By Michael Brenner
Americans discount the past. They live in the present and imagine the future. Events are assimilated into a mythologized pageant of progress that leads to an ever fuller realization of a more perfect union — liberty and justice at home, goodwill and good works abroad.
Happenings of an unseemly nature are sanitized so as to conform to the self-image of destiny’s child born in a state of original virtue; or they are encapsulated and repressed.
Deep within us, though, they survive in a state of indeterminant hibernation — along with the passions, impulses and ambitions that generated those misdeeds. They become spores, dormant until a favorable environment appears for their reactivation.
What we are witnessing in the United States today is a recrudescence of baneful elements from earlier times: the rapacious society that ruthlessly decimated the indigenous peoples from sea to shining sea; that warred against Mexico to steal half of its lands; that attacked Spain’s overseas possessions to build the early foundation of empire; that policed the Caribbean basin to its commercial advantage; that jailed those who voiced disagreement with the U.S.’ entry into World War I; that has glorified the frontier’s violence, sharp-dealing and wanton destruction of nature denied its status as an heirloom.
Certainly, those unbecoming episodes from the past resonate with what we observe today: in the United States’ rampage through the Middle East, its resort to systemic torture, its belligerence and bullying, its repressive treatment of critics at home, its crude and corrupt electoral politics.
These deeds are at variance with the country’s principles, its self-image, its external image and, too, a 20th century record that included policies and attitudes that aimed at generating public goods and attentive to the general welfare.
Moreover, our largely capable leaders who possessed an ingrained sense of responsibility for the good of the commonweal contrast sharply with our present crop of inept and feckless leaders with whom the nation is saddled.
We now are experiencing a clash between those latter virtues and the revival of those malign, demonic elements wresting free of their sublimation.
Four Evils
A diagrammatic depiction of the United States today must give central place to four interwoven facets of contemporary American society.
They are: plutocracy; the growing neo-Fascist movement; the erosion of fidelity to core Constitutional values, accompanied by a timidity in taking action to defend them.
This is evident in each of three branches of government, at state and local levels, and even among the galaxy of our famed civic institutions that populate the social landscape; and a pervasive self-centeredness that is at once an effective and reinforced cause of the nihilism that is a hallmark of our times — sapping the lifeblood out of the body politic while encouraging all manner of erratic behavior.
The complexity of the composition thus created is impossible to explicate within reasonable limits of time and space. So, let’s simply illustrate how each in its own right is manifest in the country’s external dealings.
The Financial Sector
One: Washington is unable, and disinclined, to pursue any policy that contravenes the narrow, self-defined interests of the financial and commercial powerhouses who control the political parties through electoral campaign donations and bribes, won a de facto tax holiday, monopolize the major media, underwrite foundations and think tanks so as to shape their product, and hatch schemes to infiltrate and reprogram educational institutions at every level as an invasive species denatures the eco-system.
The financial sector is the most prominent, active and influential of these private economic entities. Since they are institutionalized globally, the entire American outlook on multilateral organizations (the IMF, the World Bank, GATT, SWIFT) and their programs is dictated by the benefits that flow from them: earnings for private interests, clout for the government to cajole, coerce or dictate to other countries The abusive use made of SWIFT and the IMF in the confrontation with Russia is case in point.
When we imagine trade negotiations and accords, we visualize mainly the exchange of manufactured goods and natural resources. That is no longer the case. What counts, above all, are financial arrangements. Intellectual property comes second. Energy and agriculture next. Manufactures are an also-ran.
At present, it is China that dominates that sector of international commerce. Its overall manufacturing capacity is greater than that of the U.S., the EU and Japan combined. Add Russia’s capacity (and raw materials) to that number and you understand both Washington’s dedication to leveraging those economic assets that it retains (backed by military assets) and its mounting sense of vulnerability.
A Rising Tide
Two: The rise of a potent, expanding movement that should be properly labelled “Fascism with American characteristics” to date has had only a relatively slight bearing on the country’s foreign policy. The monsters its militants seek to slay, the enemies they see as poisoning the well of Americanism, are domestic.
The Russia threat, the China threat, the fading Islamo-fascist threat are not what drives its adherents — although they share the unanimous conviction that all of the above are evil-doers hostile to the United States. Still, it is the turmoil at the Mexican border that really gets their blood boiling — the only “foreign” issue that is as emotional, as bile-producing, as liberal elites, atheists and baby-killers.
What the future will bring in the way of adding an international dimension to this stew is unpredictable. As of now, Republicans are mainly focused on denouncing whatever President Joe Biden does rather than promoting any foreign policy agenda of their own.
Degrading Democracy
Three: The degradation of American democracy is perhaps the most profound development in the troubled state of contemporary America. Its deleterious effects are multiple — and likely enduring if not absolutely irreversible.
Most obviously, an American Republic in which “government of the people, for the people, by the people” is a motto that strikes only a faint, nostalgic note is not the country on which a mighty nation was built and which has been the grounding for the individual as well as collective self-esteem that always has distinguished the United States.
What it does do is to sow doubt as to the superiority of the American enterprise, to weaken self-confidence, to undercut American credibility among other peoples and other governments, and to dissolve that veneer of goodwill — a compound of truth and fable — that so effectively has smoothed the path to global dominance.
Moreover, it breeds a cynicism that spills over from the domestic scene to dealings abroad. Autocratic methods, arrogance, the loss of any capacity for empathy, the zero-sum conception of all relationships are liabilities — ones that are unsuited for an America of diminishing prowess and relative strength in a world moving rapidly in the direction of multipolarity and multilateralism.
Finally, it tends to bring to power in Washington persons whose skills have been honed for the rough-and-tumble of domestic wars rather than for statesmanlike vision and diplomacy.
Disengagement From Reality
Four: Nihilism and narcissism are a matching pair. They go together. A fluid socio-cultural environment encourages individuals to “do their own thing” without fear of opprobrium or penalty. Limits are vague, restraints weak, models that convey the unspoken message are plentiful.
The aggregation of persons so uninhibited accentuates the nihilism of society. A disengagement from reality is the outcome. In the first instance, it is a disengagement from norms and conventions. That leads to a disengagement from the objective features of the environment in which you live and act.
Disregard for the concerns of others (ignoring them or, in more extreme cases, not even recognizing that they exist); disregard for history, background, context; disengagement from tangible reality itself — ultimately disengagement from their former selves.
We are close to a condition that approximates what the psychologists call “dissociation.” It is marked by an inability to see and to accept actualities as they are for deep seated emotional reasons.
Thus, Janet Yellen is dispatched to Beijing in a futile attempt to persuade the Chinese leadership to moderate their strategy of de-dollarization, and to free American business from the Beijing government’s oversight, on the same day that the State Department warns American citizens of the risks they run by visiting China.
This in the context of an overt public campaign to undermine the Chinese economy via a campaign of boycott and embargo — e.g. denying Chinese companies the right to invest in high-tech sectors or to collaborate with American firms and arresting the CFO of Huawei.
Thus, Biden calls Chinese President Xi Jinping a “dictator” in a free associative string of insults two days after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken returns from his own trek to Beijing in a supposed effort to relax tense relations between the two rivals (in fact, of course, a short-term lowering of the temperature so as to give Washington more time to prepare its anti-China project).
Thus, Biden can declare Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Salman a “pariah” to be shunned and then goes hat-in-hand to Riyadh pleading for his cooperation in lowering spiking oil prices by increasing Saudi production.
Thus, as part of the same desperate effort he dispatches an envoy to Caracas to cajole Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to do the same — the very man the U.S. vilifies and has sought to overthrow by means unfair and foul.
Thus, the entire national security team embarks on a confrontation with Russia on Ukraine in the utterly fanciful belief that its economy will collapse like a house of cards (a gas station with nuclear weapons masquerading as a great power), and Russian President Vladimir Putin (that KGB thug) toppled, once sanctions are imposed.
Thus, the near universal conviction in Washington’s corridors of power that a better trained, equipped, and motivated Ukraine actually could win a war against Russia.
Thus, the facile assumption that you can steal hundreds of billions of Russian assets in the custody of Western financial institutions while paying scant attention to the incentive that gives other large depositors to move their liquid holdings elsewhere and to abandon the dollar.
Thus, you cavalierly blow up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline oblivious to how that act is in stark opposition to your “rules-based order” slogan.
Thus, the Biden White House bubbles with optimism as the foredoomed Prigozhin putsch in confidence that it will be a replay of Napoleon’s escape from Elba and march on Paris. In this latter cluster of cases, we see a display of willful ignorance whereby one’s wishes and desires fashion a virtual reality – a fable – that bears no relation to actual facts but is comforting and convenient.
Furthermore, the vise-like grip this attitude has on thought and policy barely loosens even as the Russian economy proves robust, when Putin is more popular and secure than ever, when Ukraine’s military is being methodically dismantled despite the West’s supplying it with vast quantities of weapons (exposed as inferior to Russia’s) and money.
This conforms exactly to the pattern of behavior that narcissistic individual evinces in their mundane individual lives.
Thus, finally, Ukraine is anointed as a flourishing democracy deserving to enter the exclusive “garden” inhabited by the virtuous – NATO & European Union. This effusion of respect for a country that is a sump of corruption, where all political parties except those of the rulers are banned, where draconian censorship has liquidated any semblance of media independence (far more repressive than in Putin’s Russia), where the mildest of dissenters are exiled or jailed, where statues are being erected to honor Stepan Bandera, the homicidal chief of the Ukrainian SS that were the Nazis’ partners in World War II.
A few, the Victoria Nulands, may know the score but cynically ignore these awkward truths as they relentlessly drive their own agenda for hegemonic control. However, most of the country’s political class who cultivate this deceit suffer from the collective fantasy that America’s nihilism fosters.
Thus, finally, there is Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky who is embraced with the starry-eyed acclaim reserved for the most fulgurant celebrities. The comedian from the Balkan Borscht Belt whose greatest prior achievement was to star in a Ukrainian soap opera where he played a befuddled Ukrainian president.
Promoted by a sleazy billionaire at a time when Petro Poroshenko was polling in the single digits, he ran as the peace candidate who promised to reconcile with Putin. Immediately upon taking office, he was strong-armed by the hard men who provide the steel and uber-nationalist dogma that sustains the post-coup regime.
He has been a remarkably successful front man. His performance is the ultimate tribute to Stanislavski method acting. Put differently, Zelensky is the consummate conman whose unabashed non-stop lying is integral to the part. Deceit becomes a way of life. Truth and falsity are indistinguishable for somebody who rejects the notion that the former has a claim to primacy — it is strictly a matter of personal preference.
This undeniable theatrical talent may qualify him for an Oscar — but his reverential embrace by the West as a hybrid Nelson Mandela/Vaclav Havel — with a dash of Churchill — provides the most compelling evidence of how total the disengagement from reality has become. Zelensky’s wholly fictitious recounting of events — or non-events — then are broadcast as Gospel Truth by complicit, believing media from New York to Melbourne; a perverse variation on the children’s game “Simon Says.”
