During
the George W Bush administration it was popular in conspiracy circles to speculate that events might be
orchestrated which would allow the Bush family to complete a coup against the
US Constitution and hold on to power indefinitely.
Such
paranoia and suspicion of government power in the wake of the extraordinary
post-9/11 advancements in Orwellian surveillance programs and unprecedented
military expansionism were perfectly understandable, but predictions that the
younger Bush would not cede power at the end of his second term proved
incorrect. In today’s hysterical Trump-centric political environment we now
see mainstream voices in mainstream outlets openly advancing the same conspiratorial speculations about
the current administration, and those will prove incorrect as well.
What these paranoid presidential prognostications get wrong is not
their extreme suspicion of government, but their assumption that America’s real
power structures require a certain president to be in place in order to advance
depraved totalitarian agendas. As anyone paying attention knows, intense
suspicion of the US government is the only sane position that anyone can
possibly have; the error is in
assuming that there is no mechanism in place to ensure that the same agendas
carry forward from one presidential administration to the next.
Schiff
dwelling on the fact that Trump departed from the talking points prepared for
him by national security officials so he could act “contrary to official US
policy,” which is to “deter Russian adventurism.” Glad to know even the
president is not permitted to change US policy
—
Michael Tracey (@mtracey) January 23, 2020
In a sense, the conspiracy theories about a
Bush coup were actually correct: the Bush administration didn’t truly
end. All of its imperialist, power-serving agendas remained in place and were
expanded under the apparent oversight of the following administration. The same
thing happened after the Obama administration, and the same thing–whether in
2021 or 2025–will happen after the Trump administration. The disturbing fact of
the matter is that if you ignore election dates and just look at the numbers
and raw data of US government behavior over the years, you can’t really tell
who is president or which political party is in power at any given point in
time.
The
mechanism which ensures the perpetuation of the same policies from
administration to administration used to be referred to by analysts as the
“deep state”, back before Trump and his supporters hijacked that term and began
using it to essentially mean something like “Democrats and anyone who doesn’t
like Trump”. Originally the term deep
state referred not to one political party, nor to some shadowy
cabal of Illuminati or Satanists or reptilians, but to the simple and
undeniable fact that unelected power structures exist and tend to influence
America’s official elected government. It wasn’t a conspiracy
theory, it was a concept used in political analysis to
describe how US government agencies and plutocrats form loose alliances with
each other and with official Washington to influence government policy and
behavior.
It is inevitable that such a permanent second government would
exist in the current iteration of the United States, if you think about it.
It’s impossible to have a globe-spanning empire of the sort America now has
without long-term plans spanning years or decades for securing control of world
resources, undermining rivals, securing more compliant allies, and ensuring
military and economic hegemony. If the US were a normal nation which simply
minded its own affairs, a permanent government wouldn’t be necessary. But
because it isn’t, one is.
I very seldom use the term
deep state anymore, because its meaning in mainstream discourse has been
completely corrupted. Now
when I want to point to America’s permanent unelected power structures I
usually use the word
“oligarchy” or “empire”, or simply “establishment”.
This
is why I haven’t been especially focused on the US presidential race, despite
the Democratic primaries hitting fever pitch intensity. While I believe the
race can be a useful tool for forcing establishment propagandists to expose
themselves (virulent “never Trump” neocon Bret Stephens just came out in support
of Trump if the Democratic nominee is anyone to the left of
Pete Buttigeig, for example), the
result of the 2020 election isn’t going to change a whole hell of a lot.
This might be a bit offensive to both Trump supporters and Sanders
supporters, but it’s true.
Whenever
I point out that the current administration has been advancing many longstanding agendas of the CIA and
neoconservative war pigs–agendas like military expansionism, imprisoning
Assange, regime change interventionism in Iran and Venezuela, and reigniting
the Cold War–his supporters always come in saying “If he’s working for the establishment
how come the establishment is working so hard to get rid of him, huh?”
Well, for starters, they’re
not. Nobody who can count Senate seats believes Trump will be removed from
office in the current impeachment sideshow, and everyone who understood
Russiagate knew it was going to dead-end at nothing. If they really wanted
Trump gone they wouldn’t be pussyfooting around with a bunch of kayfabe combat
that they know will never hurt him. Obviously he wasn’t the preferred 2016
choice of certain factions within the establishment, but there are mechanisms in place to ensure
that the empire can tick right along with a less-than-ideal president in the
White House.
This
will also hold true if Sanders miraculously makes his way through another
rigged primary, and then through whatever sabotage gets thrown his way in the
general election. Sure he might be able to sign a few somewhat beneficial
executive orders and we probably wouldn’t see him flirting with an Iran war,
but US imperialism will march on more or less unimpeded and
his popular progressive domestic policies would require congress to
successfully implement. At best he’d be a mild reformer who uses the bully
pulpit to help spread awareness while being narrative managed on all sides by
the billionaire media, and any changes he manages to squeak through which
inconvenience the establishment at all will be reversed by a subsequent
administration.
Huge
anti-government protests happening now in Iran? Russia? Hong Kong?
So it
won’t be plastered everywhere across mainstream media. #YellowVests#GiletsJaunes #greve25janvier pic.twitter.com/Uss6beX54N
—
Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) January 25, 2020
Obviously the establishment would
rather have someone in the White House who doesn’t constantly put an ugly face on the empire by
accidentally exposing its mechanics all the time as
Trump does, and obviously it would rather have an incompetent oaf like Trump in
office than someone who actively points out the evils of oligarchy and
imperialism like Sanders. But the establishment which runs the
US-centralized empire is not afraid of Trump, and it is not afraid of Sanders.
It’s afraid of you.
The unelected power
establishment has ways of ensuring its dominance amid the comings and goings of
America’s official elected government; they are perfectly capable of dealing
with one man being a less than ideal steward of the empire. What they
absolutely cannot deal with, at all, is the prospect of ordinary people finally
rising up and using the power of their numbers to force real change. That is
what they are really fighting against when they try to sabotage populist
candidates: not the candidates themselves, but populism itself.
You wouldn’t know it from reading the
billionaire media, but the Yellow Vests protests in France are still going on and have remained
widespread for more than a year now. This lack of
coverage is partially due to the fact that establishment narrative
managers are responsible for conveying the idea that
the only governments whose citizens dislike them are those which haven’t been
absorbed into the imperial blob like China and Iran. But it’s also because the
propagandists don’t want us getting any ideas.
The reason the propagandists work so
hard to manufacture the consent of the governed is
because they absolutely do require that consent. If enough people decide that
the status quo isn’t working for them and begin rising up to force it to
change, there’s not really anything the establishment can do to stop them.
Right now the only thing keeping people from rising up in this way is the fact
that they’ve been successfully propagandized not to, and the propagandists
intend to keep it that way.
But eyes are beginning to open. If real change is coming, it will come
from there. Not from electing anyone president, but from a large-scale
awakening to the reality of our situation. The only thing standing in the way
is a thin layer of narrative fluff.
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