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.