The politicians claw to cling to ineffective office, while the future is being planned elsewhere.
Policy will be designed by the global governors, for instance at
the next meeting in Davos of the World Economic Forum which, according to its
founder and chairman Klaus Schwab, will lay out the “Great Reset” agenda for
the Fourth Industrial Revolution that is destined to reshape all our lives.
Nicolas Berggruen will be there with his ideas. So will other billionaires.
They will not be “conspiring”, but rather laying plans for what they consider
best for the world.
A small number of very rich men are quite sure they know what is
best for the future of the world and have enough wealth and influence to
believe they can make it happen. They can be called oligarchs, but the term is
inadequate. They are a special category, the shapers of the Global Governance destined
to replace bourgeois democracy. I can name two: one who is famous, notorious
even, but very old, and another who is a generation younger, not yet so well
known or so rich but probably even more influential.
The Global Governors
The old one is of course George Soros, who needs no introduction.
He has no doubt that the world should be one big Open Society – in a word,
globalization – in which borders and nation States dissolve into a
kaleidoscopic mix of cultural identities in which major decisions are taken by
brilliant financial oligarchs like himself.
The younger one is Nicolas Berggruen, the dashing 59-year-old
Paris-born son of a leading German-Jewish art collector. Nicolas enjoys double
U.S.-German citizenship and membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, the
NYU Commission on Global Citizenship, the Brookings International Advisory
Council, the Leadership Council at Harvard Kennedy School‘s Center for Public Leadership, the World Economic Forum – and on and on.
He helped get Emmanuel Macron elected President of France and has friendly
relations with Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Union Commission.
The billionaire has his own “think and action tank”, the Berggruen
Institute, to promote his interests which center on “global governance”. He is
particularly interested in technological ways to shape and guide the world of
the future. The future for Berggruen belongs to digitalization and above all
transhumanism. In a short video, he muses over whether or not the
digital age makes us “less human”.
We are all connected and “less free” but we are all “part of
something bigger – communities, families, friends”… The digital world “looks
less human but it’s still be created by us.” (And who is “us” exactly?) Nicolas
Berggruen’s model of the future family may be seen in his own choice: two
motherless children manufactured with donated ovules and born by two surrogate
wombs.
Like European-born Soros and Berggruen, the United States is above
all the current command and control center of the Western world still aspiring
to be the nucleus of a global empire. U.S. elections are important to these
world visionaries in staying the course of world transformation. For both of
them, Donald Trump can only be an intolerable glitch in the screen. This must
be corrected in 2020. The entire liberal elite is in overwhelming agreement.
The Transition Integrity Project
So it has been easy to arouse near panic in the Washington
establishment and beyond over the notion that Trump might not be dislodged by
the November 2020 election. Fear is being spread less that Trump might win the
election (too unthinkable to think) than that he will lose the election but
refuse to budge. This possibility received a big boost from a unique social
event organized by Professor Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University, a leading
champion of women’s participation in the National Security State, and historian
Nils Gilman, a head researcher at the Berggruen Institute. This well-connected
pair easily enlisted dozens of power pointers to take part in what the Boston
Globe called “a Washington version of Dungeons and Dragons”, on the model of
Pentagon planners who form teams to imagine what the US and Russia might do in
a nuclear war confrontation. They named their fun and games the Transition
Integrity Project (TIP), clearly suggesting that the “integrity” of the
anticipated transition from Trump to Biden was their main concern. Only a few
of the 67 participants have been identified: anti-Trump Republican Michael
Steele, Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff John Podesta, David Frum
(ghost writer of President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech), and
neoconservative political analyst William Kristol.
On August 3, the TIP issued its report, entitled “Preventing a
Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition”. This report resumed the
results of the make-believe gaming scenarios, which provided imaginary support
to the growing liberal Democratic hypothesis that Donald Trump is determined to
steal the November election. “Like many authoritarian leaders, President Trump
has begun to lay the groundwork for potentially ignoring or disrupting the
voting process, by claiming, for instance, that any mail-in ballots will be
fraudulent and that his opponents will seek to have non-citizens vote through
fraud.” It was taken for granted throughout that Trump’s fears and accusations
are fake whereas his opponents fears and accusations are soundly based.
The TIP report made a feeble attempt to appear neutral: “TIP takes
no position on how Americans should cast their votes, or on the likely winner
of the upcoming election; either party could prevail at the polls in November
without resorting to ‘dirty tricks’” – a neutrality consistently violated by
the entire exercise.
The exercise comprised four scenarios: (1) an ambiguous voting
result, (2) clear Biden victory, (3) clear Trump win, (4) narrow Biden win. The
game was played by teams, primarily “Team Biden” and “Team Trump”, but it is
pretty clear that none of the players were pro-Trump, including the players on
“Team Trump”. But the games claimed to show how Trump supporters would react in
these circumstances.
·
“Team Trump was consistently more ruthless than Team Biden –
more willing to ignore existing democratic norms, to make use of
disinformation, to deploy federal agencies to promote Trump’s personal and
electoral interests, and to engage in intimidation campaigns.”
But “Team Biden” was much nicer:
·
“Team Biden generally felt constrained by a commitment to norms
and a desire to tamp down violence and reduce instability.”
·
“Team Biden often had the majority of the public on its side,
and the ability to mobilize resentment about the structural disenfranchisement
in the way we conduct presidential elections.”
Russiagate intruded into the gaming in an odd and even ludicrous
way: “There was quite a bit of speculation that Trump might […] attempt to
rally nationalist feelings to himself, or placate foreign leaders to whom he
may feel beholden, such as Vladimir Putin.” Huh?
Nobody Dares Lose
A particularly alarming and disturbingly credible assumption of
the TIP game is that in this election, neither side is prepared to accept
defeat. The scenario exercises “revealed that for many Democrats and key
Democratic constituencies, this election represents an existential crisis, the
last chance to stop a rapid and potentially irreversible US decline into
authoritarianism and unbridled nativism.” So, as much as Trump, many Democrats
are ready to stop at nothing to win this election – for the best of reasons, of
course.
Trump is depicted as equally desperate to win in order to avoid
being treated as a criminal. An underlying assumption of this story-telling is
that once out of office, Trump will be arrested and tried for unspecified
crimes. This would indeed be an incentive for him not to lose.
At this point, it is necessary to recall that democratic election
of national leaders depends on a degree of mutual trust that is being lost in
America. The United States regularly insists that all foreign countries should
elect their leaders by “fair and free elections”. But there are many countries
where, at some time of their historical development, this method is not
advisable because one party, or tribe, fears for its very life if a rival
party, or tribe, should take power. In such States, peace depends on the rule
of a king, a mediator, a dictator. The United States can currently be seen to
be regressing to just such a degree of mutual hatred and distrust.
No Compromise
It seems to me that if the Democratic establishment gave priority
to a peaceful election and transition, against the possibility that Trump might
reject the results, the smart and reasonable thing to do would be to reassure him
on the two counts which they suggest might incite him to balk: postal vote
fraud accusations and the threat of criminal charges against him.
As to the latter: “Participants in the scenario exercises
universally believed that self-preservation for President Trump and his family
will be Trump’s first and possibly only priority if he is forced to concede
electoral defeat.” So it is a bit odd that the TIP goes on to report that:
“During several of the TIP exercises, Team Biden attempted to enter into negotiations
with Team Trump about a pardon and graceful transition, but those overtures
were consistently rejected.” Since there were no Trump supporters on either
team, these game results merely reflect the intention of the Democratic
establishment to assume that Donald Trump will be charged with “state crimes”,
as yet unspecified. No compromise deal is desired.
As for postal balloting, it should be conceivable that Trump’s
misgivings are justified. Trump is not against absentee ballots, which require
identification of the voter, comparable to going to the polls, but is
suspicious of mass mailings of ballots back and forth. In an age when anyone
can photocopy any document, when mails are slow and when there are many ways in
which ballots might be destroyed, such misgivings are not far-fetched. Indeed,
in the course of Game #1, “a rogue individual destroyed a large number of
ballots believed to have supported Biden”. Why could the gamers imagine Biden
ballots being destroyed, but rule out destruction of ballots supporting Trump?
For the sake of domestic peace, why not try to find a compromise?
Kamala Harris has introduced legislation to generalize postal balloting. Why
not, instead, extend polling time, opening polls not only on the second Tuesday
in November but on the preceding Saturday and Sunday? This would provide time
to allow voters afraid of covid-19 to keep distances from each other, as they
do when they go to the supermarket. It would reduce the number of absentee
ballots, the time needed for counting and above all the suspicions attached to
postal voting. But the more wary Trump is of postal voting, the more Democrats
insist on making it universal.
It becomes clearer and clearer that hatred of Trump has reached
such a pitch, that for the Democratic establishment and its hangers-on,
defeating Trump at the polls is not enough. They are practically inciting him
to contest the election. Then they can have something more exciting and
decisive: a genuine regime change.
Preparing for Regime Change
The classic regime change scenario involves a contested elections,
mass street demonstrations including civil disobedience and finally, military
intervention.
So, to start with, the gamers posit an authoritarian leader who
won’t step down. That’s Trump.
Next, “a show of numbers in the streets – and actions in the
streets – may be decisive factors in determining what the public perceives as a
just and legitimate outcome.” In an interview stressing “the flaws
in our electoral system”, TIP organizer Nils Gilman said that what we need “is
for people to be prepared to take to the streets in nonviolent protest” if
appeals to officials do not suffice. “We’ve learned over the last couple of
months, since the Movement for Black Lives protest really took off again in the
wake of George Floyd’s murder, that taking to the streets and showing
commitment to a democratic process beyond just the ballot box is a really
important part of driving change.” The demonstrations must be nonviolent,
Gilman stressed.
As the TIP report put it, “the scale of recent demonstrations has
increased the stakes for the Democratic Party to build strong ties with
grassroots organizations and be responsive to the movement’s demands.” Certain
of these grassroots organizations – MoveOn and Black Lives Matter – have
enjoyed financial support from George Soros.
According to the scenarios, such protests could arise not only in
case Trump refused to recognize a Biden win, but also, in Game #3, in case of a
“comfortable Electoral College victory for President Trump – 286-252 – but also
a significant popular vote win – 52%-47% – for former Vice President Biden. The
game play ended in a constitutional crisis, with threats of secession, and the
potential for either a decline into authoritarianism or a radically revamped
set of democratic rules that ensure the popular will prevails (abolishment of
the Electoral College…)” The Biden Campaign retracted its initial concession,
capitalizing “on the public’s outrage that for the third time in 20 years a
candidate lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.” The Biden
Campaign encouraged California, Oregon and Washington to secede “unless
Congressional Republicans agreed to a set of structural reforms to fix our democratic
system to ensure majority rule.” Congress supported Biden. “It was unclear what
the military would do in this situation”.
In reality, Democrats know that they have managed to keep the
permanent State, including the military and intelligence agencies, on their
side throughout Trump’s presidency. Where are the forces that could carry out a
pro-Trump coup d’état?
Whose Coup?
“During the exercises,” the report notes, “winning ‘the narrative’
emerged as a potentially decisive factor. Either side can expand or contract
the ‘margin of contestation’ if they succeed in substantially changing how key
decision makers and the public view the ‘facts’, the risks of action or
inaction, or external events such as civil unrest.” Winning the narrative
appears to be a main purpose of the TIP, and it was quickly seconded in its
efforts by top Democrats.
“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I
think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we
don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side
is,” Hillary Clinton said in an interview on August 25.
A couple of days later, former Vice President and unsuccessful
2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore chimed in. Trump, he said in a particularly
loaded image, is “attempting to put his knee on the neck of democracy” by
criticizing mail-in ballots.
“He seems to have no compunctions at all about trying to rip apart
the social fabric and the political equilibrium of the American people, and
he’s strategically planting doubts in advance”.
People ask whether Trump will leave office next January 20.
“Well,” said Gore, “it doesn’t matter because it’s not up to him. Because at
noon on January 20th, if a new president is elected… the police force, the
Secret Service, the military, all of the executive branch officers, will
respond to the command and the direction of the new president”.
The Bottom Line
Meanwhile, Americans can listen to the extravagant rhetoric of the
two enemy camps, calling on them to choose between alleged “authoritarian white
supremacy” (grossly exaggerated) and “radical Marxist socialism” (totally
false) while offering absolutely nothing in terms of coherent public policy of
benefit to the American people and the world. The politicians claw to cling to
ineffective office, while the future is being planned elsewhere.
Policy will be designed by the global governors, for instance at
the next meeting in Davos of the World Economic Forum which, according to its
founder and chairman Klaus Schwab, will lay out the “Great Reset” agenda for
the Fourth Industrial Revolution that is destined to reshape all our lives.
Nicolas Berggruen will be there with his ideas. So will other billionaires.
They will not be “conspiring”, but rather laying plans for what they consider
best for the world. There is no political system enabling us to influence or
even fully understand the projects they will sponsor. Surely these projects
deserve to be sharply debated. But the politicians supposedly representing us
are somewhere else, fighting furiously with each other over contrived issues.
The Electoral College is not the most fatal flaw in American
democracy. Rather, it’s the monopoly of political discourse by a Two Party
System fueled essentially by personal ambition, taking its cues from lobbies,
the military industrial complex, Wall Street and the Global Governors.
Diana Johnstone lives in Paris. Her latest book is Circle in
the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020).
https://www.unz.com/article/the-2020-election-bourgeois-democracy-meets-global-governance/