America’s Elections: Brace for Impact!

By Bob Travica

Mayday, mayday, a big bang is coming up as America is crash-landing on the upcoming elections day, when a new President and Congress are to be decided, and the world should brace for impact! Why? Because there is going to be a huge mess regardless of who'll win the Oval Office and Capitol Hill.

If the Democratic party runner Kamala Harris wins, the Republican opponent Donald Trump will set in motion what he’s already consistently rehearsed since the last 2020 election he lost: an adamant denial alleging that the election was “rigged“. If Trump wins, he’ll start large-scale revenge against everyone who impeached him, sent him to courts of law, and criticized him in the past four years, and he'll try to dismantle constitutional order. In both cases, law enforcement, security structures as well as armed groups of citizens, and spontaneous crowds will act, disrupting public safety and business as usual.

A disastrous crash in American society seems inevitable with unforeseen consequences. Let me put forward a scary one: civil war-like developments may unfold.

Irreconcilable Divisions

American society has been characterized by deepening rifts for a good part of the 21^st century. The economic divisions that lingered throughout the 1990s erupted in the 2011 Occupy movement led by the economically disadvantaged majority (the alleged 99-percenters juxtaposed to the super-wealthy one percent of Americans). It was a powerful earthquake that capped tectonic changes in the global economy unleashed by globalization, which lured capital to economies in transition (China, Indochina, India, East Europe) and disrupted American labor markets (less demand, smaller pay). [1] The impoverishment of the masses, a staggering loan burden on individuals, homelessness, and unaffordable health care occupied the minds of various streams of the Occupy movement. In the end, a few years later, the movement dissolved, and capitalism survived, but not without a financial rescue by the government and the workings of security forces. Dissatisfaction with income inequality and with key institutions (banks, government, big corporations) remained.

If this economic hardship applied equally to American working people regardless of their ideological orientation, the election of the first President with African roots did not. Old political and cultural divisions resurfaced and new ones erupted. White supremacists revived racist traditions born with America’s primal sin of slavery (granted, inherited from the British colonial period). Battling the legacy of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, reviving old fears of the Anglo-Saxon majority, and adding new conspiracy theories like the “great replacement” (allegedly, non-whites systematically replace whites across the globe). [2] All this intoxicated the public space.

The anti-racist Americans pushed back. Still, both camps used the black race roots and appearance of President Obama to their advantage: Supremacists strived to prove a growing “disenfranchisement”, whereas anti-racists strived to prove the truism that a black person can run the highest office in the country. The adversaries blew the same horn even though Obama’s mother was a white woman, and so he is half white and half black (fathered by a Kenyan immigrant). It appears that the uniting potential of his half/half background was in nobody’s interest in the nation focused on emphasizing differences rather than similarities.

The divide over the racial issue indeed characterizes the main division in American society today between conservatives and liberals, represented in the Republican and Democratic parties. The conservative camp embraces racist ideas, anti-abortion (“pro-life”) laws, unrestrained gun rights (purchase, own, carry, expose), creationism and closer ties between religion and education, opposing the LGTBQ exposure, strict law and order, and restrictive immigration policies. Liberals hold diametrically opposed views. And then comes Mr. Trump to foment the disintegration of the social fabric.

Crowdsourcing Political Power

The former President/the second-term hopeful belongs to the conservative camp but that’s only by pragmatic necessity. Trump is no ideologist and could go along with any party that feeds his interests if not the party he’d establish (an option he’s tinkered with). He is no politician either, despite riding wildly through the political circus for about a decade. If politics is an art of reconciling different interests and aggregating them into feasible governance decisions and practices, Trump isn’t there. Rather, he’s still a hard-handed business owner who views the whole country as his own business he can rule at whim.

Trump understands that managing by a stick-and-carrot method works in national politics as in organizational politics. He’s been assured so with taking over the Republican Party years ago and reassured he’s still controlling the party even after losing the election after his first term in Office, getting impeached twice in the House, and being sued multiple times for various offenses and crimes. However, Trump is still missing the differences between business and the political sphere. Society is a few orders of magnitude beyond a business firm in terms of players, interests, tactics and strategies, fight-and-flight developments, chance events, etc. Not even the largest corporation matches society in complexity. The implication is that autocratic governance of a country isn’t the same as running a centralized company. At least, an extensive mechanism of state oppression must be kept in motion to rule over citizens’ minds and bodies and contending power circles, which indeed happened in 20th-century Europe and elsewhere.

What in particular feeds Trump’s wings are his MAGA followers (Make America Great Again) – the  Trumpists, his devoted voting machine, and partly the recruitment basis for street fighters that showed up during his rule and finally stormed Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. Make no mistake of equating MAGA supporters with conservatives. For example, Trump’s Vice President Pence is a conservative but no MAGA supporter. Trumpists share conservative values and add some more. They are for strengthening the police, protectionism, isolationism, and leaning toward an authoritarian attitude and a strong leader. Trumpists uncritically buy every word of their leader, including the denial of lost 2020 elections and numerous conspiracy theories (e.g., Covid-deniers, anti-vaxxers). They ardently follow him as if he’s a cult leader, filling his rallies, spreading his word through social media, and following his marching orders to intimidate opponents if not inflict worse damage. If Trump takes aim at the institutions of the republic, the balance between legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government, and even regular elections, MAGA will follow all this obediently.

Trumpists originated in the U.S. and spread to Canada, Latin America, Europe, and possibly elsewhere. I was shocked to face such people outside North America, who babbled about Trump’s messianic role in fighting evil across the world. In the U.S., typical MAGA supporters are older, retired, Christian, men, earning income at the lower middle-class level; about 30% have at least a college degree. [3] We could see former marines and police officers among violent protesters on January 6, 2021. But there are also supporters with higher academic degrees and prestigious jobs, and they are spread across the country. These insights undermine the belief that MAGA is confined to the blue-collar and rural populations.

Trumpism is a populist movement, where the leader crowdsources political power, to use the contemporary management term. A billionaire who pretends to be in the same boat as ordinary people by using various rhetorical tools. [4] The man whose hairstyling costs more than the annual salary of his typical supporter, gets under their skin by speaking simply, showing anger and hate straightly as simple guys do, mocking the political machinery in D.C. as if speaking their mind, promising to defend them against “deep state” (the usual evil suspect) as well as immigrants that take their jobs and even “eat their home pets”, assuring them of material wellbeing he’ll bring to bear and a mythical resurgence of the golden past…

He leverages this crowd-controlling power to gain support in the Republican Party and silence the traditional conservatives. Power over the masses is the reason why that party has clung to Trump despite his losses, legal troubles, and the demonstrated and still promised undermining of the American Constitution and Republic. Democrats warn about this by portraying Trump as a threat to democracy and national unity but in vain: MAGA refuses to listen, the Republican Party lost its identity, and others either don’t make sense or don’t care. Does the other side really want a democratic republic and one united nation, as liberals assume?

Civil War Prospects

Calling out civil war may sound like a pessimistic exaggeration. The term is usually associated with the war between the Union and Confederate states in the 1860s. But a hundred years later, the Civil Rights Movement and protests against the Vietnam War unfolded over the years, with violence on city streets involving opposed groups as well as establishment defenses. Half a century later, the Black Lives Matter movement arose and culminated in 2020 due to revealed cases of police brutality. It coupled with ongoing street brawls between leftist and rightist violent, armed groups. These events resemble civil war acts, even though they may not fit the orthodox definition of such a war. The upcoming elections will surely follow suit and may trigger something worse.

The ball is in Trump’s yard. If he loses, he’ll just continue to deny the regularity of elections and repeat doggedly that he won. The “Stop the Steal” protests will reemerge, lawsuits get reenacted, protesters fill the streets, right-wing armed groups awake, their leftist counterparts respond, election officials be threatened, the police and FBI become very busy, and so on. The final counting of electoral votes could be accompanied again by rampant violence. The traffic, commerce, work, education, and whole public life could be derailed for a significant period. Timing of disruptive developments could be tricky to predict so that there’s a calm before the storm (as in an old song).

Should Trump win, he’ll start to rule by pardoning himself and his supporters for various misdeeds they committed. Then, he’ll unleash a large-scale revenge against everyone who impeached him in the House, supported the impeachment in the Senate (although it didn’t pass), accused him in courts of law, and criticized him in the past four years. He’ll install loyalists in federal law enforcement institutions and the military, grab more executive powers, and fill again the innermost power circle with his family members and sycophants. Most of the mainstream media (he calls (“fake news”) will be sidelined and pressured. Tracking down undocumented immigrants and mass deportations will unfold. Enter his possible tinkering with the Constitutional right to vote, having in mind the dream of every dictator to obscure and eventually disable it. (He promised the MAGA crowd to alleviate them of the voting burden after this election.) This grave scenario might be somewhat moderated by a prospective Democrat majority in the House/Senate. Still, the American political system already skewed toward executive power will provide a broad basis for monarchic rule. Serious consequences would follow for large parts of the world as well, but that’s another topic.

 Brace for impact!

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228341417_Informing_in_the_Flat_Rough_World_Balancing_Globalization_Gone_Awry

[2] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2022/05/17/racist-great-replacement-conspiracy-theory-explained

[3] https://sites.uw.edu/magastudy/demographics-group-affinities/

[4] https://www.eurasiareview.com/03112024-trumpist-conservatism-how-it-differs-from-classical-american-conservatism-analysis/

NATO 2024 Summit: Rampant Hypocrisy

 By Bob Travica

The NATO 75^th annual summit occurred on July 9-11, 2024 in Washington D.C., USA. The war in Ukraine, which has been running since February 2022, dominated the agenda. The war in Gaza, which started in October 2023, wasn’t on the agenda. Around 11,000 civilians died in Ukraine, and at least three times that number in Gaza. The former started with Russia’s response to NATO’s advancement to its borders, and the latter began with Israel’s reaction to small-scale attacks on Israel proper by fighters from Gaza (two million strong Palestinian territory within Israel, which Israel sealed from the land and sea). Russia’s war is against Ukraine’s policies of endangering Russia’s borders, while Israel’s war is against the entire Gaza population (not just the Hamas government’s military) whom most Israelis deem a lower race and terrorists. Russia wants a neutral Ukraine, whereas Israel wants an ethnically cleansed Gaza for Israeli settlers. There are accusations of Israel being an apartheid state by many, including free-thinking Israelis, as well as genocide allegations. But these alarming characteristics of the Gaza war didn’t compel NATO to put it on the agenda. Neither did the similarities between these two wars.

[ “NATO calls out the U.S., as the decisive enabler of Israel’s war on Gaza, to cease all material and political support to Israel’s war effort.” 

The NATO declaration could've read like this, had Gaza been on the agenda,         but it was not. ]

Both the Ukrainian and Israeli governments are backed by the Western powers, most notably the U.S. Both get Western weaponry, surveillance on the battlefield, military training, etc. Neither war would be possible to sustain for longer without the support of NATO countries. Therefore, they could make an impact on the Gaza war should they wish so. Moreover, both wars destabilize large geographical and geopolitical spaces, pose significant security threats, and violate the values alleged by NATO (peace, freedom, stability, democracy, rule of law). Still, NATO remained mute on the Gaza problem as there’s no single cite of “Gaza” or “Israel” in the summit’s declaration (https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_227678.htm). Abundant shouting and rambling about Ukraine happened beside the elephant in the room with the inscription “Gaza”. The aging military alliance chose to celebrate its jubilee in furnishings of smoke and mirrors, covered by hellish-red domes.

Peons on the Eastern Flank

No observer has paid attention to the racial dimension in the Ukrainian war. Russia is the largest Slavic nation (144 million), and Ukraine is the third (38 million). In between lies Poland (40 million) which plays a major role in NATO’s eastward expansion and support to the Kyiv government. In this war, the West succeeded in turning the second and third-largest Slavic nations against the largest one. This is important because there are differences in decision-making stemming from cultural differences between Slavs and Western races (Germanic and Latin).

Roughly speaking, an elevated emotionality outweighing rational reasoning pushes Slavs toward extreme decisions. Specifically, Ukrainian officials don’t balk at the prospect of dragging the world into an all-out war in order to beat Russia; in fact, they invite this! Getting Ukraine into NATO at wartime, would mean that 32 NATO countries would have to come to rescue, no matter that this would most likely cause a devastating nuclear war that would first wipe out Ukraine itself. This standpoint isn’t just irrational but it borders with an intelligence insufficiency.

Enter Poland. It shows eagerness to fight Russians by all means, for example as being the top dog in the American push toward an integrated NATO missile defense system. Throughout its history, Poland had been sandwiched between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and parts of it were chopped off. So, Poles’ animosity toward the conquering powers was coming in tides. It was turned against Germany which started WWII by attacking and occupying Poland (1939-1945). As Germany lost the war, sympathy turned toward Russians/Soviets who defeated Germans. Poland’s capital was promoted into the formal center of the military alliance of the Eastern block of communist countries: In 1949, the Warsaw Pact was established in response to the formation of NATO. But the period until the disbanding of the Eastern Block germinated an animosity against the former liberators, who over time came to be viewed as occupiers. Since the 1990s, the Polish tide of animosity targeted Russia, while the West (including Germany) was embraced across the board (economy, geopolitics, popular culture, military strategy). A desire for “revenge” against Russia became the backdrop to Poland’s foreign policy and is visible to the naked eye in Poland.

Note that Poland holds grudges against Ukraine due to some territorial disputes and still vivid memories of atrocities that Ukrainian Nazis, serving under the German flag, committed against Poles in WWII. But it appears willing to neglect this temporarily for the sake of the larger vengeful cause. Similarly to Ukraine, it appears that Poland is awaiting the U.S. cavalry to come and deal justice by killing the big bad bear. To the extent that Poland would be targeted by Russia’s nuclear arsenal early on in a war between NATO and Russia, Poland’s decisions aren’t less irrational than Ukraine’s. (Or they may be an effect of film-binging westerns after decades of deprivation.)

Ave, Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant

What about Russia? It certainly fits the Slavic emotional pack: the culture of protecting the grand motherland has been meticulously nurtured across generations of Russians. Even Stalin, a Georgian by nationality, understood that when his propaganda machinery crunched slogans of defending the Russian motherland against Germans in WWII rather than the Soviet Union or communism. There’s no better way to consolidate the Russian nation into a formidable fighting force than with the help of a real foreign threat; Mongols, Swedes, French, and Germans know a thing or two about this. The more NATO presses against Russia’s borders, the more it plays into the hands it tries to cut off.

Cold-blooded decision-makers in NATO’s decision rooms know how to account for nationalistic sentiments in decision-making. In the familiar divide and conquer approach, such a sentiment is an instant yeast for fomenting problems and providing self-serving solutions for them. Eager ears and willing bodies of executioners are ready, awaiting marching orders. Those ready to die are greeting you, Cezar! Cezar of our days, the aged Yankee, who’s six years older than NATO, demonstrated at the NATO summit how he still draws fatal Cold Warrish energy from sending young men to die on the battlefield.

And so, the NATO summit dropped the topic of the devastating war in Gaza, since the master said so. However, it poked China for being “a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine through its so-called ‘no limits’ partnership and its large-scale support for Russia’s defence industrial base.” NATO even dared to call out China “to cease all material and political support to Russia’s war effort.” Had Gaza been on the Summit’s agenda, the NATO declaration could also read something like this: “NATO calls out the U.S., as the decisive enabler of Israel’s war on Gaza, to cease all material and political support to Israel’s war effort.”

The key conclusion of NATO’s summit is the promise to Ukraine that it’s on an “irreversible path” to future NATO membership. Ukraine is dissatisfied as there is no clear timetable for this promise, which is actually 20 years old. In fact, there has always been a timetable: Keep fighting against Russia until you reach the line where you fall dead (“deadline”, as ordinary people call it). Too cynical? No, just realistic: Only while being outside NATO can Ukraine be manipulated as an obedient fighting peon to keep straining and weakening Russia. Therefore, the US/NATO will keep fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian. 

As for the Kyiv regime, it can only hope that NATO will continue footing the war bill indefinitely or get tricked somehow to finally engage fully in the war. In any case, such a decimated Ukraine would eventually not be militarily worthy for inclusion in NATO. As for the democratic, economic, and security reforms required again for the membership, the road can even be much longer. It is no secret that Ukraine shares the destiny of the corrupted countries in East Europe, characterized by a strange mix of state, business, and organized crime structures. Therefore, the deadline for joining NATO is practically - never! It would be beneficial for Ukrainians, who awfully suffer, that their government start thinking realistically and cutting losses before these become unbearable. 

The 75^th NATO summit confirmed its historical roots – it’s an instrument of the American empire for holding Europe in a semi-colonial status. The degree of servitude Euro members exhibited by dropping the Gaza topic proves this. Israel is in Europe's backyard and wars in the Middle East endanger Europe's security. The summit also confirmed a newer principle set with the cessation of the Cold War, when NATO transformed into a hot war-mongering alliance. Isn’t this 75^th anniversary also the 25^th anniversary of NATO’s first war of aggression on a sovereign country, FR Yugoslavia? That’s when champions of the New World Order trampled over the international law and global security guaranteed by the United Nations, and imposed an “order” based on “rules” (the champions’ arbitrary decisions). At that point, the history wheel was turned back to the Middle Ages because the master could sue you, and the master could judge and sentence you.

Vivere mori! Live and die much faster with NATO as a custodian of international security.