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2018-09-25 -Land of the Free
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Trump's America: Establishment under siege
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[Asia Times] The funeral service for the late senator John McCain, which was held at Washington’s National Cathedral on September 1, was notable not so much because of the 2,500 mourners in attendance but because of the conspicuous absence of US President Donald Trump.
The mourners paying their respects to the veteran conservative politician, who died on August 25 aged 81, included former US presidents Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama, as well as Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, comedian Jay Leno, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and former vice-presidents Dick Cheney and Al Gore. While the latter two were possibly as far apart politically as can be and ultimately represented the opposite bookends of the American political arena, they were still part of a political continuum that included the whole spectrum of the American power Establishment.
That Trump was absent from this assembly was not a passing trivial occurrence. Those that had assembled to pay their last respects to one of their own was the American political Establishment. Trump’s absence was simply a brazen reminder that he was not one of them.
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What stands for the Establishment in the United States is an extemporaneous conglomerate comprising the two main political parties, Congress, all branches of government, the intelligence agencies, the military, the foundations, think tanks and NGOs that have gelled together into an amorphous overreaching mass. Within the ecosystem, there are no fundamental ideological divides, only policy fluctuations, which are kept to a minimum by an overreaching system geared to maintain stability. Ultimately, the system operates as one under the leveling effect of its own gravity. Within this overall setting administrations come and go but their thrust remains basically constant.
Granted, when one administration replaces another there are major personnel shifts among the mid and upper reaches of the bureaucracy, with the outgoing human resources generally finding refuge either in the private sector or, more commonly, in academia, the foundations or the NGOs. There they will sit out their exile from power until the next change in administration upon which they can resume their careers in government. Over time the two groups, which generally come from the same universities, intermingle in a web of pervasive personal contacts.
The end result is that in terms of substance, there is little to distinguish George W Bush’s foray into Iraq from Obama’s proxy foray against Syria; both are based on the assumption that the United States is the dominant world power and has a God-given right to intervene in the affairs of other nations. And the nation that gave the world the Monroe Doctrine goes into spasms of righteous indignation when a resurgent Russia endeavors to reaffirm its security interest in its geographical sphere of influence. Likewise, after having systematically intervened in other nations’ electoral processes throughout the world, the fact that Russia has allegedly done likewise to the United States is perceived as the pinnacle of unacceptability.
The cement that binds together this multifaceted enterprise is essentially metaphysical and results from a Manichean vision of the world that it perceives as a struggle between absolute good and total evil. Bending this vision to suit America’s political interests is only an occasional subterfuge that makes policy an exercise in religious fervor that demands that all allies and proxies be sugarcoated with the attribute of free and hence of “good,” while all enemies are by definition the incarnation of “evil.”
Within this context, the immense reservoir of knowledge that the establishment has access to is rarely put to full use because it rarely conforms to a world vision based on moral absolutes and on an imagined struggle between absolute good and absolute evil. Thus the establishment could, for decades preceded on the assumption that Taiwan rather than Beijing represented China or that the Vietnam War was a winning proposition.
The problem is, if anything, compounded by naivety. The Establishment is basically insensitive to plots, manipulations and the labyrinths of hidden motives and concealed agendas that dot the international scene and proved easy to manipulate by the likes of Chiang Kai-shek, Nguyen Van-Thieu, not to say Hamid Karzai.
What gives the Establishment a degree of power unrivaled throughout the world is its resources. The tax base on which it rests, namely the private sector, is so wide and deep that, combined with an astute management of the national budget deficit, it provides the Establishment with resources which permit it to embark with little fear of consequences in ventures which bear no relation to cost-effectiveness. From the Vietnam War to the invasion of Iraq to the continued US presence in Afghanistan, cost has never been a major consideration of the Establishment.
But a massive and secure financial base is not enough to anchor the overall authority of the Establishment in the society over which it holds sway. In order to ensure its comprehensive reach, it needs one more component – legitimacy. A system of government is legitimate as long as those it rules feel that it is. Be it the “mandate of heaven” in ancient China, “divine right” in western monarchies or the “will of the people” as expressed by a constitutional document, legitimacy is essentially derived from the acquiescence or the respect that those who are ruled hold towards those who rule them. The recognized assumption is that a government is “legitimate” when it represents the will of the majority and that this will has freely expressed itself through elections.
Conversely, elections do not always reflect the will of the people but the fact that they don’t does not necessarily disqualify a government from being “legitimate.”
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Posted by 3dc 2018-09-25 00:00||
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Posted by Bright Pebbles 2018-09-25 03:42||
2018-09-25 03:42||
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Posted by Abu Uluque 2018-09-25 11:49||
2018-09-25 11:49||
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