Trump is not the ‘right card’, in the view of the U.S. power-élites; the Joker should have been pulled from the pack.
As the ousted ‘Emperor’, Biden made his ‘final walk’ from the dias at the UN; he was not the Emperor of yore, brimming with the bravura that the U.S. is back, and ‘I’m running the world’.
For as the Middle East explodes, and the Ukrainian bubble deflates, the White House continues to urge restraint on all parties to dial back the violence. But no one is listening.
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With his era stumbling to an inglorious close, Biden may have loved the idea of pulling the levers of coercive soft-power influence, only subsequently to discover that the wires connecting those levers to the real-world railway ‘points’ were gone. Influence had flown; imperial coercion increasingly was met with disdain. Diplomacy had failed across the board.
So what does today’s surge in turmoil, war in the Middle East, and Ukraine collapsing, signal for the future – as seen from the long arc of history (and following the lead of Mike Vlahos and John Batchelor’s Ancient world analogy)?
A stumbling ‘Emperor’ has been overthrown. There is no real crown prince; only an ‘adopted daughter’. It is deliberate. The Power-oligarchy (the ‘Senate’, if we follow the Ancient analogy), seems indifferent to the lacuna. It is intent to rule, as the Washington Post reports – outing the Oligarchic thinking: rule via a consensus of ‘democracy-supporting’ institutions as a kind of ‘permanent secretariat’ (a notion that has been kicking around since the 2016 election ‘loss’.)
Yet nonetheless, there is an imperial succession issue. Every Empire needs an Emperor, beyond an Aristocracy/Senate, because the factious powerful in society need to have some pillar to which they can resort for settling their internecine feuds.
Every ‘Empire’ needs too, a common substantive culture to make strong decisions of general interest. In the European past there were two: Catholicism and the Enlightenment. They clashed. And both now have been marginalized for the benefit of libertarian arbitrariness, intended to free the individual from all constraints of communal norms.
Post-modern culture makes people “mad because individual freedom no longer accepts objective truth”. The virtual world kills the sense of the real – to replace it with imagined reality. The art of governing becomes that of administering an imposed pretence; one which people can clearly observe about them is not real, yet they are obliged to pretend that ‘narrative’ is the objective real.
This tension leads to existential insecurity and exploding reports of people in poor mental health.
Yet by contrast, in most places, David Brooks writes, “people are formed within morally cohesive communities. They derive a sense of belonging and solidarity from shared moral values. Their lives have meaning and purpose because they see themselves living in a universal moral order with permanent standards of right and wrong, within family structures that have stood the test of time, with shared understandings of, say, male and female”.
Fiona Hill, formerly of a member of the U.S. National Security Council, propounds the counter-view: that since U.S. interests, described mostly as ‘threats’ which are long term, “the structures to address those threats must also be long-term, too”. (She illustrates the point by quoting ‘the long-term threat from Russia’).
Hill is saying ‘the Aristocracy’ will rule long-term, via institutionalised, ‘inter-agency’ world order prescription.
This then, is the Aristocracy’s solution to the Imperial succession lacuna: Leviathan. “Leviathan – whose promise and project is straight forward – cancel all powers except one, which will be universal and absolute”.
The implicit aim is to ‘Trump-proof’ policy prescriptions. This implicit objective however, underlines its flaw. There will be no participation. People will not participate; nor do they feel that they participate – because they don’t. The mood amongst the World Order back-room strategists is that selecting political candidates by voting has become ‘a bug’ and is no longer a feature. Voters do not know, let alone grasp, the import of the deep-seated policy structures on which U.S. hegemony is built. Participation is a glitch.
It is at such a point in history that a ‘Big Man’ often emerges into the arena; one who challenges the emperor. The ‘Big Man’ is perceived to speak for the people, whose participation in political life has been dulled out, and who are angry. The Big Man always tells this betrayal story well.
The ‘Big Man’ is happening today, mainly because the traditional practice of swapping out of one ruling entity (party) for the other, to produce a look-alike (Uniparty) leader, has ruptured. It was engineered as if a card trick, with the spectator (the voter) always ‘happening’ to choose the ‘right card’ – the very card that the magician always intended would be chosen. Magic! And all the cards selected inevitably turn-out to be from the same suite!
This card trick became obvious in recent months. Everyone could see its mechanics.
Trump is not the ‘right card’, in the view of the U.S. power-élites; the Joker should have been pulled from the pack.
What is unusual about today’s emergence of the ‘Big Man’, however, is that unlike in the Classical World, Trump seems to have no aristocracy behind him, following in his train. Will this work? How will it turn out?
In the next months, the Empire faces many crises beyond that of an empire fading and unable to adapt.
Simplicius writes that:
“the latest WaPo piece describes a state of disarray in the West political class when it comes to deciding on a way forward against a clearly defiant and unbending Russia. You see, all the provocations, games, and peace ‘tricks’ were meant to bow Russia to the West’s leverage, but the Empire is finding that, after decades of dealing with shallow vassals, confronting one of the last remaining truly sovereign nations in the world is a glaringly different thing”.
It is not just Russia. The Pro-Consul of a crumbling imperial far-off territory has come to ‘Rome’ to seek the raising of a new Roman army, and the provision of Roman ‘gold’ to support it. But times are hard across the Empire, and the Pro-Consul likely will fail, as this would constitute his third army, after the others had been destroyed.
The coming implosion will inflict a severe blow to the Empire’s prestige and authority. Its warrior class may turn in anger on the Capitol, vexed by their leaders’ reluctance to clench an iron fist. (This has occurred in earlier times).
Another rebellious imperial Pro-Consul presages a graver and distinct predicament. This Consul wants his own Hebraic hegemony and is unbending and utterly ruthless in its pursuit. The Empire can do nothing, even though it half believes the Consul will bring about his own downfall.
But should this venture fail – as it might – it could wreak havoc into those American deep structures of impune power on which the wider structure has rested all these decades. Should the war fail, the American institutional leadership attached to this particular Consul would forfeit its raison d’être. A whole leadership cadre would be hollowed out – bereft of purpose. The Institutional leadership class as a whole would be weakened.
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What is the way out then, as the homeland slowly implodes? Well, the Washington Post article concludes by advocating a new supra-national global governance Order; likely a Davos- style digital-authoritarian governance designed to preserve a consistent policy and alignment, before the Russo-Chinese-Iranian-BRICS link-up beats them to it.
If the western states do not take the risk of freedom, then they take the risk of the Leviathan. That is possible. Yet, it is a profoundly unstable regime, extremely oligarchic, concentrated, dictatorial, Professor Henri Hude affirms.
The more the post-modern West loses control of the world with its mode of nihilistic reasoning, and the more diverse Asia remains, the less chance of the Leviathan succeeding. “What the Ruling Strata have not understood is that postmodern libertarian deregulation cannot be defined by economics and sex alone”.
“The extraordinary technical power, on which the Leviathan relies is inseparable from economic reality. It is therefore a techno-market reality, a power of technique and money that exercises a form of tyranny. In this context, what is likely to prevent the triumph of the Leviathan is the collapse of technical civilization” – as such that it is.
The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.
