US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, singer of cover songs in Ukraine Nazi bars and overseer of genocide, got a jump start on the Biden administration obituaries with his recent fantasy world op-ed in Foreign Affairs titled “America’s Strategy of Renewal: Rebuilding Leadership for a New World.” It was nominally about Biden, but considering the impairments of “the big guy,” Blinken was mostly congratulating himself.
National security advisor Jake Sullivan is also already being lionized by the likes of Wired:
And it’s Sullivan I’d like to focus on here. If we remember back, it wasn’t just a “tech war” he had planned; he also had grand designs to wed a rebuilding of the American middle class with the Biden foreign policy. Here’s Politico back in 2020 describing Sullivan’s philosophy:
…the strength of U.S. foreign policy and national security lies primarily in a thriving American middle class, whose prosperity is endangered by the very transnational threats the Trump administration has sought to downplay or ignore.
This was a convenient narrative for Sullivan and company because:
- It provides an easy dig at Trump.
- It shifts blame for the destruction of the middle class from American elites to nefarious foreign actors.
- It is an attempt to rebuild some modicum of social trust and patch over the country’s decay as it gears up for the plutocrats’ long war against Russia, China, Iran and anyone else under the sun that opposes US hegemony.
Did the plan really have anything to do with boosting American workers though? Or were any benefits potentially going their way simply to be the byproduct of the plutocrats’ goal to take control of clean energy technology, AI and the like from China and make sure the US is at the center of what’s commonly called “the economy of the future”?
Let’s take a closer look at Sullivan’s plans and compare them with the results. In comments last year at the Brookings Institution Sullivan laid out the tenets of this philosophy:
A modern American industrial strategy identifies specific sectors that are foundational to economic growth, strategic from a national security perspective, and where private industry on its own isn’t poised to make the investments needed to secure our national ambitions.
CHIPS and IRA
The CHIPS Act, which subsidizes semiconductor manufacturing in the US, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes billions for clean energy tech, have added roughly 131,100 jobs so far, according to Jack Conness who does a neat job tracking the investments. It’s not much more than a small blip on the radar:
That’s still a far cry from the 3.7 million jobs sent to China from 2001 to 2018, and there are reasons it’s unlikely those jobs will ever come back.
For one, the CHIPS push has already stalled due to a shortage of qualified workers for its domestic semiconductor industry. There’s also the issue of automation, with newer factories being heavily automated and employing a fraction of the workers that they used to.
There hasn’t been any real effort to bring back other jobs that aren’t in strategic national security fields. A 2020 Bank of America study found that it would cost American and European firms $1 trillion over five years to shift all the export-related manufacturing that is not intended for Chinese consumption out of China.
And note that’s just out of China, which doesn’t necessarily mean the production is coming home. The “friendshoring” push means moving from unfriendly China — which used to be friendly before wages got too high and production moved into strategic fields — to other currently friendly countries which also happen to be low-wage.
Companies from China are already out in front of the friendshoring trend and are increasingly setting up shop in Mexico in order to be closer to their biggest market in the US. And the reality is, it’s next to impossible to remove China from production networks anywhere in the world. From The Diplomat:
“Friend-shoring,” “nearshoring,” and newfound industrial policies in the United States (and Europe) could very well lead to the diversification of U.S. imports, lessen the perceived national security risks associated with import dependence, and provide economic benefits to ASEAN countries by shifting some manufacturing activity from China to Southeast Asia. However, these policies are unlikely to fundamentally challenge China’s central position in regional trade and production networks in the mid-term. As Apple’s struggles in diversifying the production of the iPhone show, China-centered production networks are not easy to replicate in other countries, as Chinese logistics and suppliers possess significant advantages.
The big question looming over any attempt to return manufacturing jobs to the US is whether it’s even possible under the country’s advanced-stage neoliberalism. As Micahel Hudson writes:
[The US] has built too high a rentier overhead into its economy for its labor to be able to compete internationally, given the U.S. wage-earner’s budgetary demands to pay high and rising housing and education costs, debt service and health insurance, and for privatized infrastructure services.
The Empire Consolidates
Washington is demanding more and more tribute payments from its “allies” in one form or another. As Sullivan puts it:
Meanwhile, through the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, and through our trilateral coordination with Japan and Korea, we are coordinating on our industrial strategies to complement one another, and avert a race-to-the-bottom by all competing for the same targets.
The US has pressured TSMC to move some chip production out of Taiwan (just in case!), but it might also be unintentionally destroying the company which will harm its customers and suppliers, most of which are US firms.
Elsewhere, the US is cannibalizing the EU. If we remember back to the months following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), European officials were complaining about its $50 billion in tax credits to entice Americans to buy electric vehicles assembled in North America. To be eligible, a portion of the minerals that are used to make the batteries must come from countries that have free trade agreements with the US (the EU does not).
Well, the two sides finally came to an agreement, which EU lackeys championed as the US giving in to their principled demands. It was anything but.
US Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen said the US would include allies like the EU, UK, and Japan despite the lack of formal free trade agreements.
“Today we agreed that we will work on critical raw materials that have been sourced or processed in the European Union and to give them access to the American market as if they were sourced in the American market.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters after a meeting with Biden.
Sounds great. But while Biden and von der Leyen sold this as a win for “the most comprehensive and dynamic economic relationship in the world,” the problem is that the EU has little in extraction or refining within its borders. As the European Commission notes:
The EU’s industry and economy are reliant on international markets to provide access to many important raw materials since they are produced and supplied by third countries. Although the domestic production of certain critical raw materials exists in the EU, notably hafnium, in most cases the EU is dependent on imports from non-EU countries.
The supply of many critical raw materials is highly concentrated. For example, China provides 100 % of the EU’s supply of heavy rare earth elements (REE), Turkey provides 99% of the EU’s supply of boron, and South Africa provides 71% of the EU’s needs for platinum and an even higher share of the platinum group metals iridium, rhodium, and ruthenium.
So in the end the US concession amounted to squat, and European EV battery companies continued to relocate to the US due to the US subsidies and uncompetitive EU energy costs, which the US also made sure was the case with the cutoff of Russian pipelines.
Sullivan mentions the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, and while that is indeed an effort to ensure the EU complies with efforts against China, it also continues the partners abusive relationship with Washington by making it easier for US tech companies to take over Europe while officials like von der Leyen keep championing the transatlantic ties.
Is Any of it Working for the Middle Class?
While the US is finding limited success bringing strategic industry to its shores, there is little evidence that it is having much of an effect on the whole middle class side of the ledger.
Although the American middle class does not have a set definition, there is general agreement that it has been shrinking for 50 years as the share of Americans who are poor or rich increases. That being said, middle class is generally considered a comfortable standard of living and significant economic security for a sizable chunk of the population. So how’s that looking?
Here are real wages:
Not great. And there is evidence that the majority of those gains are at the bottom for the working poor. From Thomas Ferguson, Research Director at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Boston; and Servaas Storm, Senior Lecturer of Economics:
We showed that claims of broad wage gains under Bidenomics were specious. The opposite, in fact, was the rule: The U.S. was plainly in the throes not of a wage-price spiral but a price-wage merry go round, with real wages for most workers falling steadily behind prices. For one set of workers only this pattern did not hold true: workers at the very bottom of the wage distribution were indeed seeing pay raises in real terms. This owed little to any policy change: It was a unique case of wages rising to subsistence levels as COVID exponentially multiplied risks of working at what had previously been relatively safe jobs and workers at the bottom of the wage distribution left their jobs.
While the Biden Administration somehow got antitrust right, any effects from the Department of Justice and Federal Trade CommissionAll the other economic news — from credit card and medical debt to homelessness and economic inequality — continue their downward spirals, and they’re still trying to sell us on Biden being FDR.
Sanders said today again that Biden is the “most progressive president since FDR.”
This is a total lie. The workers’ share of national income has plunged to its lowest level on record under the Biden administration.
Biden was a bonanza for Wall Street. pic.twitter.com/NDjrk7JUWY
— Joseph Kishore (@jkishore) October 27, 2024
As opposition to all the money flowing to Ukraine and Israel began to grow, the foreign policy for the middle class began to morph into the arsenal of democracy argument. All the money flowing to US proxies was like a US jobs program, they claimed. In October of 2023, Biden delivered an Oval Office address to promote $106 billion in “emergency” spending that included tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Here’s what he said:
And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores… equipment that defends America and is made in America: Patriot missiles for air defense batteries made in Arizona; artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country — in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas; and so much more.
Even creatures who prefer the shadows like former Under Secretary of State and wrecker of worlds Victoria Nuland was sent in front of the cameras to try to persuade the people:
“Vemember, zee bulk of zis money goez vight back into zee economy.”
— Herr Nuland explains self-licking ice cream cone theory to CNN’s last remaining 500 subscribers.
The neocons made a stupid, clumsy play for imperial conquest over Russia, now the whole world is witnessing… pic.twitter.com/diHiE1pGhZ
— Chebureki Man (@CheburekiMan) February 25, 2024
Setting aside the obvious answer to the question of whether there are other ways for the government to provide employment rather than the purchase of bombs that rain down on women and children in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, how much truth is there to Biden and Nuland’s argument?Does the US even have the capacity to act as a so-called arsenal of democracy anymore?
It would appear not. The looting and shipping of manufacturing operations overseas primarily to China isn’t something that can be corrected by flipping a switch. The skilled labor and research capacity just isn’t there.
That means the US currently relies on components made in China for aircraft carriers and submarines. It means a trillion dollars in defense spending helps enrich China – the very country which is supposedly one of the points on an axis of evil behind the increased defense spending in the first place.
It means that the Pentagon contracts General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems (a US company) to build three 155mm projectile metal parts lines in Texas, but the company needs to call in Turkish subcontractors. As the Department of Defense itself notes, the “advanced weaponry and supporting equipment necessary to dominate in modern warfare require highly sophisticated manufacturing, yet the domestic workforce has suffered for decades.”
There’s still enough weapons of death being produced so that washed up comedians and former Israeli Defense Forces volunteers can get together and sign bombs:
We must all do our part in the fight for freedom — from the workers in Scranton who make Pennsylvania the arsenal of democracy to the brave Ukrainian soldiers protecting their country.
We stand with Ukraine in their just defense of their homeland in the face of Russian… pic.twitter.com/5VnYRfQOm5
— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) September 23, 2024
While they try to highlight the supposed jobs benefits in keeping the money flowing for the plutocrats’ proxy war against a nuclear-armed power, the struggle to find workers continues. Maybe it’s a skills shortage, maybe people don’t want to make bombs, maybe they don’t want to work in a poorly ventilated factory during an ongoing pandemic, or maybe the jobs aren’t as attractive as they used to be. As Taylor Barnes points out, “…[the defense industry] dropped average salaries, and battered its unions in recent decades, meaning that, from a labor perspective, a job in the military-industrial complex just isn’t what it used to be.”
That means Sullivan failed spectacularly in what was supposedly his top goal.
There’s more. Another problem with the whole arsenal of democracy as economic policy. War might provide a temporary boost, but it doesn’t last long. It crowds out investment in other areas, and can be especially harmful for the working class in a country with as much consolidation as the US.
While Sullivan made his foreign policy for the middle class sound like it was full of big ideas, it amounted to little more than the feudal aristocracy throwing a few gold coins from the royal stage coach to starving peasants. Unsurprisingly it has done next to nothing to rebuild the collapse of social trust in the US, which was one of the goals:
We can likely look forward to some form of Sullivan’s policy surviving whoever the next president is. While Sullivan isn’t expected to stay on, Kamala says she wouldn’t change anything policy-wise from the Biden administration. Trump has already made clear that his administration wants Germany’s jobs, so there’s that. Maybe he’ll downgrade one conflict while prioritizing another or two.
Sullivan’s ideas (if genuine and not simply some domestic cover for plutocrats’ desired wars) were doomed from the start as his entire theory was built on BS. While outlets like Politico salivate over his “mea culpa” for the foreign policy establishment’s decades of errors, he was in reality doing the complete opposite.
He was the point man for rewriting history and learning nothing in an effort to ensure that nothing will change. Here’s Sullivan telling of what went wrong:
But the last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations. A shifting global economy left many working Americans and their communities behind. A financial crisis shook the middle class. A pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains. A changing climate threatened lives and livelihoods. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underscored the risks of overdependence.
First, notice the lack of agency. Second, they’re not cracks in a foundation. I think a penthouse wobbling on stilts is a proper metaphor with the absence of a foundation being the result of American elites wielding a sledgehammer.
The global economy did not just shift as part of a natural process. American elites did the shifting with NAFTA and bringing China into the World Trade Organization in order to profit off of the deindustrialization of the US.
American elites “shook the middle class” when they constructed the financial house of cards that decimated the country and much of the world, and then they got bailed out.
American elites organized the supply chain to be fragile (and designed a pandemic response that whacks tens of thousands of mostly working class Americans every year).
The elites ignored climate change, are responsible for most of the emissions, and think they’ll ride it out.
And it was the elites who instigated one of their latest losing wars in Ukraine in their desire to plunder Russia and a genocide in Gaza. And the working class pays — either due to higher prices, US social policy circling the drain, or in the case of Ukrainians, Palestinians, and others, with their lives.
Refusing to acknowledge these simple facts ensures no fix and more crises to come until eventually even the stilts give way and the penthouse comes crashing down.
That means the US currently relies on components made in China for aircraft carriers and submarines. It means a trillion dollars in defense spending helps enrich China – the very country which is supposedly one of the points on an axis of evil behind the increased defense spending in the first place.
I think people, many of them, have lost the ability to experience cognitive dissonance. I remember all those Intro to psyche 101 in college where studies of this phenomena were common. But now it seems there is no "mental discomfort" when people experience inconsistencies in what their gov't/media tell them. Logic has less purchase on people's mental process that what was normally assumed. Gustav LeBon was more correct than "democratic" biased countries like the U.S. in describing the phenomena which picked up some currency recently under the rubric of "mass formation pyschosis."
Well if you ignore the things that create the inconsistency then you don’t have the discomfort. The information age made it much easier to keep a very rigid mental narrative because there is always some data (data which doesn’t need to reflect reality) to support it.
To me digital escapism was the biggest change between the 19th and 21st, not the culture or the minds of people.
Yep. There is a link for everything. Wikipedia has become a collection of nonsense with links as proofs.
I have to disagree with that – slightly – Wikipedia is now a collection of deliberate lies, (aka propaganda), with links as proof. Certainly as far as political (and some scientific) articles are concerned.
Ed Bernays pioneered the methods to convince people to act against their own interests. Perception Management has been fine tuned, and one could say that we have the most pervasive and sophisticated system of psychological conditioning and disinformation in history.
FDR had his Fireside Chats. Some of us grew up with parents who lived in that era, saw manifold benefits and heard on the radio from someone who cared about them.
Biden has his Beachside Snores, interspersed with yelling at clouds, muttering and roomba-ing off stages. He cares about a ‘legacy’, not a country or people.
Some of us are old enough to have parents who remembered not just FDR but also a Depression era America where rural people were genuinely poor and suffered not so much from overpriced health care but no health care at all. Jimmy Carter wrote about his mother–a nurse–and how she would travel around south Georgia treating vitamin deficiency diseases.
Whereas those of us born after WW2 lived in an America that was top of the heap with developing countries still developing and Europe shattered by their wars of the imperialisms. The truth is that the America of these past decades has been a very wealthy country and so much so that the financial grifters saw the chance to siphon off ever greater amounts of that wealth. But as I have argued here before, by world standards we are still well off.
And so, while there’s a lot of dissatisfaction, this is why there won’t be a revolution either by the MAGA or certainly by woke elites who look down on them. You need a greater degree of desperation to risk all.
And you also need a certain degree of desperation to get people to return to working in cotton mills or deadening factory jobs. So domestically I think this election is a lot of noise but not a crisis. It’s overseas where our useless eaters in DC are slinging the wrecking ball. They can’t even offer cogent reasons for this but it makes them feel important.
By world standards, the country as a whole is quite wealthy, but there is such a huge degree of income disparity, that basic things like owning a home or even renting an apartment or having healthcare are out of reach for a huge and increasing swath of the population.
However, I do not think this will translate into any real uprising as things have been this way for so long, millennials and later simply cannot conceive of things ever being different as the New Deal era and FDR might as well be a folktale to them. Parts of the US have already reached third world standards and have been that way for decades and is not going to be changing anytime soon no matter which party puts their figureheads in office as they are all beholden to unelected corporate oligarchs and deep state nomenklatura. I think the majority of people in the generations after the New Deal have simply given up and accepted things as they are in the plodding decline as the US continues to circle the drain with no end in sight as FDR might as well be Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill to people born in the neoliberal era.
Finally, if you did have any sort of “revolution” that threatened to get off the ground, the surveillance state would either come in and haul the potential instigators off to indefinite detention on “terrorism” charges before they could do anything, or they would send a drone or two to bomb the buildings that they are in. I do not see any conceivable way any sort of insurrection in the US could be successful with the weapons and the MIC that the US has at its disposal, and would not hesitate for one moment to turn all of its forces and weapons on the populace if the elites felt threatened.
Your other points are very valid, but when it comes to “millennials and later simply cannot conceive of things ever being different”, they are very much aware otherwise “Old Economy Steven” and similar memes wouldn’t be a thing.
It’s simply a 70ies photo of a guy with such bangers as:
Loses job – finds new one on the way home
or
Pays into Social security – receives benefits
But yeah, they know that things are heading the wrong way, so they don’t things will turn around, if that is what you mean.
FDR and Eleanor used to drive around the countryside and interact with the electorate.
Roosevelt’s Little White House State Historic Site Warm Springs
‘Sanders said today again that Biden is the “most progressive president since FDR.” ‘
At this point Sanders is just a parody of himself and can only gaslight voters. Regardless, no matter what people like Jake Sullivan say there is no urge to strengthen the middle class but merely to cannibalize it. There is only one way that America can come back again and that is by renouncing neoliberalism and go back to old-fashioned capitalism like the Chinese do it. But that won’t happen as neoliberalism is how the elite accumulate those untold trillions for themselves – at the expense of the other 99% of the population. Things in America have to get a whole lot worse before people are ready to rebel and demand a change.
True. Sanders the Sheepdog is just doing his job herding the disgruntled D faithful back into the fold. His hypocrisy is worse than most. Despite the typical cheap rhetoric, he goes right along with Joyful Genocide and provoking Russia, Iran and China into war. Just like his buddies in the R faction. The Washington Consensus always wins.
At least the Rs are more honest: they have no problem with the genocide and treating Arabs as Uentermenschen.
The Ds need to just be honest: “we will fund and enable the slaughter of 100s of thousands of innocent civilians and we will make a profit doing it.”
But then again, they have maintain the “good cop, bad cop” routine to distract the plebs.
The Chinese have a mixed economy, so-called capitalist and socialist elements. No human system is perfect, but history shows that all economies are planned, either by the private oligarchy or some form of public oversight. Of course, The Washington Consensus dictates that private oligarchy plans the US economy and those of the vassal states.
Bernie will be the first in line for that $25,000 handout for another house.
If you ever see the news photo of him in his black framed glasses at a protest being carried off by a Chicago cop in the mid/‘60s, the one at a park near 52nd and Lowe, the one with the concrete wall in the background by railroad tracks, he staged that himself. “…let me at ‘em!” Talked with the cop at an Irish wake up the street a few years later.
How can Sanders possibly say that and mean it? He must know better. He must know that huge numbers of his own supporters know better. Unless he is as senile as Biden, he must know that saying such things destroys his credibility for good.
I was listening to an “academic” on the radio who began by saying that Hillary Clinton lost because she ran a bad campaign (which is at least true, although I’d say that her loss was due to more factors than that) but then went on to talk about how much better Karmala Harris’ campaign was (this is hard for a foreigner to assess, but my impression is that her ducking and diving and negative campaigning have not gone down particularly well) and then that Biden had been the best President ever, saving the country from COVID, reforming the economy into a powerhouse of manufacturing might, and successfuilly stopping the evil Putin from conquering Europe, with only a few little glitches like some killings in Gaza which he could perhaps have done a little more to discourage . . .
I don’t believe at this stage that the Democratic Party or its supporters can be reformed.
I saw this posted recently: https://www.metrotimes.com/news/detroit-muslim-leader-ejected-from-kamala-harris-rally-deepening-rift-between-democrats-and-arab-americans-37670193
To sum up: Moderate muslim leader, Democrat, former congressman, kicked out of Harris rally for doing nothing.
What was interesting about the post was that the poster had commented that he thought the Democrats were trying to lose. I wouldn’t go that far, but that is apparently the kind of comments the Harris campaign is drawing.
Nice article Conor!
To be fair, Biden did tell his Wall Street backers that nothing would change. Sullivan is simply engaging in rear guard PR
Sorry if this is on domestic issues but the window to post on the election becomes smaller of course:
Norman Solomon with the usual on the dangers of the rise of fascism:
(I am not sure how Fred Hampton – whom he quotes – would have argued today – if he were as witty as in his youth (unlike Angela Davis).
This Is Not a Drill. Fascism Is on the Ballot. But .
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/this-is-not-a-drill-fascism-is-on-the-ballot-but/
Solomon ends with this:
Last week, the insightful article “7 Strategic Axioms for the Anxious Progressive Voter” offered a forward-looking way to put this presidential election in a future context: “Vote for the candidate you want to organize against!”
Do we want to be organizing against a fascistic militaristic President Trump, with no realistic hope of changing policies . . . or against a neoliberal militaristic President Harris, with the possibility of changing policies?
For progressives, the answer should be clear.
p.s. I wonder how conversations between Solomon and “rogue” actor Sean Penn would play out in 2024 on Ukraine…
Norman Solomon, Juan Cole, Democracy Now, Common Dreams and the rest of the Compatible Left do this routine every 4 years and it got old decades ago. It’s the old bait-and-switch routine.
The intelligence-insulting gross hypocrisy is on full display. Vote Joyful Genocide, to “save democracy”. What democracy?
Norman Solomon and the gang will be complicit in the Genocide as well. If dude isn’t an asset of the CIA, he might as well be. He works tirelessly to maintain the status-quo.
Re: the anger management deficient, activist penn;
Looks like the lachrymose nepo baby might not get his film trinket back.
In brief overview of America’s role in the world today, vassal states of the US are one of two things. They are either cannon fodder, see Ukraine, or they are food, “Hello there EU!”
Naturally though, the cannibalization of the at-home population continues apace, as well. It is neo-liberal, or rabid capitalism, after all. The inherent characteristics, or intentions, of such are accelerating wealth concentration (which is already astronomical) into fewer and fewer hands, conflict everywhere and all the time, and destruction of the biosphere on which our lives depend; not a double, but triple, tap.
In my opinion, the status quo led and championed by the US is suicide for our species on this planet.
And there will be no substantive change in future either, no matter who wins the freak show election. Despite the never-ending miasma and BS spouting from the mouths of the politicians of both factions, the facts are the facts, the policy is the policy. It is amazing how so many will make excuses for one side or the other, and believe the tired, worn-out lies over and over. The grip of Collective Stockholm Syndrome is powerful. Ed Bernays would be amazed and proud if he were around today.
There will be no improvement in the health care crisis, housing crisis, homeowner insurance crisis, environmental crises, Debt Peonage crisis etc.
There will be more institutional corruption, kleptocracy, Genocide, war, proxy wars and plenty of resources for that as usual. Not to sound typically doom and gloom, but there is no evidence to support a more positive outlook.. And then we have the possibility of widespread political violence if the “election” results are not favorable to the DT crowd.
“we have the possibility of widespread political violence if the “election” results are not favorable to the DT crowd.”
Personally, I’m more worried about what the left is going to do when they lose to DT. The Dems have most of their voters convinced that DT is “literally Hitler” and that democracy itself is at stake. Kind of hard to accept a Kamala loss if those are the perceived consequences. I know of nice normal people that are again talking about moving to Canada or something if DT wins.
The left? Yeah, the “left” (far-right racist warmongers with a smiley face and BLM lawn sign) hyperventilating about “fascism” when BOTH factions fall all over themselves to fund, enable and assist in full-blown genocide, and mass destruction in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen etc. Fascism?
The “left” are just as racist, right wing, authoritarian, pro-oligarchy than the “right”.
Left and right are largely meaningless terms. The “left” are supposedly anti-gun, so they will be heavily outgunned in any violent conflict.
As I have said before: since there is no meaningful choice in our sham elections, I would rather have the DT as POTUS, although I will do a write-in as always. Since there is no choice but genocide, kleptocracy, and oligarchy, we might as well be honest.
Although a typical conman and serial liar, he is a more honest representation of the US oligarchy: loud-mouthed, obnoxious, bigoted, ignorant etc. He is the perfect Ugly American.
The “left,” even if it’s not really the left, also controls the assets of the state–the military, law enforcement, the spooks, the banks, etc. That’s the problem. FWIW, Trump and his crowd really don’t, or at least they aren’t quite so wholly assimiliated as the others. I think, if Trump loses, the worst that could happen are a bunch of never do well’s rioting, which will be played up by the msm as the armageddon, no doubt. But what the “left” might do is infinitely more frightening.
The usual US (deliberate on the part of the state and the ‘right’) confusion of ‘leftism’ with ‘liberalism’. In reality there is, at least in the rest of the world, no confusion about these terms. Liberals are capitalists – most, (realistic) leftists are anti-capitalist. But it suits the US (deep) state and the Republicans to tar both their opponents with the same stick. I really wish that US commentators would catch on to this.
My (leftist) interpretation of the political spectrum would have three mutually opposed segments: Left, Liberal and Conservative (or Right). Anarchism in different forms separates/merges into, left from liberal and left from conservative. I’m not sure what separates/merges liberal from conservative – maybe fascism?
Sullivan apparently made his bones by being the biggest ass-kisser in DC.
He apparently lives to provide these sort of post-hoc justifications on behalf of the few hundred greed-head billionaires who wrecked the economy in order to crush the worker/middle class voting bloc that had defected from the Dems during the 1970’s over Vietnam, civil rights, and feminism.
What amazes me is how the obviously delusional world-view that Sullivan spouts goes unchallenged on the op-ed pages of our co-opted billionaire-owned “news” media, the second-biggest ass-kissers in DC.
Point: Refusing to acknowledge these simple facts ensures no fix and more crises to come until eventually even the stilts give way and the penthouse comes crashing down.
Counterpoint: 601 Lexington Ave.
Seems as good a place as any to set down this bindle. US government policy, in a 5-6 hour nutshell. I apologize, I don’t have timestamps for what I would characterize as the relevant points – I was working and listening simultaneously, so you’re just going to have to sit through it, same as me (i was standing actually), if you want to agree/disagree.
Or don’t! We’ve all got better things to do.
Gilles Deleuze: Against the Dialectic (Nietzsche & Philosophy, Part 1 of 2)
Gilles Deleuze: Ressentiment, Bad Conscience & Becoming-Active (Nietzsche & Philosophy, Part 2 of 2)
THE BACCHAE: Dionysus, The God of Illusions
To render myself more thoroughly unassailable, I will say, even though I can’t remember what parts I’m referring to from the above, that they were DEFINITELY all quotes from the source material, and NOT narrator editorializing.
DEFINITELY…
(sry i did try to retrace my steps but gotdang that’s a lot of listening and sifting when you’re working full time lolz)
Saw this at N.C. a while ago:
Handouts abound. There’s plenty for the left—requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons.
That project is going better for Arizona than the actual chips part of the CHIPS Act. Because equity is so critical, the makers of humanity’s most complex technology must rely on local labor and apprentices from all those underrepresented groups, as TSMC discovered to its dismay.
https://thehill.com/opinion/4517470-dei-killed-the-chips-act/
A great overview of the work of this oligarch courtier, who has existed solely within the ideological echo chamber of elite universities, elite-funded think tanks, and as an advisor in the Democratic hive mind. “Too clever by half” would rightly describe this clever man who has had no real life experience to threaten his cozy ideology, even marrying a near clone of himself. Promoted beyond his capabilities due to his close working relationships with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
As you say nothing much will change with a Trump administration, apart from the rhetoric.
In the “politics island of survivor”, Sullivan has allied himself to the tribal chief, Anthony Blinken – if you’ve seen somnambulant Biden recently, you can understand Blinken’s role as Netanyahu’s representative. Personally, Sullivan will do well in the near future. The country, not so much – human animals not measuring up in Blinken’s chosen world.
In the closing days of the election cycle, we’re hearing how the US economy is the envy of the world! Yes, envy of the world!! Perhaps that’s why millions are pouring to the borders in search of below minimum wages and zero medical benefits. But, campaign surrogates insist on Cable TV that American workers are earning record top wages and how the US median income is well beyond Mars, which, of course, explains the “cohort” of 750,000 homeless.
Moreover, with Oligarchs “donating” millions to both campaigns, how can the US fail? Or, US-styled democracy, not fail? Republican/ Democrat/ Independent Michael Bloomberg is reported to have just “donated” $45M to the Harris campaign, which means the Palestinian “final solution” will continue in earnest in a Harris administration. Under the “orange one”, Gaza and the West Bank would be emptied out faster than you can say – pretty please?
Sullivan will likely trundle off to some hedge fund or other as a reward for a job well done. His wife will likely be the next 2nd district congresscritter for NH. She’s spook-adjacent and has worked for both parties, so what’s not to like? Her neocon credentials are solid—the PMC crowd in NH love her, while her opponent is a far right libertarian who fled “communist” China.
This essay is simply terrific, but an added comment:
US manufacturing productivity has been slowly declining for the last twelve and half years, which is unprecedented. Manufacturing productivity has historically increased at about 2% yearly:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=m2mB
January 30, 2018
Manufacturing Productivity, * 1988-2023
* Output per hour of all persons
(Indexed to 1988)
Word.
The discussion of the middle class perked my ears – I think that the current definition would include homeless in San Francisco and making $50k because that is the statistical definition, which is nudged to make the party in power look less lousy.
But my thought outside useless stats is the question: Can the middle class overlap the precariat class and still legitimately be middle class?
I think that the US political class uses the term “middle class” to avoid using the words “working class” which are considered too subversive.
A good synonym for “middle class” would be “proles”.
Thanks Conor, very good article!