three, jobs just to survive. What’s more, they were the fortunate ones. For far too many Americans, joblessness and underemployment became the new normal, leading to creating a vast underclass of people across the country’s rust belt seething with hatred for the liberal élite in Washington and on either coast. With such obscene levels of inequality, alienation, and poverty being the fate of a growing section of the population, exacerbated by the worst economic recession since the 1930s, caused by the ineffable greed of those at the top of this grotesque income scale, something had to give. That something was Donald Trump’s election as president, a billionaire with no earlier political experience, but a disdain for the political correctness and identity politics associated with Washington.
However, here one needs to strike a note of caution, one that comes to us from history. For just as the collapse of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s under similar conditions of economic depression and dislocation gave way to fascism, so the collapse of the liberal order in our time has given way not to international brotherhood and solidarity as the dominant narrative of a denuded and disaffected working class across national, religious, ethnic, or cultural differences, but to nationalism, white supremacy, xenophobia, and the rise and spread of racism. All across Europe, we witness the rise of the far right… in the Ukraine, Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere the ideology of “we ourselves” filled the space opened up by the collapse of the liberal centre ground. Brexit in the UK is merely its British manifestation, whilst in the USA, Donald Trump’s election leaves no doubt that not since the 1930s has rightwing populism managed to gain such traction and support in the West.
In the 1940s, Bertolt Brecht warned of the danger of complacency with regard to the prospect of fascism ever rising again after the Second World War. In words that resonate today, he said:
The womb from which this monster emerged remains fertile.
This isn’t to suggest that Donald Trump is a fascist, however, or that everyone who voted for him did so motivated by racism or xenophobia. Not at all. On the contrary, one must understand that Trump’s campaign opened up space for elevating both to the mainstream, motivated by inchoate anger and rage at the aforementioned liberal establishment. This is why no one should mourn the demise of the Western liberal order either in the USA or across Europe. It’s failed and failed utterly, destroying communities and decimating the lives of millions at home, whilst creating chaos and instability across the world. Donald Trump’s election may not be the solution to all the damage and chaos wrought, nevertheless, it resounds as rejecting cultural values that amount to lecturing a man on his lack of political correctness and manners whilst he’s drowning in a swamp with no way out.
14 November 2016
John Wight
RT
Voices from Russia 
Why Trump Must Slay the Beast of Neoconservatism
Tags: 2016 US Presidential election, Bush, Donald Trump, Election, elections, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, neocon, neoconservatism, oligarchs, political commentary, politics, United States, US elections, USA
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Donald Trump’s pledge to embark on a new direction when it comes to American foreign policy is both welcome and necessary. However, if he is to succeed, he’ll first have to slay the beast of neoconservatism in Washington. No one should be in any doubt as to the enormity of the task president-elect Donald Trump faces if he is to undertake the new course in foreign policy he outlined during his campaign for president. Over 800 US military bases across the globe tells their own story, evidence of an empire of which the Romans would’ve been proud. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman summed up most succinctly the nature of this American Empire:
The point is that the economic hegemony enjoyed by the USA around the world couldn’t exist without the military power that both protects and acts as its guarantor. This military power is both a key driver of the economy, on the grounds set out by Friedman, and a major drain on the nation’s federal budget, hoovering up a mammoth 53 percent (600 billion USD (38.8 trillion Roubles. 4.12 trillion Renminbi. 40.8 trillion INR. 806 billion CAD. 802 billion AUD. 562 billion Euros. 484 billion UK Pounds) of US federal discretionary spending. One can’t downsize its bloated budget and power without a fight, what with the vast network of vested interests dependent on it being maintained. Dealing with those vested interests in Washington is going to be crucial if Donald Trump’s words are going to manifest in the sort of action they herald going forward.
Though the president-elect is no neocon, the neocons haven’t gone away because of his election; and not more importantly has their belief in a world operating to the beat of America’s drum. The likes of John McCain, Victoria Nuland, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, etc., along with their fellow travellers in Washington… working within the myriad of think tanks and foundations that constitute an industry all by themselves… remain very much a fixture within the American political, security, media, and military establishments. When we talk about neocons, we aren’t only referring to Republicans either. Hillary Clinton was as neocon as they come with regard to her vision of America’s place in the world, as was Obama throughout his tenure in the White House… something to which the people of Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria would readily testify. To their credit, Trump and his team refused to avoid confronting the ugly and uncomfortable truth that Washington’s foreign policy in the wake of 9/11 bore all the hallmarks of a drunk giant lumbering around a china shop, smashing and destroying everything in its path, lacking any direction or coherence. In a statement as succinct as it was profound, the newly-elected US President said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal:
Compare this simple yet cogent analysis to the imperial arrogance that fuelled the case for the now infamous Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the neocon doctrine that emerged in response to the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. PNAC’s statement of principles, drawn up in 1997, read in part:
As the world knows by now, these crazed US neocons weren’t interested in advancing democracy or human rights, it was domination, hegemony, and the crushing of any and all opposition to their perverse vision of a Pax Americana. Herein lies the real motive behind the war in Iraq, régime change in Libya under the auspices of NATO, and the attempt to effect régime change in Syria by proxy. Indeed, though never a signatory to or member of PNAC, Bill Clinton’s presidency operated to the same philosophy with the break-up of Yugoslavia, again, utilising NATO as a club to smash opposition to Washington’s imperial interests.
Indeed, the only significant difference there was between Democrat and Republican administrations in pushing this agenda was in method and not aims. Democratic Party presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama opted for a multilateral approach, using NATO as that “mailed fist” described by Friedman and not the US military on its own, or in alliance with other junior partners, such as the UK. Meanwhile, for the Republican Bush administration, it was a case of “you’re either with us or against us”. Regardless of the method employed, the result was the same… the arrogance and tyranny of a superpower gone mad. Now, with Trump’s election to the White House, this neocon doctrine suffered a seismic ideological, intellectual, and political setback. However, as mentioned, neoconservatism is far from dead, which is why Trump can look forward to a major struggle in Washington in the course of acting on his vision of a step-change in the direction of US foreign policy. The 45th President of the United States has no choice. In 2016, America is no longer the world and the world is no longer America.
15 November 2016
John Wight
Sputnik International
https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201611151047453834-washington-trump-neocons-policy/