“Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of
great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy,
the second as farce.” – Karl Marx
The assumption of the executive by Donald Trump is a naked
expression of the emptiness of United States representative democracy, and
consequently the most damning.
Beyond the subversion of democracy by the electoral college,
created in the drafting of the Constitution for the purpose of securing slavery
and the political power of the slave states, the foundation of representative
democracy in the United States is itself an erosion of democracy.
Noam Chomsky observes that the form of
ratification whereby two positions are offered and the voter merely selects one
of the two positions is an impoverished form of democracy. He observes further that the electoral
process in the United States decades ago became “stage-managed elections, with the public relations industry” managing.
Trump’s campaign turned this tragedy into an utter farce, with a
reality-show celebrity and his cadre of ultra-right-wing media propagandists
(Bannon and others) turning the election into a complete spectacle.
Ever since the end of the Cold War and the hostilities with
jihadi terrorist groups (most of whom were either directly or indirectly
organized and armed by the United States) the so-called “war on terror” has
effectively replaced the cold war ideology of anti-Communism hysteria. Trump has taken this already shameful and
violent history of aggression and pulled away the masks, revealing the naked
racism and bigotry undergirding the rationalizations for imperial hegemony and
extending this towards outright ethnic cleansing with, conspicuously, the fight
for a “Muslim ban.”
With the vicious history of the United States’ depredations
in the middle east which has stoked the fires of conflict there since the end
of WWII (Iran in 1953, etc.) and exacerbated by George W. Bush’s invasion and
occupation of Iraq (the international crime of aggression), of Trump’s new
developments has been to toss a Molotov cocktail into the fires in the form of
declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel while the Israeli state continues to
occupy the Palestinian territories and expanding settlements into them.
Trump’s erratic and unhinged threats to North Korea are
putting the entire human species and most others as well into jeopardy. The international politics of the Trump administration
are entirely inadequate and often dangerous, yet the threats to North Korea of
a nuclear strike are of altogether another category. It’s enough that human civilization has since
the cold war only by a miracle avoided nuclear holocaust (Chomsky, 2016) while the United
States and others have ensured the failure of the nonproliferation treaty (Chomsky & Barsamian, 2017),
requiring more miracles yet still. To trespass beyond such a terribly
precarious reality and threaten a nuclear armed state with a nuclear strike is
something like combining the game of chicken and Russian roulette into the most
dangerous, potentially terminal game ever played.
In light of Trump’s comments about the fascist violence and
terrorism in Charlottesville and every comment that he has so far uttered
regarding the “Muslim ban,” immigration and the border wall, it is evident that
the only consistent position and policies for which Trump advocates and
attempts to enforce are those of white Christian supremacy. It is of principle importance to resist the Trump-led whitelash and one must defend oneself and one's allies by
any means necessary.
It is clearer than ever that the impoverished form of
democracy within the United States is inadequate for the attending to of the
most serious and pressing issues. It
recalls to mind Rosa Luxemburg writing in her Junius Pamphlet, before she was
murdered by the Freikorps, elements of which fermented into the Nazi party: “Friedrich
Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either
transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.’ What does ‘regression into barbarism’ mean to
our…civilization?...A look around us at this moment shows what the regression
of bourgeois society into barbarism means…The triumph of imperialism leads to
the annihilation of civilization. At
first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then
when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable
consequences. Today, we face the choice
exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it…either the triumph of imperialism and
the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation,
degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the
victory of socialism…”
Chomsky, Noam, (2016). Who Rules the World? (pp. 100-114). Metropolitan Books.
Chomsky, Noam, Barsamian, David, (2017). Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy (pp. 108-109). Metropolitan Books.
