The Roots of Demagoguery Run Deep
"When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart." —WILLIAM GIBSON, ZERO HISTORY
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We are in a time where the free flow of truth, commentary and ideas is critical to the survival of our societies. We are suffering, The Death of Truth, a book by Michiko Kakutani, which I will be referring to in the following blog. Knowing and understanding our times are the essential first steps to exercising our civic responsibilities and activism where daunting challenges face us all.
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Great change is upon us. We have sacred and profound obligations to future generations.
In too many ways, we have become societies preferring the reassuring lies destroying us over the inconvenient truths that are ultimately our salvation. Like everything else in our mass, materialist societies, what was objective truth, has been weaponized, commodified, and slandered out of existence. What passes for politics and governance is shameless tribal warfare conducted by bribed cave dwellers.
Demagoguery extends beyond compulsive lies to the point where it involves the blatant deconstruction of realities, left to fester and intensify. These are nothing more than rhetorical band-aid solutions concocted to avoid taking socially and morally responsible actions. Policies become the regressive dictates of insidious rogue ideologies.
Demagoguery signals the consolidation of autocracy. The collapse of democracy makes tyranny increasingly difficult to challenge and more absolute. The specious truths of the autocracy become more deeply embedded, audacious, and socially volatile— just as we are seeing now.
Demagoguery represents the final collapse of democracy, where real power concentrates into fewer and fewer hands until a dictatorship emerges. Power emanates from the dictator, and his cabal of followers serving at his behest.
“In a culture fueled by burnout, a culture that has run itself down, our national resilience becomes compromised. And when our collective immune system is weakened, we become more susceptible to viruses that are part of every culture because they're part of human nature - fear-mongering, scapegoating, conspiracy theories, and demagoguery.”
We can never make the silly assumption that demagoguery arrives out of the blue. Its roots run deep and were planted long ago. The roots of demagoguery lie dormant waiting to be invigorated by human foibles, deviant behaviors and our compulsive recidivism. As A.H. suggests above, our cultures are fueled by burnout, and left unchecked become like the horrific brush fires we are witnessing in California.
When a demagogue arrives, it is a predatory emergence as they where collapse is opportunity and like a cat pounce on the mouse. One such mouse in this instance is the Democratic Party, so slothful as to run two candidates, one after the other, with tarnished credentials unacceptable to voters. What better time for the demagogue to leap into action and turn them into objects of mockery and derision and undermine the last vestiges of a corrupted and meaningless electoral system, riven with bribery, graft and cronyism, and controlled by the obscene fortunes of oligarchs.
The arrival of the demagogue is when the adversities(the ongoing challenges we face) are drowned out by the perversities of the demagogue and his deviant reckless behaviors. He is the cat playing with the half dead mouse until such time as the “kill bite” is administered—— Oh Yes! that cute cat on your couch is capable of such tortuous behaviors— my dogs do the same with rats and moles.
“If citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives,” Nichols wrote, “they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.”— Kakutani, Michiko. The Death of Truth.
Demagoguery creeps into the taproot of our societies through the lateral roots that feed and sustain the trees of our existence, accomplishments and institutions. Where we allow ruinous ideologies to thrive the taproots become becomes rotted and even severed to where we are now- a time of culmination— in cruder terms where the shit hits the fan. Neoliberalism, for example, is the ideological infestation the West has been suffering for the last forty years and now the rot issues forth. It is the black plague of our times, a systemic inconvenient truth nobody wants to talk about.
I have known about and written about neoliberalism for many years to no avail. There is a huge body of books and writings on it, never penetrating into the public sphere as the narrative is controlled by demonic think tanks and a negligent and traitorous mainstream media, having whored itself to a moribund status quo.
Our societies exist in a perpetual state of being blindsided by the clandestine machinations of the tyrannies and despots we complicity condone.
Neoliberalism can be defined in many ways and many viewpoints… socialism for the very rich, raw, predatory capitalism for everybody else… the giant vacuum cleaner in the sky that indiscriminately vacuums up the wealth of nations and rips down their social fabrics according to the greed and appetites of the oligarchs and their demagogues. It is no coincidence most of the world’s wealth is controlled by 3000 oligarchs. It is no coincidence we are “sentenced” to perpetual corporate wars for corporate profits.
“That is neoliberal democracy in a nutshell: trivial debate over minor issues by parties that basically pursue the same pro-business policies regardless of formal differences and campaign debate. Democracy is permissible as long as the control of business is off-limits to popular deliberation or change; i.e. so long as it isn’t democracy. The neoliberal system therefore has an important and necessary byproduct—a depoliticized citizenry marked by apathy and cynicism.”— Robert W.MacChesney, in the introduction to Chomsky, Noam. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order
Books by notable authors like Kakutani and Chomsky are preciously invaluable but the picture is never complete and constantly changing. We must also look at eras like the post war decades of the 1950s and 1960s. These were definitive to our present times. Historical ignorance is in itself a key issue in our times. One of the most persistent criticisms I hear from analysts is how ignorant Trump is on history and geopolitics, which is generally true of most politicians. History is the referee they don’t want around. They shun the advice of historians and scholars— which Kakutani and others point out is why truth in our times is so mutilated.
Where scholars should be key advisors they are isolated and marginalized as dissidents. Their roles now are more critical than ever as they tell us the truths the venal status quo refuses to share and entertain. I refer to such notables as Jeffrey Sachs, Douglas Macgregor, Michael Hudson, Alastair Crooke and so many others who we might refer to as “government in exile.” These are the thought leaders, the “sounding boards” essential to anchoring us in the true realities of our times.
The true narrative requires continual referencing by curious souls.
In the tumult of the aftermath of the greatest war ever fought there were momentous choices to be made and tremendous new forces unleashed. America emerged as the richest most powerful nation on earth with 50% of the world’s wealth and only 4% of the world’s population. It had a huge cash surplus and population deficit, with the warning from diplomat and historian George Keenan that it was only a matter of time before the Asian heartland would demand it’s place under the sun.
Would America remain a republic and a hemispheric world power as defined by the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, or would it aim higher and become the global hegemon as the world's policeman? It had a taste of the forbidden fruit—the vast wealth that a corporatized war economy could produce in a very short time. For America the abject poverty of the 1930s had transformed it into the corporate juggernaut of the 1950s.
The choice became a democratic republic vs a new empire to succeed the British and German empires which had just fallen. The choice was for empire and the rapacious corporate capitalism that would move it forward.
Adjustments were necessary as the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC) was set in place, as Eisenhower warned in his 1960 farewell speech. The1960s were the decade of assassinations as peace and democracy were no longer priorities for the fledgling empire. All shades of socialism had to be eradicated by way of the MacCarthy hearings of 1957. C.Wright Mills book, The Power Elites, was the seminal book of the times. The Deep State and Wall Street were the new key elements in the reconstituted America. The taproot of what was America had been hybridized. It had opted for empire and a warfare state, and “the shining citadel” abandoned.
America became defined by its obsessive triumphalism, marked by the hubris and conceits of empire. Claims of “exceptionalism” and “indispensability” served as the specious props and rationales for its existence.
If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump - a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses, she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility.
It would be a different world today if America had been content with hemispheric dominance rather than its compulsive pursuit of global dominance—a quest beyond its capability, especially as the multipolar world emerges and its minority position becomes more fractured and diminished.
It suffers from the delusional belief that it is exceptional and indispensable, but no more so than any other culture. To make either of these claims is a fatuous attempt to revert to a child-like state of doing whatever one wants whenever one wants, with no regard for the rights of others. To obstinately maintain these claims are the seeds of its own destruction. As time wears on, the transparency of its corruptions and deviance only become more conspicuous and appalling.
As it is, this revanchist death wish inflicts wars, violence, death, and destruction, which are ruinous to global stability and détente at a time when planetary survival is the essential priority.
The US has been reduced to the Friday night poker player, playing with other people's money, resources, and futures in a game of winner-takes-all. It has played too late into the night and is now drunken and bleary-eyed.
Our societies, as complex and integrated as they are, are more vulnerable than ever to viruses, ruinous ideologies, deviant behaviors, and despotism. The rule of law, civility, diplomacy, and democracy must be more vigilant than ever.
In the epilogue to her book Kakutani quotes generously on the wisdom and prescience of America’s founding fathers. As the quote below shows they foresaw just what is happening here and now:
“Washington warned about the rise of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who might try “to subvert the power of the people” and “usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”— Kakutani, Michiko. The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.
America, and the West it leads, is at a point of culmination, and the situation is dire. Her book was written in 2018 when trump was half way through his first term. Now he has leapfrogged into a second term. He is all powerful, the legislatures have been neutered and he indulges his every caprice.
He appears to think he can fix America and the world in seven days and seven nights. Nothing could be further from the truth. History is cyclical. Real change is generational and must be based on consultation, consensus and reconciliation.
He and his legions might want to consider that the consequences of our actions and policies reverberate through time. Many of the tangled roots we are dealing with date back to World War II and beyond.
Much ado about nothing? We are just becoming cultures of resignation?
It seems that these days appealing to the lowest in a person is easily achieved. Trump is a prime example.