Revisions and Reversals Part 1

Culturally and politically we are undergoing a series of revisions and reversals. History is being re-written and in many cases historical positions and convictions once held by one political faction are being rejected and as a consequence embraced or appropriated by the other side. These shifts are producing chaos and confusion and in some cases a complete distortion and re-working of the historical record.

While not unheard of, this round of 'turning things on their head' is on the extreme side and given the media climate and the presence of the Internet it is taking on a very different, even disturbing character. Every generation must deal with the past being forgotten, re-written and mythologised but in our day it seems to be happening at a furious tempo. It's been amazing to watch the legend of John McCain take shape in just a matter of months. It had already begun before his death but now just in matter of days he's been made into this towering figure of myth and heroic fantasy. It's also been instructive to watch supposed Leftists and 'Socialists' like Bernie Sanders and rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offer him homage and praise.

Things are not always what they seem.

In some cases these reversals and revisions are the fruit of politics, in other ways they represent the nature of power and its struggles. As parties rise and fall from positions of ascendancy to opposition they modify their narratives and re-cast their positions. As polarisation escalates, battles ensue and the narratives regarding the Establishment also shift and are inverted but in many cases even the political opposition, even the seeming political fringes, still have connections to aspects of and figures within the Establishment. Otherwise they wouldn't be on the fringe, but wholly outside the Establishment's circle or consensus. True outsiders are rarely castigated by the gatekeepers of the media and Establishment. Generally speaking they are ignored.

Some of this will be review and many of these topics are known and have been previously discussed. The goal here is to put them together so the reader may ponder and perhaps feel the weight of our present ideological and political climate. The information is swirling about in something of a frenzied chaos. No one can keep up and I believe that's intentional to some degree. But there are some rather stunning things to consider.

First and most obviously the Anti-Russia campaign. What's perhaps the strangest aspect about the campaign is that this was an old narrative and tool of the Right wing. Red-baiting and McCarthyist witch-hunts were the tools of the Right. Opposition was severely denounced. Anyone who didn't support the militarist line against Moscow was a dupe or a traitor. The campaign functioned like a modern day Inquisition, tearing down anyone who didn't exhibit sufficient zeal for the nationalist agenda. The programme was one of convicting innocents of thought-crime and destroying them as a consequence. The crusade (for religious terminology is applicable) was used as a means of censorship and the promotion of militarism.

For at least a couple of generations the Left has railed against McCarthyism and the machinations and conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society. The whole episode was repugnant to them and represented a repudiation of classically liberal values. To the Left, this was a flirtation with fascism and a cause of great bitterness and ever a sign of warning and a signal of impending danger.

And yet today it is the Democrats, indeed many of the children of the 1960's who are leading the charge and have appropriated the language, paradigms and methodology of the 1950's Right-wing. This is a fairly stunning reversal. How is it accounted for? Any answer is necessarily complex but for the sake of brevity the answer is found not in questions of ideology which recede as memory fades and power corrupts. The answer is found in power itself, in the nature of the Establishment and how it wields power. The Anti-Establishment ideologues of the 1960's entered government and were corrupted by its power and have as a consequence moved ever-right on fundamental and systemic issues. This is even while they have retained certain progressive ideologies with regard to social issues. McCarthyism is Right-wing but more than that it's a crude and yet effective populist tool utilised by an element of the Praetorians (or would be Praetorians) in a moment of crisis when an agenda is desperately trying to be pushed and implemented. Elements within the Praetorian structure see the crisis as real and thus they will back the campaign even if certain players and enthusiast aspirants seek to appropriate the agenda in order to exploit it and amplify their own profiles in the process.

The issue in the 1950's was whether American Cold War policy would pursue an aggressive 'Rollback' agenda, or whether it would seek a degree of stability and balance in a policy of Containment. Both were militarist policies but Rollback advocated by figures like MacArthur, McCarthy, the Birchers and Barry Goldwater was far more aggressive. Convinced it was a pathway to victory, their aggression frightened many as an inevitable path to world war. The Rollback faction lost, suffering defeats in the demise of McCarthy, the firing and downfall of MacArthur, the reversals under Kennedy and the defeat of Goldwater in 1964.

Betrayed by Nixon their hour of victory arrived in 1980 but by 1985 the momentum was lost. Their fury with regard to Reagan was spun in the wake of the Soviet collapse and they supported his legend in order to exploit it as indeed they have done.

Bush II and September 11^th provided them with another moment of optimism but once again their plans went awry or more properly were stalled. Like an automobile driving forward and hitting ice, the road to their destination began to spin and went sideways.

In the wake of Obama's 2010 mid-term defeats, the agenda along with many of the players re-appeared and have been driving policy ever since. Obama triangulated his policy and took his administration to the Right on these 'core' or systemic issues. As the GOP began to self-destruct in light of the Tea Party/Trumpist insurgency and a civil war broke out between Populists, Libertarians and the Christian Right, the Democratic Party expanded and by the end of Obama's second term came to embrace a host of Right-wing figures, formerly GOP affiliated Praetorians and the ideologues of Rollback and American Unipolarity.

Trump has proven to be a wild card on some of these issues and they have aggressively sought to steer his administration toward their goals. His corruption along with his erratic and embarrassing behaviour aside, his administration has proven to be friendly to various Establishment interests and even his opponents have come to find him useful in driving forward a dialectic synthesis. The middle continues to move to the Right when it comes to nationalism, militarism, security issues, Constitutional issues and the general degradation of Classical Liberalism. At this point groups like DNC and the Christian Right are effectively advocating forms of Anti-Liberal communitarian doctrine albeit in often diametrically opposite forms when it comes to the social ethics and basis for the community.

What's at stake this time? Why a McCarthyite campaign in the 2010's? After 1991 the project (often represented by think-tanks like, Heritage, PNAC, FPI and CNAS for example) has been about securing American unipolarity and while a grand Middle Eastern War and a state of permanent warfare were (and are) part of the agenda, the loss of traction during the years of 2003-2010 put the timetable for the scheme into a state of crisis. The unresolved 'problems' of the 1990's, Russia and the Balkans were not resolved and had become resurgent. The 'regime change' schedule had been waylaid, and the 2007-2008 financial crisis along with the meteoric rise of China had become serious and even vital threats. This is why the Terror paradigm was being all but abandoned and was 'put to bed' in 2011 when bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad Pakistan.

The rise of ISIS was by some accounts unforeseen but attempts were made to 'steer' and 'utilise' the group until it became such an international crisis that it finally had to be put down. This is not the end of Islamic terrorism. It will continue and at the same time remain useful for certain aspects of the larger agenda. But clearly by 2017, as demonstrated by the DOD's official position and agenda, a new paradigm was being birthed.

Cold War II is the new paradigm, though the name is by no means official or endorsed by a consensus. It's a war against 'Revisionist' powers like Iran, Russia and China and this conflict is quickly being cast into the same existential terms as the original Cold War. The ideological frame is a little tougher to sell to the public but the media and pop culture are certainly doing their part. It would seem Anti-Modernist/Anti-Liberalism vs. the Atlantic Liberal Order (farcical as that may be) is the framework. But again, that's a little obtuse for the likes of the general public and so at present it's being marketed under various aspects (including some rather McCarthy-esque conspiracy theories) as a more general theme continues to take shape.

In many ways the United States has two Right wing parties when it comes to economics, militarism and nationalism. Some will scoff as they believe the Democrats represent socialism. This is because they don't know what socialism actually is and in other cases they have an oversimplified even childish understanding of capitalism and how it functions in the real world. The Democrats are a pro-Wall Street party and rabid defenders of the militarist-capitalist imperial paradigm.

In many ways the parties are being torn asunder by libertarian and communitarian impulses which represent two extremes. Classical liberalism is in crisis and is the casualty of these partisan battles. There are some interesting lessons regarding libertarianism as the Left has pushed the social end of the ideology while the Right has embraced the extreme version of its economic ideology and both have reached a point of a crisis and a point in which (as a consequence) a great many freedoms are now in jeopardy... on both ends of the spectrum.

I'm not sure what is more strange. To watch the children of the 1960's advocate militarism, anti-Russia conspiracies and defend institutions like the CIA and FBI or to watch the Right completely re-write and re-cast history and paint themselves as defenders of the Classical Liberal order. To do this, history must essentially be re-written and the campaign to do so has been underway for a generation but in the past ten or twenty years it's gone in some strange directions.

The Nazis were left wing we're told. Divorcing fascism from Right-wing politics has been a long term project pursued with great zeal by the sundry Right-wing media outlets and think-tanks. The complicated and somewhat misnamed nature of Nazi socialism is milked for all its worth in order to insist it was a Left-wing movement. Contrary to all conventional historical and philosophical interpretations the extreme nationalism of the fascists is transformed into Leftist totalitarianism.

The Blood and Soil tribalism and mystic-destiny connection to the land and volk-nation is transliterated and transformed into Leftist Environmentalism even though the ideologies couldn't be more divergent and stem from completely different philosophical and epistemological sources.

But the campaign has done its work as there are now hordes of Right-wing people who themselves flirt perilously close to fascist ideology and yet have been so conditioned that they literally believe figures like Obama and Pelosi are proto-Hitlers. This is even while they pander to quasi-fascists like Trump and even near-fascists like Santorum.

Now (as I continue to argue) the Democrats are in many aspects a Right-wing party and as such will champion the nation and the warfare state, but in terms of history and the US political spectrum these figures (affiliated with the DNC) detestable though they be, are a far cry from the overt fascists, let alone the Nazis. Are they moving in the fascist direction? When it comes to issues like the Anti-Russia campaign, they most certainly are but that's a still far cry from out and out fascist ideology.

That ideology is already present among the American Right, a grouping which would most certainly include the Christian Right. Apart from the overtly Right-wing extremists who are taking to the streets, the one faction of American society that has moved most rapidly into the fascist spectrum is that of the Christian Right and yet due to conditioning, they are about the last people able to see it. Trump's Right-wing populism which in many ways defies conservatism typifies the ethos and political values of Mussolini-style fascism. Jonah Goldberg, Dinesh D'Souza and other hacks and frauds can (for financial gain and obvious political motives) paint the American Left as fascist but they cannot account for the fact that the very fascists who walk our streets, the members of organisations who openly identify with 1930's fascism are not praising Schumer and Sanders. On the contrary the man they back, the man that has energised them is Donald Trump. Anyone who understands the history of the ideology will find this makes perfect sense.

But it doesn't fit the agenda of the Right, and so the sorcerers are put to work, generating fog and twisting reality. The Democrats are pursuing their own Right-wing campaigns and so they too generate fog as they pursue similarly Right-wing agendas in the name of defending the Establishment.

Again this is where the ideas of conservatism and progressivism break down. In one sense it is now the Democrats who have become the conservatives. They are trying to hold together, conserve and preserve the post-WWII American dominated global order within a mostly Centrist framework, even while advocating Progressive social policy.

The Republicans have been pursuing an extreme reactionary campaign seeking to roll back everything from the Great Society to the New Deal and in other cases Wilsonianism and Reconstruction. This is done even while they would pursue market libertarianism coupled with Anti-liberal social policies and (for the most part) a very aggressive militarism. The contradictions are myriad. The overall social polarity has reached a point in which rolling back to previous models has become a threat to the system itself and thus many powerful elements within the Establishment want to see the hardliners in the GOP fail. At this point they're not just knocking down what they see as superfluous structures, they are in fact trying to jackhammer at what are now long-term established foundations of the American order.

Continue reading Part 2