Dodging Bullets.

Fight! Fight! Fight! Had the assassin’s bullet found its mark and killed Donald Trump, America’s descent into widespread and murderous violence – possibly spiralling-down into civil war – would have been immediate and quite possibly irreparable. The American Republic, upon whose survival liberty and democracy continue to depend, is certainly not out of danger, not yet. But, in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, 13 July 2024, the USA also dodged a bullet.

HE’S UNSTOPPABLE NOW. The photographic images transmitted across the planet mere minutes after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, USA, are already icons. The former President, blood on his face, raises his clenched fist above his head in a gesture of fierce defiance, as the stars-and-stripes billows theatrically behind him. Together, these elements constitute a tableau that leaves absolutely no room for doubt. Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States.

In a nation that still believes in a God that blesses America, the message taken from this deadly incident is easily intuited. Had the path of the assassin’s bullet deviated by even an inch, the Republican candidate’s head would have exploded, live, on national television. Instead, the bullet nicked his ear. Another rally-goer was not so fortunate, fatally struck by the shooter who had so very nearly killed the former President, and who, just seconds later, was shot to death by Secret Service snipers. Half of America will now be firmly convinced that the Almighty’s plans for Donald J. Trump are beyond the power of mere mortals to alter.

In the hours and days following the attempted assassination, the merest of these mortals will be the incumbent President of the United States, Joe Biden. Impressively fired-up before a hugely responsive rally of Democratic supporters in Detroit, Michigan, just 24 hours before the shooting, Biden had called Trump a “loser”. But losers do not dodge bullets. Losers do not create instant and iconic campaign posters a minute after being shot. Losers do not have the presence of mind to gesture defiantly to the crowd even as their Secret Service detail is bundling them into an armoured people-carrier. No, Donald Trump may be the person who was fired-at on 13 July 2024, but it was Joe Biden who got fired.

This shocking event has made the Democratic Party’s dilemma even more acute. The contrast between the two candidates, already skewed dangerously in Trump’s favour, is now untenable. Biden looks old. He has the tentative shuffle of the frail elderly. Deprived of his teleprompter, the look of incipient panic in his eyes is painful to observe. Overwhelmingly, politically engaged “progressive” Americans have come to the same conclusion: “We love you, Joe, but it’s time to go.” Now, they have no choice.

In the years following the American Civil War, the triumphant Republican Party won election after election by waving “the bloody flag” that flew over that unparallelled American tragedy. Over the next four months, the Republicans have only to re-play “the bloody footage” of 13 July.

At the time of writing, the full identity of the shooter and his political affiliations – if any – remain unknown. But, if the profiles of previous presidential assassins are anything to go by, then he is likely to be an embittered individual, in the play of whose life Fate has repeatedly refused to assign him a meaningful role. By killing the President, the assassin seeks to become the hero of a new and deadly drama of his own devising.

Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth, unable to win genuine renown on the battlefield, fighting for his beloved Confederacy, and, perhaps, sensing that the hated leader of the Union had already won admittance to the company of the immortals, sought vengeance, and a darkly kindred immortality, by shooting Lincoln dead with a Derringer in Ford’s theatre.

Lee Harvey Oswald was a left-wing extremist who, like so many American leftists, found his fellow citizens’ indifference to the political causes that moved him so reprehensible that he determined to punish them by taking the life of the young President so much of the nation admired and loved. Marksmanship was one of Oswald’s few personal accomplishments, and unlike Trump’s would-be assassin, he didn’t miss.

There will be many Americans who received the news of Trump’s attempted assassination without surprise. For many years now the polarisation of American society has been growing increasingly perilous. Inevitably, if enough people at the margins of political discourse become convinced that there is nothing to be gained by communicating conventionally with opponents they have come to regard as irredeemably evil, then the prospect of communicating with one’s enemies “by other means” acquires an ever-greater salience.

This is what makes the identity of the sniper seen scrabbling up the roof of the building overlooking Trump’s enclosure at the Butler agricultural showgrounds so potentially explosive. If the man shot dead by Secret Service counter-snipers turns out to be an “Antifa” (anti-fascist) extremist with an online history of violent anti-Trump rhetoric, then the baying of the Right’s attack-dogs will be deafening. Fox News will declare the entire American Left guilty by association.

In response, the Democratic Party will likely tack aggressively to starboard, leaving its “progressive” wing alone and unprotected. One-time darling of the Democratic Socialists of America, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, might find her re-election chances in free-fall. It is unlikely that political aspirants proudly asserting their radical left-wing credentials would continue to attract the same level of enthusiastic journalistic support.

But, if the assassin turns out to be a right-wing extremist, then it’s the conspiracy theorists of the Left who will go hog-wild. (What even the extreme Right would have to gain by eliminating conservative America’s most effective champion since Ronald Reagan is not exactly clear – but then, if extremists acted rationally they wouldn’t be extremists, would they?)

Certainly, it is easy to picture the nuttier sort of leftist arguing that the shooter was a fanatical anti-abortionist who believed that Trump had “gone soft” on the rights of the unborn child. Handed a rifle with defective sights by the conspirators, and told that he would be permitted to flee the scene by “God’s people”, who would then spirit him out of the country, the “patsy” assassin, having missed his target, would instantly be shot to pieces by the Secret Service. The political consequences would be pure gold for these MAGA conspirators. Trump, bloodied but unbowed, would roll on implacably to a landslide victory.

The only aspect of the assassination attempt at Butler, Pennsylvania, that lends even the tiniest skerrick of credibility to this sort of wild speculation is the undeniable fact that somebody, hauling an AR-15 automatic rifle, was able to get on the roof of a building offering a clear shot at the former President of the United States without being confronted by a heavily-armed and body-armoured “Hawkeye” from the USSS’s tactical squad. It is Close Protection 101 that all potential “sniper’s perches” must be reconnoitred, located, and neutralised. The assassin, clearly visible to multiple witnesses on the ground, should never have made it as far as the building, let alone onto the roof. The deadly attack at Butler must, therefore, constitute the most egregious failure of the US Secret Service since Dallas.

Whatever the true story turns out to be regarding the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, its most crucial element is that it was just that, an attempt. Had the assassin’s bullet found its mark and killed the “deplorables’” champion, America’s descent into widespread and murderous violence – possibly spiralling-down into civil war – would have been immediate and quite possibly irreparable. The American Republic, upon whose survival liberty and democracy continue to depend, is certainly not out of danger, not yet. But, in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, 13 July 2024, the USA also dodged a bullet.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 15 July 2024.

Harsh Truths.

The Way We Were: An indelible mark was left upon a whole generation of New Zealanders by the Great Depression and World War II; an impression that not only permitted men and women of all classes and races to perceive the need to work together for the common good, but also to know – thanks to the bonding experiences arising out of existential danger – that such co-operation was possible.

THERE ARE LESSONS to be learned from the Biden-Trump debate/debacle. Important lessons, which New Zealanders would be most unwise to ignore. The first and most important of these is the need to face some harsh truths.

The American people have been running from the truth for decades. Electing an actor to govern them in 1980 merely confirmed their allergy to reality. Now they are readying themselves to elect Donald Trump for the second time. And, having witnessed Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, who can blame them? That the American Republic will struggle to survive such a final and decisive refusal to correct the consequences of its own corruption is unlikely to dissuade the American people from embracing its liquidator.

New Zealanders should, however, resist the temptation to sneer at the USA’s self-inflicted wounds. A dispassionate survey of New Zealand’s present predicament reveals a nation whose First World status can no longer be considered secure, and lacking a political class of sufficient calibre to retain it.

At virtually every level of the New Zealand state, from the lowliest public servant to the Justices of the Supreme Court, there is an alarming absence of evidence that the nation’s predicament is understood. Distractions there are in great number, but a clear-headed grasp of what it takes to hold a country together is not in evidence among those responsible for New Zealand’s administration.

This lack of clarity also pervades the ranks of New Zealand’s elected representatives. These are, with only a handful of exceptions, inadequately educated, lacking in relevant experience, and unadventurous to the point of actual cowardice. New Zealand’s current crop of politicians are place-holders not nation-builders. Unable to rise above the crude calculation of partisan advantage, an understanding of the broader national interest and of the needs of citizens yet to be born is beyond their capabilities.

Accounting for these alarming deficiencies is not easy. No matter how precariously positioned, New Zealand remains a First World country. Its people are educated, and their health preserved, by public institutions that easily bear comparison with those of much larger and richer nations. That being the case, the administration and government of New Zealand should be more than equal to the challenges faced. Likewise, its entrepreneurs and business leaders should be equal to the task of maintaining a productive and profitable economy.

And yet, when it comes to maintaining and extending the nation’s infrastructure, New Zealand’s leaders – private as well as public – are failing dismally. The political unanimity required to recognise, plan, and pay for the projects required to preserve social cohesion, while enhancing economic competitiveness and growth, is no longer a feature of New Zealand’s national life.

An indelible mark was left upon a whole generation of New Zealanders by the Great Depression and World War II; an impression that not only permitted men and women of all classes and races to perceive the need to work together for the common good, but also to know – thanks to the bonding experiences arising out of existential danger – that such co-operation was possible.

Depression and war (but especially war) made brothers out of farmers and freezing-workers, professionals and tradespeople. Bullets and bombs were no respecters of who one’s ancestors were, or which particular sailing vessels they arrived in, but incoming ordnance did make clear who was keeping who alive. Such lessons are not easily forgotten.

But, neither are they easily learnt. In the absence of the near universal experiences of economic hardship, the threat of invasion, and the intense comradeship born of armed conflict, the influences of class, race and gender soon recover their power to separate and divide human-beings. Without the common memories born of working, fighting, and sacrificing together, it becomes easier and easier to believe that “some animals are more equal than others”. And the longer that heresy goes unreproved, the harder it becomes to see the point of building anything that benefits anybody beyond one’s own kind.

There was a time when New Zealand politics was a reflection of the efforts of its two largest political parties to both represent and advance the interests of their “own kind”. Labour stood for the working-class. National for farmers, businessmen and (most) professionals. Thanks in large part to the Cold War, however, both parties understood the importance of keeping political sectionalism on a short leash. The beliefs that held New Zealanders together were accorded much greater importance than political ideologies with the potential to tear them apart.

But those beliefs, absent the experiences which informed them, could not escape the challenges of a generation that had not known privation or war. The ideas that kept New Zealand society tight: white supremacy, male supremacy, heterosexual supremacy, capitalism and Christianity; were deemed oppressive and unjust by the most outspoken of the first generation of New Zealanders for whom tertiary education was something more than an elite privilege.

But if these young intellectuals were successful in loosening New Zealand’s tightly wound society, they had also made it easier for the separate strands of that society to be pulled apart. It would become increasingly practical for New Zealand’s now less-connected citizens to look after their own kind – at the expense of all the other kinds.

Inevitably, it was the wealthiest and most powerful New Zealanders who had most to gain, and gained most, from the post-war generations’ great loosening of New Zealand society. In just two generations the nation reverted to the class-ridden, race-divided, sexually-exploitative society it had been before the election of the First Labour Government in 1935. The country’s politics, likewise, reverted to a competitive struggle between the elite defenders of the nation’s farmers and importers, and the elite protectors of its professionals and industrialists.

The single most important difference between that earlier, elite-dominated, New Zealand society, and the elite-dominated society of today, was the arrival of a gate-crashing new elite comprised of Te Iwi Māori whose children had taken advantage of the expansion of tertiary education in the 1970s to carve out a niche for themselves in the new political power structure. Revisionist history notwithstanding, the key role of this new Māori elite was to distract the urban Māori working-class from its poverty and exploitation – mostly by aggressively promoting the twinned illusions of tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake.

These elements of New Zealand’s story run parallel to those that gave us the political bankruptcy of the Biden-Trump debate. The USA underwent its own great loosening which, like New Zealand’s, unravelled the social solidarity responsible for uplifting so many ordinary Americans between 1945 and 1980.

It is a process from which the wealthiest Americans have benefited hugely – primarily by disconnecting themselves fiscally from the rest of America. With a much-reduced tax base, the USA, like New Zealand, is undergoing its own slow infrastructural collapse.

New Zealand’s tragedy may lack the compelling duo of Biden and Trump – each in their own way illustrating the moral exhaustion of the American political system – but that is no excuse for Kiwi complacency. Both countries need to face the harsh truths of national decline.

Because, in Bob Dylan’s words:

It’s not dark yet 

But it’s getting there.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Monday, 1 July 2024.

Thinking About The Roman Empire.

Template For Masculine Politics: It is as well, then, that, all over the Western World, young men are thinking about Rome. Because, if ever there was time to “unleash hell” on the decrepit, the corrupt, and the criminally incompetent, then that time is now. For, make no mistake, all across the rest of the world, there is no shortage of young men thinking about the Barbarians.

WHY ARE MEN always thinking about the Roman Empire? Women, baffled by their partner’s quickening heart-rate when confronted with images of disciplined legionaries preparing to “unleash hell”, or worried by the Caesar-like poses they catch them striking in front of the bedroom mirror, have turned to their sisters on Tik-Tok for answers. Predictably, it was men who responded. The conclusion of the male commentariat? Men think about the Roman Empire a lot because the Roman Empire still contributes such a lot to what it means to be a man.

But, Rome retains its relevance for another reason, one only partially bound up with masculinity. Rome provides the template for empire: a template so powerful that we have been surrounded by its symbols for centuries. From the Dark Ages, when Charlemagne received the title of Holy Roman Emperor from the Pope; to the Consuls of the French Republic and, after them, the Emperor Napoleon; to the fasces that can still be seen adorning the United States House of Representatives and Lincoln’s memorial throne; to the classical colonnade of our own Parliament Buildings in Wellington: the legacy of Rome is ubiquitous.

The simple truth about Rome’s persistence of vision is that the ideas, the institutions, and the leaders that nourished it continue to inspire and guide our own. The way we think about politics: our curious bifurcation of means and ends; the way we honour the spirit of the Laws, even as our leaders flout the reality; the way we seek peace by preparing for war; all this is as Roman as “Hail Caesar”.

So, too, the notion that, to a favoured people, God (or, the Gods) might promise “empire without limit”. There are still numerous New Zealanders who recall hearing their parents talk about “the British Empire, upon which the sun never sets”. To this very day, Americans still celebrate in song a continental republic stretching from “sea to shining sea”.

So, Rome lives, and men of all ages still thrill to its unalloyed celebration of power. Ninety years ago, Nazi stormtroopers marched beneath devices self-consciously modelled on the eagle standards of the Roman legions. “Hail Hitler” they cried, as lustily as the men of Rome’s Thirteenth Legion had shouted “Hail Caesar!”, offering their leader the same stiff-armed Roman salute. Certainly, the movie director Ridley Scott had as little difficulty as Joseph Goebbels in mixing valour and violence into a thrilling, if extremely dangerous, recapitulation of Rome’s political imperatives. “Gladiator” is fascism in sandals.

Rome’s shadow is visible even in today’s headlines. It is said that the Roman senator, Cato, ended every speech with the same sentence: Ceterum (autem) censeo Carthaginem esse delendam [Furthermore, I consider that Carthage must be destroyed.] When it came to which great city-state should command the Mediterranean basin –  Carthage or Rome – there could be only one. Clearly, the Israeli state and Hamas have arrived at the same conclusion. Like Cato, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seems hell-bent on destroying his mortal enemies. When Carthage finally fell, the Romans left not one stone standing upon another. The Israeli’s seem determined to leave Gaza in the same state.

Confronted with the imminent demise of his people, the Roman historian Tacitus has the ancient Briton, Calgacus, say of his conquerors: ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant – they make a desert and call it peace. We must earnestly hope that Tacitus’s words do not supply Gaza with its epitaph.

Equally relevant to the headlines of the 2020s is Rome’s bloody transition from republic to empire.

Very few people living today understand that Julius Caesar, the man who made the Roman Republic’s fall inevitable, was what most of us would call a socialist. Though a patrician (aristocrat) by birth, Caesar saw in the Roman Senate little more than a corrupt body of elite oppressors of the plebs (the ordinary people).

Attempting to protect the plebs from the patricians was, however, a risky enterprise. Caesar had before him the fate of the Gracchi brothers (think of the Kennedy brothers in togas) whose lack of a sufficiently large body of armed men to protect their reformist agenda resulted in both of them being assassinated.

Caesar’s success as a political leader was founded squarely on Rome’s legions and the money they allowed him to amass. By the time the patricians became desperate enough to kill him, Caesar had made sure that the corrupt, elite-driven Roman Republic was beyond saving. His adopted heir and protégé, Octavian, would become Rome’s first emperor – Augustus.

It is very difficult to look upon the corruption and dysfunction of the present American Republic without recalling the moral and social disintegration of the Roman Republic. (The constitutional inspiration, incidentally, which guided the USA’s founding fathers.)

Like the young Roman Republic, the young United States would acquire its own version of empire and, by virtue of its military and economic strength, emerge as the master of its world. As is so often the case, however, the vigour and vitality of a young republic fades. Wealth substitutes for glory. Republican virtue becomes a memory. Unity dissolves. The republic falls into the hands of men with too much money and too many years.

The question upon which the fate of the world now turns is whether or not the American Republic, still rich, still immensely powerful, can rise above the rancour and corruption into which it has fallen. Caesar was murdered by men who clung to a Roman republican constitution that no longer worked. It had become a threadbare veil, no longer capable of hiding – let alone restraining – the naked ambition of ruthless political and military leaders eager to replace it with something more rational – and less restrictive.

There are many who would argue that the United States is not that far removed from the circumstances which led to the fall of the Roman Republic. America’s enemies would appear to be better students of history than either the Democratic or Republican parties. Profound challenges to American hegemony in Europe, the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East can hardly be faced down by a nation that cannot even elect a Speaker of the House of Representatives – let alone pass a budget! Not even Rome, in all its long history, was able to produce a cavalcade of clowns to match the current American spectacle.

That the USA is presided over by a man in his 80s speaks eloquently of the USA’s predicament. Every day, it’s sclerotic institutions make it clear that America is no longer a country for young men. America desperately needs what Rome, in extremis, always seemed to find: a vigorous political general, with a plan in his mind – and loyal legions at his back.

It is as well, then, that, all over the Western World, young men are thinking about Rome. Because, if ever there was time to “unleash hell” on the decrepit, the corrupt, and the criminally incompetent, then that time is now. For, make no mistake, all across the rest of the world, there is no shortage of young men thinking about the Barbarians.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 23 October 2023.

What’s Sauce For Monroe’s Goose, Is Sauce For Putin’s Gander.

Not In My Back Yard! If the American President, Joe Biden, has forgotten the lessons of 60 years ago, then the Russian Federation President, Vladimir Putin, has not. Unacceptable in 1962, the stationing of military resources (including tactical nuclear weapons) along Russia’s borders remains unacceptable in 2022.

IT WAS BURIED DEEP in his State of the Union address to Congress. A warning to the great powers of his day that any attempt to once again colonise the Western Hemisphere would be regarded as a direct threat to the national security of the United States of America. The year was 1823. The President delivering the State of the Union address was James Monroe. And the declaration that the entire Western Hemisphere of the globe was an American sphere of influence became known as “The Monroe Doctrine”. It remains a core principle of US foreign policy to this very day.

What amazes historians about the Monroe Doctrine is the sheer affrontery of the United States in declaring half the world off-limits to powers in possession of considerably more wealth and military strength than itself. One can only imagine the lips of the rulers of Great Britain, France, Russia and Prussia curling in contempt at this jackanape of a republic presuming to teach the world its business.

Not that the great powers of the day misunderstood the reasoning motivating President Monroe and his advisers. The Spanish Empire: which had once embraced the whole of the South American continent (except Brazil) Central America and what is now Mexico, the South-Western states of the US and California; had just lost, or was in the process of losing, her American possessions – just as, forty years earlier, Great Britain had lost her thirteen North American colonies. Monroe’s Doctrine warned Europe’s rulers: “Don’t even think about trying to take them back!”

Why, then, is it so difficult, one year from the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, for the United States to comprehend why the Russian Federation might want to declare Eastern Europe, the Ukraine in particular, off-limits to the NATO alliance?

Twice, in just over a century, vast armies have swept eastward across the Great European Plain to wreak havoc upon the peoples of, first, the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union. In the last invasion, led by Nazi Germany (in alliance with Romania, Hungary and Italy) more than 20 million Soviet citizens lost their lives. Had the Nazis won, it was their plan to starve as many again to death, emptying the broad wheatlands of the Ukraine of human inhabitants in preparation for their permanent “Germanisation”.

It is a melancholy fact that the only American president who truly appreciated what had happened to the Russian people was John F. Kennedy. Hardly surprising, really, since his refusal to tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, which he deemed to be a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, had brought him face-to-face with the certainty that casualties numbering in the scores-of-millions would be America’s fate if he and General-Secretary Khrushchev did not step back from the brink of Armageddon.

In his famous 1963 speech to the students of the American University, in Washington DC, Kennedy described the Soviet Union’s experience in terms these young Americans could understand:

“[N]o nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland – a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis was, of course, sparked by the United States decision to install Jupiter nuclear-tipped missiles along the Soviet Union’s border with Turkey – a NATO ally. The quiet withdrawal of those missiles was the quid-pro-quo for Khrushchev’s withdrawal of his Cuban missile batteries.

If the United States President, Joe Biden, has forgotten the lessons of 60 years ago, then the Russian Federation President, Vladimir Putin, has not. Unacceptable in 1962, the stationing of significant military resources (including tactical nuclear weapons) along Russia’s borders remains unacceptable in 2022.

Would the United States tolerate a hostile, Russian-backed, military alliance refusing to rule out inviting Mexico to become a member? Any US President who allowed a nuclear-armed rival to establish a puppet regime just across America’s southern border would be rightly accused of abandoning the Monroe Doctrine, and impeached.

Why, then, can’t President Joe Biden acknowledge that President Putin is asserting no more than President Monroe – and with considerably greater justification?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 January 2022.

Democracy In Danger?

Hard Sell: The insurmountable problem facing President Joe Biden’s democratic capitalist missionaries, is that in order to fill the cups of the oppressed with freedom, they will first be required to empty their own pockets.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN has just wound up his virtual “Summit For Democracy” and, frankly, I’m none the wiser. The underlying premise of what looked suspiciously like and anti-Chinese, anti-Russian, propaganda exercise: that democracy is threatened by the advance of authoritarianism; was poorly defended by the American President and his supporters.

Our own Prime Minister (whose participation in Biden’s summit was, for a few encouraging moments, a matter of some doubt) certainly failed to advance a credible argument that democracy was under attack. Indeed, her most serious critique was reserved for the disinformation spread by the leading social media platforms. That all of these are based in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, did little to dispel the intellectual confusion characterising the entire summit.

How much more helpful it would have been had Jacinda Ardern chosen to broaden the debate by comparing the present historical moment with that of the 1930s.

Ninety years ago, Democracy, as a political system, was unquestionably under unrelenting ideological attack. From the radical Left came the critique that the democratic system was nothing more than a smoke-screen designed by the ruling classes to hide the true power relationships of capitalist society – which were economic, not political. In the oft-quoted observation of the French writer, Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

The Right lamented the weakening effect of democratic party politics on the expression of the national will. The unity of the people and the power of the state could only be undermined by Democracy’s relentless focus on the rights of the individual. The slogan of Benito Mussolini: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”; summed up the political objectives of the radical Right admirably.

Crucially, these anti-democratic ideas were not the preserve merely of party activists, academic authors, newspaper columnists, and radio personalities – the 1930s equivalent of today’s social media communicators. The assault upon Democracy was led by substantial nation-states.

The Soviet Union, through its mouthpiece the Communist International or “Comintern”, heaped nothing but scorn on Western “bourgeois democracy”. It was condemned for offering no credible response to the poverty and despair unleashed by the Great Depression. Against the dictatorship of Capital, the Comintern offered not democracy, but the dictatorship of the working-class. Its clinching argument: “There are no unemployed in Russia!”

Germany, under Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party – the Nazis – pretended not to feel the loss of the parliamentary democracy that had been swept away by the “National Revolution”. Gone was the vacillation, weakness and political gridlock of the hated Weimar Republic, and in its place stood the volksgemeinschaft – the national peoples community – which was credited with restoring order, unity and prosperity to the German nation.

How do Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany compare, as anti-democratic proselytisers, with Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation and Xi Jinping’s Peoples Republic of China – supposed leaders of the authoritarian crusade against which the “Summit For Democracy” set its face?

Frankly, today’s authoritarians aren’t a patch on their 1930s predecessors.

If the Russian Federation had genuinely turned it face against Democracy, deriding it as a failed experiment imposed upon the Russian people by the rapacious nations of the West, why would its leader devote so much time and energy to maintaining the pretence of leading a democratically-elected government? Would someone cast in the mould of Joseph Stalin really feel obliged to rig election after election in the manner of President Putin? Is it not more accurate to observe that the sins committed against democracy in Russia are, in fact, proof of its enduring hold upon the imagination of the long-suffering Russian people?

What about those 100,000+ troops massed along Russia’s border with Ukraine? How “democratic” is that? A better question might be: How would the Russian people react if their President did not do all within his power to keep the military forces of Nato as far from Russia’s borders as possible? If Russia and its allies had military forces ranged along both the Canadian and Mexican borders, and its navy was galivanting around the Gulf of Mexico, how bellicose do you suppose the American people would expect their president to be?

Just for the record: the last time so many foreign troops were massed along the Russian border was June 1941.

Even accepting that the Russian Federation is a deformed democratic state, the same, surely, cannot be said of the Peoples Republic of China? Is it not the case that President Xi Jinping has openly boasted the superiority of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” over the failing democracies of the West? Hasn’t he contrasted the extraordinary economic growth of China, and the dramatic improvement in Chinese living standards, with the grotesque inequality and moral disintegration of neoliberal capitalism? For those countries still struggling to join the rich nations’ club, President Xi’s characterisation of authoritarianism as the fast-track to prosperity, must be tempting.

Not least because so many of those aspiring nations are only too aware that the phenomenal growth experienced by China was set in motion by the enthusiasm of Western investors for a nation state that did everything within its power to crush “bourgeois democracy”. The fact that this prime destination for foreign (especially US) capital did not permit a multi-party system, free and fair elections, a free and outspoken news media, or, most importantly, an independent trade union movement, was precisely the reason why they were so keen to relocate their factories in Chinese territory.

China’s great sin isn’t that it maintains rigid control over the lives of its people; or that it represses the Uighurs of Jinjiang Province. (After all, the United States, the UK and Australia invaded, mangled and economically crippled Iraq in the same cause – i.e. combatting “Islamic terrorism”.) No, China’s great sin is that she refuses to allow contemporary Western capitalists to dictate her future in the same way as their nineteenth and twentieth century predecessors.

Viewed from this perspective, President Biden’s “Summit For Democracy” (to which, confusingly, the Philippines were invited, but Singapore was not) begins to look like those great evangelical gatherings of two hundred years ago, where one distressed clergyman after another rose to speak of the unfortunate millions of Africans and Asians dwelling in the darkness of religious error, their souls in peril, and urgently in need of the liberating word of God – followed, after a decent interval, by the not-so-liberating instruments of Mammon.

The great advantage of the Christian missionary movement was that the paradise it promised lay not in this world, but the next. The insurmountable problem facing Biden’s democratic capitalist missionaries, is that in order to fill the cups of the oppressed with freedom, they will first be required to empty their own pockets.

And where’s the profit in that?

Money And Morality: Oil And Water.

Familiar Excuses: Those wondering why our Prime Minister was so willing to countenance a reputationally damaging breaking of Air New Zealand's contract with the Saudi Arabian navy should wonder no longer. Pieces are in motion on the Middle East chessboard. The interests of the majority shareholder in Air New Zealand are, accordingly, in flux. Jacinda Ardern has sniffed the wind and smelled Joe Biden’s aftershave.

CAPITALISM IS CHANGING. Twenty years ago, the sole obligation of a capitalist enterprise (other than abiding by the laws of the states in which it operated) was to generate a return on its shareholders’ investment. So entrenched was this notion that it was specifically referenced in the legislation giving effect to the free-market reforms of the 1980s and 90s. Not anymore. In today’s climate, the interests of shareholders are expected to give way to the moral convictions and/or objections of journalists and politicians. The pursuit of profit now comes second to the quest for ethical perfection.

The current furore engulfing Air New Zealand’s commercial relationship with the Saudi Arabian Navy illustrates the many problems associated with mixing money and morality.

A quick Google search established that, in the words of the Sanctions Scanner website, “there are no formal international sanctions implemented against Saudi Arabia”. Following the gruesome assassination of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in 2018, the US Congress briefly considered imposing unilateral sanctions, but nothing came of it. (In matters relating to “The Kingdom” nothing usually does.) Put simply, there was and is no legal impediment to Air New Zealand entering into a commercial relationship with the Saudis. The company saw an opportunity to make money for its shareholders – and took it.

Yes, but, the Saudi navy is blockading the war-torn nation of Yemen, a country constantly teetering on the brink of humanitarian catastrophe. Refurbishing the gas turbine engines of its warships places the national carrier in the invidious position of at least appearing to be aiding and abetting the perpetrators of acts which some critics of the Saudi regime have alleged to be war crimes.

Some critics? Therein lies the problem. Yemen finds itself in the unfortunate position of being caught up in the struggle for regional supremacy between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran. By means of its naval blockade, and intermittent bombing sorties, the Saudi regime has been able to prevent Iran’s proxies – the rebel Houthi militias – from over-running completely what remains of the Saudi-friendly forces associated with the government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. The Saudis’ extremely restricted military options in this ferociously complex civil war leave them acutely vulnerable to accusations of war crimes. To date, however, international opprobrium has been deemed preferable to an Iranian ally controlling the geopolitically critical entrance to the Red Sea.

Not that the most vocal critics of Air New Zealand’s association with the Saudis have much to say about geopolitics. For the Greens’ Golriz Ghahraman, the fact that people (many of them children) die in wars is sufficient reason for New Zealand to have nothing to do with them. For Valerie Morse, one of the most outspoken critics of New Zealand’s small but innovative arms industry, there can be no excuse for even the most peripheral involvement of Kiwi companies in the production or refurbishment of military equipment – especially a company whose majority shareholder is the New Zealand state.

All very noble and principled of this outspoken duo, whose political stance, in addition to being high-minded, is also (dare we say it?) guaranteed to attract massive support on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Less ethically lustrous, perhaps, is the consideration owed to Air New Zealand’s highly skilled engineering workforce. With their usual flow of contracts stemmed by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Saudi refurbishment job was likely seen as a godsend. That nobody asked too many questions about what these refurbished engines might be powering is entirely understandable. Air New Zealand’s engineering capabilities are an important contributor to its international success. Management had every right to assume that, as the company’s majority shareholder, the New Zealand state has a vested interest in keeping one of its airline’s most efficient operations economically viable.

It would have been equally understandable if those involved in, and associated with, the contract saw the whole exercise as part of a much bigger picture. New Zealand is, when all is said and done, still a member of what John Key called the Five Eyes “club”. With the two biggest exporters of arms to the Saudi kingdom being fellow Five Eyes members the United States and the United Kingdom, and with the Aussies revving-up their own arms industry in sympathy, New Zealand pitching-in to the geopolitical working-bee may well have been seen as the shrewdest move – diplomatically-speaking.

The Iranians already possess the capability of closing the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Allowing them to close-off the entrance to the Red Sea would be greeted with alarm and dismay by all those nations dependent on the oil and natural gas reserves of the Arabian peninsula. That’s not just us, by the way, but also our biggest trading partners China and Australia.

To Ms Ghahraman and her Green colleagues, the prospect of so dramatically exposing the world’s dependence on fossil fuels was, no doubt, an alluring one. Unfortunately, the global economy is nowhere near being able to do without coal, oil and natural gas. For many years to come, the strategic criticality of Middle East oil will drive the decision-making of nations much larger and more ruthless than New Zealand.

That the very existence of the Air New Zealand-Saudi relationship came to light at all may be related very closely to the recent political shifts in the biggest and most ruthless nation of them all – the United States of America. On 4 February 2021, America’s new president, Joe Biden, delivered a foreign-policy speech in which he signalled the USA’s unwillingness to let the bloody stalemate in Yemen continue.

“This war has to end,” said Biden. “And to underscore our commitment, we’re ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arm sales.”

Those words should not be interpreted as an indication of the USA’s willingness to let the Iranians claim victory – far from it. What Biden’s announcement portends is Washington’s impatience with the Saudi regime’s military inadequacies. Donald Trump may have taken its Crown Prince’s assurances that his armed forces were more than a match for Houthi militiamen, but Biden is much more willing than his predecessor to believe the evidence of his military and diplomatic experts on the ground. Uncle Sam is getting ready to butt some intransigent heads together. Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitions will be put on ice, while the Iranians will be offered an end to crippling US sanctions if they undertake to help broker a lasting peace in Yemen.

Those wondering why our Prime Minister was so willing to countenance a reputationally damaging breaking of the gas turbine contract should wonder no longer. Pieces are in motion on the Middle East chessboard. The interests of the majority shareholder in Air New Zealand are, accordingly, in flux. Jacinda Ardern has sniffed the wind and smelled Joe Biden’s aftershave.

Maybe capitalism hasn’t changed that much after all?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 15 February 2021.

The Winds Of Change.

Yesterday's Gone: Cold shivers are running up and down the spines of conservatives everywhere. Donald Trump may have gone, but all the signs point to there being something much more momentous in the wind-shift than a simple return to the status quo ante. A change is gonna come.

ONE COULD ALMOST feel sorry for them. Until, that is, their propositions are subjected to robust interrogation. All around the world, conservatives are feeling the fresh winds blowing out of Washington – and they are shivering. They fear that ideas hitherto denied the full imprimatur of state power have been issued arms and are on the march. In short, today’s conservatives are feeling what old-fashioned Labourites and social democrats felt in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was sworn-in as the fortieth President of the United States.

President Joe Biden is 78 years old. He has trod the floor of the Capitol Building for nigh on 40 years, trimming his sails to the prevailing winds as all successful politicians learn to do. All those years of experience are speaking to him now: warning him that the mighty gale currently filling the sails of the American ship of state cannot be tacked against, only run before. This will not be a “trimming” presidency: the Biden years will be a time of surging forward.

As one recent comment on The Daily Kos put it: “This isn’t Biden 2008. Something in the last 12 years has broadened his horizon and pushed him to centre-left territory. He put RFK’s bust in his office along with Caesar Chavez. If that’s where he’s looking for inspiration, I’m happy.”

Which explains the cold shivers running up and down the spines of conservatives everywhere. Donald Trump may have gone, but all the signs point to there being something much more momentous in the wind-shift than a simple return to the status quo ante.

Biden’s victory was built on the votes of America’s youth, America’s women, and, most triumphantly, on the votes of America’s people of colour. “Sleepy Joe” knows that his campaign was dead in the water until the veteran black congressman from South Carolina, James Clyburn, rallied his people behind the former Vice-President and pushed him all the way to the White House. As a long-time mover-and-shaker in the US Senate, Biden also knows that without the astonishing efforts of black activist Stacey Abrams in Georgia, neither he nor his party could have uplifted the legislative tools of change.

Someone else who knows this is the forty-third President of the United States, George W. Bush. Encountering James Clyburn in the Capitol Building on Inauguration Day, ‘Dubbya’ told the veteran congressman that he was America’s “saviour”. Without his intervention, said Bush, the only politician who could have beaten Trump would not have won the nomination.

Most certainly it was no accident that the person who ended up stealing the show on Inauguration Day was young, female and black. Rightly celebrated for the power of “The Hill We Climb”, her poem in honour of the new President, Amanda Gorman was also a flesh and blood celebration of the new America that is rising. Clearly, it is not going to be an America dominated by the values of conservative white males. Equally clearly, that message has been received loud and clear by conservative white males everywhere.

Fourteen thousand kilometres to the south, the Weekend Herald’s columnist, John Roughan, offered words of advice on the best way to reach out to Trump’s defeated army of followers. He addressed his remarks not only to the US Democratic Party, but also the American news media:

“If American Democrats and the country’s respected newspapers and television networks really would like to bridge their country’s cultural divides, rather than simply saying they do, they need to come halfway over the bridge. They need to overcome their aversion to certain views and respect the fact that a lot of people, about half the population, think that way.”

Wrapped up in those two sentences is pretty much the whole of the world view that conservatives believe to be threatened and which they are moving heaven and earth to protect. Under no circumstances should “respected” media outlets give extensive access (and, by implication, validation) to the voices of those on the receiving end of these “certain views” held by “about half the population”. Rather, it is the duty of the mainstream news media to “overcome their aversion” to such views.

Another way of saying this might be to invite responsible journalists to come halfway across the bridge (Selma Alabama’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, perhaps?) to meet the racism, sexism, climate change denial and white supremacist thinking that has allegedly enthralled half their fellow citizens – along with every other ideological defence of inequality the political right sees fit to advance.

Failure to display such tolerance will have consequences. “If the world is not to suffer more populist disasters,” warns the author of hundreds of NZ Herald leader articles, “possibly even an encore for Donald Trump, news media have to find an open mind again.”

Or, it might have to narrow its mind somewhat.

“Many journalists have had a tertiary education in liberal arts and it shows”, writes Roughan. “Some of their news angles reflect the values and explanations of a social science seminar where nobody’s misfortune can be attributable to poor personal decisions, society is always to blame, if an ethnic minority is underperforming it is evidence of ‘systemic’ racism.”

Is Roughan accusing the graduates of New Zealand’s universities and journalism schools of disseminating “fake news”? Or, is he merely giving credence to Kellyanne Conway’s classic Trumpian assertion that it is perfectly acceptable, when debating politics, to advance “alternative facts”?

Then again, if we are not to trust the evidence of social scientists: or, if we are being asked not to rely upon evidence at all; then in who and in what should we repose our trust? In the scepticism of those whose world views cannot survive the introduction of contradictory evidence? In the ‘reckons’ of people who believe democracy consists of one’s own ignorance being regarded in every respect as the equal of others’ knowledge? Or, are we simply being invited to accept that, politically-speaking, everything goes more smoothly when educated citizens agree to meet ignorance and prejudice half way?

John Roughan argues that Joe Biden struck a series of “clanging notes” when he used his inaugural address to call out “political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism . . . anger, hatred, extremism . . . racism, nativism, fear . . . facts that are manipulated, even manufactured”. What the Weekend Herald columnist did not explain, however, is how the new President could possibly have kept faith with the eighty million Americans whose votes put him in the White House if he had refused to strike the Liberty Bell so forcefully.

The consequences of heeding Roughan’s advice are there in American history for all to see. In the decades following the Civil War, politicians and newspaper editors from North and South insisted with ever-increasing fervour that it was time for the people of the United States to put the rancour of those bloody years behind them. Increasingly, it was asserted that far from being about the abolition of slavery and “a new birth of freedom” for the American republic, the war had only been about its noble antagonists’ differing definitions of freedom. Before long, the veterans of Blue and Gray were warmly embracing each other like long lost brothers.

Thus was racism reprieved in the United States. As white men’s willingness to meet each other half way condemned African-Americans to a life that offered them no way at all to the full and equal enjoyment of their constitutional rights.

Amanda Gorman’s poem spells out the moral obligation this historical failure places upon her fellow citizens:

because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

New Zealanders should learn from America’s experience. Truth owes nothing to falsehood. Knowledge owes nothing to ignorance. Tolerance owes nothing to prejudice. Equality owes nothing to racism. Justice owes nothing to injustice. And anyone who suggests otherwise is most definitely offering you fake news.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 25 January 2021.

A Very American Coup?

Deconstructing American Democracy: The joy manifested on American streets over the weekend, as the news of Joe Biden’s victory spread, may soon be transformed into incandescent rage. Worse, any mass protest action in support of President-Elect Biden will, almost certainly, be answered by the mobilisation of President Trump’s own supporters – many of whom will arrive on the streets heavily armed. Widespread civil disorder and loss of life is likely to follow.

IT IS MY earnest hope that by the time you read this column, its speculations have been refuted by the facts. If they have not, then we are on the threshold of a very dark period of American history.

Let us begin with an important historical precedent.

In the summer of 1974, the US Secretary of Defence, James Schlesinger, made it very clear to the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the American armed forces that any order from the Commander-in-Chief, President Richard Nixon, to deploy US troops on the streets of the nation’s capital should not be obeyed unless countersigned by himself.

Nixon’s Cabinet had become so alarmed by the behaviour of the President, that Schlesinger’s extraordinary intervention was understood to be both prudent and responsible.

Fast-forward 46 years to 2020. The President of the United States, Donald Trump, defeated in the General Election by his Democratic Party opponent, Joe Biden, is steadfastly refusing to acknowledge his loss. Worse, the President is claiming that the election has been stolen from him by means of wholesale electoral fraud. Accordingly, Republican Party lawyers have begun filing lawsuits in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania. Their purpose? To prevent the certification of voting tallies from traditionally “Democratic” counties.

It can only be assumed that the political effect of such a blatant attempt to thwart the will of the American electorate will be inflammatory. The joy manifested on American streets over the weekend, as the news of Biden’s victory spread, will, in an instant, be transformed into incandescent rage. Worse, mass protest action in support of President-Elect Biden will, almost certainly, be answered by the mobilisation of President Trump’s own supporters – many of whom will arrive on the streets heavily armed. Widespread civil disorder and loss of life is bound to follow.

If the President’s behaviour during the Black Lives Matter protests is any guide, Trump will seek to quell such widespread violence and disorder by ordering the US armed forces onto the nation’s streets.

Until Tuesday morning (NZ Time) the only institutional obstacle to such a course of action being followed was Trump’s Secretary of Defence, Mark Esper. Secretary Esper had reacted with dismay to the deployment of federal law enforcement personnel – including military police – to drive protesters from Lafayette Park so that the President could walk the few hundred metres separating the White House from St John’s Episcopal Church in safety. On Tuesday morning, however, the President removed that obstacle by sacking Secretary Esper and replacing him with the Director of the National Counter-Terrorism Centre, Christopher Miller.

By Tuesday afternoon, rumours were sweeping Washington that Esper’s dismissal was about to be followed by the sacking of FBI Director, Christopher Wray, and CIA Director, Gina Haspel.

At the time of writing, both of these key law enforcement and national security officials still held their jobs. If, however, they have been sacked and replaced by Trump loyalists, then, by the time you read these words, the President of the United States will have effectively decapitated what his most fanatical supporters – the followers of the mysterious “QAnon” – call the “Deep State”.

In the eyes of these deluded Americans, their President will have struck a blow for freedom and decency, and they will be looking forward eagerly to his next move: the arrest of senior members of the Democratic Party – including, no doubt, President-Elect Biden and Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris. If this is what transpires, then the method in the madness of the QAnon conspiracy theory will, finally, be revealed.

To those watching in Moscow and Beijing, Paris and Berlin, Canberra and Wellington, however, the nature of the events unfolding in the United States will be understood very differently. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Emanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Scott Morrison and Jacinda Ardern will know exactly what they are looking at: a steadily unfolding coup d’état – its every step retrospectively justified and validated by a lame-duck Republican President and a lame-duck Republican Senate.

If this is the way events have unfolded since Tuesday afternoon, then only one force in American society possesses the strength to defend the US Constitution and uphold American democracy: the armed forces of the United States.

This time, however, they will not be able to rely upon the Secretary of Defence to make the necessary intervention. This time they’ll have to do it themselves. 

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 November 2020.

Revolution Postponed.

Crisis Averted - Again: In a funny/sad sort of way it’s a pity that Joe Biden won. Once again, Americans will convince themselves that the system, the Constitution, has worked exactly as it should. Yes, that same Constitution did allow a man like Donald Trump to wield full executive power for four years. But, it also gave the American people the opportunity to correct their mistake – which they have just done. So, crisis averted. Time for everyone to stand back and stand down. Sleepy Joe and Kamala have got this. (Are you listening Bernie? Do you hear what we’re saying, AOC?)

THE THIRD AMERICAN REVOLUTION has been postponed, but it has not been cancelled. With the American news media (Fox News included!) calling the Presidential Election for Joe Biden, that part of America which still believes in American democracy is allowing itself “a brief period of rejoicing”.

The followers of Donald Trump, sullen and watchful, have yet to accept the judgement of those powerful social forces for whom the news media speaks. With every day that passes without a clear call-to-arms against the fast-consolidating Biden ascendancy, however, the Red Hats’ stomach for a full-scale uprising will diminish. In the words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly”. For Trump, and Trumpism, delay means death.

That a crushing coup d’état was not unleashed the moment the trend toward a Biden victory became clear bears testimony to Trump’s signature lack of organisational talent. While indisputably the master of improvisational political theatre, the President has never demonstrated the slightest ability to stick to a script – let alone write one! The slow and careful accumulation of the human and material resources necessary to seize the American state has proved, thankfully, well beyond Trump’s capacity. Hence his personal tragedy’s rapid descent into farce – as illustrated to perfection in the Veep-like absurdity of the “Four Seasons” press conference!

Were Trump and his rapidly shrinking band of courtiers to issue orders to the United States Military, demanding the forcible impoundment of the ballots in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia, it is now highly unlikely that they would be followed. Nor can Trump rely upon the Supreme Court to pull his electoral irons out of the fire. The nine justices may not see eye-to-eye on many things, but it’s a safe bet that any request to nullify the largest tally of presidential votes in American history would be met with a polite – and unanimous – refusal.

Possession, they say, is nine-tenths of the law; and right now Biden has what Trump most wants: public acceptance of the “facts on the ground”. Confirmation that he will be the next President of the United States.

Where does this leave the Third American Revolution? The answer, sadly, is stalled. What should have happened in the 1970s; what could have happened in 2009 as Capitalism threatened to expire in the death-grip of the Global Financial Crisis; looks certain to be put off again. Why? Because, once again, just as the American system seemed on the very brink of political catastrophe, it rescued itself.

Think about the last time a malignant, mentally-ill President was holed-up in the White House, asking himself if he dared to strike down American democracy. Richard Nixon, in 1974, was considered so unstable that his Secretary of Defence, James R. Schlesinger, distributed a secret memo to the commanders of the military bases around Washington DC, advising them not to respond to any Presidential order to deploy troops onto the streets of the capital unless it was counter-signed by himself. It turned out to be unnecessary. The US system, the US Constitution, ended up working in precisely the way it was supposed to work. The crisis was averted. The overwhelming majority of Americans stood back and stood down.

But, not all Americans. The effective deposition of a sitting President, by putting the rights contained in the First Amendment to the US constitution to effective use, was the last straw for the most reactionary elements of the American ruling-class. Democracy was out of control. The rapid post-war expansion of the “Middle Class” had raised expectations beyond the capitalist system’s capacity to satisfy them. Organised labour was out of control. Blacks, women, minorities of all descriptions, were demanding their place in the sun. The Third American Revolution: the revolution in which the republican institutions arising out of the First American Revolution (1776-1783) and the efforts of the Second American Revolution, usually referred to as the Civil War (1861-1865), to infuse those institutions with genuine liberty, equality and democracy will finally be vindicated and transformed in a radical re-imagining of American freedom – it simply had to be stopped.

In their essence, this is what the four decades since Watergate have been about: delaying the Third American Revolution. Using this insight as a key, it is relatively easy to unlock the recent history of the Republican Party. It’s increasingly strident efforts to drive back the gains of African-Americans in the 1960s; its cynical alliance with the open misogyny and homophobia of fundamentalist Christianity; its packing of the US judiciary with reactionary judges; its deliberate debasement of US political culture and discourse: all of it has been about putting off the evil day when the full revolutionary potential of American democracy manifests itself.

And the Democratic Party? It’s history, over the past four decades, has been all about convincing both itself, and the American people, that it is not the political vehicle for bringing the Third American Revolution into being – even though anyone who pays the slightest attention to the sort of Americans who are voting for the Democratic Party knows that it must be.

Which is why, in a funny/sad sort of way it’s a pity that Biden won. Once again, Americans will convince themselves that the system, the Constitution, has worked exactly as it should. Yes, that same Constitution did allow a man like Donald Trump to wield full executive power for four years. But, it also gave the American people the opportunity to correct their mistake – which they have just done. So, crisis averted. Time for everyone to stand back and stand down. Sleepy Joe and Kamala have got this. (Are you listening Bernie? Do you hear what we’re saying, AOC?)

Except that the most reactionary elements of the American ruling-class can no more afford to stand back and stand down in 2020 than they could in 1974. Forty years on, they have so much more to lose. In 1972, when Richard Nixon won his second term in a landslide of historic proportions, the top 1 percent of Americans controlled roughly 10 percent of their country’s wealth. After 40 years of more-or-less constant counter-revolutionary success that share has grown to nearly 30 percent!

Their shield and their sword, the Republican Party, is not about to help Biden “heal America’s soul”. On the contrary, it’s going to do everything it can to exacerbate the differences within the Democratic Party and, by doing so, break-up the fragile social unity created by Trump’s anarchic improv theatre.

Deep down, the forces of reaction will be glad to see him go. The Republican president they will need to keep the Third American Revolution at bay for another 40 years must be made of much sterner stuff.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 10 November 2020.

Not Quite Enough "Passionate Intensity".

The Fire And The Fury: And so, they came out and voted for him – four million more of them (and counting) than turned out for Trump in 2016. Not quite enough, it would seem, to keep their Rough Beast in the White House. But close. Far too close.

PRESIDENT BIDEN. It has a reassuring ring. A democratic ring, too, given that more Americans have voted for Joe Biden than for any other presidential candidate in US history. That is hardly surprising, since the last time such a large percentage of eligible Americans turned out to vote the year was 1900 – twenty years before US women secured the franchise! And yet, in spite of all these hopeful portents, the world is not ready to cheer – not yet.

Because it is close. Very close. So much closer than, in theory, it should be. In theory, a big turnout equals a big Democratic Party victory. For decades, the political scientists have argued that if it is poor and marginalised Americans who are boosting the numbers voting, then, overwhelmingly, they will be voting for the party which, ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, has presented itself as the friend of the ordinary American working man and woman.

That theory now lies in tatters. The huge surge in voting numbers has, in large measure, been a bi-partisan surge. Yes, the Democrats have turned out their vote, but so have the Republicans. The latter’s strategists learned the art of the “ground game” from, of all people, Barack Obama, whose campaign team pioneered new and highly effective methods of identifying and mobilising the Democratic vote. Even those pundits sympathetic to the Democratic Party have conceded the superiority of the Republicans’ ground game in key battleground states.

But it wasn’t just the party’s ground game that turned out the Republican vote, it was Trump himself. With the energy of a man half his age, the President criss-crossed the United States on Air Force One, sometimes speaking to as many as four rallies in a single day.

The veteran Republican strategist, Karl Rove, famously advised those wishing to understand American politics to watch the television news with the sound turned down. Anyone following his advice over the course of the final few days of the campaign would have seen Trump, pumped-up and punching the air in front of rapturous crowds. Biden, careful and Covid-wary, spoke to car-parks full of masked and socially-distanced voters. With the sound down you wouldn’t even have been able to hear the beeping of their horns.

Observing these very different events from afar, it is difficult not to be reminded of the following lines from W. B. Yeats’ famous poem, The Second Coming:

The Blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

It is also very difficult not to be reminded of the political magic of the UK Leave Campaign’s Dominic Cummings – the man who made Brexit happen. With help from the notorious Cambridge Analytica, Cummings was able to communicate directly with people who, for years, had given up on politics as a mug’s game. The sort of people who chuckled when someone joked: “Don’t vote – politicians always win.” The fatal mistake of the Remain Campaign was to assume that these non-voters would stay non-voters. Their chief pollster, one of the best in the UK, built that assumption into his data analysis. That’s why he got it so wrong. That’s why the Remainers never saw Dominic coming.

It is highly probable that the US pollsters made a very similar sort of error. Certainly, Michael Moore, the left-wing US film-maker, who famously called the election for Trump as early as June of 2016, has been warning anyone willing to listen that the pollsters were dramatically under-counting Trump’s supporters.

Moore knew this because he’d made it his business to go to the places where Trump supporters lived: to the trailer parks and the endless miles of soulless suburban tract-housing. He knew because he had sought out, as Paul Simon puts it in his song The Boxer: “the poorer quarters where the ragged people go, looking for the places only they would know.” He knew it because he’d heard it from their poor, white, barely-making-it, working-class mouths: “Trump is making us great again.”

And so, they came out and voted for him – four million more of them (and counting) than turned out for Trump in 2016. Not quite enough, it would seem, to keep their Rough Beast in the White House. But close. Far too close.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 November 2020.

Conversation In An American Bar.

Out of Options: “What does it say about this country, Jerry, that this is the choice we’ve been given? Between a septuagenarian grifter and a septuagenarian dotard. Three hundred and thirty million Americans and the best candidates we can come up with for President of these United States are Donald Trump and Joe Biden!”

“JESUS WEPT! Turn it off, Jerry, I’ve seen enough!”

“Don’t you touch that remote, barman! Me and my friends are enjoying watching the President beat the living crap out of Sleepy Joe Biden, senile old bastard.”

Jerry sizes-up the huge man in front of him. The bulging biceps, the impressive amount of ink, the MAGA cap on his head, and nods.

“Sorry, Carl”, he says, moving down the bar and pouring his old friend a free glass beer by way of apology.

“No, no, it’s alright, Jerry. I shouldn’t have asked you to deny your patrons their gladiatorial sport.”

“Gladiatorial? Doesn’t that imply two evenly matched fighters? Not much evidence of equality in this contest. More like a face-off between a Christian and a lion.”

“What does it say about this country, Jerry, that this is the choice we’ve been given? Between a septuagenarian grifter and a septuagenarian dotard. Three hundred and thirty million Americans and the best candidates we can come up with for President of these United States are Donald Trump and Joe Biden!”

“What it says, Carl, is that the people of this country are hoping that a Democrat Dad or a Republican Pop will sort everything out. Not themselves, they don’t really trust themselves. And certainly not their kids. The younger generation are a complete mystery to them. They’re reaching back to those times in their lives when they turned to Mom and Dad for help. When their first marriage crashed and burned. When their second business failed. When their eldest daughter got pregnant to that drug dealer. When the factory closed and they lost their job. Those moments when they were at a loss. When they were scared. When they needed help.”

Carl throws back his beer and brings the glass down on the bar with a crack.

“Another?”

“Thanks, Jerry.”

A great cheer goes up from the MAGA men. Carl looks up at the big screen and turns away quickly from the bewildered expression on Sleepy Joe’s face.

“Poor old bastard really is getting a shellacking – as Obama used to say. And all those guys in the caps: why in God’s name are they cheering-on a New York billionaire who pays $750 a year in taxes? Jeez, that’s less than half what those guys pay the IRS. Dammit! They’re all working stiffs, just like you and me. Why can’t they see that Trump is not their friend?”

“Oh, come on, Carl, you know that ain’t true. He’s been a better friend to them than Hilary Clinton would ever have been. He gets them, Carl. He knows them. They’re the guys he used to josh around with on his daddy’s building sites when he was a teenager. Remember Nixon’s Hard Hats from the 1970s? The guys who beat the living shit out of those anti-war hippies outside the New York Stock Exchange. Trump’s always known that the American working-class ain’t exactly full of liberals.”

“Oh, don’t, Jerry. Don’t say that – not when it’s true.”

“And I’ll tell you something else. At some place, deep, deep down, they get him, too. They know that only Fat Cats can get Fat Cats. Guys like them, working stiffs, as you call them, they worked out long ago exactly how much power they don’t have. The guys who worked for Trump senior, their unions were all run by the Mob. Look the wrong way at those wise-guys – let alone stand against one of them for the presidency of the union – and likely as not you’d end up in the foundations of one of old man Trump’s tenement buildings.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t always like that, was it?”

“Wasn’t it? What was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, if not a Fat Cat from upstate New York? What else was Jack Kennedy? Jesus Christ, Carl, the guy went to Choate and Harvard! You know what his daddy told him, Carl? As he was preparing to send his little boy to the White House? He said, ‘Son, to become President of the United States you only need three things. The first is, money. The second is, money. And the third is, money.’ And, guess what, Joe Kennedy had plenty of all three!”

“Yeah, well, Clinton wasn’t from a rich family, and neither was Obama.”

“And didn’t it show, Carl? Didn’t it show! They couldn’t do enough for the big boys on Wall Street. Look at Obama, when he summoned the big bankers to the White House. Man, they were quaking in their boots. They thought Obama was going to go after them with an axe. Did he? Like hell he did! He told them not to worry. He bailed out their banks. He rescued Wall Street. What about Main Street? Fuck Main Street! Ordinary folks – like those guys in the caps – they have never been too big to fail.”

“Oh my God! Did I just hear Trump tell the Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by’?”

“Judging by the cheers and the fist-pumping, Carl, I think that’s exactly what you heard.”

“Jesus Christ! What they hell is it with this guy? Does he really want a civil war?”

“Isn’t it obvious, Carl? Of course he wants a civil war. It’s what he’s wanted from the very beginning. Not just because he’s broke. Not just because he owes the IRS. Not just because he’s likely to be indited on multiple charges if Biden beats him. But because the United States is all played out. He knows it. Those guys in the MAGA caps know it. Wall Street knows it. The military know it. About the only people who don’t know it are the Democratic National Committee and the mainstream news media.”

“Jeez, Jerry, lighten-up will ya. It’s not that bad.”

“Actually, Carl, it is that bad. This country’s tired, bone-tired, of pretending to be something it’s not. It’s tired of trying to live up to Lincoln’s “better angels”. Everybody knows that the stories America tells herself are the worst kind of lies. We’re a vicious, rapacious people: always have been, always will be. How does Bob Dylan put it in his song, Blind Willy McTell? ‘Well, God is in his heaven, and we all want what’s his. But, power and greed, and corruptible seed, seem to be all that there is.’”

“Man, you need a drink!”

“Carl, I’m just getting started. You know I love to read history.”

“Oh yeah. We all know about you and your history books, Jerry.”

“Well, let me tell you something about the Roman Republic. It was brought down by wealthy men. Not aristocrats, mind you, but plutocrats. And do you know how these Fat Cat Romans, brought it down? By siding with the plebs against the aristocrats. By promising to look after them – and keeping their promise. By pledging to expand the Empire – and making Rome great again. By sharing with the plebs the wealth which the Senate and People of Rome plundered from the tribes and cities they conquered. I tell you, Carl, the American republic is going to end exactly the same way. It’s going to be brought down by an unholy alliance of the very rich and the very poor. It’s going to be destroyed by an American Caesar.”

Carl’s response is drowned out by the guys at the end of the bar breaking into a chant:

“USA! USA! USA!”

This short story was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 1 October 2020.

Only Bob Dylan Has The Words For The Trump-Biden Debate.

 

Idiot Wind 

by BOB DYLAN

It took only ten minutes to grasp the sheer scale of the Democrat's failure. This sad old man, Sleepy Joe Biden, hasn't a hope of defeating Donald Trump. Goddammit! It's a wonder that he still knows how to breathe!

Idiot Wind indeed!

Video courtesy of YouTube.

This posting exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Super Tuesday 2020: “No, No, No, America – You’ve Got It Wrong!”

Joe-mentum! In spite of the Sanders Campaign’s self-proclaimed and much-vaunted ability to mobilise the sort of disillusioned and marginalised American voter who usually sits out elections, especially the young, just about all the energy on display on Super Tuesday came from those who turned out to support Joe Biden.

OH, THE WAILING! Oh, the gnashing of teeth! How could the American people have been so stupid? Why couldn’t they see the clear path to paradise laid down for them by Bernie Sanders? And how? Oh, Dear God! How could they vote in such self-defeating numbers for Joe Biden?

More than half a century ago, in the aftermath of the 1953 workers’ uprising in East Berlin,  the German Marxist playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht, penned the following, justly famous, poem. He called it:

The Solution

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Reading the outpourings of rage and grief at the unsatisfactory outcome (at least for America’s young progressives) of the Super Tuesday primaries on social media, I couldn’t help recalling Brecht’s sardonic proposition.

In spite of the Sanders Campaign’s self-proclaimed and much-vaunted ability to mobilise the sort of disillusioned and marginalised American voter who usually sits out elections, especially the young, just about all the energy on display on Super Tuesday came from those who turned out to support Joe Biden. In Virginia, for example, Democratic Party voters turned out in numbers well up on 2016: not for Bernie, but for the former Vice-President. In Massachusetts, where he had done no campaigning, Biden carried the state. Its “favourite daughter”, incumbent Senator Elizabeth Warren, came in a poor third. Even in Texas, with its large Bernie-backing Latino population, Sanders was bested by Biden. And again, against all predictions, Biden remains competitive in California – the state Bernie was supposed to run away with.

What happened?

The short and very painful answer is: Bernie and his progressive supporters were viciously mugged by reality.

Retailing “revolution” in the United States of America has always been a hard sell. Before Bernie, there was the radical trade unionist and Indiana State Senator Eugene Victor Debs. In the Presidential Election of 1912, representing the Socialist Party of America, Debs racked-up 6 percent of the popular vote.

It’s worth noting that support for socialism in America peaked in the years between 1900-1916. There were socialist mayors and councillors, socialist legislators and at least one socialist state senator.

When compared to the support for the Republican and Democratic parties, however, the SPA’s vote remained stubbornly in the low single digits. Things got much worse after the USA entered World War I in 1917. Debs himself was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for speaking out against military conscription in 1918. The draconian legislation he fell afoul of was inspired by the high-minded Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson. He was eventually pardoned by President Warren G. Harding, a Republican, in 1921.

Bernie’s electoral success has been in spite of, not because of, his socialist principles. He has always been careful to call himself the “Independent” Senator from Vermont, and his outstanding success as a presidential candidate was made possible not by the sudden conversion of the US electorate to the principles of democratic socialism, but by the rule allowing non-members to contest Democratic Party caucuses and primaries. Without this rule, Sanders wouldn’t have been able to make more than the slightest impact on the American political scene. Be honest, could you identify the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for the US Presidency in 2016? Of course not. Do you know how many votes the SEP ticket received? 382.

Faced with the prospect of a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” carrying the Democratic Party’s colours into the 2020 Presidential Election, most registered Democrats were dismayed. In their eyes Candidate Bernie Sanders would be an absolute gift to Donald Trump. That’s why the Democratic Party leadership seized upon Biden’s big win in South Carolina to break the log-jam of moderate contenders and give the voters the chance to restore “Uncle Joe” to his former position as the man most likely to beat the ogre in the White House.

Yes, you can argue that Americans should want more: that they should take the opportunity to bring their country into the twenty-first century that Sanders is offering. But, if you take that position, then you are ranging yourself alongside the Secretary of the Writers Union in Brecht’s poem. Castigating the people for failing to live up to your expectations of them is not the best way to win their confidence. For better or worse, democracy affords ordinary people the occasional opportunity to apply their collective weight to History’s rudder. If they fail to follow the “revolutionary” course you have suggested, then whose fault is that? Theirs, for not taking it? Or yours, for not giving them good enough reasons for risking everything on a politician’s promise?

I never really saw eye-to-eye with the late Mike Moore, but there was one saying of his that I’ve never had the slightest difficulty in endorsing:

“The people are always right – even when they’re wrong.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 6 March 2020.