It’s done. The Brontosaurs of American politics have picked their poison.
The Republican is a bizarre contradiction, embracing openly much of the party’s long and carefully masked racist, sexist, nativist, anti-scientific, and authoritarian bedrock tenets, along with a potpourri of positions that are anathema to it: a wiseguy rap on Wall Street; a stop order on imperial wars; amicable relations with Russia; rejection of massive secret international trade deals; and ending “defense” of Japan and the backing of NATO.
The Democrat is a monolith of Neoliberal Imperialism, a proud servant of Gangster Capitalism, a furious jingoist exceptionalist, and a supporter of brutal absolutist regimes everywhere.
She is the cynosure and CEO of the financial party elite and the effective enemy and betrayer of the broad and vital interests of a plurality of Democrat and independent voters.
Trump will destroy his party as utterly as Lincoln did The Whigs, and for similar reasons: he’s exposed–embodied, really–the untenable falsity of their dynamic. Whatever stumbles bloody from this election calling itself Republican will be an elephant of a different color, missing several limbs.
Cliinton will destroy her party by different means, leading its elite owners in victory or defeat, since in either case she will hack the nomenklatura away from the proletariat.
Her candidacy, with its flagrant and exposed contempt for people and process, the exhumation of the stinking corpse of the DNC and its necrotic fixing, and the fact that the logos of Wall Street are virtually embossed on her forehead, mean that this divorce will be irrevocable.
Talk of how we got here is tiresome and useless. Jefferson warned; FDR admonished; Ike forebode. In a sentence: a system whose sole purpose is to make citizens into ignorant, hoodwinked, terrified “consumers” must fail.
So: political trainwreck with election of one of these monsters and then..? The game doesn’t end. Calamity, as has been observed, is of long life. Crises don’t have clear beginnings or clean ends. With either in office we are in unknown waters where–go all in on this–there will be dragons.
The mind boggles at the notion of Trump creating a legislative program of any kind. One hears loose talk of “fascism” and “dictator” but it’s brainless; dictatorships take effective organization and reliable force. He has neither.
What he does have is bravado, a rash mouth, and a questionable capacity to do anything but go successfully, serially bankrupt. What comes of this?
The Prez proposes and Congress disposes, or at least it used to. What torrents of public rage and madness might explode under a regime not only hopeless to achieve anything at all, but openly, violently at war with itself?
In such a scenario–domestic chaos–the unthinkable becomes possible: a “Christian” military coup managed by the worst of the Rightist financial elite.
America is already owned by the War Machine. What is to prevent it from simply asserting its ownership openly with its hired mercenary army, given social chaos?
It has what Trump doesn’t have: organization and force, and breakdown of law and order has always been the mother of juntas. You will say it can’t happen here, but you can’t prove a negative. Sure, it can.
And in case of Hillary? Again, a totally hostile and factionally hysterical Congress, high-centered and gridlocked as to achievement of any kind.
And in this toxic stasis, a leader who will harness the fury and rage of the people to the greed of Predatory Capitalism and the War Machine via the one matter of policy on which the parties are in fraternal agreement: wars.
The end of relentless American provocation of real powers–Russia and China–as Putin and Xi have made eminently clear, will not be capitulation.
It will be retaliation, possibly pre-emptive, and with titanic violence. Such an outcome is conceivable in a jingo, propagandized nation, vexed to nightmare, led by a bedeviled exceptionalist with ego-blinded judgment.
These scenarios are speculation, but not fantastic. Life is what happens while you’re making other plans. Could there be good, wise, productive outcomes from this debacle? Is it in the realm of the possible? Perhaps…but don’t look for it.
Kafka said it long ago: there is infinite hope, but not for us.
By Paul Edwards