John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CHECKPOINT ASIA
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Response to a comment about the incredible society America could build if it didn’t spend all of its resources on the military-industrial complex:
No one in America’s power establishment is the least interested.
For Democrats and Republicans with political ambition, the route to success is through plutocracy and empire, America’s very social-political structure being deliberately constructed to channel them into that outcome. It is next to impossible for any individual, no matter how gifted and ambitious and idealistic, to rise while avoiding the constraints and demands of that immensely powerful structure.
Ordinary folks do not count at all anymore in America, despite a lot of fake political rhetoric, and there are no resources left for them anyway after the costs of war and empire. America’s power establishment views the concerns of ordinary Americans much as a great lord of the 18th century would view the concerns of peasants and servants – that is, not at all.
Both parties are factions of a single national imperial party, one which allows no straying from basics, one with immense resources for punishing anyone’s attempt. No candidate, except for one dutifully ignored by America’s entire corporate press and receiving no attention from national figures beyond scorn, Tulsi Gabbard, has any intention of seriously challenging anything important.
That very much includes Bernie Sanders, who so often makes interesting and pleasant noises but has no record of genuinely opposing empire and establishment and endless war. Simply the fact that he has a decades-long successful political career, with its concomitant reward of increasing personal wealth, under existing circumstances should tell you that. His noises are just that, noises, because even in the unlikely event he were elected, he would have zero capacity to realize any of his major social programs. The establishment doesn’t want them, any of them, and that just could not be clearer.
If you can't change the basic structures - money and lobbies completely driving politics, immense wealth and much abused privilege avoiding any real share of national burdens, insane commitments all over the world from Israel to 800 American military bases, an immense and democracy-corrupting military and security establishment, you cannot change anything of substance. Not a thing.
This of course is exactly the embarrassing situation, the impossible dilemma, into which Trump has fallen. Despite his throbbing ego-centric love of seeing himself as a strong and uniquely capable leader, he cannot change anything, as he may have wanted to change things in foreign and military affairs, because he has never had any inclination to change basics.
Trump has no capacity for doing so, even were he so inclined. He has demonstrated remarkable cowardice, repeatedly, in avoiding the establishment’s efforts to direct or destroy him, and he has literally grovelled to members of Israel’s Lobby in return for protection and financing, something making him part of the problem and not the solution.
It would take an almost revolutionary development, such as total economic collapse or a great war, to turn the reality of America’s situation around quickly. Those are highly unlikely events.
What we are likely to see is a continued, perhaps increasing, decline of America's position in the world, a decline well underway already. Loss of everything from the loyalty of traditional allies in the face of American arrogance and greed to the loss of the special place the dollar holds in the world, a place enabling the country to run gigantic deficits at least for a time.
The showy American circus we now see running just cannot continue indefinitely. It is often the case that people are fooled by noise and flash and displays of power, but they can only continue so long in the face of changing underlying realities.
Apart from America's international support network now becoming badly frayed, new competitors in the world, who didn’t exist during America’s post-WWII heyday, just keep coming on strong. There just is no putting everything back into Pandora’s box, as Trump pathetically tries doing.
America is rapidly losing every bit of good will it ever earned with a set of views and policies literally hostile to everyone else’s interests. You can’t attack other peoples’ interests and then turn around and expect their admiration and support. It cannot be done. Only a lunatic would try.
America has attacked every worthwhile organization which provides the other 95% of the world’s people a place from which to speak – the UN, the WTO, the ICC, and others - and it has attacked the direct national interests of dozens of individual countries, from Germany and India to China and Iran and even South Korea.
How can anyone even think that complete contempt for the rule of law, for the laws of other nations, for international law, and the substitution of America law applying to everyone, can possibly succeed in the long run? Only political ideologues, as blind as intense religious fanatics, can believe that.
People like Pompeo, Bolton, Abrams, Haley, and other absolutely miserable Trump appointments.
America is on the wrong side of history in almost every part of its foreign policy and diplomacy and hammer-blow trade measures, and the accumulating results of those are going to be very destructive for America’s position in the world.
That’s not Jeremiah speaking, that’s the cold and unrelenting reality of the human condition.
