Trump got a bloodied ear. US 'political violence' poses a far bigger danger to the rest of us
Biden and Trump are two rotten figureheads of a rotting empire. Ignore the tribal rhetoric: neither poses an existential threat. But the system behind them does
The outpouring of opinions on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump mostly offers little insight or honesty – apart from the all-too-obvious concern that the shooting of the former president is likely to make the United States even more of a tinderbox than it is already.
There’s a reason for this. The responses – whether from Trump supporters or Trump opponents – are all embedded in the same ideology of political tribalism that provoked the gunman. Neither side is capable of self-reflection because the US system is designed to avoid such self-reflection.
Despite what the political class wants you to believe, “political violence” is as American as apple pie. The US global empire was built on political violence, or the threat of it, most especially after the Second World War. Just ask the people of Vietnam, Serbia, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and Gaza.
The difference now is that Washington’s imperial grip is all too clearly weakening.
President Joe Biden is not alone in refusing to recognise this fact. He recently told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos: “I’m running the world.”
But US elites are rapidly finding that the world is no longer prepared to submit.
Washington’s international military arm, Nato, is being run into the ground by Russia in a proxy war in Ukraine.
Washington’s key military client state in the oil-rich Middle East, Israel, is being flooded with US weaponry to destroy Gaza. But in the midst of a genocide, Israel is exposing how weak it is. Hamas has not been defeated. In fact, it has been strengthened. And greater cooperation is being encouraged among those opposed to Israel’s regional hegemony.
Current domestic US politics can only be properly understood through the prism of the gradual decline of US influence abroad. The building of alternative international power formations, such as BRICS, is weakening Washington’s military and economic reach.
Adding to its woes, Washington’s ideological hegemony is crumbling too. Transnational capitalism – headquartered in the US – has no answers to the environmental fall-out from the endless resource extraction required to feed the appetite for wasteful, mass consumption it has to cultivate to generate greater profits for a corporate elite.
As the plundering of the planet’s finite resources gets harder, especially as corporations continue to stoke our hunger for material excess, other states are less willing to sit back and let the US take its pound of flesh.
The result is a growing political and economic instability that is hard to miss.
Outrage machine
In the US, there have been two political impulses in response.
The first – illustrated by the Biden camp, backed by most of the US establishment media and three-letter agencies such as the CIA and NSA – is to double down on a failed strategy and continue seeking “global full-spectrum dominance”.
That means raising the stakes by showing uppity rivals, most especially Russia and China, that any defiance will be punished. It means endlessly expanding wars, with the inherent risk of increasing the chances of triggering a nuclear confrontation.
The other, more muddled response is illustrated by the Trump camp. If the US can no longer effectively impose its will abroad, rather than risk repeated humiliation it should withdraw into a more isolationist posture, even while stepping up the imperial rhetoric.
Part of the reason for Trump’s muddled posturing, of course, is down to his narcissistic personality. He bigs himself up, even as he prefers to be master of the small domain he knows best. Caesar Trump has an instinctive aversion to global structures like Nato and the United Nations where he must share the limelight.
And part of the reason is that Trump can’t truly control the domestic terrain either. He depends on deeper power structures – such as the three-letter agencies – that would become pale shadows of themselves were they to agree to shrink US influence on the world stage. They need to push him out of his comfort zone.
The US political system – whether Democrat or Republican – all too obviously has no answers to the deepening crises faced at home or abroad. Which is why the choice for US voters is between Biden and Trump, two rotten figureheads of a rotting imperial system of power.
And because the US system has no solutions, it has to redirect ordinary people’s attention to internal wars. Voters – or those who still trust the system enough to vote – must be persuaded to invest their energies in tribal feuding. The rhetoric of division grows, one in which the other candidate poses an existential threat and has to be stopped at all costs.
The truth is that each candidate – and the camps that stand behind them - is feeding this outrage machine. Biden is responsible for the assassination attempt on Trump, says one camp. Trump is guilty of inflaming the January 6 riots at the Congress, says the other.
At least it would be consistent to conclude either that both are responsible, or that neither is, rather than apply one standard to your tribe’s preferred presidential candidate and a different standard to the opposition tribe’s candidate. That is hypocrisy.
But the most useful conclusion we can draw is to understand that Biden and Trump are symptoms, not causes, of a diseased body politic. Neither Biden nor Trump pose an existential threat by themselves. But a declining US economic power, backed up by the largest military machine the world has ever known, determined to stop its decline at all costs, does pose just such a threat.
Biden and Trump are symbols. One, a lifelong creature of the billionaire donor class, is now deep in the grip of Parkinson’s. The other, a rapacious businessman committed only to his own aggrandisement, can’t distinguish between reality and reality TV.
No one should take seriously the claim that either is capable of running the world.
What they are is symbols – of a US in crisis. Which, given the US addiction to its imperial pretensions, is a crisis for all of humanity. Trump got a bloodied ear. The rest of us have far more at stake.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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In a rational world, the US would be leading the way on surviving the climate emergency, the shrinking natural environment, and the 6th extinction underway. This is no longer a mere game of imperial power, it's about the future of civilization on this planet and the survival of our species. We refuse to let go of the consumption model and predatory behavior capitalism is built on. We're on the verge of a world-wide economic meltdown, climate displacement in the billions, and agricultural failure. No leaders in the developed world talk about these realities, let alone have a real plan. Someone explain to me how we are going to build this renewable green economy as the remaining fossil fuels approach economic non-viability to extract. The house of cards is about to fall, and the results, unpredictable, are going to be ghastly.
"Despite what the political class wants you to believe, “political violence” is as American as apple pie. The US global empire was built on political violence, or the threat of it, most especially after the Second World War."
And domestically in it's colonial stage and after independence - conquest, control, power, wealth. The pie they had was huge with indigenous inhabitants succumbing to disease in large numbers and thus settlers swarmed across the West rapidly toward the Pacific.
With the huge pie, the emerging market-led economic system was able to develop shallow "fixes" to the nexus of hostile, competing actors because of abundance. Thus "smart-arsed" thinking was able to trump wisdom with no restraint as they headed to the frontier making vast fortunes and being able to quell opposition with state-sponsored violence; steel, coal, meatpacking and so on with a constant pool of available labour segregated by race and ethnicity and so on; in the South the feudal, slave system was also defeated but with the awful legacies of racial division that are palpable in the present.
The US is not an intellectual place; it is a very clever, technocratic one, with the myths from above telling the corporations that run the place that they can always have more, expand, conquer and fix things by making deals with any manically ambitious or greedy psychopath they can pay off: their global quest for dominance is an extension of their domestic history using the same methods they used when they had a big pie. That has gone. The system is now cannibalising itself within and without as smart-arses like Larry Fink devise ways to control the globe by financialising everything on it - controlling digital currency coming soon ...
The contradictions and limitations of this system to take over the globe are now becoming glaringly obvious and the ghouls who run the US (not the people) face collapse from both without and within with much older cultures and states able to counter them.
But corporate types don't get it because the limited (yet very clever) way they think tells them all they have to do is push even harder which is now threatening all of us. Their own myths tell them to double-down, simplify everything, boil it down to good v evil and so on - it is manic and eschatological.
Iain McGilchrist is excellent on this psychology with his books; The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/home/
Thanks for another great piece, Jonathan. Great journalism and insight as ever.