August 26, 2016
by Rob Urie
The political establishment in
the U.S. is rapidly moving toward a crisis of legitimacy as capitalist
democracy is exposed as a system of insider dealing where war, manufactured
social misery and environmental catastrophe are ever-more-implausibly posed as
solutions to their own facts. With growing evidence, as if any more were
needed, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton spent her time at as Secretary
of State filling the coffers of the Clinton family slush fund, the Clinton
Foundation, with the tainted money of special pleaders, despots and global
misery mongers as she went about launching wars-of-choice against some fair bit
of the planet.
While the intersection of
commerce and governance— capitalist imperialism, has long been the operating
model of America’s leadership class, the pretense of inclusion in the affairs of
state through nominal political participation provided a cleansing veil for a
citizenry toiling to produce corporate profits in exchange for the modest
give-back of living indoors and eating regular meals. More damning than
corruption, about which Americans have rarely taken issue as long as they
perceived it in their own interest, is clear delineation of class difference,
the ‘inside’ from ‘outside’ which the trade in public-private funds of Clinton
Foundation donors rendered evident.
The precise ratio of insiders
to outsiders needed to achieve national political stability through
manufactured global instability— the mission of capitalist imperialism, is soft
science under the best of circumstances. The global grift-ocracy seen
contributing to the Clinton Foundation hardly toiled for its keep outside the
tedium of being born into political power. The structure of economic
distribution seen through Foundation ‘contributors;’ oil and gas magnates,
pharmaceutical and technology entrepreneurs of public largesse, the
murder-for-hire industry (military) and various and sundry managers of social
decline, makes evident the dissociation of social production from those that
produced it.
For much of the last century
the illusion of social progress sold through the New Deal, the Great Society
and more recently through capitalist enterprise ‘freed’ from the bind of social
accountability, if not exactly from the need for regular and robust public
support, served to hold at bay the perpetual tomorrow of lives lived for the
theorized greater good of accumulated self-interest. The Clinton’s special gift
to the people— citizens, workers; the human condition as conceived through a
filter of manufactured wants to serve the interests of an intellectually, morally
and spiritually bankrupt ‘leadership’ class, lies in the social truths revealed
by their actions.
Being three or more decades in
the making, the current political season was never about the candidates except
inasmuch as they embody the grotesquely disfigured and depraved condition of
the body politic. The ‘consumer choice’ politics of Democrat versus Republican,
Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, poses the greater-evilism of an ossified
political class against the facts of its own creation now in dire need of
resolution— wars to end wars, environmental crisis to end environmental crises,
economic predation to end economic predation and manufactured social misery to
end social misery. Hillary Clinton’s roster of donors is the neoliberal
innovation on Richard Nixon’s enemies list— government as a shakedown racket
where friend or foe and policies promoted or buried, are determined by
‘donation’ status rather than personal animus.
That is most ways conservative
Republican Richard Nixon’s actual policies were far Left of those of
contemporary Democrats, including Mrs. Clinton, is testament to the ideological
mobility of political pragmatism freed from principle. The absurd misdirection
that we, the people, are driving this migration is belied by the economic power
that correlates 1:1 with the policies put forward and enacted by ‘the people’s
representatives’, by the answers that actual human beings give to pollsters
when asked and by the ever more conspicuous hold that economic power has over
political considerations as evidenced by the roster of pleaders and
opportunists granted official sees by the political class in Washington.
To state the obvious,
dysfunctional ideology— principles that don’t ‘work’ in the sense of promoting
broadly conceived public wellbeing, should be dispensable. But this very
formulation takes at face value the implausible conceits of unfettered
intentions mediated through functional political representation that are so
well disproved by entities like the Clinton Foundation. Political ‘pragmatism’
as it is put forward by national Democrats quite closely resembles the
principled opposition of Conservative Republicans through unified service to
the economic powers-that-be. That Hillary Clinton is the candidate of
officialdom links her service to Wall Street to America’s wars of choice to
dedicated environmental irresolution as the candidate who ‘gets things done.’
As historical analog, the West
has seen recurrent episodes of economic imperialism backed by state power; in
the parlance, neoliberal globalization, over the last several centuries. The
result, in addition to making connected insiders rich as they wield social
power over less existentially alienated peoples, has been the not-so-great
wars, devastations, impositions and crimes-against-humanity that were the
regular occurrences of the twentieth century. The ‘innovation’ of corporatized
militarization to this proud tradition is as old as Western imperialism in its
conception and as new as nuclear and robotic weapons, mass surveillance and
apparently unstoppable environmental devastation in its facts.
Left unstated in the
competitive lesser-evilism of Party politics is the incapacity for political
resolution in any relevant dimension. Donald Trump is ‘dangerous’ only by
overlooking how dangerous the American political leadership has been for the
last one and one-half centuries. So the question becomes: dangerous to whom?
Without the most murderous military in the world, public institutions like the
IMF dedicated to economic subjugation and predatory corporations that wield the
‘free-choices’ of mandated consumption, how dangerous would any politicians
really be? And with them, how not-dangerous have liberal Democrats actually
been? Candidates for political office are but manifestations of class interests
put forward as systemic intent.
The complaint that the Greens—
Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka, don’t have an effective political program
approximates the claim that existing political and economic arrangements are
open to challenge through the electoral process when the process exists to
assure that effective challenges don’t arise. The Democrats could have
precluded the likelihood of a revolutionary movement, Left or Right, for the
next half-century by electing Bernie Sanders and then undermining him to
‘prove’ that challenges to prevailing political economy don’t work. The lack of
imagination in running ‘dirty Hillary’ is testament to how large— and fragile,
the perceived stakes are. But as how unviable Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
are as political leaders becomes apparent— think George W. Bush had he run for
office after the economic collapse of 2009 and without the cover of ‘9/11,’ the
political possibilities begin to open up.
The liberals and progressives
in the managerial class who support the status quo and are acting as enforcers
to elect Hillary Clinton are but one recession away from being tossed overboard
by those they serve within the existing economic order. The premise that the
ruling class will always need dedicated servants grants coherent logic and
aggregated self-interest that history has disproven time and again. A crude
metaphor would be the unintended consequences of capitalist production now
aggregating to environmental crisis. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both
such conspicuously corrupt tools of an intellectually and spiritually bankrupt
social order that granting tactical brilliance to their ascendance, or even
pragmatism given the point in history and available choices, seems wildly
generous. For those looking for a political moment, one is on the way.
Click here to listen to Chris
Hedges’ interview with Rob Urie on his new book, Zen Economics, now
out in paperback
(and digital
format) from CounterPunch Books.
