Be Just As Afraid Of Democratic Establishment Propaganda As Trump Administration Propaganda

This can't last. The all-consuming blur of ridiculous information that's been lobbed our way for the past four months notwithstanding, cracks continue to appear in the larger order that are too big not to be confronted at some point. Last month a report was done proving, beyond the anecdotal evidence of the many dilapidated houses I encounter on a daily basis, that America has regressed to a third world country for the majority of the population; amid levels of societal debt bigger than that of ten years ago, the new housing bubble has entered its first stages of fraying; the behavior of Arctic weather alone in the last year veers into otherworldliness as the Trump administration does everything it can to accelerate climate change.

Yet as the most viscerally scary part of these converging disasters shows signs of its imminence, with the recent behavior of North Korea being just one of the hints a major attack on the U.S. is coming soon, the leaders and institutions that are supposed to protect us from this all have for the most part been doing anything but. Instead of preemptively fighting the spasm of military aggression and power grabs that the Trump administration will attempt when this attack happens, Democratic leaders, members of the "liberal" media, and so-called moderate Republicans have so far largely supported Trump's Syria strikes and helped confirm his most authoritarian cabinet nominees.

But this report isn't about how what passes for the political center these days is so often disappointing or lacking in principle, any more than my beef with the Democratic establishment is still about it not satisfying my ideals. In both cases, it's about how the supposed center, formerly a mere enabler of fascism and right-wing extremists, has taken on a reactionary bent of its own. And how it's looking more all the time like those beholden to the so-called Democratic Party will be the ones who make the difference in ending American democracy.

In this sequel to my similarly focused but incomplete piece from February, I'll show how the neoliberal Democrats' tactics have matched up not with those of the Trump administration, but with those of the fictional Party from 1984. I know Orwell analogies have become somewhat trite, but the reason they've been used so much is that they're based on some of the most terrifyingly keen observations about human society ever made. So get ready to do a lot of reading, as starting with the first out of my three illustrations on how the Democratic Party has become the embodiment of Orwellianism-as well as on the ghastly implications this has for the very near future.

War is Peace

The vision of the future described by Orwell during his 1949 composition of 1984 is one where, just a few years after the defeat of totalitarianism in Germany and Italy, it suddenly comes back like never before. Sometime mid-century, the novel enigmatically says, a new cabal of uniquely driven and skilled totalitarians started a powerful political movement, and then gained worldwide domination after the explosion of many nuclear bombs persuaded global leaders to hand things over to the fascists. What followed was a series of massive purges against anyone deemed a threat to the new order, the dividing of society into a meticulously maintained hierarchy with a possibly metaphorical figure named Big Brother at the top, and the creation of an infrastructure that almost totally monitored humanity's communications, movements, and thoughts, all amid a paradigm of perpetual war.

This prediction, which couldn't be considered a "prophecy" but a harsh conclusion of what humanity was capable of now that it had technologically advanced so much, was naturally not half inaccurate. Even as Orwell had written it, a circle of powerful fanatics had laid the foundations for a society whose status quo was reinforced by endless war-in 1940 business leaders met with government officials to design a new geopolitical situation where America acted as the dominant "world policeman," and where war for political and corporate profits would be easier than ever. Thus the immediate switching to new conflicts after World War II ended, and the series of almost perpetual wars that's been going on for as long as most have been alive.

And thus the attempts to normalize militarism on both the self-identified right and left. Obviously the Republican imperialists have been the most notorious propagators of enthusiasm for profit-making wars. But disturbingly unbeknownst to every Democratic Party loyalist I've tried to confront on this issue, the Democrats have been virtually identical to the GOP on foreign policy since Carter.

They've done little or nothing to reduce the insane American military budget; they've unnecessarily bombed Kosovo; they've made the difference in the number of Senate votes Bush needed to invade Iraq; they've created a horrific drone warfare program; they've escalated the war in Afghanistan to disastrous effect; they've joined part in the 2011 NATO effort to invade Libya; they've handled the outbreak of war in Syria in just about the most hawkish way possible; they've essentially started another Iraq War in impractical response to ISIS; they've doomed America to thirty years and a trillion dollars of nuclear weapons spending; and they've dropped over 26,000 bombs in 2016 alone. So their latest foreign policy project isn't any surprise.

Amid the American empire-disobedient behavior of Putin and Assad in recent years, along of course with the financial and political rewards for the Deep State a war with Russia would bring, the operators of the U.S. war machine have been waiting to instigate such a war for quite some time. This became apparent last July, when the American intelligence and media establishment's first response to the DNC email leak was to blame Russia sans any evidence-just statements that it was so.

Sure, Putin has a history of interfering in elections, and yes, he clearly favored Trump over Clinton as the former wasn't promising to start a war with Russia. But the arguments for the Deep State having made up the Russian hacking claims, when you add them up, are far stronger; by making this claim, the establishment was simultaneously deflecting from the DNC's corruption, laying the grounds for threatening Trump with impeachment should he have won, justifying McCarthyite attacks against their opponents, and kicking off their campaign for war with Russia.

And I have to hand it to them how well they've played the card. Thanks to the Russian hacking line, pro-Clinton neocons and even some compliant NATO allies have been able to use language like "Russia committed an act of war" or "we were invaded;" Obama has been able to put sanctions on Russia in the last weeks of his term; and the Deep State allies in Congress have been able to threaten Trump with fake investigations on whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the election, which Trump has naturally responded to by pleasing them with Syria strikes and attempts to prosecute WikiLeaks.

Yes, the neocons have had some good times with their "Russia hacked the election" talking point, and while Trump's capitulating to their agenda is forcing them to replace it with the similarly suspicious claim about Assad and Putin having been behind the gas attack last month, the times are sure to soon get even better.

In the last month or so, some clear signs have appeared that the start of the actual war effort is imminent. After forces have been set up by the American empire and Russia alike, the Democrats' favorite Russia conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch has kicked off the open calls for combat with the May 13 tweet advocating just that. Coupled with the CIA run Washington Post's column this week claiming it would be just too gosh darn hard to improve relations with Russia, it's clear we're one more easily Russia-blamed terrorist attack away from World War III.

When this attack happens, as evidenced by how most pro-establishment liberals supported Trump's April Syria strikes, support for this war will be stirred up among not just Republican but Democratic loyalists. And it will be the support from the latter that gives the regime justification to launch the whole affair-along, as I'll illustrate, with a lot of other things.

Freedom is Slavery

I know I shouldn't be surprised to see rank and file establishment liberals getting behind the neoliberal, authoritarian policies of their party. But I guess it's that Bernie Bro naivete of mine that makes me find the spectacle of people willingly giving up their economic and constitutional rights so baffling.

As I've illustrated by citing incidents where establishment liberals have said things like "we're always at war, what's one more?" and polls showing the vast majority of Democratic loyalists support Obama's drone terrorism, the drug war, neoliberal trade, and unconstitutional mass spying, the average loyal Democrat no longer opposes many of the most illiberal and repressive policies of our time. This isn't to mention the hostility Democratic elites have been able to incite towards heroic whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. And when looking at the origins of this shift towards authoritarian thinking on much of the supposed left, its implications for our fate come the next big terror attack look very ominous.

I'm of course talking about the normalization of approval for such policies that happened in the American consciousness post-9/11. Even ten years after the attacks, Americans were still being found to largely put security above civil liberties, and authoritarian attitudes have no doubt escalated since then with the emergence of ISIS and Trumpism. And looking back on how so many Democrats went along with the Bush administration's post-9/11 wars and power grabs when Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi endorsed them, the Trump administration's likely far worse actions after this next attack will largely have bipartisan support as well.

Already Democratic elites have been able to corral many of their followers toward backing some of Trump's ghastliest policies, like when Clinton campaign manager turned Washington Post columnist John Podesta praised the expansions of the military budget or when the supposedly left leaning major media outlets persuaded many of their viewers to back the Syria strikes. There's also the tactic the neocon propagandists have been able to use now that Bernie Sanders has become a major force of reminding their followers that those naive, sexist Bernie bros oppose such policies, compelling Democratic loyalists to support them out of spite.

Who's to say things would be different in the event of the administration trying to change the constitution post-terrorist attack, or create a Muslim registry, or something too awful to foresee? The answer, sadly, is that there's pretty much no limit any more to what Trump and Democratic loyalists alike will typically put up with from their leaders. The moral zeitgeist within both these groups has been twisted too much toward the warmongering, authoritarian, and overall Orwellian, and they can easily be expected to receive the coming calls for societal lockdown without question.

To address something everyone not in either of these groups will soon be wondering, there are some understandable reasons so many Americans have become willing to take the plunge into fascism.

Ignorance is Strength

Then again, maybe it's not so much been warmongering and authoritarian propaganda that's gotten much of the left to embrace the Deep State's policies, but efforts to simply hide the Democratic Party's Orwellian actions from its base. When confronted about their party's behavior in recent decades, I've seen Democratic loyalists deny that it happened far more often than I've seen them (at least directly) say they support it. Most alarming have been the cases where they've claimed specific misdeeds from Democratic leaders aren't real-according to the party loyalists I've met online, Obama ended the wars, mass spying stopped after Bush, Bill Clinton didn't sign NAFTA, Democrats didn't deregulate Wall Street, and the documented cases of massive voter suppression and electoral fraud in the 2016 Democratic primary are all "allegations."

The instances go on and on of top Democrats getting away with neoliberal, neocon policies by convincing their supporters that they didn't enact those policies in the first place (see the Party's historical revisionism tactic in 1984). This dynamic has been able to survive in an era where anyone could find out the true history of the Democratic Party with a half minute of searching on Google due to the tactic the neoliberal propagandists have lately taken up, of saying any online source that isn't part of the mainstream media is "fake news" and/or Russian propaganda.

Thus the declarations from every establishment liberal I've shown links proving the truth about the Democratic Party that the article I've provided is an opinion piece, is Russian lies, etc. And thus the insular attitude that's emerged within the establishment liberal groupthink towards any information challenging the status quo, as paralleled in what Orwell described as the "orthodoxy" of the Party from 1984.

And while this aggressive campaign against facts has been central in the Democratic establishment's public relations mechanisms from the start, it's gotten more fine tuned and extensive in recent years. Following the  consolidation of this country's major media outlets into a vast series of propaganda outlets for a handful of large corporations (as made possible by Clinton's 1996 Telecommunications Act), the Democratic wing of the plutocracy took a big step toward expanding its influence over public discourse in 2007: establishing, as revealed by WikiLeaks, an explicitly described echo chamber used to organize corporate Democratic politicians and media outlets around molding the sentiments of liberals as effectively as possible. Thus the seemingly lockstep nature of this movement towards war with Russia.

Then, of course, came the 2013 law quite literally legalizing psychological warfare, having allowed the CIA to send secret agents into American and foreign media and try to influence public opinion. Thus the bizarre new breeds of deception that have come our way of late, such as CNN's subliminally saying last year that it's illegal to read WikiLeaks, or the Bana Al-Abed Twitter account. The most recent effort to put control over discourse into the hands of the state has been Obama's so-called Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, to be quite possibly followed by the FCC's dismantling net neutrality and the passage of the internet freedom-imperiling TiSA deal. Even the establishment liberal-owned private companies have been participating in the war on open debate, with Facebook now suppressing sites it deems "fake news."

However far this psychological coup goes, though, it's already entered some very unsettling terrain. In direct parallel with the introduction of the Newspeak language in 1984, which was designed to make questioning the status quo linguistically impossible by limiting one's vocabulary to a few nonthreatening basic words, Democratic propagandists have lately been discouraging use of revolution-encouraging terms like Deep State and neoliberalism. Our language itself has become under attack by the forces of regression and greed, and Orwell has shown what comes next.

Then again, on the one hand things will keep getting worse. The regime's following, having grown virtually impervious to ideological threats from the outside, will continue to rally around demagogues of both the Trumpist and Clintonist kinds from within their insulated social microcosms. The state of the world outside those microcosms will continue to deteriorate as a result, with economic, environmental, and geopolitical collapses happening on a wildly unprecedented level. And those responsible for the looming calamity will continue to cling more determinedly to the status quo, employing scapegoating, conspiracy theories, and ideological reinforcement with ever more insistence and elaboration.

On the other hand, sanity will prevail. The populist left and right will decide to unite in their shared goal of taking down America's unelected power structures. This anti-establishment front will use the unprecedented potential for sharing information it now has, online censorship or not, to win the war of ideas against the already weakened and self-constrained traditional media. And despite the best efforts of the regime (which, it turns out, is supported by a solid minority of the population), a better world will emerge. Whichever happens, I'll be glad when this is gotten over with.

Dear Deep State: We're Not Going To Let You Lead Us Into War This Time

On April 6, when the newly military and intelligence establishment-assimilated President Trump attacked Syria with Tomahawk missiles in response to a chemical attack from two days earlier that Assad had allegedly orchestrated, everyone aware of the U.S. military empire's ghastly dynamics no doubt got that feeling again.

We got the sense that yes, once again, the war profiteers are going to get away with it. Yes, the primary operators of the nation's news sources will once again bombard their unwitting audience with war propaganda ranging from the blatant to the subliminal. Yes, the oil and weapons industries will once again get their donation receptacles in both parties to perpetrate attacks on ignored and/or scapegoated middle eastern communities while the feedback loop of endless counterinsurgency wars gets further perpetuated. Yes, staggering amounts of resources and lives will once again be wasted to increase the profits of corporations and increase support for the political establishment, and yes, the majority of Americans will once again believe the claim that this is all about humanitarianism or freedom.

This time it's an especially reasonable assumption to make. Since the last time we went through all the war motions in 2003, the Deep State (oops, I used the forbidden phrase) has greatly expanded its already formidable propaganda machine. The vast majority of the media we consume has become owned by 15 billionaires as just 6 companies control 90% of said media; George W. Bush admitted in 2005 that the U.S. government quietly produces videos meant for the use of news outlets; in 2013, a 1948 law was repealed which restrained the U.S. government from implementing "psy ops" to manipulate public sentiment in America and in foreign countries; and the final presidential Christmas present Obama gave to America was the creation of a program designed to suppress non-state approved ideas. If you're shocked you've never heard about any of that, well, don't be.

Under this environment, the Deep State's task of instigating war with Russia-for which the Syrian conflict is just a stepping stone to-seems beyond easy. The only reason said war's chief proponents have so far revealed their intentions merely in dark hints is that they know doing so now would rightly make them seem ludicrous, and the time will come when they can openly roll out an agenda of full-on combat with Russia. I expect the moment of shock and awe 2.0 will come after a major terrorist attack against the United States inevitably happens-an attack which the Deep State will easily be able to pin on Russia no matter who's responsible for it.

Yep, this outcome is so likely that even the Russian government, afraid as it clearly is of war with the U.S, has been preparing to defend itself from the coming onslaught of American military might since Trump's Syria strikes. I guess all we can do now is share anti-war memes on our Facebook timelines, watch Doctor Strangelove to save our ability to laugh when the inevitable occurs, and hope this next American war doesn't get quite so out of hand that it's the last one.

Or at least that's the way it's going to happen on paper.

It turns out that while the oligarchy has done an impressive job of consolidating and empowering its mechanisms to influence people's minds since 2003, the people themselves have gained abilities to counter the establishment's propaganda that more than compensate. I'm of course talking about the internet, which has gained more than a hundred million users in the U.S. since 2003 along with the revolutionary idea sharing tool of social media. Also, due in part to the mainstream media's shamefully power serving behavior in the run up to the Iraq War, trust in the corporate news outlets is now a qualifiably fringe phenomenon while reliance on independent news sources has relatively exploded.

Okay, some are no doubt thinking, now we have more gadgets. How's that going to stop a war machine that's been going strong for two hundred years? To prove the power of the internet in the year 2017, I'll review an overlooked chapter in that saga of McCarthyite war propaganda Russiagate: following half a year of constant assertions from Russian war propagandists, based on no evidence, that Putin's hackers gave WikiLeaks the DNC emails, a January 2017 poll came out showing over 60% of Americans were falling for this objectively implausible claim.

And then, after I and other independent journalists, particularly the fantastic Glenn Greenwald, frequently spread the fact that the proof for Russian hacking simply isn't there, a poll came out in March saying just 50% of Americans believed the claims. Happy epilogue: given how the corporate media has mostly given up on Russiagate since April 6, a poll for that issue from this month would likely show a solid minority of Americans are buying that Russia was behind the leaks.

That's right, through typing away at keyboards, we've been able to convince possibly tens of millions of Americans not to side with the establishment on an issue that (formerly) represented the main case for going to war with Russia. And the fact that the argument for war has consequentially shifted to the similarly dubious claim of Putin having known about the April 4 chemical attack in advance shouldn't daunt us a bit; we clearly have the ability to dramatically swing public opinion away from the Deep State's favor.

Okay, now The New York Times doesn't need to acknowledge a claim is false for the majority of Americans to do so. How's that going to stop an oligarchy whose war plans clearly don't hinge on what the public thinks? The war's supporters within the government, after all, won't have to worry about their unpopular actions getting them voted out if they can eliminate democracy itself-something they'll very easily be able to do when the mentioned terrorist attack occurs. Well expect it or not, here's where it gets really encouraging.

The amazing Caitlin Johnstone illustrated what I mean in her March 22 rhetorical expose of the Deep State:

Not that long ago, the ruling class dominated their subjects by simply forbidding dissent on pain of torture and death. The trouble with this was that it invariably led to public resentment, which expends a lot of energy and runs the risk of winding up on the business end of a guillotine blade. The great Noam Chomsky once wrote that the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum, and that is exactly what has happened. The proles are given the illusion that they have every freedom within reason, while their opinions are being deliberately manipulated every single day and their spectrum of acceptable ideas is being artificially limited. This has created a very energy efficient system of domination, where all new income can be funneled to the plutocrats who rule the nation while the unwashed masses who turn the gears of their machine slowly choke to death under the burden of the Walmart economy. 

Luckily the internet is rapidly expanding the available spectrum of public opinion, and the ruling elites cannot shut it down without forever shattering the energy efficient illusion of freedom that they’ve worked so hard to establish.

So there you go. If the Russian war's proponents try to keep up their charade of democracy, the people will exploit the loopholes for dissent that this method has and stage a internet and alternative media-aided revolution. If the oligarchy decides to clamp down and outlaw freedom of expression, an ultimately similar kind of revolt will ensue. Either way the Deep State's hopes for an extended or even existing war with Russia are doomed to failure. And as Johnstone has also illustrated, given the  overwhelming opposition towards military conflict among members of the armed forces and Americans in general, the idea of people simply refusing to go along with the ruling class' orders to fight is already looking within reach.

For now, keep up those social media posts about things like the laughable absurdity of the official narrative on last month's Syrian chemical attack. Keep donating to causes like Tulsi Gabbard's campaign for peace. It's seemingly little things like these that could very well spoil the oligarchy's plans for war with Russia, not to mention take down the oligarchy altogether.

For Democratic Elites, "The Resistance" Isn't About Saving The Country-It's About War

We all knew it was coming. The buildup to it had been happening for months-years, in fact, if you counted the whole history of this drama. But when the inevitable did at last appear, it felt no less shocking and appalling than in any other case for the fairly small minority of Americans who disapproved of it. On March 4, 2021, the new president has announced the U.S. is now planning to send forces into Russia.

Some have seen this coming for a lot longer than others. For many on the far left and the far right-who, it turns out, have a lot more in common than it would appear-expectations of something like this happening have been experienced for as long as four-and-a-half years ago, when establishment Democrats started doing to their opponents what Republicans used to do to them and went on a relentless Red-baiting campaign. In this case, the Red Scare was based on the still unsubstantiated claim that Putin's hackers gave WikiLeaks the DNC emails. From there on things only got crazier.

By mid-winter, Obama was spending the last weeks of his term using the at that point religiously accepted "Russia hacked the election" narrative to push sanctions onto Russia while the beloved gang of late-night liberal comedians made really ha-ha funny jokes about taking this feud with Russia further. By spring 2017, top Democrats were blatantly saying they wanted war with Russia, a development that was shortly followed by NATO allies starting to express similar sentiments. As the Russia rhetoric coming from establishment Democrats, anti-Trump neocons, and Deep State officials grew more and more unhinged, so did the conspiracy theories they used to justify it. When the great economic crash of 2017 happened, many of the leaders in the pre-war effort tried to deflect attention from the fact that the crisis was largely the fault of Obama by claiming it was the result of Putin's trying to "sabotage the American economy." By the time much of the pro-Trump fervor following the terrorist attack of 2017 died down, some of them even tried to link the attack to Putin. All the way through, much of the American population accepted this 21st century Cold War propaganda, and the theoretical war's supporters only grew going into the 2020 election.

Hillary Clinton's victory over Trump in 2020 was as narrow and unexpected as her defeat had been in 2016. Having become the Democratic nominee only because of the massive voter suppression and electoral fraud perpetrated by pro-Clinton primary election officials as had been the case in 2016, she'd always appeared to be an even weaker candidate than she'd been the last time around. The one factor behind her coming-from-behind victory, it seemed, was the fact that she and her supporters had run the most rabidly McCarthyite campaign imaginable, which motivated the at that point solid majority who wanted war with Russia to come to the polls. And now, after a month-and-a-half of president Clinton laying the final foundations for this war with sanctions and quiet deployments of NATO forces close to Russia, she's finally done what we've all come to quietly expect. Americans may not have much money these days, or much more time where oil is easily accessible, or hope for a stable climate, but at least they now have an entertaining show to watch.

Dystopian essay concluded. I'm of course not saying this is exactly how I think the next four years will unfold, or that Hillary Clinton will be the one to usher the war in if it does happen (though that's a real possibility), or that things won't go completely the other way. But I am saying that as the members of the Deep State, the Democratic leadership, and the corporate media continue to assess their priorities for the Trump era, this is certainly the kind of future that they intend to bring about. And the so-called resistance movement is their most valuable tool for realizing that future.

We'd all like to think the current dynamic is a contest between the Trump regime and the Trump regime's noble, rightly unified opposition. If that were the case, things would be simple for those who want to avert the nation's slouch into fascism at the hands of Trump and Friends; all we'd have to do is get behind the Resistance movement, and everything would be fine. The complex truth, though, is that there's currently a quiet effort to divert the energy of the anti-Trump movement into something that could very well ultimately create something just as dangerous as a Trump Reich: a full scale war between Russia and the United States.

Anyone who's been paying much attention to the recent actions of the non-Trump forces within the American centers of power can tell they're preparing for a new war with Russia. Half the country believed Russia and the U.S. were heading for conflict in Gallup's latest poll on the matter, and that survey was taken a full year ago, before the breakout of this "Russia hacked the election" business. If that poll were taken now, well above 50% would no doubt think war with Russia is coming, and a significant faction among them would likely approve of this. All of what I said in the second and third paragraphs of this piece preceding the mention of a 2017 economic crash is true, with those in the coalition that's formed between establishment Democrats, Deep State officials, and much of the major media amid the rise of Trump having been engaging in an unsettling campaign of Red baiting. And this campaign resembles an all-out war effort more all the time. Such a war would be very profitable for these forces, both financially and politically, and they're going to be spending these next three-and-a-half years exploiting every bit of the public's righteous anti-Trump sentiment with the goal of building support for this project.

The propaganda they've employed in the effort to do so has been both frightening and amusing. They've created something of a buffer to protect their supporters from finding out their true motives by often strongly implying that any news sources outside of the corporate media's neoliberal Democrat echo chamber are run by Kremlin operatives. They've used every means reality provides them to try to draw a link between the Democratic establishment's opponents and Russia. They've in some cases, like the one pictured above, gotten rank-and-file individuals to become outraged at their baseless McCarthyite claims instead of the real problems our country is facing.

Speaking of which, these threats posed by the Trump regime-elevated militarism, increasing racial and economic inequality, climate change, expanded government authority to survey, punish, and censor citizens-are not the concern of these "resistance" leaders. All of these things have very much been perpetrated or endorsed by the Democratic Party, the Deep State, and the corporate media, and when they claim to be standing in solidarity with the cause of climate, labor, civil libertarian, and human rights activists who represent the truly productive aspect of the Resistance, it of course isn't genuine. Paul Street assesses the real problems these figures have with Trump in his piece The Deep State's Hatred Of Trump Is Not The Same As Yours:

"The establishment’s contempt for the orange-haired beast, I noted [in a past article on this subject], was different. The nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire were perfectly willing to live with most, if not all, of what the left hated about Trump. After all, I reasoned, they’d been backing or tolerating most or all of those terrible things under presidents from both major United States parties for decades. Trump, I wrote, faced ruling-class disdain because he was considered bad for transnational capital and the American empire. For the most part, the 'deep state' masters who backed Hillary Clinton did not appreciate The Donald’s blustering promises to roll back the neoliberal 'free trade' agenda in the name of the forgotten working class. The foreign policy and 'national security' establishment especially hated his criticism of Washington’s long march toward war with Russia. They did not relish the related threat Trump posed to Brand America. It is longstanding, bipartisan, U.S. ruling-class doctrine that this country is the world’s great beacon and agent of democracy, human rights, justice and freedom. American reality has never matched the doctrine, but smart rulers knew that it would be especially difficult to align those claims with a president like Trump."

Furthermore, as Counterpunch's Chris Floyd observes after criticizing the joke about war with Russia that I mentioned earlier, these figures aren't even truly at odds with Trump: "See how ha-ha funny that is? Especially from the funny ha-ha folks at SNL — who paid Trump to be the host of their show while he was conducting the most racist, hateful political campaign in modern American history. They normalized his hatred, they gave him a national platform to show he was an all-right guy with a sense of humor, no big threat, no big deal. They normalized him, lionized him, helped him reach millions of people who pay little attention to the news. Now, of course, they’re 'leading the resistance' with 'cutting-edge comedy' — Alec Baldwin puckering his lips and fawning on a shirtless Putin — and with really funny ha-ha stuff like saying Trump should totally be more like that gutsy Hitler guy and 'take on Russia.' Meanwhile, Trump and his minions and the Congressional extremists are already rolling back every law and regulation they can lay their hands on in a slavering frenzy to poison the earth, remove all restrictions on corporate rapine, strip millions of health care, roll back decades of hard-fought civil rights advances, double the military budget and build a Berlin Wall on the Mexican border. It’s a full-bore Barbarossa on the wellbeing and common good of the American people (and the world) — but who cares about that? According to the funny ha-ha guys at SNL — and practically the entire Democratic Party and the so-called liberal media — what Trump should really be doing is 'taking on Russia.'"

In short, if you think this picture is as simple as us, the military and intelligence communities, the major media, the Democratic Party, all those wonderful late-night liberal comics, and that similarly lovable George W. Bush against the Trump regime, you're being taken for a dangerous ride. As I've said before, Trump needs these figures to keep up his charade of being an admirable enemy of the establishment, and these figures need Trump to keep up their ruse of being noble protectors of a sane order. Trump, in his usual carelessness, has even blown the cover multiple times on this symbiotic relationship of theirs by tweeting last year that he would rather run against Hillary Clinton than Bernie Sanders, and then having tweeted last week that he couldn't be happier for the Republican Party now that the neoliberal Tom Perez has been appointed DNC chair. So it's a surprise that about half the left and most of the right still doesn't seem to recognize what's really going on here.

Given that, a U.S.-Russia war isn't the only kind of conflict Democratic elites want to perpetuate-they also stand to gain from a largely theatrical war between themselves and the Trumpists. The staged scuffle between Republicans and Democrats that the oligarchy until recently used to protect its interests has escalated into a war between neo-fascists and sleazy, warmongering neocons. And since the conflict between the Trumpists and the Clintonists is a lot more evenly matched than it appears, with the former camp able to gain a lot more political leverage through terrorist attacks and wars with countries other than Russia, this war could continue for a while, possibly until two election cycles from now. Because by then, the oligarchs who profit from all these wars could very well be forced to retreat into the luxury survival bunkers that many of them are creating for themselves after their half-century long quest for more collapses society as we know it.

The encouraging thing we can take out of all this is that the oligarchy-benefiting war between Republicans and Democrats has been escalated for a reason. The plutocrats are taking notice amid the populist uprisings that have appeared in the recent years, and they're desperate to divert the energy of these movements away from the direction of defeating the neoliberal order. Through determined efforts to resist the war efforts mentioned, we can unite not just the Sandersist left but pretty much all of the 99.9% around the goal of taking away the power of the corporate and deep states. We can set the country in a better direction. But to do so, we'll need to understand the war-related obstacles that are being put in front of us.