Today’s Coffee Break on a holiday weekend in the US is the simple recommendation that you go straight to this long essay in Front Porch Republic by W. Aaron Vandiver of Carbondale, Colorado: Trump and the Furies of Empire –– Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are.
Yes he is, but only for those with the critical faculties to recognize ours is not a problem of one side or the other, but of the Uniparty in charge. As a diagnosis of Trump Derangement Syndrome and the other TDS, Trump Deification Syndrome, it is difficult to imagine a better place to get a handle on our predicament. You will need a cup of coffee, or two, maybe a couple of pints of Guinness on the back porch, as Mr. Vandiver lays out where we are and how we got here. Although there may be a few minor quibbles, there is nothing new here for this community, since the very beginning.
Donald Trump is not the cause of anything, but he is the result of much. When he exits the stage, nothing will change unless the people change it. Can we? That is our only hope.
The Furies are coming for us, ready or not:
In considering Trump’s name for his Iran war — “Epic Fury” — we might recall that the Furies of Greek mythology were the relentless goddesses of vengeance who pursued and tormented those guilty of sins such as murder, anger, greed, and jealousy. They were personified curses, like ghosts of the victims, haunting the offenders, driving them mad, causing fear, paranoia, and suffering.
What if the Furies came for America? What does the karma of an entire nation look like in anthropomorphic form?
If Trump is ushering us toward some sort of critical defining moment, perhaps even an apocalypse as so many seem to believe, it’s worth remembering that the definition of an apocalypse is a revealing of previously hidden truths. If we look at President Trump through a symbolic lens, what previously hidden truths are being revealed about America? What does his particular character tell us about our collective character?
Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are. We like to soothe ourselves with pretty talk about “democracy,” but Trump, as he balances the world on the knife-edge of war, is compelling us — or giving us an opportunity — to grapple with an unseemly truth that has been quite obvious for a long time to anyone willing to face it: we don’t really live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchic, militaristic global empire that operates largely beyond the control of “the People” our Constitution puts in charge.
That empire, in its full global dimensions, grew out of the military-industrial complex that arose after World War Two. In the ensuing decades, the American Empire killed and ousted foreign democratic leaders around the world — and these are well-established historical facts — like Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and Salvador Allende in Chile. Since the Second World War, the U.S. has directly overthrown over a dozen foreign governments (and initiated dozens more regime-change efforts and interventions in foreign elections), including the 1953 Iran coup, which planted the seeds for Iran’s hatred and mistrust of us, and arguably led to the current war. Through all that, the American people and their politicians carried on with their somnambulant, self-soothing rhetoric about democracy. We are bringing democracy and freedom to the world, the TV told us, and we nodded along. Then came the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK; Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza. Still we focused on money, cars, houses, pop culture, professional sports, consumerism — the American Dream — and lulled ourselves with fanciful stories about democracy.
Here are a few links from our previous discussions here that are particularly relevant to our coming fierce fight with the Furies. This battle can be won. But only if we regain our sense of humanity and ignore the noise of the Uniparty.
The Meaning of Freedom in These United States (Nicholas Buccola)
Hayek’s Bastards and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Quinn Slobodian)
The Making of the MAGA Right (Laura K. Field)
How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (Wolfgang Streeck)
Christopher Lasch and the Distemper of our Time: A Chronicle Foretold
Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class (Catherine Liu)
Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin and the Tenor of Our Time (Kei Hiruta)
An Inconvenient Apocalypse (Wes Jackson of The Land Institute)
Herman Daly: The Economist for Our Time (Daly is included in the essay)
Thanks for reading! I look forward to the wisdom of the commentariat on the Furies of Empire. The items I had in mind for today’s Coffee Break can wait until next week.
On this Memorial Day Monday in the United States, let us remember what our unthinking imperialism has done to so many millions of families around the world.
I think the US is nearing collapse. Alecto will fly.
Collapse like the Roman or Spanish Empire, that is the question! 🤔
Given the surprising similarities between the USA and the late Spanish empire, I presume it may well end in a comparable way: its main military force — the navy for Spain, the air force for the USA — annihilated by its enemies; its financial power — the silver piece of eight then, the dollar now — falling to the wayside as the country loses its privilege of minting and imposing the international currency; its cultural preponderance reduced from an admired model to a few folkloric themes; its economy ruined by de-industrialization, agricultural deliquescence, and gigantic trade deficits.
“its cultural preponderance reduced from an admired model to a few folkloric themes;”
Including internally. In my view, what will end the US is likely to be that that nobody believes in the ideology anymore, meaning that, in the absence of any other unifying identity, people in various parts of the country with cease feeling commonality with each other.
Annihilated or ignored?
One could not ignore what was one of the most powerful navies in the 18th century. The Spanish navy had to be destroyed, and so it was during the Napoleonic wars (most famously at Trafalgar, but not just there). Whatever Spain managed to reconsistitute was destroyed in Cuba and in the Philippines during the Spanish American war in 1898.
Just the same, one cannot ignore probably the most powerful air force of our times. It will have to be destroyed (by Iran? China?) for the “USA empire” to collapse.
Airframes have a dramatically shorter lifespan than wooden ships.
The B52 is going on 70 years old from design and still flying. Wooden ships lasted, at best, a couple of decades
The US dollar is, quite literally, the Spanish piece of eight, you know (at least in terms of its origins…)
The Spanish piece of 8 was legal tender for 1 Dollar until 1858 in the USA, by the way.
That’s why an American quarter dollar is called “two bits.”
“Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar!”
“All for Wall Street, stand up and holler!”
The ‘cheer squad’ ethos in finance is here overt.
It became legal tender (generally in the form of overstruck coins) in British colonies in 1797, and remained so in Canada till 1860. It was also legal tender in Asian countries, most importantly in China (the largest trading entity in the world in the 18th century and a large part of the 19th) till 1930.
As well, many recently independent Latin American countries derived their national currency from the Spanish one (after all, the silver mines were located in those Latin American countries), and so did Japan with the Yen in 1871, and China with the Yuan.
Spain was way more important in the 18th century and till the end of Latin American wars of independence than is commonly realized nowadays.
It’s a Trump production…
“It will be the greatest and most beautiful collapse in human history!”
The Golden Collapse. Hey, Age? Collapse? No big deal. The point is: it’s Golden.
I don’t see any comparison with the Roman or Spanish empires. No need to go back so far when the best example is currently an ally, the UK.
The British empire had the world’s most powerful navy; now I think it has three boats. It also had a presence in the ME and it controlled oil, no longer. Nonetheless, the financial sector, the City of London, is important and influential. But the UK is now an ordinary country.
Faced with China and Russia acting together, and possibly with the EU if it can get its act together, the US is headed toward the UKs fate; Wall Street and a tech sector will continue but the US will be less powerful, less interesting, with lots of poor people.
There’s no historical analog to this collapse.
Wouldn’t a ‘proper’ Marxist say: “Di-Alecto will flay?”
It’s helpful to remember that the US has never been a free society. From the days of chattel slavery to global colonialism. Democracy has always been a cover story for vicious oligarchy and extraction. Every ruling class has some cover story to justify endless extraction and control, and in the famous words of Nazi Hermann Goering “it works the same in every country.”
But can the people make something different after Trump? If the people haven’t been free for 250 years of American history, if we’ve been stuck with an unaccountable ruling class the whole time, what would have to change to achieve a different political outcome?
If people can only imagine a way of life with a ruling class, we’ll just keep shifting around between different ruling classes with different narratives justifying unaccountable political leaders that extract from the people. This a shallow revolution, where one ruling class swaps out for another and nothing much changes fundamentally.
If we wanted to actually have deep transformative change, I suggest studying what actually-free societies are like. How do societies have laws without a ruling class? What expectations do people have for each other, how are laws upheld without police and how do people encourage sharing and avoid greed? I’ve lived with a society briefly that had no ruling class and it was profoundly beautiful. Plenty of observers, including Ben Franklin, myself, and several other observers I’ve found, have noticed these societies don’t have police, prisons or crimes. And it’s not an accident – free societies don’t have so many of the troubles that we’re used to.
I’ll keep bringing up this proposal as a framwork for a different future:
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/basic-law-of-the-commonwealth-cfc
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/playing-devils-advocate-arguments
“Yes he is, but only for those with the critical faculties to recognize ours is not a problem of one side or the other, but of the Uniparty in charge.”
“Donald Trump is not the cause of anything, but he is the result of much.”
Thank you. I would say it’s a problem of all of this happening in a mid-term election year. However, the election cycles in the USA are long and continuous (and politicians fill most of their time fundraising). No sooner will the mid-terms be over then the cycle will go on hyper drive about the Presidential election. The election cycles keep the divisions going that hinder deep analysis.
Don’t all nations and groups flatter themselves? Just asking. That D.H. Lawrence “soul of a killer” crack has always rubbed me the wrong way. Here’s suggesting that Americans as a group are merely average in the evil dept–like most groups.
The behavior of the powerful on the other hand is a completely different average and not a good one.
It may be a matter of scope and opportunity. Rome was once just a nondescript town but when it conquered much of the known world, its internal flaws became magnified which led to its destruction. Britain was once an island off a well-populated peninsular but when it went on to take over much of the world, it’s internal flaws were writ large. Now it has mostly gone back to being an island nation. Same sort of thing has happened to America which will take decades to unwind and America has already passed its zenith with nadir beckoning ahead. In each case, it was their mercantile interests which led to their demise.
i derive this from Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God, vol 4, from memory.
apo kalypsos is the rending of the veil that hides the Holy of Holies in the fancy tent-temple of the habiru, back in the day.
so Toto tearing the curtain away from the Wizard of Oz fits that to a T,lol.
Luke 12:2, what is hidden shall be revealed.
or Zarathustra:”Undrape! you are not guilty unto me”.
of note, perhaps, for our Woo-Woo aficionado’s: Cliff High’s long web crawler linguistic digital prophesy thing had “Secrets Revealed” as a liet motif throughout(my Mom was a supporter/subscriber).
and that old saying, “it’ll come out in the wash”.
buried things have a way of unearthing themselves…this is what sulfuric acid, various kinds of maggots and septic tanks are for…if one really wishes to hide the evidence, there are ways…but Hubris hasnt the time for such thoroughness, thankfully…and thus is forever stalked by the goddess Nemesis. So mote it be.
and Front Porch Republic has been my second favorite place on the system of tubes for quite a while.
small-C conservtive bent(think Wendell Berry), but a lot of thoughtful stuff, there
indeed, despite a few quibbles, the article summed up brilliantly what I have been trying to narrow down in my mind. The US has become a caricature with Trump, completely unshackled from pretense. At last, the truth appears.
To drive the point home I would only add that the US overthrew Mosaddegh in Iran (at the behest of BP), Arbenz in Guatemala (at the behest of United Fruit,) Allende in Chile (at the behest of Anaconda and other mining companies,) Maduro in Venezuela (probably at the behest of Chevron and others,) etc These are only the most obvious examples. Foreign policy is often conducted in close cooperation with Corporate America and out of sight of any accountability.
Scratch a little below the surface and you might find CIA dalliance with drug suppliers in Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, and Latin America have corporate relationships. Alfred McCoy has written extensively about the CIA-drug lord dalliance. I’ve long marveled at how often local pushers get busted, and how rarely the managers and bankers of the nationwide US drug distribution organization. (Hint: Mary Kay has 5000 employees and 3.5 million cosmetics pushers.)
I am surprised that no one has yet written books about the corporate and financial interests behind the Zionist project. Too “antisemitic?” And too revealing of how much “foreign aid” gets skimmed off for the benefit of politicians and Zionist interests?
“I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers…In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism.”
Smedley Butler
And that’s global capital interests.
Allende and Anaconda–
There were many besides Anaconda, including ITT. In the fall of ’73, I played trombone in the marching band’s performance of “The Chile Show.” The marching band was not a traditional one. We only practiced on Saturday mornings, in between trips to alumni tents where we’d snatch some drinks. So our routine in a show was to form words on the field, play a snippet of a song, then jump to our spot in the next word on the shot of a gun. Occasionally, we’d get ambitious and sort of march from one word to the next WHILE PLAYING. “The Chile Show” went all the way.
I don’t remember the whole show, but I remember the end. The narrator said, “And now we know who really runs Chile.” Gunshot. Form “CIA” on the field. Play “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard” while “marching from “CIA” to “ITT.” Gunshot. Form “CASTRO” on the field. Play “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
My parents, who happened to be there on their annual fall trip to visit me, and who thought Harvard was Shambala, were completely baffled.
In case you don’t check the link, another of the companies involved in the plot was Pepsi. WTF? And we were the Pepsi Generation?!?
Ah, yes. Sounds like my junior university.
“Former lackeys of the administration, Henry Kissinger and Earl Butz”
While rapidly shifting from “Kiss Butz” to “Ex Lax” while playing tower of power “So very hard to go”
My 50th reunion is coming up
I read Mr. Vandiver’s piece, and couldn’t help but note a factual discrepancy in his paragraphs about Harry Truman. Harry and Bess didn’t drive themselves back to Independence from DC. Like most people would have done in the early 50s, they took the train, something I remember from Merle Miller’s bio that I read when in my 20s.
It was funny. When I checked this online, I found a lot of Reddit and Facebook posts that had them driving, but remarkably, here’s a Time Magazine story about how the Trumans got home. It seems that Ike had “lent” the Trumans the Presidential railcar for their trip home, a bit funny because the pre-Inauguration meeting of the Eisenhowers and Trumans at the White House was bordering on hostile.
Here’s the account of their arrival, not at big Union Station in Kansas City (the newest civic symbol shown on sports telecasts under red light), but at the little station in Independence:
A different America.
When I was about 10, my parents took me to a Jose Iturbi concert at the Pendergast-built Music Hall. At the end of the concert, my mother took me backstage for an autograph (I was going to be the next Van Clyburn.), and my dad waited at the main exit. While we were getting the autograph, Harry, a big piano fan, came down the aisle, acknowledged my Dad and made his exit. No Secret Service. No fanfare. Just a guy from Independence who liked piano music.
Can you imagine the Clintons, Bushes or Obamas doing the same?
A different America.
Or the same. Harry gave us the CIA and had a lot to do with the Cold War. JFK said a sack of ’48 campaign cash got him to endorse the creation of Israel.
But true at least he didn’t post online pictures of himself as Jesus.
I’d say mass media have coarsened our culture but not necessarily changed it.
C’mon, Carolinian. It was even in Vandiver’s article. In December, 1963, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Truman (CIA’s own summary!) in which he lamented having founded the CIA. He explained how the agency was sold to him because in such a complex world, the President needs to have an agency of information gatherers and organizers. But, Truman said, the CIA has combined that function with “cloak-and-dagger” operations, even in peacetime.
As for a sack of cash to recognize Israel, Harry Truman was a man of intense personal loyalty. I mentioned Pendergast in the comment above because Truman was a Jackson County Commission when Pendergast ran Jackson County and Kansas City. The Pendergasts had a construction company, and there was a lot of concrete poured in those parts during the 30s. Harry was never implicated in any corruption, but when the by-then-disgraced Pendergast died, VP Harry flew back to K. C. for the funeral, against the objection of everybody around, probably FDR included.
This Zionist source proudly sets out how the pre-Israel Israel lobby pressured Truman to recognize Israel. The core problem was that Secretary of State George Marshall, whom Truman greatly admired and relied upon for international affairs, wisely opposed recognizing Israel. Truman was irritated by The Lobby’s pushiness:
So the nascent Lobby brought in Harry’s old business partner, Eddie Jacobson, playing on that personal loyalty:
The president of B’nai B’rith urged Jacobson to go to DC to see Truman. Jacobson flew to Washington without even making an appointment, and walked up the White House driveway and entered the West Wing. (This is not the same America.) Harry greeted his old friend and took him into the Oval Office, but the reunion didn’t go well:
Jacobson makes one last pitch:
No bag of cash, but the story sounds eerily familiar. Maybe you’re right. Nothing’s really changed.
As for JFK’s “testimony,” do you think it might have had something to do with Truman’s vocal dislike for the Kennedys?
As for the Cold War, it’s quite true that Truman went along with a plan already in place. In fact, he was part of the plan (unknowingly) as the replacement for Wallace. but the plan had been in place for a long time. Things were going along nicely. Then the North Koreans got restless:
So far, it seems you’re right. Things seem eerily familiar. Deja vu all over again.
MacArthur had some big ideas about what he, not the CiC, would like to do:
The only difference between MacArthur and the Neocons was that Mac had a huge combined force at his command.
Truman called a halt:
A different America.
MacArthur didn’t go quietly onto two or three MIC boards. A mere eight days after he was fired, MacArthur stood before a joint session of Congress, with the invitation that brought him there bearing the signature of Speaker Sam Rayburn, Harry’s bourbon-cigars-poker buddy. In a scene that inspired Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May, MacArthur attacked Truman’s policy as insufficiently virulent in its anti-Communism, then went on to a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan.
Truman stood his ground. He took a hell of a hit politically, but held onto the office and preserved the civilian authority over the military. MacArthur did indeed fade away–with McCarthy taking his place. But no President has done as much since–and lived to tell about it.
It’s easy to throw a few cynical lines of half-assed accusations, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a different America. I didn’t say perfect. I said different.
Thank you HMP!
Alas, Harry dropped the bombs, against better advice.
That he did. He had been President for 3 1/2 months, which is exactly how long Truman had even known about the Manhattan Project. FDR had never allowed him to be told. There was some opposition from some of the Manhattan scientists and mid-level officials, but the committee formed to study the bomb’s use recommended its use without warning, and chief-of-staff Marshall had headed Manhattan, appointed Groves and approved the bombing plans subject to the President’s approval. While it doesn’t absolve him, there was no way neophyte Harry was going to stand up against all that.
But with 5 years of experience as President and after being elected in his own right, Truman stood up to MacArthur, whose desire to use scores of nuclear weapons on China was well known and for which MacArthur continued to advocate until his death. It didn’t make up for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Truman did prevent an unimaginable war crime.
Curtis LeMay, head of SAC during Korea, was another advocate of using the bomb on at least North Korea. Later, he advocated for bombing Cuba during the Missile Crisis, but JFK said no.
It’s not just me and I was going to link up Garry Wills long ago take down of Truman but the Esquire archive is paywalled.
https://classic.esquire.com/article/1976/1/1/im-not-wild-about-harry
And yes the US establishment was itself eager to resume their interrupted crusade against communism and brought on Truman as VP to help with that. Truman was fully onboard with what they wanted, so claims that he was merely a folksy and naive guy run up against his own famous slogan.
The buck stops here.
FDR wanted a different world post WW2 and the Truman pivot had huge consequences that we are still living with in Ukraine. So to me debates about Truman’s character or whether he was a secret bad guy or good guy aren’t that relevant although I’m glad for you that you have some good memories.
I’m more of the “worse than a crime, a mistake” attitude. And your personalized anecdote about Truman and Israel doesn’t make him look better in what may have been the biggest mistake of all. Bag of cash or no he was a servant of capital and the world we have now.
Thanks. That was very informative and changed my opinion of HST.
Thanks to both Carolinian and HMP for a civilized and granular exchange of views. Finding the ‘truth’ is never easy. I’m the better for it.
I would suggest that anti-democracy and empire in America have roots that stretch back much farther than the hegemonic period post World War II. The genocidal destruction of Indigenous people, slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny and the seizure of territory from Mexico all point to the deeply ingrained imperial mind-set.
As for the anti-democratic impulse at the heart of the Republic, I think it’s high time for a significant progressive rediscovery of Gustavus Myers’ landmark 3-Volume “History of the Great American Fortunes,” (1910) a work that is still breath-taking in its scope, detail and documentation. It should be studied in every school, and warrants a contemporary review in Naked Capitalism. What began within spread out across the world in a global commitment to “make the world safe *from* democracy”
“We” decided we’d be Britain II and save “Ourselves” a bunch on taxes in the bargain. That’s pretty much the same themes today: Imperialism and Propertarianism had a baby.
Slavery was a very common institution until the 1800s.. Any peculiarities in American society cannot be traced to slavery — but they might be traced to peculiarities in its particular form of slavery (such as, obviously, its racist characteristics).
AMERICANISM. As toxic, violent, racist, and psychotic as another unhuman ideology, Zionism. No wonder that the two mesh together so coherently when the right (wrong) figure takes the scene.
And Britain makes three, with historic ties to America and Israel. Sorry to all of our wonderful British members of the Commentariat, but I’m afraid I see so many similarities between the perennial goals of these states. And it’s a little like Multiplcity, each knock-off strays a little further from the British Empire’s positive aspect, its respect for law and reason.
But the racism, the sense of ethnic or cultural superiority? I find it hard to distinguish among the three.
Many years ago I read Domestic Manners Of The Americans written by Frances Milton Trollope. In 1827 she travelled to America and documented her journey to the Mississippi and East Coast. I found it a fascinating, pretty candid view of America and Americans and I got the impression at the time that they haven’t really changed.
I recall reading that Dickens, one of two writers who actually moved me to tears, never had an Irish character in any of his voluminous works. But fog everywhere, in every field and corner of England. Perhaps the Brits have never found their way out.
I stopped telling myself those comforting lies in 1968, when I was 15.
Reality intruded, as it is wont to do.
And it will be the Spanish model, American Society has a lot of Spanish influence, which is most obvious in our form of corruption and the style of US cruelty.
The Conquistador worldview.
I read parts of Mr Vandiver’s essay – I was impressed that he mentioned ecological overshoot and linked to an article that featured William Rees. I was a little surprised to read, in the paragraph about him at the bottom of the page, that he “served as Senior Writer for Policy and Communications on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential campaign.” People have their reasons, of which we know little.
A few months ago I asked a large language model to take a surrealistic poem by James Tate, in which an apparition of Anna Swan has a non-speaking role, and write dialog for her about the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. I smiled when “Anna” said: The predicament will outlive you by forty, fifty years. It doesn’t need your constant attention. It will be fine without you.
Of course, “fine” doesn’t mean comfortable, easy, okay. It means that the situation will develop as it must, for those components obeying the laws of nature, in combination with actions and inactions by those participants with agency. I regard myself as a poor wayfaring acquaintance – occasionally encountering a fellow traveler.
I am puzzled,. Can a discussion of trump which omits the roles of epstein, ben gvir, smotrich, mileikowsky, witkoff, kushner, nudelman, etc., be complete?
Thank you for telling us about Vandiver’s article, and for also referring back to articles on this blog that convey important parts of the same story: That we (Americans, and the collective West) are paying for lying to ourselves about who we are and who we have been. That we are experiencing extremes of corruption, dissolution and loss of collective standards and purposes that separate us from the good things that we thought were at the center of our civilization, and that this separation is beginning to seem unrecoverable to some of us. Or at least, unrecoverable without crossing some vast killing field that might bear comparison with the Terror of the French Revolution, or even be markedly worse than that.
Vandiver’s article seems to me to be a brilliant summation of what Trump means historically, and the collective work of NC you refer to offers the broadest and best grounded understanding of our intellectual and institutional failures available anywhere. NC is an amazing guide.
But there is something missing here, a perspective that comes from the writing of Alastair Crooke, who subtly contrasts the arrogant nihilism of the West with the spiritual and ethical inspiration of the Civilizational States, which include Russia, China, and Iran. The Civilizational States, Crooke shows, are following standards of political and social humility now unknown to the West. The World War that seems to us to always be threatening, and always again postponed, seems to be between those who are hanging on to a civilized and religiously informed human identity, and a nihilistic neoliberal West that has come to display contempt for humanity in all of its artifices.
I can only point out very briefly some of the places where Crooke has made these arguments. I hope you will be inspired to look at the originals and not depend too much on what I have to say about them–being myself a product of nihilism, I may be an unruly narrator. First, there is Crooke’s 1922 essay “The Crux of the Putin-Xi Revolution for a New World Order – Arresting the Slide to Nihilism” (link: https://strategic-culture.su/news/2022/11/28/the-crux-of-putin-xi-revolution-for-new-world-order-arresting-slide-to-nihilism/ ) Here, through Crooke’s eyes (as I view him) you can see the elements of arrogance, breakage and failure in the West’s project of neo-liberal hegemony and the countervailing return of civilizational construction and ethical reconstruction of nations and religiously inspired spiritual truths. You can see in this essay that the current crisis has a scale and a grounding that show that it is something beyond an ordinary crisis WITHIN the West, and may be comparable to nothing we have experienced since the French Revolution, or perhaps, since the transformation of the late Roman Empire into the feudal west. There is to be, it seems, a recasting of authority, of the sources of creativity, the scale and dimension of social and economic life, of international relations and economies, to accompany the military revolution now being brought about by cheap drones, missiles and AI.
On the fate of the West, Crooke quotes Bruno Maçães, a commentator and former Portuguese Secretary of State for European Affairs:
“[The West] wanted its political values to be accepted universally … In order to achieve this, a monumental effort of abstraction and simplification was needed … Properly speaking, it was not to be a civilization at all but something closer to an operating system … no more than an abstract framework within which different cultural possibilities could be explored. Western values were not to stand for one particular ‘way of life’ against another — they establish procedures, according to which those big questions (how to live) may later be decided”. And so, Crooke thinks: “It becomes questionable whether the West can compete as a civilisational state and maintain a presence.” The operating system has aged badly, and is failing.
If Putin and Xi are the leading characters in that essay, Iran is mentioned as well. In his 2009 book “Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution,” Crooke notes that “Islamist resistance was jolted into existence by the trauma of social engineering, ethnic cleansing, political disruption, repression and massacres that were the direct consequence of the western experiment in exporting to Muslim societies of economic market-based life, freed from social and political control.” He thinks the resistance has broken free of the mental straitjacket of the West, has great strengths, and will survive and thrive in the world the failures of the West is creating.
Crooke often reveals something of his broad understanding of the crisis in longer interviews. Perhaps the best of these is this one:
“Civilization at the Crossroads with Alastair Crooke,” (interview about May 12, 2026) (Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGnJEb4sXwM ) Near the end, he talks about the West’s attack on the very idea of humanity, and he also notes how optimistic and hopeful young people have become in Iran and other civilizational nations, as compared with young people’s misery and pessimism in the West.
Crooke’s observations have mde me think of the crisis Vandiver describes as more global than Vandiver describes, with countervailing tendencies coming from outside the West itself.
In Oreskes and Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, the conceit is that it is written a few hundred years later, after the revival of the Second People’s Republic of China. Perhaps the authors think, as I suspect – and hope – and let me add I have never been there – that the people in charge in that place have a sense of the “common good” that is absent in neoliberal societies.
https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/142/1/40/1830207/daed_a_00184.pdf
It just might be the case that in Trump Derangement Syndrome there is failure or unwillingness to see any aspect of ourselves in his behavior or rhetoric.
It just might be the case that in Trump Deification Syndrome there is a failure or unwillingness to see any downside to his irreverence, because of our continual amusement at his puncturing of everyday pieties.
But without such self-reflection, any hope for the eventual emergence of a new solidarity that might contain our polarization and nihilism seems unlikely
I yearn for a real bond between people who think and act quite differently rather than groupings of people who only think and act the same. That kind of solidarity just may have the strength to start something new politically.
The Dude Subsides
This aggression will not stand, man.
There was good reasons for trumpo derangement syndrome for anyone that did their due diligence on his whole life. It was only the New American Century [tm] rusted on sorts clutching onto anything that would ring in prophecy or wishy washy liberal sorts that thought it was just a bump in the road and steady hands would right the neoliberal ship with its softer touch in investor administration. Sorry but America is now a nation of consumers and not citizans after decades of neoliberalism = wealth is fact – truth and the only thing that matters …
“America is now a nation of consumers and not citizens.”
I buy, therefore I am.
The one who dies with the most toys wins.
“The one who dies with the most toys wins.” – 80s bumper sticker on some nice cars as I observed. Around the same time in Calif I noticed lots of people talking about the Fed Gov should be run like a for profit business and get out of the road of risk taking/wealth creating individuals[tm] making packet which would trickle down thingy = natural order ….
Same place the whole RE investment for retirement kicked off and everyone was on their own in the market place via scam artists selling 1500k a ticket seminars = borrow/leverage and never pay it off, skim income, lower credit terms, die and insurance picks up the tab …
As a friend once observed about that “wealth” mindset; “The one who dies with the most toys is still dead.” No wonder the Techbros are scrambling like rats in a population density experiment, trying to live forever.
I see Trump as the example of the dictum that: “Government is not a business.”
Perhaps the Jackpot is inevitable, and the Club of Rome is right.
Stay safe.
Ugh mate … there is at minimum a few thousands of year of finance/econ natural history one has to wrap their head around just to understand what was wrought and why. Akin to studying religion since day one in human history. Who has the biggest platform/megaphone is and always been a drama in advancing perspectives about who were are and how we should live – born into thingy.
Michael Hudson’s …and forgive them their debts
Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption
From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year
is a good place to start if you doubt where to start.
I did my own yonks ago and was banging on about on NC yrs ago, hence Hudson’s experiences in communicating with anthropological departments. I also recommend Steve Hall for his deep knowledge about these matters and is a parallel to Hudson from the UK experience.
For instance the dramas with a nation that was very wealthy till – see Argentina foreign-currency debt-trap since the Barings Bank debacle 1824-1830.
Now consider the dramas in the ME with a trillion a day financial flows across fiber cables vs oil lmmao and all those AI/algo/data nodes centers. Its all a huge game of smiley poker and no on wants to smile and then let the unwashed have a clue about what is going on …
Some then wonder why I paint old 100 yr old houses …. its a better life …
As an American perched here in GMT+3 I watch the unwinding of The Empire and feel only sadness for what seems to be an inevitable collapse. People here have always admired the United States, and seeing its decay they just shake their heads briefly while moving on with life. Even five years ago it was the ambition of many to move to the US and live in that miracle of prosperity and freedom. But in recent years this goal has died down considerably. And it is little wonder why, because they have built the American Dream for themselves. And it’s better than ours ever was. If you have not visited here you will not believe it. It cannot be true. “No country run by an authoritarian dictator evil thug could possibly build anything except a gulag.” Oh, is that true? Perhaps if you stop looking in a mirror and free yourself, you might find differently. But the implications of that understanding lead to a self-indictment so raw and terrible that few have the strength. So they trudge on towards the cliff.
I was blessed with great teachers. Fine people who taught us the ethics and moralities of our forefathers, and the foundations of our culture. Superman was on TV, and what was he guarding with his heroic strength? “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” I have neither forgotten nor abandoned those lessons. But what I have found by emerging from the distorted cave of modern American culture is that others in the world were learning those lessons too. America was indeed a beacon, once, and its ideals escaped the borders and found fertile soil all over the world. The garden of its origin is not doing so well. So I find myself living in another country in order to honor the American Dream that I learned as a youth. Because that dream was not just the American dream, it was a dream for all humanity. And we are all very fortunate that it will outlast the country where it once flourished.
@Zephyrum at 2:08 am
GMT+3 includes Moscow, Turkey, East Africa, and Eastern European Summer Time!
So where do you live?
…or Madagascar.
On Herman Daly (1938-2022): The Economist for Our Time Is there really such a thing a redistribution? Doesn’t our political economy begin and end with distribution?
” … and lulled ourselves with fanciful stories about democracy.”
I take exception to the active voice here. We ‘were lulled.’ Movies and then TV fed us lovely narratives about stalwart pioneers, building a country from scratch. Feel good war movies and TV documentaries on brave GI’s dying for freedom.
It wasn’t until the advent of the information-rich Internet that I began looking up the real narrative. The last quarter of a century has been a long, slow, depressing time of uncovering what is behind the lovely screen.
I thought this was going to about an invasion of people who like to pretend they are anthropomorphic animals.
Thank you, KLG, for posting this essay. I haven’t looked at Front Porch Republic in some time – used to read it and The American Conservative occasionally, as a dissenting former “progressive,” who joined Ralph Nader’s and Vandana Shiva’s International Forum on Globalization in 1995 precisely because I knew how globalization would harm working class people like me in the US – when all my PMC acquaintances were touting its wonderful benefits.