A "World on Fire," Part II.

From U.S. Domestic Politics, To Ukraine and the Middle East, We're in an "Age of Fracture," with Democracy on the Defensive & Dictators in the Making.

Introduction:

This posting has been under “composition” for some time, Part I being the post of October 15, 2023, entitled “U.S. puts Ukraine $$ ‘at the end of the rope’ where it will hang along with hopes for peace in the Middle East.” The subtitle was: “Unconditional support for Israel vs carefully paced and parceled aid for Ukraine with major restrictions....and now the end in sight.”

I’ve been juggling the four main topics of what I wanted to cover since then, and thought it best, in describing our “World on Fire,” to start with the domestic politics of the U.S. and the remarkable language former President Trump introduced in his speeches in the fall. Language which confirms what I have thought since he emerged in 2015 as a serious candidate: that we were headed towards an authoritarian government, if not an American version of Fascism. And where I thought Congress was headed, earlier, during the rising Republican Right’s strangulation of the presidency of Barack Obama, with the private declaration by the RR’s leadership that none of the President’s legisation would get any Republican support. I felt then, in 2013-2014, that this was the road to another American Civil War, the exact form unknown. Thus I kept my historical analogies open to both the American 1850’s, and the experience of Weimar Germany, 1919-1933, both eras having witnessed the inability of national legislatures to deal with major legislation, much less profound societal problems - racial, cultural, economic.

The “Unite the Right Rally” held in Charlottesville, VA in August of 2017 was confirmation of themes from each downwardly spiralling era I highlighted, as you can see from the Wikipedia write up of that Rally, in detail, with flags, slogans and symbols from each period, the spark for the event coming from the national disputes over Confederate monuments. And add in a dose of Anti-Semitism to flavor the awful stew. If it was possible to draw any reassurance from this event, it was that several hundred marchers in the unauthorized torch light parade of August 11th, chanting “we will not be replaced” and “Blood and Soil,” wore white shirts and khaki pants, as if they were dressed for a casual Friday at their corporate employers, not looking to beat up the “leftist vermin” that the SA stormtroopers were out to get in the Weimar Streets in the 1920’s - and that Herr Trump explicitly borrowed from in his portentous Veterans Day speech on November 12 in New Hampshire. I suppose an optimist could say - “see, dress shirts and preppy pants” - nothing to worry about here. To which I would reply, reading the “dress code” a bit differently, that white race domination flavored with pro-business pants is the contempory American version of Philip Roth’s warning in “The Plot Against America,” (2004) that it could happen here - but it wouldn’t culturally look exactly the same as the dress code in Weimar’s streets in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Please visit the brief review of this Roth novel from the March 16, 2016 online edition of Tikkun magazine, before Trump won election. Roth's Warning

And so in the wake of Charlottesville I wrote my British editors (at the World Economics Association, the WEA) proclaiming that the torchlight march was the confirmation of my two strands of perhaps now reinforcing, not competing, historical analogies. Perhaps the deepest explanation for the rise of Fascism between the wars was the pioneering work of Karl Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation” (1944 ). “Classical” Fascism was a movement built out of intense national grievances and from a world capitalism which itself built an earlier era of globalization, from at least 1815 until 1914, and was an era of hubris and over-reach, of the commodification of land, labor and capital, and threatening for the first time to destroy the Nature from which man had arisen.

Earlier, in the U.S., the fears of the leaders of the American South in the last years of the 1850’s, which led them out of the Union after the election of Lincoln in 1860 were based on two competing versions of capitalism, one built on slavery, the other on, relatively speaking, free labor (and the small businesses and mobility that made the term have more truth than the “free labor contracts” immigrants faced in the last decades of the 19th century, the later years of the Gilded Age.) Those fears, so well summarized in the work of the great American Civil War era historian James M. McPherson (“The Battle Cry of Freedom,” 1988) reminded late 20th Century Americans that the great military victory of the North was bittersweet, as the Epilogue hinted at with his title- “To the Shoals of Victory.” And what he quoted from Southern apologists about their fears of the domination of the North and the insurgent Republican Party carries us ideologically over to the rise of the extreme Republican Right, from the Cow Palace, San Francisco nomination acceptance speech of Barry Goldwater in 1964, to its “rocket booster” phase triggered by President Obama’s election and on to the now openly proclaimed Fascist running for a second term:

“The accession to power of the Republican Party, with its ideology of competitive, egalitarian, free-labor capitalism, was a signal to the South that the northern majority had turned irrevocably toward this frightening, revolutionary future. Indeed, the Black Republican party appeared to the eyes of many southerners as ‘essentially a revolutionary party’ composed of ‘a motley throng of Sans culottes…Infidels and freelovers, interspersed by Bloomer women, fugitive slaves, and amalgamationists.’ Therefore secession was a pre-emptive counterrevolution to prevent the Black Republican revolution from engulfing the South.”

And the title of McPherson’s Epilogue anticipated the work of an emerging, major contemporary American historian, Heather Cox Richardson, with her 2020 book “How the South Won the Civil War.” In that work, the Reconstruction South and the new American West evolve a white male oligarchy - anti-black, anti-Indian, anti-Chinese, anti-labor, and anti-egalitarian economically, barely tempered by the availability of low cost federal lands and the need for cheap labor.

Of course, we have to flip roles here over the changes in the Republican party between 1860 and the emergence of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and now Herr Trump. But as the fears of the “Gone with the Wind” culture declare in McPherson’s closing, there had emerged a whole world view around the defense of slavery, and it emerged largely intact, without the cursed instituion itself, in the Reconstruction Era, and took new, subtler forms in the backlash to the Civil Rights movement, the cultural mores of the 1960’s and then the gender roles and abortion battles of the “Culture Wars” in later decades. It was pretty easy for me, at least, to hear echoes of Nixon and the early Republican Right’s attack on the 1960’s “sex, drugs and rock’n roll” culture in that list of Ante-Bellum Southern planter’s “spectres” under Lincoln’s Black Republicans. Today the party is still white, very nationalistic and anti-globalist in economics, hates all the associations around the word “cosmopolitan” (especially throw in Ivy League colleges, of course) and racially focused on opposing “wokeness,” “Black Lives Matter,” and the waves of immigrant brown people from the many failed states to our South. I’ll add in some other features and clarifications as I discuss Trump’s emergence as an open dicator with Fascist potential.

From the Times of Israel, October 12 showing the aftermath from Oct. 7th in a child’s room

The choice for topic two in this essay was not difficult, the horrific events of October 7th unleashed in a planned pogrom by the Islamic rulers of Gaza - Hamas - having taken over the news almost entirely since then, pushing the fate of Ukraine, and further aid for it into the ideological maelstroms of the Republican ultras in the House. And a subtheme here is their continued skillful outmaneuvering of the Democratic leadership to block aid for Ukraine by linking it to unqualified aid for Israel - both causes hinging on controlling the Southern border, with the Biden White House hinting at compromises to get the foreign aid that are already worrying the Hispanic Caucus.

Immigration is an issue where even good Centrist Globalist Farheed Zakaria did a major piece on his Sunday CNN show in November criticizing the Democratic Party’s failure to come up with a tough, comprehensive program. Of course, had the Dems conceeded a Wall of some greater extent, there is no guarantee that the Republican Right would not pull an Obama era “never” if the Dems insisted on their enhanced work and certification program for citizenship for many of the millions of immigrants here now illegaly (estimates of up to 13 million). But we’re hearing less and less about those policy proposals. And of course, any fair “due process” procedure to sort out who stays and who goes runs into one of the great ideological divides between the left and right today: federal resources and taxes, the budget deficit - in other words, the role of the federal govenment, debt and deficits. And also missing from the debate is where American businesses stand on the gaps between the two parties. Are citizens to believe that meat processors, farmers and the vast service sector of hotels, restaurants, fast food chains and other labor dependent industries like the franchises of Serve-Pro - have no skin in the immigration debate game? The reporting on this angle is missing in action.

A Palestinian man carries a child casualty following Israeli Strikes on housing in Rafah in Southern Gaza, October 17th. Reuters (Ibrahem Abu Mustafa)

Because so many aspects of the Israeli-Hamas-Middle East conflict are frought, to put it mildly, I’ll save my analysis and comparisons for the full essay which will follow later this month. As readers surely know, the conflict - and taking sides between Palestinians and Israel has descended in all its full fury on domestic politics in the US: in the streets, on campuses and inside the Democratic Party. Ivy college presidents are under attack by wealthy donors for not clamping down on pro-Palestinian voices, some of which do call for pushing Israel off the map. For purposes of this Introduction, let me state that I have sent many letters to Senate Foreign Policy Chairman Ben Cardin, one of my Senators, and to Rep. Jamie Raskin, both of whom are Jewish and influential, to share my views, which are secular and left, internationalist but selective as to the how’s and why’s of the U.S.’s many forms of intervention. My comments leaned strongly to the view that Israel’s reaction to October 7th is going to hurt that nation over the longer term, is doing so now in the court of world opinion, and the US, by being so one-sided, is also hurting its own long term standing which in the Middle East still rests upon the chances and support for a two-state solution. (Which in the short and probably medium run are next to nil…) US conditions for its aid to Ukraine on the amount, type and use of weapons, and where they can be deployed, stand in stark contrast to Biden’s inability to set conditions for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s conduct of the war, despite all the verbal slaps on the wrist, which have been ignored. As I finish up this Introduction, the casualities in Gaza now are between 18,000-20,000 dead and 50,000 injured. Only 4 of Gaza’s original 24 hospitals are functioning, barely, with inadequate facilities and basic supplies. The intensity of the bombardments, the greatest since the US bombing of North Vietnam, the shameful lack of shelter, medical supplies, electricity, heat and clean water - and the lack of any safe place to flee, have turned much of the world against their initial sympathy for Israel.

Third, on the War in - or better - upon Ukraine by Russia, it is clear a substantial portion of the Republican leadership in the House, the key leaders, do not want any further US funding to save the “stalemate,” much less to push Putin and Russia back to the 1991 borders. But it would seem that the Biden administration, echoing Israel’s troubles with Hamas and Gaza, has no clear political strategy - caused by its undefined end goal - and hence we have a military stalemate. It was allowed to unfold as I have steadfastly maintained, by the fears of Putin in U.S. leaders’ minds, fears of his nuclear brandishings, fears of escalation which might lead to our and NATO’s boots on the ground and wings in the air, and fears perhaps of a Russian state collapse if Ukraine wins back those 1991 borders.

And the final note, not in order of planetary significance, but in the “pecking order” of what’s on the major powers’ front policy burners, is the continuing heating of the planet, the rise in the frequency and cost of major climate induced disasters which NOAA in the U.S. has documented, and the refusal of the American business (and world business) “camps” to unite in a program to leave the vast majority of remaining fossil fuels in the ground. The majority of the business leadership is backing away from the scope and costs of the task staring them in the face: it requires the transformation of all the complex processes of modern extraction, processing, production and transportatio and distribution that mark modern capitalism. And thus leaving the tough calls to professional politicians who are still so dependent on the money and power which the private sector still wields. Indeed, wields that power with ever greater authority since the Thatcher-Reagan movement to the Right at the close of the 1970’s and 1980’s. And that movement of conservatism in economics and the role of the state has stripped out the most necessary tool to guide the hoped for transition: democratic planning, nowhere more in evidence than the failure to think through, much less plan for the modernization and expansion of the American electric grid to accomdate the regionalism of alternative energy (the fact that the sites of generation are at a large distance from the largest energy markets) the hoped for rise of electric cars, and the system’s vulnerability to the damage from storms that cannot be reversed in the short and perhaps even medium term.

The temporary business unity of the late 1970’s for lower taxes, less regulation, global trade, free movement of capital but not people, and the rebuff of the union-left in Great Britain, here, and almost everywhere labor parties once flourished, has not been duplicated in any public spirited, good- for-the-planet, necessary-for-our-survival type program of solidarity, there being no unifying ideology for business besides short term profit, market positions. There are simply no “countervailing powers” to match the business ascendancy of the Neoliberal Era, neither strong consumer organizations, strong labor unions, or international trading and financial enforcement mechanisms after the collapse of the Bretton Woods arrangements in the 1970’s - which Nixon unilaterally initiated, one of the most undemocratic and arbitrary uses of power in American history - in August of 1971.

This economic evolution - or is it devolution? - has supplied the deep background turbulence that has led to the rise of the populist right, pushing aside the left populism of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn with the help of the political center.

The British philosopher John Gray, an early critic of Globalization with his book “False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism” (1998) has now focused on the “bankruptcy” of liberalism itself, looking at the wreckage in Britain after Brexit and the Liz Truss government collapsed, and has said that Liberalism is politically and morally without a vision. (And Gray’s use of the term liberal here includes the later stages of Thatcher conservatism, which he abandoned, an attempted revival of the old classical economic “liberalism” which presided over industrialization’s baptism in the late 18 and early 19th century.) It’s most glaring failure was to miss the level of pain caused by globalization to substantial portions of the middle and working classes, which the populist Right, Trump in the US, has exploited.

This political and philosophical emptiness has supplied the circumstances which two very different economic historian/professional economist used to conclude their long, recently published works, both of which I have referenced over the past two years: Jonathan Levy’s “Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States,” (2021), and J. Bradford DeLong’s “Slouching Towards Utopia,” (2022).

Levy’s work is divided into four “Books,” the last of which, covering the 1980’s up to the Great Recession of 2008-2009, is entitled “The Age of Chaos, 1980…”

DeLong’s closing paragraphs are less dramatic, but also hint at the historical failures and troubles to come:

“Perhaps the bright future that many of us had envisioned during the Clinton administration…was always an illusion…Or perhaps the opportunity could have been grasped, had chance and contingency turned out otherwise. Perhaps if in 2008 the United State had elected an FDR, he (or she) could have worked a miracle - as the original FDR had unexpectedly done in 1933 and after. Perhaps even in 2016 the dry bones of the long twentieth century’s pattern of rapid productivity growth, governments that could manage the creative-destruction transformations that such growth brought to the world, and American exceptionalism could have been made to live again.

But it turned out that post-2010 America would instead elect Donald Trump, and Western Europe would do little better, ending possibilities of revitalization.

A new story, which needs a new grand narrative that we do not yet know, has begun.

Editor’s closing note:

As to the Clinton “illusion,” we now have a long, scholarly work from the left, by Nelson Lichtenstein and the late Judith Stein, “A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism,” which appeared in 2023. It’s well worth a citizen’s time to help sort out, for Democrats, and the nation perhaps, “what went wrong” between 1992 and 2000. And in that vein, I still pay tribute to Daniel T. Rodger’s “Age of Fracture,” the Bancroft Prize winner in history in 2012, the year after publication. I read it first in 2018, and cited its pessimistic drift when I wrote up a long essay on the Green New Deal and the difficulties of left reforms inside the Democratic Party, my parting gift to the 2019 “Democracy Summer” class that Rep. Jamie Raskin invited me to address that August in Silver Spring, MD. I opened my talk with a brief foray into the meaning of the series “Game of Thrones” and asked what the gifted and energetic young Democratic foot soldiers made out of it. Not quite what author and reviewer of the series Fintan O’Toole made out of it in the Irish Times on March 30 of 2019 in his “Game of Thrones: An Epic for our Times”:

“Why does this terrible vision appeal to us? For all its elements of fantasy and wonder, it is, as John Lanchester has put it, “not a world any sane person would want to live in”. There are, of course, many insane people who would love to live in it. At the most basic level, Game of Thrones is a far-right fantasia. Its apparent worldview is the one that is taken for granted in far-right thinking: that there is no such thing as society, only a crudely Darwinian struggle for existence and dominance in which one must kill or be killed, enslave or be enslaved. The vision would not be out of place in Mein Kampf and it informs (if that is not too flattering a word) the rantings of every white nationalist psychopath.”

PS Given the length of this Introduction, now over 3,000 words, I’ll send the “main body,” on Trump and then Gaza-Hamas-Netenyahu-Middle East separately, and then the concluding parts on the war on Ukraine and the state of the climate after that.