By Joaquin Flores | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 25, 2020
Did you know that 25% of Americans want their state to secede from the United States? In part one of our series, we laid out our opening – that the betrayals of the Democrat Party against its own working class base would lead towards an uprising, finally coalescing around a National Labor Movement, christened through blood and sacrifice. This would ultimately team-up with Trump’s small business and working class base, making every conservative-libertarian’s worst horse-shoe theory nightmare a living reality.
This is the era of the new populism, beyond left and right.
We said in the previous article in this series that because of Trump’s commitments and Reaganomic view of wealth creation, that he would not be able to rise to the ‘FDR level’ needed to radically transform America’s social contract and forge a genuine New Deal. As it stands, the American economy is set to shrink by a depression-era 14% in Q2 alone.
But Amazingly – Trump Once Again Defied All Odds
Between publishing our dire warning, written days before it had run on SCF, and when we had set to produce our next installment here, it appears that we were right to gauge the seriousness of the moment, but underestimated Trump’s ability to begin the very thing we had been urgently writing about for the past year: take up the necessary transformations proposed by Bernie, by Yang, and by Gabbard.
Reading comments sections on ‘progressive’ YouTube channels, the call for Trump to dump dumb Pence and take on Gabbard or Yang as VP. In a policy sense, that’s just what he’s starting now to do. Democrats would shatter upon the rocks of discoherence if they tried to pick up Pence’s pro-life Christian dominionist evangelical fundamentalist base.
And so Trump moved left, and no – not leftwards to the center – rather he made an unprecedented end-run around the anti-labor centrist Democrats over to the pro-labor economic left of the Democrat Party. That’s the very same economic left of the party that the Clinton-Pelosi-Biden corporate Democrats have suppressed and tried to relegate to invisibility. Clinton and Pelosi failed.
Where Clinton’s DNC succeeded in destroying the campaigns of Gabbard, Sanders, and Yang – despite their nauseating willingness to play DNC ball – the DNC fell victim to their own success. They handed this opening to Trump on a platter.
This happened because the DNC believed its own lies, and succumbed to the cognitive impairment disorder known as ‘Orange Man Bad’ Trump derangement Syndrome. For too long the DNC arrogantly believed that they could simply pander to the billionaire oligarchs and that working people would vote for them by default. Those days are over.
Now we are looking at the beginning of a Trump UBI, at the time of writing this stands at a proposed $500 billion which we have calculated works out as such: if there are about 160 million working age adults, which does not include about 45 million retirees receiving social security etc., then this comes out to $3000 per person. Is this just the beginning?
Once this sort of line is crossed, it’s difficult to go back. Trying to take it back will necessarily lead to the sort of backlash and threatened social violence and chaos which brought about its necessity in the first place.
We’ve already seen with Hurricane Katrina what upright citizens will do to survive, when literal starvation is the alternative. But Trump went further. He ordered a moratorium on evictions, protecting working Americans who might be late on rent. He ordered a ban on bank foreclosures for Americans paying mortgages, for those whose loans were done through HUD and FM & FM.
Then Federal Reserve hack Larry Kudlow, now working as Director of the National Economic Council under President Donald Trump since 2018, announced even more – Trump is seriously looking to propose partial nationalization of businesses needing government assistance.
Universal Basic Income? Moratorium on evictions and foreclosures? Partial nationalization of business and industry? The possibilities presented now with “Comrade Trump’s” opening salvo, knows no bounds.
The most stupid criticism of Trump’s move is that he’s doing this merely in response to what the public wants, that he’s only doing this because people are demanding it, and if he didn’t do it, he couldn’t win re-election. We find this kind of anti-logic to be a form of violence against the understanding of politics in a republic with democratic traditions such as the U.S.
Isn’t this what elected representatives are supposed to do, to represent? Aren’t concessions and proposals in the face of losing one’s mandate what a responsible head of government is supposed to enact? Isn’t it strange that despite these very needs bubbling beneath the surface for decades, Democrats have not moved on these things, and haven’t been afraid of their own base? Isn’t this inability to carry out one’s responsibility to the constituents the very reason for the total implosion of the Democrat Party now underway?
When Democrats failed to do these things, the blue-no-matter-who crowd only made battered-wife syndrome level excuses – they blamed Republican obstruction even when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of congress for two years starting in 2008.
And Still it May Not be Enough – Towards a National Labor Movement
Despite Trump’s bold pronouncements which have outflanked the Democrat Party, the reality is that the present situation is so stark that even if these proposals all go through as planned, these will not likely be enough. That’s why we introduced this installment with the shocking figure on Americans wanting their states to secede. How this becomes part of the platform of the National Labor Movement will be critical.
There is a good possibility that Trump will extend and even reinforce these social-patriotic provisions at least through the election cycle. But then what, after that?
The reason this 25% secession figure is as small as it is, is because there has been no concerted effort to promote the idea. Compare this naturally popular idea to ‘politically correct’ social views which appear popular in polls, like gun control, but enjoy this largely as the result of tremendous social engineering. This came as public service announcements, subtle references in film and television, the expressed opinions of celebrities and social media ‘influencers’.
Eliminating the 2nd Amendment is an unconstitutional and anti-popular move that only a police-state would want. Despite a non-stop campaign since the 1980’s to vilify the very pillar which guarantees all the other amendments, only 20% of Americans are said to support its elimination.
But this is an idea that has been extremely unnatural, and expensive to promote. It required what many Americans even think were false flags and hoaxes to build to that 20%. It’s a figure that also happens to be shrinking despite thirty years of non-stop preaching.
What would happen to this 25% pro-secession figure if there were organized efforts to build around that idea? There was, bear in mind, the ‘Yes’ movement in 2016, for California to secede from the Union. Also, when the poll was conducted a few years ago, the situation was bad but not the catastrophe we are upon today. This catastrophe, whether engineered or not, has been a fascinating subject. It is unlikely that the Coronavirus is the cause of it, but rather the convenient timing of such appears to be a good reason to telegraph an emergency situation to the elites that now is the time to institute a series of socialist/corporatist/fascist (read: planned economy or distributist) changes to save the system by transforming it.
But absent a real show of extra-parliamentary force from the rank and file of a freshly organized National Labor Movement, any presently proposed patches to the failing system are unlikely to indefinitely stave-off a real uprising.
The 2016 through 2020 election cycles will go down in history as the final and most conclusive end to the America as we knew it. The global pandemic, Covid-19 is one thing, the phenomenon is another. That’s to say – the virus is one thing but the hype hysteria, and pretext for new forms of social control is entirely another.
The Democrat Party’s betrayal of its populist base doesn’t simply mean that millions of potential voters who favored Sanders and Gabbard are going to stay this election out – though they will. It means that some significant segment is going to throw in their lot with the anti-politics or the post-politics of a people with nothing left to lose. Direct action, veterans leading militia groups, organized crime, secessionist movements, revenge killings against corrupt cops, ‘revolutionary conspiracies’, fed-up rogue labor organizers running decertification campaigns and wild-cat strikes – all now known to the state as ‘terrorism’.
“When the people have nothing left to lose, they lose it”, as the popular business consultant Gerald Celente has repeatedly explained for years.
Any analysis of what the DNC should have done, as this author’s ongoing series of essays for SCF on the subject has attempted to do, has wrongly been understood by some readers as a friendly exercise in hopeful proscription to ‘fix’ the DNC – it is not and was not.
My aim has been to show that when a society’s elites reach such a pinnacle of corruption and detachment from its moral and constitutional obligations and authority, then the whole society is on the precipice of collapse. It has been to show that numerous elements of the kinds of policies and attitudes that could have saved this country are in fact known to the Democrats, as Yang for example helps to prove, and they had cast these to the side nonetheless, as if these were all just optional ventures on what was otherwise a fair-weather day.
The sheer hubris of the chattering political class of beltway pundits has served to separate the have-less from the have-nots, to make those just getting by more blind to the situation of those who aren’t. Worse, it has been to set these two great classes against each other – the false notion that giving a hand-up to the latter will come with some greater tax burden to the former. The policies that could have fixed things were out there and were known to the political elite and their financial backers. Still, they turned the other way and told us to turn the other cheek.
Trump’s Still-Born Revolution?
Some of these needed fixes in the area of foreign policy, were seen in still-born form in Trump’s attempts as we discussed. And those opposing Trump’s attempts at steering foreign policy in a sustainable direction were met with obstruction and contempt from the Democrats and neoconservative Republicans as well. After years of impeachment chatter, threats of impeachment, Trump was pushed into striking Syria. And finally with an impeachment proceeding, pushed into murdering Qasem Soleimani. This happened to have the effect of turning off Trump’s anti-war supporters.
This author consistently explained and showed back in 2015 that the nature of Madame Secretary Clinton’s financial and ideological commitments would have irreconcilably led to a massive and bloody military intervention against the Russian Federation, which in turn could have signaled the kind of final, nuclear Armageddon which Ronald Reagan saw as akin to the Christian teleology found in Revelations.
To be clear: the party of Clinton is and has been the enemy of the American people, second only to the financial oligarchs who finance these Democrats. Trump’s left pivot is likely not to go far enough, and the necessary feedback loops are hard to read. That’s why in the next installment we will detail the coming national labor movement and the kinds of social violence we may expect as it emerges from the womb of chaos and bloodshed.