Nixon 68 is back with a vengeance, with President Trump placing himself as the guarantor/enforcer of Law & Order.
That slogan guaranteed Nixon’s election, and was coined by Kevin Phillips, then an expert in “ethnic voting patterns”.
Two weeks ago a senior Trump Administration official revealed that the president had decided to withdraw 9,500 American soldiers from Germany and that the administration would also be capping total U.S. military presence in that country at 25,000, which might involve more cuts depending what is included in the numbers.
It’s welcome news that Boris Johnson is being tough with EU negotiators, who, clearly don’t really want to negotiate on fair terms Britain’s future relationship with Brussels. But the ‘let’s get Brexit done’ mantra from Boris which got him into Downing Street comes with a heavy price as the number of policy blunders and dithering which also accompany the PM are mounting.
The U.S. State Department annually publishes an extremely biased report on human rights around the world. Conveniently, the report omits one of the most systemic violators of human rights on the planet. Under Donald Trump, the United States has graduated from systemic human rights violator to human rights pariah, as witnessed by recent murders and assaults by police of innocent people on the streets of America.
President Trump’s favorite news channel Fox has been caught out falsifying protests in Seattle, giving the distorted impression that the city is overrun by armed anarchists. That conveniently set Trump off on a rant in which he threatened to send in military forces to “take back” the city from “domestic terrorists”.
In earlier articles, I noted that America has been skirting the precarious cliff-edge of ancient antagonisms, dating back to the Civil War – Red versus Blue. The two irreconcilable visions of American life: on the one side, the ‘Federalists’, who partly have morphed into cosmopolitan ‘Sorosites’, and claim the moral high ground on matters of life; and on the other, a tradition of state co-sovereignty, dating back to the 1871 (the Articles of Confederacy). That divide remains. It is – as it has long been – aside from the FDR era, an overarching frame.
“Western Europe has only 20 to 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship, and whether the dictation comes from a politburo or a junta will not make that much difference.”
– Willy Brandt (German Federal Chancellor, right before he stepped down in 1974)
Believe it or not, but the dystopic view that democracy is dead is by no measure a new idea. However, what might disturb you is where this design, in its contemporary form, really germinated from.
With America in turmoil following the murder of George Floyd, the talk is all about police reform – defunding them, abolishing them, or subjecting them to greater federal oversight. It brings to mind the nineteenth-century British member of parliament who supposedly cried out in despair, “Reform! Reform! My God, aren’t things bad enough as they are?”
The United States is again engulfed in protests/riots regarding the treatment of Blacks in the nation by authorities. We have seen this many times before, just a few years ago in Ferguson, before that in LA in the 90s, etc. In a previous piece I wrote that the best strategy for Trump would be to just ride out the storm, and I stand by that, but that is the best strategy for his own immediate survival in the short term.
The marriage of post-Lockdown and George Floyd protests has nurtured a rough beast that is still immune to any form of civilized debate in the U.S.: the Seattle Commune.
So what really is the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone cum People’s Republic all about?
Are the communards mere useful idiots? Is this a refined Occupy Wall Street experiment? Could it survive, logistically, and be replicated in NYC, L.A. and D.C.?
