Trumpet of evil

Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House tomorrow is just the most recent event in the ongoing counter-revolution of the world’s most reactionary political forces. All the people he has so far chosen to run his government’s cabinet posts and most important agencies have consistently been the most ultra-conservative choices anyone could possibly have made, without bringing in someone from outside the USA, like Vladimir Putin, or appointing someone like the current grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan to one of those posts.

To start with, DT himself is the worst possible president, at least in the context of having won an election that was supposed to have been focused on ending elitism. A billionaire president who refuses to make his income-tax returns public, or to divest any of his business holdings while in office, is the most likely person in the world to have conflict of interest issues every day of his entire presidency. Particularly when he has also chosen several other billionaires, and Goldman Sachs executives, to many other key posts, not to mention appointing his own son-in-law as senior White House advisor.

By cutting out the “middleman”, i. e. professional politicians, DT will undoubtedly end up running the most elitist government in US history, under the direct control of the most reactionary elements of the American plutocracy, starting with himself. Calvin Coolidge’s definition of American politics, “the business of America is business”, has never been so cruelly obvious. The Donald’s administration will now become the most elitist government in the entire world, with the possible exception of North Korea. Which means that DT has also become the biggest liar in world history, replacing Nazi Germany’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, in that exalted position.

Billionaire Carl Icahn, the “wolf of Wall Street” himself, as DT’s special adviser on regulatory reform, that Icahn spent his whole life denouncing. Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, winner of the Putin medal for supporting Russia, as the secretary of state. Gary Cohn, the current president of Goldman Sachs, as head of the White House National Economic Council. Steven Mnuchin, also from Goldman Sachs, as secretary of the treasury. Billionaire Wilbur Ross, of Rothschild’s, as the commerce secretary. Jay Clayton, a top-notch lawyer specializing in helping big business avoid government regulation, as the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Rick Perry, the ultra-conservative former governor of oil-rich Texas, as the energy secretary. Well-known corporate lawyer and former Reagan administration official, Robert Lighthizer, as US trade representative.

As if those choices were not bad enough, DT has also picked Stephen Brannon of the ultra-right-wing (misogynist, xenophobic, and racist) Breitbart News Network, as his chief political strategist. As well as Andrew Puzder, chief executive of a major restaurant chain, who opposes government intervention into the “labor market”, as labor secretary. And Terry Branstad, an old friend of Xi Jinping, as ambassador to China. Not to mention lawyer David Friedman, known as being an even more right-wing Zionist than Benjamin Netanyahu, as ambassador to Israel. “Mad dog” general James Mattis, as defence secretary. Pro-Russian general Mike Flynn as national security advisor. Betsy DeVos, an extremely well-known promoter of private “charter schools”, as education secretary. Anti-Obamacare activist Tom Price as health secretary. Republican congressman Mike Pompeo, opposed to any congressional surveillance of government spy agencies, as CIA director. Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, who firmly opposes all environmental regulation, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Fundamentalist Alabama senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general of the USA, presumably to help his fellow Christian conservative, vice-president Mike Pence, fight abortion, homosexual marriage and other similar, liberal-Democrat “abominations”.

In other words, in every category, in what was supposed to have been an anti-elitist, swamp-cleaning government, the worst possible person has been chosen for every job. The only theoretically anti-establishment element in this whole stinking mess has been Trump’s own personal campaign to force corporative executives running several of the country’s largest manufacturing industries to bring more factory jobs back to the USA. Rather than helping big business ship them all off to low-wage paradises like China and Mexico instead, the way that all the Republican and Democratic administrations have been doing since Ronald Reagan took power for the first time, 36 years ago.

Unfortunately, the only people who will probably end up benefiting from Trump’s job lobbying are a relatively small number of workers from the labor aristocracy in the USA, those who have always enjoyed higher than average wages than everyone else. Given DT’s generally negative attitude toward labor, as shown above in his choice for labor secretary, raising wages generally for the vast majority of American workers seems entirely out of the question. Enormous new tax cuts being proposed, mostly for rich people once again, will also ensure that no level of US government will have the resources necessary to counter the historically unprecedented trend toward increasingly unequal incomes. In fact, all that DT seems to be trying to do is renew the traditional US alliance between big business and the aristocracy of labor, leaving at least 95% of the US working class in the lurch.

As pointed out earlier, this new administration has become the USA’s main “contribution” to the current authoritarian, neofascist counter-revolution, all over the world. The neoconservative alliance of reactionary movements, not only in the West but everywhere else as well, wants to have nothing at all to do with anything remotely progressive. It is working hard to bring back full-blown misogyny, racism, xenophobia, unabashed environmental degradation, traditional attitudes toward the family and sexual orientation, not to mention social “harmony” based on renewed deference toward one’s rich and powerful “superiors”. All the people belonging to this antediluvian frame of mind think that they are doing “the right thing” by restoring a good, old-fashioned, “Downton Abbey” or “Father knows best” kind of society. But in reality they are doing evil instead, supporting every reactionary tendency that has ever existed.

In North America, parts of Latin America, all of Eastern and Western Europe, the Russian federation, Australasia and Israel, these antediluvian forces think that they are doing good by bringing back white supremacy, based on the wonderful cultural achievements of ancient or modern, Judaeo-Christian civilization. The Trump supporters in the USA, Trump imitators in the Conservative Party of Canada or in Quebec, anti-native, neocolonial sympathizers in Latin America, the anti-EU, “Brexit” people in Great Britain, the ultra-right-wing parties in continental Europe, whether they are in government, as in Russia, Hungary or Poland, or currently in opposition, as in France, Austria or the Netherlands, the ultra-orthodox right-wingers in power in Israel, Trump imitators in Australia and New Zealand, all those radical traditionalists, firmly believe that they have God on their side.

Each one of those movements wants to “make America great again”, or make Britain great again, or make Russia great again, or make Germany great again, or make France great again, or make any of the less powerful Western, or pro-Western countries, at least greater than they have been recently. None of them seem to realize, however, that they cannot hope to accomplish anything of the sort, if they all try to do so simultaneously. Inside this extended spectrum of reactionary and ultra-reactionary political forces, that includes not only Zionists and Christian Zionists, but also notorious antisemites, differences of opinion between competing groups of reactionaries can be very dangerous. They may all end up wiping each other out in the process of trying to impose their own particular versions of counter-revolutionary atavism on everyone else.

But this nefarious spectrum of white-skinned authoritarianism is enormously compounded by the fact that most of the non-Western countries also harbour very similar governments, and movements. As I have pointed out in several other recent blogposts, this kind of moral rearmament movement is just as active in many different Asian countries, like China, Japan and India, all of which also want to make their own nations great again. All of them are also relying on their own religious traditions, such as Confucianism, Shintoism and Hinduism, to recreate some kind of popular moral regeneration, propping up the established Asian elites with the same type of exaggerated, xenophobic rhetoric that was supposed to have been abandoned to the lunatic fringe of society after the Second World War.

The jihadist movement in the Muslim world, Sunni or Shiite, has also stepped into the vacuum left by the Western-organized collapse of all the socialist and nationalist movements in the Muslim-majority countries, trying desperately to revive the imperial Islamic caliphates that managed to dominate vast regions of Africa and Asia many centuries ago. All the other countries and regions in the world dominated by Buddhism, or Sikhism, or whatever other religions, are also actively promoting their own forms of xenophobia. Even indigenous populations scattered all over the globe have also developed their own ultra-reactionary movements, trying to replace foreign, colonial religions with home-grown varieties of totemism and shamanism.

Each one of these revivalist movements has fallen under the overwhelming influence of dualism, or Manichaeism, the extremely simplistic philosophy according to which the entire universe is divided equally into two opposing principles, good and evil. This kind of thinking has been around for centuries, having been part of such ancient religions as Zoroastrianism, originally based in Persia since the ninth century BC, that still survives among today’s Yazidi minority, as well as the second century AD version founded by the prophet Mani in Mesopotamia. Manichaeism itself became a very widespread religion for several centuries after that, eventually dying out in China during the late Middle Ages. Dualism has always had a major influence on Christianity, notably in Western European Catharism and Eastern European Bogomilism, surviving to this day in current forms of Gnosticism, as well as also having a major influence on Islam. Official Christian and Muslim attempts to eradicate dualism completely have always failed miserably.

Nowadays, atavistic movements on every continent are once again moving back to extremely old-fashioned forms of dualism. The past several decades of neoliberal domination of world policy have completely eliminated the brief interregnum (1945-1979) of democratic capitalism that once convinced millions of people, at least in the Western world, to believe in political, economic, social and cultural progress for awhile. Unfortunately, democracy and capitalism have never functioned very well together, and were only able to do so for a time under exceptional circumstances. Normally, private ownership of the country’s most important enterprises is a lot like insider trading, because it constitutes an unfair advantage for people not possessing a great deal of capital available for investment. Capitalism is also based on a permanent set of corporate and bureaucratic conspiracies, aimed at keeping commercial secrets away from all possible competitors.

The end of the Cold War (1989-1991) left the world’s most important financial capitalists with no socialist or communist alternatives to their rule, with the result that they promptly set about concentrating most of the world’s wealth into their own enormous personal fortunes, wiping out most working-class or middle-class opposition to their increasingly frantic accumulation of all available capital. The largest private investors, backed up by state-capitalist bureaucrats operating out of ex-communist regimes, military dictatorships and theocracies, then brought almost every government in the world under their heavy-handed control. Thereby preventing most remaining attempts at using any of the world’s wealth to help less wealthy people, such as Obamacare, all of which soon became increasingly difficult to defend against much more powerful political forces.

Unfortunately, in the world’s bell-wether nation-state, the USA, the bitter resentment of many of the formerly middle class people to that massive cash grab has now been channeled into enthusiastic support for an even worse regime. The Trump movement has succeeded in convincing tens of millions of people in the white working class to support a government that will make the past several administrations of that country, since the Second World War, look almost progressive by comparison. Instead of the massive assault on elitism that the “Trumpeters” promised during the election campaign, those white workers will have helped install a much more elitist government than the USA has ever suffered from before.

By convincing millions of middle-class people to denounce all public social welfare programs, no matter how benign, as being “communist” and “anti-American”, the Trump administration has already succeeded, starting on day one of their power trip, in imposing a new form of dualism. As predicted by such authors as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, they have convinced a large portion of the popular masses to call good everything that is really evil, at least for them, and to call evil everything that is really good for American workers as a whole. In the almost total absence of any credible opposition to this brand of dualism everywhere else in the world, the Trump formula also seems to have taken over almost every country on Earth.

The triumph of Trumpism, however, did not begin merely during the most recent US election campaign. For example, people knew, or should have known, that this day was coming, at least as far back as 1999, when Bill Clinton supported the Republican Party’s legislative repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, that used to separate deposit banking from investment banking. A decision that, among many others like it, led directly to the world-wide financial crisis (dubbed “the Great Recession”) of 2008, even though Clinton himself has always denied that fact. The total inability of democratic governments to control finance capital, in any way, shape or form, is the kind of complete repudiation of every possible kind of progress that is now trumpeting evil, not only in the USA but also everywhere else. All the countries in the world are rapidly going over to “the dark side”, maintaining all the while that they are in fact the ones who truly represent “goodness and light”.

Women’s liberation is another major aspect of post-war progress that has also died recently, having been killed off not only by pussy-grabbers like Donald Trump, but also by female haters in other parts of the world, like Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Racial equality has also died, not only in the USA with the repeal of several relevant sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but also with the rise of white supremacy in every other part of the Western world, and similar, racially-motivated atavism in every non-Western country.

Curiously enough, even British and Anglo-Canadian multiculturalism, which was supposed to have down away with racism altogether, ended up reinforcing it instead, by encouraging every “cultural community” to forever maintain each one’s “essential culture”. In this form of dualism, mutual influence between deliberately juxtaposed communities is discouraged, lest any of that cross-cultural contact be misinterpreted as “neocolonial assimilation”. Turning good into evil and evil into good, this kind of phoney inclusiveness is really just another form of apartheid. To make their point even clearer, politically-correct Canadian liberals also firmly oppose any suggestions at replacing the native reserve system with integrated municipalities, while simultaneously denouncing Quebec “separatism” as being divisive. In such ways do dualist movements succeed in turning every proposition into its opposite number.

The same thing, obviously, has also happened to the fight against environmental degradation, energy independence from every other part of the world having replaced climate change as the most reputable goal any people could ever have. Utopian technocrats are proclaiming that material innovations such as electric cars will soon be replacing gasoline engines, anyway, while conveniently “forgetting” that many of the world’s most important electric grids are still dependent on coal, and other fossil fuels, for their very existence. People still demonstrating against climate change are accused of fomenting an elitist international conspiracy against sovereign governments. Which is in reality another interesting example of the “big lie” technique, the neoconservative movement itself having become the world’s most successful conspiracy against the democratic nation-state.

In other words, beginning tomorrow the Trump presidency has become another very important step toward the world-wide decline and fall of progress, and its replacement by a very probable, long-term, domination of universal regression. Turning this thing around, and putting progressive politics back on the agenda again, will require a truly enormous effort, much bigger than any of the isolated, feeble protests against reaction that have characterized the past several decades of human history.

The truth cannot be told

This blogpost was inspired by the recent story about how a human sexuality teacher in a California community college was forced out of her job, at least temporarily, and went into hiding out of that state, because of the enormous negative reaction to her in-class rant against Donald Trump. Apparently, she said that DT’s election last November was an “act of terrorism”, and that it meant that the USA was “really back to being (in) a civil war”. According to newspaper articles on the subject, many Trump supporters sent her death threats for being “a commie”, and her union president reported that one such supporter claimed that if she wanted communism, she should go to Cuba, and that if she tried to bring communism to “America” (aka the USA), “we’ll put a (expletive) bullet in your face”.

What I found most interesting about that story is that it was reported in the news during the same week that Trump himself confirmed that Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, was his choice for secretary of state. All the electronic and print media, all over the world, then filled up with stories about Tillerson’s very close business ties with Russian oil and gas companies, their common investments in Siberia (Russia) and in Alberta (Canada), and the very prestigious 2013 “Order of Friendship” award bestowed on him by Vladimir Putin. Not to mention the fact that ExxonMobil lost a billion dollars on its Russia investments because of Obama’s economic sanctions imposed on that country after its recent military seizure of the Crimean peninsula, that had been granted by the USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev to the Ukraine back in 1954. All of which came out at the same time as Barack Obama’s renewed warnings about Russian electronic manipulation of the recent election campaign, in favour of Donald Trump. Who also talked a lot during the campaign about how much he liked Vladimir Putin, and how Russia and the USA ought to be cooperating together against their common enemies, rather than fighting with each other, as in Syria.

All those recent events backed up the comments that I made in my previous blogpost about how Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and several dozen other ultra-conservative populists in many other countries, seem to be trying to reimpose an updated version of the fascist axis that made a concerted attempt to take over the world during the Great Depression and the Second World War. In that text, I also referred to the role being played back then by American business tycoons like Texaco chieftain Torkild Rieber, in promoting Italian fascism and German Nazism, both commercially and ideologically. Although today’s neofascist leaders are not yet operating quite as openly as they did eighty years ago, there does seem to be a certain resemblance between Rieber’s role back then and Tillerson’s role nowadays.

To be sure, history never repeats itself, at least not completely, but sometimes it comes a bit too close for comfort. In my previous post, I also made the point about how the business group in the USA that seemed most favourable to DT during the election campaign was the fossil-fuel industry, which was furious at Obama for having imposed environmental controls on that particular industry. Controls that outside the USA look very puny, but that inside the USA seem to have both the petroleum companies and the right-wing populists upset about foreign ecological influence on the Obama administration, and his apparent lack of interest in “making America great again”. Now that energy independence for “America” finally seems realizable in the very near future.

All of this was also coming out at the same time as reports about the recent victory of Syrian shiite dictator Bashar al-Assad against the rebel coalition in Aleppo, described in the media as a bloody massacre. Assad’s forces were, as everyone knows, backed up by the Russian air force, as well as by ground forces from Iran and the Hezbollah militia, based in nearby Lebanon. For its part, the anti-Assad coalition of sunni Muslims in the ongoing civil war include not only US-backed military forces theoretically favouring some kind of “democracy”, but also ultra-reactionary Islamist forces, including the Islamic State movement. Not to mention the often conflicting roles being played by Syrian Kurdish forces (mostly Sunni) and forces backed up the Turkish army (also Sunni). Similar forces also seem to be at work, often with just as devastating results, in many other recently failed states, such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, the South Sudan, the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo, Haiti and so on.

So what does all this appear to indicate for Trump’s upcoming presidency, and for the immediate future of the human race? It looks uncomfortably like a contemporary repetition of Aimé Césaire’s definition of twentieth-century fascism as an extension to the Western world of the same kind of inhumane treatment that had previously been meted out to all the colonial peoples, in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Nowadays, extremely alienated white supremacists in the Western world, which includes North America, Europe, the Russian federation, Israel and Australasia, are on the warpath again. Most of the ordinary people in all those countries, of whatever racial origin, have not benefited in the slightest from the massive increases in wealth accumulation that accompanied economic globalization over the past four decades. 

Unfortunately, it seems that a large and growing proportion of the white people, or at least of those who consider themselves to be white people, in all those increasingly multiracial Western countries, seem to be falling once again for the populist chimera of blaming all their troubles on people considered to be non-white, both those living in the West and those living abroad. Like the “poor white trash” of the antebellum period in the USA, many of the ordinary whites who voted for “Big Daddy” strongmen like Trump and Putin are turning to nativist “solutions”, “preserving their dignity” by considering themselves to be “at least” superior to all the world’s non-white populations. If not to the rich and powerful minorities from their “own race”, who are exploiting their labour so completely, as well as that of a large part of the “non-white” labour in the world.

At the same time, as I also reported in my previous post, dozens of ultra-authoritarian post-colonial governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America, are simultaneously justifying their own similar treatment of their own populations by blaming all their nation’s troubles on the legacy of Western colonialism. Or on the ongoing neocolonialism still being practised not only by the Western powers, but also by the Russian Federation, not to mention all the other emerging, or re-emerging, neocolonial empires. Even such previously left-wing populist governments as the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe and the Maduro regime in Venezuela, are also using similar rhetoric these days. Meanwhile, the most important of those recently reconstituted empires, the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of China, finds itself in the peculiar situation of not only blaming the same white-skinned empires for many of its current problems, but also being blamed by less powerful countries for having copied those same powers, as well as imperial Japan, by setting up its own, very similar, political and economic empire.

In other words, all the ultra-conservative governments and populist movements all over the world are blaming each other for the presumed fact that every country’s, or every religious community’s, current situation constantly appears to be getting worse and worse. Every extreme right-wing, fundamentalist religion or populist ideological tendency in the world has also invented its own version of a mythical empire from the past that can be used as a rallying cry to make that particular country or religion “great again”, by decisively defeating every foreign, impious enemy in its path. At the same time, each currently established government and movement is constantly being pushed further and further to the right by rival movements and potentates claiming that it has not yet gone nearly far enough in its campaign against its own, “particularly disgusting” enemies.

So far as I can tell, whenever large numbers of ordinary people end up supporting the reactionary political views of very rich and very powerful people from their own country or religion, alienation or false consciousness is to blame. This alienation sets in after those target populations have suffered through decades or even centuries of mind-altering propaganda, aka “brainwashing”, designed to deliberately induce cognitive distortions on a massive scale, about their social status. Eventually succumbing to that official propaganda, large percentages of less wealthy and less powerful people, from various under-privileged social classes, end up adopting erroneous conceptions of what their lives are all about.

In a recent work, Canadian author Ronald Wright described what happened to poor people in the USA, for example, with the following quote (apparently often wrongly attributed to John Steinbeck): “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Wright’s idea about poor Americans brainwashed into believing in their nation’s totally unreal dream of rags to riches, certainly seems to apply to most of the slightly over one quarter of the potential US electorate who actually voted for Trump. They do indeed seem significantly more alienated than the somewhat larger group of American citizens who voted for Hillary Clinton, or the even larger group (more than two fifths of the potential electorate), who did not vote at all.

In the USA, the majority of the current population are no longer small farmers, like they used to be during the nineteenth century, nor industrial workers, like they became during the greater part of the twentieth century. With the the rise of neoliberalism, following the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the industrial workers lost their majority position and have now been replaced by service workers. Only extremely dishonest people, professional con men like Donald Trump, can get away with claiming that most of the decisions taken by the business leaders and the leading politicians of the USA (“the business of America is business”), have actually ever been, or ever will be, taken in the best interests of service workers (or their industrial and agricultural predecessors).

As in every other modern “democracy”, the USA has in fact always been run in the best interests of a small minority of the population, those who own and operate the most important businesses in the land, in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy. Individually and collectively, none of the less wealthy and the less powerful citizens, whatever their social class, have ever actually run the country, as one would normally expect if one’s only source of information about the subject was reading a dictionary definition of the word “democracy”. Which makes false consciousness a very important concept indeed for understanding anything important about the real world, i. e., the one in which we are all forced to live, by virtue of having been born on this particular planet.

Ruling extremely large numbers of people against their own best interests means finding some kind of effective “opium of the people” capable of keeping all those people in their place, which has most often been accomplished by using any one of the world’s most reliable myth-making machines, known as religions and/or political ideologies. Belief in a heavenly father-figure such as God, for example, helps pave the way toward getting people to trust strongman dictators, whether or not they are elected to power. Belief in a fake democracy, as in modern liberalism, is another tried and true method that has often been used with a great deal of success. So has belief in the restoration, or the “moral rearmament”, of some previously existing empire, such as in the slogan “making America great again” or, alternatively, “restoring the Islamic caliphate”.

Neoliberalism and neofascism are the two most important non-religious ideologies in the world today. Both of them, however, are almost always used in conjunction with some religious concept, as when fundamentalist Christians use the slogan, “God helps those who help themselves”, in order to justify spending most of their time making money rather than praying, or converting all the God-forsaking non-believers to the “one true religion”. All over the world, all currently existing political regimes and systems use such slogans to stay in power, not just the ones pretending to be much more democratic than all the others.

Similar slogans have always been used throughout history to justify the power of every other dominant regime that ever existed. Every now and then, well-known authors like Ronald Wright come up with extremely useful quotes like the one cited above, about the USA’s proletarian millionaires. But even such relatively perspicacious analysts of present reality often also make truly outlandish claims about more ancient civilizations, as in Wright’s 1992 work, Stolen Continents: The New World through Indian Eyes, since 1492. In that book, his completely justified indignation against the way that European empires treated the American “Indians” during the 500-year-long colonial period led him into making extraordinary, and completely unrealistic, claims about how well the native empires (Incas, Aztecs, etc.) were doing before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

In fact, as I discovered over and over again when doing extensive research in preparation for my numerous courses on the history of the “Third World”, none of the pre-Colombian civilizations anywhere in the world were any further advanced, or less advanced, than the European colonizers were from an overall moral standpoint. It is just as important to rid ourselves of “reverse racism” (pro-native prejudices) as it is to rid ourselves of “Western” racism (anti-native prejudices). Unfortunately, no truly universal point of view, based on the genuine absence of privileged treatment toward any exploited sex, class or minority grouping whatsoever, has ever existed in any established government, regime or social-political system known to mankind. Every group of people in power, in whatever part of the world or in whatever period of history, has always been obliged to use some form or another of false consciousness to stay in power. There are no exceptions, and no justified claims for any kind of exceptionalism, American or otherwise.

False consciousness about one religious or political ideology is almost always complicated, as well, by the fact that almost everyone, not only from the ranks of the poor and the powerless, but also among many rich and powerful people, suffer from belief in more than one such bogus ideology at the same time. People’s inherent tendency to impose a non-scientific, ideological, origin on practically everything that happens, leads almost all of them to simultaneously adhere to several conflicting “explanations of reality”, without realizing that each one of those false prophecies effectively nullifies the other preferred interpretations of events. Over the past several years, the US Republican Party has become a “classical” example of such a thoroughly confusing amalgam of criss-cross belief systems.

Today’s Republican Party contains what commentators refer to as conflicting “wings” of the same organization. First of all, there is the Christian fundamentalist wing, focusing on social-conservative issues such as abortion, homosexuality and related “abominations”, which often spawns the kind of politicians who state that they are “Christian first”, and something else, such as “American”, second. Then there is the “America First” contingent, who, without openly disavowing Christianity, nevertheless put the emphasis on “making America great again”, notably by repudiating, or rather by saying that they intend to repudiate, all the free-trade agreements entered into by previous governments. Lastly, there is the libertarian wing, theoretically favouring the total elimination of all government “intervention” into anything at all, thereby going even further toward “rule by market forces” than the original laissez-faire tradition (economic liberalism) in US politics. Which began even before Adam Smith himself pointed out, in 1776 (!) how beneficial it would be for the British Empire if ever its American colonies succeeded in becoming an independent state.

The problem, of course, is that there is no way for anyone to succeed in being a good Christian, a good patriot (American or otherwise), and a good libertarian, all at the same time. Each one of these three ideologies is universal in scope, and cannot possibly combine itself with any other ideological pretension without thoroughly repudiating its own internal essence. Christianity, for example, is most emphatically a universal religion, which cannot be fitted into either a small nationalist or a great nationalist (i.e., imperialist) mold, nor into a market-shaped “invisible hand”, without collapsing into total nonsense. God cannot be kind and gentle with only one people, or one sex, or one social class, without ceasing to be God. Look at it whichever way anyone has ever tried to look at it, the job cannot be done without repudiating the Supreme Being forever. Not even if we change his name from “God” to “Allah”, or to “Jahveh”, the original version, each theocratic ideology of abrahamic origin being in total agreement on this point. “I am what I am”, which means not to be shared with any lesser idols.

In the same way, patriotism cannot combine with libertarianism, in any possible way whatsoever, without both of them turning themselves into thoroughly extraterrestrial abominations. “America” (or any other nation) cannot become great again (on the unlikely assumption that it was indeed great at some point in the past), if its imperial designs are thwarted at every turn in the road by the need for its government to kowtow completely to every US-born billionaire’s absolutely un-negotiable desire to make the greatest possible profit imaginable at everyone else’s expense. Running the entire world entirely without any government at all, no “interventions” into anything that might curtail some megalomaniac’s individual desire to be “free” of all bureaucratic restraints, is not only impossible, but also incompatible with any kind of patriotism whatsoever.

Which means that the real question that people should be asking about this particular ideology is, what are any true libertarians doing in the Republican Party in the first place? Why are other libertarians trying to get themselves elected on their own ticket, not only to become part of the US government, but of any other government? By its very essence, libertarianism is totally opposed to the very idea of government, and the pragmatic compromises that any government operating in the real world always entails. Or have we already gone so far down the yellow-brick road, of refusing to make any distinctions at all between real news and fake news, that no logical objections to anyone’s ideal belief systems make any difference any more?

To be sure, the US Republican Party’s internal ideological contradictions are not any more obvious than any of the other internal contradictions also being adopted by any one of the dozens of other weird political amalgams also being practised anywhere else in the world. Such as Vladimir Putin’s unnatural combination of Russian patriotism, Orthodox Christianity and toleration of the economic corruption of certain selected Russian billionaires. Or Xi Jinping’s harmonious, heavenly mandate bringing together Chinese patriotism, Confucian social policy and respect for the individual rights of his own red-diaper billionaires. Or an even more extreme amalgam, uniting a strictly Sunni form of jihadi salafism with enormously generous subsidies from a relatively small number of Muslim billionaires, buying their way into paradise without having to repudiate their own intimate contact with impious usury.

In today’s world, beset by such huge problems as massive environmental degradation, unprecedentedly large divisions between the social classes, dangerously stagnant economic conditions and increasingly threatening cultural conflicts, the last thing that people ought to be doing is falling ever more completely under the control of such unnatural ideological combinations. What the world needs now is intelligent cooperation to help solve all those problems, not even more vigorous competition between rival forces. We need more political, economic, social and cultural democracy, not more kowtowing to billionaire-financed religious movements disguised as multiculturalism. We need toleration of prosperous minorities in every country as well as, rather than in place of, prosperity for majority populations. We need scientific scepticism rather than bought and paid-for “house scientists”. And so on, and so forth. Instead, what we are really getting is every possible combination of deadly obsessions with completely contradictory systems of absolute belief.

People everywhere need to get over the ridiculous idea that “social harmony” between conflicting ideas can be imposed on the world through the kind of pre-packaged amalgams described above. Governments all over the world should no longer be allowed to get away with adopting falsely harmonious ideological structures like the Quebec government’s “Ethics and religious culture” (ERC) program of courses imposed on both primary and secondary students in that province. It should not be possible for politicians to continue getting away with presenting all the world’s religions as being socially and ethically neutral, ignoring the fact that they are instead deliberately discriminatory in every way, particularly on gender issues. It is simply not possible to “pursue the common good”, as the ERC propagandists proclaim, by substituting false harmony for ideological reality.

Unfortunately, instead of doing what they should be doing, that is becoming more and more progressive all the time, almost every political and religious force in the world is doing just the opposite. Instead of going forward, they are all backing up as fast as possible. Which gives the impression that the truth cannot ever be told, because the rich and the powerful still feel that they must deploy every one of those eternally conflicting forms of popular belief in order to rule the rest of us, for at least as long as those internal contradictions do not succeed in blowing up in all of our faces.