The Liberal Warfare State
By Don Thompson
George
W. Bush’s re-election has forced many on the left-leaning side of the
fence to ponder seriously about what another 4 years of George Bush will
do to the U.S.
and the world. It seems to me the
most troubling issue surrounding Mr. Bush’s re-election is the vast lack
of awareness among voters as to what’s really at stake. The Republicans
have become masters at finding the carrot/wedge issue (for this campaign
that was Gay marriage) that gets socially conservative voters to the
polls, and once the candidate is in power it’s a typical bait and switch:
the right wing tackles its real objectives, such as dismantling
Roosevelt’s New Deal.
In many ways the conservative movement of recent history is a counterpoint
to Roosevelt, with Reagan being the
anti-Roosevelt, if you will. And if anything, Bush is the anti-Kennedy. I don’t need to draw too many
parallels between Joe Kennedy Senior and Prescott Bush’s tribes to make
the point. On the other hand, Kerry was in a sense the shadow Kennedy,
the echo of Kennedy (with the initials JFK), as was Edwards the echo of
Bobby Kennedy (remember, together they were “John/John”). These signs are not completely
coincidence or trivial:
the national mindset seeks the “brand” of a great leader –
and in a consumer societies brands are what political life is all about.
Kerry was very much the Kennedy brand from Massachusetts, while Bush was
the cowboy brand from Texas.
There
is a cultural dialog between Massachusetts
and Texas,
as each reflects different poles of the American personality – different
brands of political consumerism.
Perhaps more than anything, these poles delineate different stands
on the appropriate use of power.
Does a leader use power within the context of a global community,
or is it the sovereign right of the Imperial Nation State to wield
whatever influence necessary to keep the peace, promote prosperity, and
protect its interests? This debate
runs deep into the psyche of the nation: or at least the Republicans
would like us to think so, and not ponder too much about what their
neo-con intellectuals are really up to.
When John Kennedy made his well-known speech at the American
University, saying he sought no “Pax Americana”
he was trying to nullify or at least counter-balance the Imperial
tendencies of the conservative pole of the ruling elite – and some said
he was even murdered (in Texas) for taking that stand. But soon enough
that speech was forgotten, and Lyndon Johnson (a Texan) has us deep into
Vietnam, establishing our peculiar kind of democratic morality, even if
that country didn’t necessarily want it. The Vietnamese believed then, as
the many Iraqis do now (particularly Sunnis), that the American brand of
democracy (force fed at gunpoint), is a ruse and a sham, and that the
real reasons for these American “adventures” are economic and to expand
the U.S.
sphere of influence. But after Johnson the Democrats turned face, became
“weak” and embraced the left. So the Imperial Elite had to turn to the
Republicans for all of its answers. The apex of this movement can be
found in the neo-conservative tracts of The Project for the New American
Century and other think tanks formed during the 1990’s while Clinton was still
in office.
Fundamentally, the neo-con
Republicans, for all of their talk of family values, are the party of
Social Darwinism and survival of the fittest – and that translates into
the need to show force and not yield overwhelming military might.
From
this view, struggle is the birthright of nations and men, and without it
societies will atrophy and die. On the other side are the utopians, who
actually believe there may be some final, stable societal model that more
or less answers the question once and for all “what is good government” –
that humanity can finally come to some kind of peaceful coexistence and
overcome its desire to kill one another. Europe has in some ways become
this model, although the EU is quickly devolving many aspects of the
social democratic utopia that found its expression in the liberal welfare
states of the U.K. and
continental Europe. Its counterpoint, a
work in progress that we see today in the U.S., is the liberal
“warfare” state. Let me explain.
40
or so years ago, the conservatives in the U.S. (whether Democrat or
Republican), seeing the anti-war movement, civil-rights movement, women’s
and environmental movements stripping them of their relevancy, felt
cornered by a conspiracy. For many on the right, this was captured neatly
in a fascinating little book called None Dare Call It Conspiracy. At the center of this conspiracy theory
was the fear of One World Government under the United Nations, originally
dreamt up as the League of Nations by a
ranting humanist and academic named Woodrow Wilson. To answer this
conspiracy, conservatives came up with their own counter-conspiracy,
replete with its own think tanks, media and other institutions necessary
to counter the onslaught of the leftist utopians who
had the ear of The New York Times, American Civil Liberties Union,
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and so on. All of these
organizations were (according to the conspiracy) in lockstep with
European Bankers and the U.N., and leading us toward institutionalized
international cooperation, an end to wars, promoting “sustainable”
development – in short, all kinds of nasty stuff that conservatives think
can lead people to a weak-kneed dependency on governments and an ever
more hedonistic emphasis on individual liberties.
This
counter-conspiracy has at its heart the desire for a revitalized
Judeo-Christian, Anglo-Saxon empire centering on the U.S. and Britain
(notably, along with Australia,
countries that made up the Iraqi “coalition”). The agenda, laid out quite
explicitly in neo-con tracts such as Niall Ferguson’s Colossus: The
Price of America’s Empire–and critiqued extensively by people such as
author Gore Vidal and Lewis Lapham of Harper’s—is
to gut the liberal welfare state, entrench the U.S. in perpetual war, and
to squeeze the middle class so that the only option for young men and
women in some parts of the country is to join the military where
disenfranchised Blacks and Hispanics become war fodder – “the new Celts”
(as in Roman times) for the American Imperial Force (no, I didn’t make
this up!). The name of the game is keeping sufficient fear in the
populace, and through constant fear and perpetual war they – the neo-cons
– can maintain power and hide their dirty little secret, the 800-pound
gorilla in the room: that the white Anglo-Saxon race is in decline, it is
not reproducing as it once was, and is in fact in serious retreat.
Ask
any good demographer of the political landscape, and they will all tell
you that the current changes in population by race and urban lifestyle
will tend to favor the Democrats and socially progressive policies. This fact is multiplied many times when
looking from a global perspective. While the current commentators on CNN
and Fox may tell you about a “mandate” for the political conservatives, quite
the opposite is true. Lacking a mandate, conservatives must turn to fear
as a mechanism of maintaining control. Lacking good ideas and/or the
conscience of the nation or the lessons of history, the neo-cons must
manipulate, gerrymander and con (no pun intended) their way into power.
My greatest fear is that this has all led to a level of corruption we
can’t even ponder, even if we continue our internal myths to the
contrary, forever believing we are “the world’s greatest democracy.”
Ironically, the world’s
greatest democracy may not be the U.S.,
but the Ukraine,
whose population seems to care enough about voter fraud to do something
about it on the streets.
You
may ask yourself, why would they (the neo-cons) want to do such things?
Why would they want such a global scenario when it obviously can harm so
many people? The core reason may
lie at the center of the human question: do we function predominately on
the basis of hatred and fear, or do we evolve to function primarily on
the basis of compassion? The natural evolution of mankind, if such an
evolution exists, must logically be toward tolerance, increased
democracy, and compassionate social policies that assure stability and
the common good. Eventually, this
democracy should extend into the corporate boardroom. But this evolution
is quite obviously a threat to our current economic masters and their
consumer economies that rely so much on fear and desire as the leitmotif of
their existence, economies that promote a methodically engineered mental
space that keeps people ignorant of their slavery to the elites as if
offers fake “freedoms” (freedom of choice between goods and services
instead of freedom of mind). The neo-cons promote the welfare of the
oligarchs and elites, believe in an almost Mafia-like adherence to family
as the core organizing principle for peoples, and tend to favor a
resurgence of small, entrenched, aristocratic-like pools of wealth and
influence (hence the need to kill the Estate Tax). Why? Because they
believe in these pools of influence and believe that they create a world
more favorable to their interests. Theirs is an “us” vs. “them”
mentality. And make no mistake about it – we are the “them.” These trends
are already well in place in this country today and have been for
decades. The disparity in wealth in this country has become almost
laughable. There are maybe a few hundred “influentials”
who wield a majority of the world’s economic decision making power – it’s
no wonder so many people today are taking anti-depressants. Isn’t it
interesting how in both the conspiracy theories of the left and right,
the rich always seem to come out on top?
The
end game of the Liberal Warfare State is the support of liberal free
market policies (thus the “Liberal” part); the creation of economic
spheres where labor is cheap, pliant and hopefully under a dictatorship
(China); a continual low level war against terror; keeping the lowest level of the labor
pool in this country in check and militarized (can you say video games?);
an ever more “Romanized” and violent entertainment geared toward keeping
the masses in an ignorant and cynical place; manipulating elections
through a variety of techniques (some fraudulent); virtual control of the
corporate news media (all owned by the “influentials”);
enhancing the power of the police state; keeping society divided by
values-based “wedge” issues; and allowing the Internet as a method for
the disenfranchised intellectual to vent his or her spleen (I guess I’m
one of those intellectuals). In
the mean time, global trade agreements create a meta-state of corporate
power where the influentials reside and run the
show. If anyone will recognize this New World Order of the Liberal Warfare State,
it is George Orwell. Or better, the CIA in Latin
America in the 1980’s (the “Petri dish” for a lot of this
stuff). And guess who’s going to be the new Intelligence Czar – a product
of that 1980’s CIA “Iran-Contra” Central America: John Negroponte (the
former Ambassador to Honduras,
1981-85).
The only threat to
the Liberal
Warfare State
is popular awareness of its existence and a desire to reveal it and end
it among an aware population that rallies to the cause. Aware and engaged
people have always been, and will continue to be, the only enemy of the
entrenched status quo. So in this sense the new U.S. that
landed on our doorstep on September 11, 2001 is a new opportunity to
continually unite progressives. If that happens, Mr. Bush and all of his
colleagues, and their dreams of Imperial Glory, will not last that long,
and we can get on with the business of human evolution. If not, we may
well be in for a long, dark ride.
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