Islamo-Bonapartism Comes to Egypt

The true axis of the present government passes through the police, the bureaucracy, the military clique. It is a military-police dictatorship with which we are confronted, barely concealed with the decorations of parliamentarism. But a government of the saber as the judge arbiter of the nation – that’s just what Bonapartism is.

The saber by itself has no independent program. It is the instrument of “order.” It is summoned to safeguard what exists. Raising itself politically above the classes, Bonapartism, like its predecessor Caesarism, for that matter, represents in the social sense, always and at all epochs, the government of the strongest and firmest part of the exploiters; consequently, present-day Bonapartism can be nothing else than the government of finance capital which directs, inspires, and corrupts the summits of the bureaucracy, the police, the officers’ caste, and the press.

The “constitutional reform” about which so much has been said in the course of recent months, has as its sole task the adaptation of the state institutions to the exigencies and conveniences of the Bonapartist government. Finance capital is seeking legal paths that would give it the possibility of each time imposing upon the nation the most suitable judge-arbiter with the forced assent of the quasi-parliament.

–Leon Trotsky, July 1934

A broad compromise alluding to the “principles” of Islamic law as a guiding reference, as in the current Constitution, seemed to have been reached earlier this month but disintegrated as Islamists tried to rush through the draft document, whose concentration of power in the presidency is worrying

Railroading a document of this importance is not an option. Egypt will split, investment dry up and unrest continue. Morsi must overcome his Brotherhood suspicions to forge a credible constitutional assembly including liberal opponents who, like Republicans in Congress, should now express patriotism through pragmatism.

–New York Times one-percentrist columnist Roger Cohen, November 29, 2012

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

–Napoleon Bonaparte

Is anyone scratching their head right now as to why we aren’t hearing every neocon, every Zionist, and every bible-thumping militarist in Washington denouncing Mohammed Morsi’s Hitlerian power grab in Egypt? Save for John McCain’s Alzheimer’s-induced rants, it’s crickets. What explains the hegemonic power of this silence? For more than a decade, these American-Enterprise-Institute types have bombarded us with the specter of Islamofascism whenever some girl so much as showed up to school in a hijab. Yet today, Egypt appears to be actually on the verge of a faith-flavored post-Jacobin totalitarian nightmare, and the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment is unwilling to lift a finger. At best they say “play nice” and leave it at that.

To grasp the stance of Washington toward the events now playing out in Cairo, one would do well to remember President Obama’s reluctance to abandon Hosni Mubarak during last year’s January 25 revolution. Hillary Clinton, remember, assured us that Egypt was “stable” mere days before Anderson Cooper was dispatched to the Cairene barricades.

Joe Biden, meanwhile, told us that Mubarak was “not a dictator.”

It was only when Anderson got his precious little ass kicked by “pro-Mubarak supporters” and had to broadcast the next night’s news report from a bunker in an undisclosed location that our imperialist decision-makers realized the jig was up.

Immediately after arriving at this realization, they had no choice but to insist that what was happening in the world’s most populous Muslim country was not 1979 in Tehran but rather 1989 in Berlin.

Only Fox News failed to get the memo.

After all, millions of Egyptians had taken to the streets demanding liberal, democratic freedoms—the very things George W. Bush had told us we were fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. imperialism simply could not side with its client dictator of thirty years under such circumstances and continue to maintain the popular fiction that it was something other than imperialism.

Thus, after our dependable ally in the Middle East, a man who had maintained a desert with Israel for thirty years that Washington called peace, was overthrown by masses of farmers, factory workers, and other moochers who take more in government handouts than they contribute, even Bill O’Reilly had to concede that this man was “a thug and a criminal.”

In the new, post-Mubarak narrative of the global one percent, the Middle East and North Africa were in the midst of an “Arab Spring”—a term which evokes in the minds of those who study history the European revolutions of 1848 or the Prague Spring of 1968. Such an implied historical comparison is naturally comforting to parasitic bankers and politicians and their hangers-on the world over because the springtime, like all seasons, is finite—it always comes to an end. Furthermore, every revolutionary moment in history that has subsequently been labeled a “spring” has ended up being ruthlessly and violently repressed, and one or another parasitic, tyrannical regime came out triumphant in the end. Private property and finance capital always survived these springtimes unscathed.

So the “Arab Spring” was to be co-opted and channeled into yet another extension of the “End of History,” much like the fake color-coded revolutions that the Bush-Cheney administration engineered as part of their “global democratic revolution.”

Except that the reality on the streets of Egypt in 2011 was no different than the reality playing out in the streets all over the world—the End of History was beginning to end, the politics of open, zero-sum class struggle that these Washington dandies and toffs assumed had been dead and buried for good burst forth from it’s premature grave with a vengeance. Egypt and Tunisia were but the opening salvo in a relentless and ongoing assault on the global capitalist class from below in country after country, an assault that is to this day ongoing and indeed intensifying. This is no mere spring we are experiencing. It is permanent political climate change. No cosmetic replacement of ruler, no reshuffling of legislatures will pacify the hungry, indebted millions who now approach the gates of the McMansion.

And so in Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the imperialist West sees its last hope for “stability” and the only force standing between its “interests” in the region and utter, historic defeat. Like Napoleon before him, Morsi promises to crush this revolution in the name of saving it. He will stamp every aspect of the theocratic tyranny he seeks to establish with the brand of January 25 and Tahrir Square. He will govern exactly in the manner of the fictional brown-skinned Hitler the neocons scared us with tales of, and our leaders, at this moment trembling far more at the thought of fiscal cliffs and an electorate that demands wealth redistribution than childish ghost stories about a resurrected Islamic caliphate, could not be more grateful to him for it.

Nobody in one percent media land has yet dared to compare the political situation in Egypt over the past two years to Russia in 1917, but those who govern us know deep within their bones that were Egypt to go communist, were Egyptians to overthrow and smash not only Mubarak but also the Muslim Brotherhood and the military apparatus to boot, confiscate the wealth of the country’s rich without compensation, seize and nationalize all Western-owned assets in the country, and set a political example for workers and youth in Europe, North America, and the rest of the planet, the West’s only allies in Cold War II would be the same jihadi elements that helped us defeat the Soviets in Cold War I before turning on us and flying planes into our buildings. Because at the end of the day, Bush, Cheney, Bin Laden, Obama, and Morsi are all on the same side of the global class divide. If defending the institution of private property and the rule of capital requires the architects of Western imperialism to ally themselves with the “savages” who planned and executed 9/11, their justification will be “better dead than red.”

This piece suffers from a certain vulgar Weberian cultral essentialism, but it still provides food for thought as for how different layers of society (as opposed to classes per se) think of themselves.

Check Your Premises Before You Wreck Your Premises: The Romney Campaign Shrugs

“The rich and the crooks are two sides of the same medal, they are the principal category of parasites which capitalism fostered; they are the principal enemies of socialism.”

-Vladimir Lenin, 1918

“We risk hitting a tipping point in our society where we have more takers than makers in society, where we will have turned our safety net into a hammock that lulls able bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency.”

-Paul Ryan, 2012

“I’m stupid rich, got retarded money/I’m special Ed, I got special bread”

-50 Cent, 2008

Today’s conservative has a rather easy time dismissing leftists as naïve “bleeding-hearts” who are presumably too lazy and perhaps effeminate to undertake the rigorous analysis necessary to achieve an understanding of the contemporary world in all of its economic, political, and social complexities. The straw-man “lib’ruls” that right-wing nutjobs love to hate are a cognitively inferior race of beings first and foremost because, like sissies, they evaluate the world in terms of “fairness” and “justice” without acknowledging inconvenient truths such as ballooning government deficits or shrinking profit margins.

But whenever a leftist acknowledges such inconvenient truths and persists in calling attention to the bankruptcy of the capitalist system in the twenty-first century, the right-wing nutjobs get nervously quiet all of a sudden. How can it be that more government spending, not less, is the best plan for the people in both the short and long run if government borrowing at the current levels is unsustainable in both the short and long run?

The scientific socialism of Marx and Engels has always posed a far more serious intellectual threat to the legitimacy of capitalist rule than the utopian moralism of reformers and anarchists. It sets forth a rigorously scientific methodology for understanding the real world in real time that acknowledges and even welcomes the existence of material contradictions in the social organization of production.

Like most people living on the planet, Marxists are indeed morally outraged by the parade of horribles that capitalism has unleashed and continues to unleash upon society. But the methodology of scientific socialism demands that one temporarily set aside one’s personal indignation when studying the social reality of the present time. It demands that one pay close attention to objective contradictions in the global economy, like the fact that more productive factories that produce more widgets in less time using fewer workers may lower businesses’ operating costs but in so doing produce higher unemployment, lower wages, and thus ultimately less demand for those very widgets. To acknowledge contradictions such as these is to give up any illusion that capitalism can be “fixed” or that we should even be trying to “fix” it. It is this dialectical thought process, and not the rigid adherence to any set of dogmatic principles, that makes one a Marxist.

Ayn Rand, the Muhammad of the Mayberry Machiavellians that comprise today’s Republican Party, did not merely declare war on social democracy and collectivism of all types. She also set out to undermine, by way of sheer philosophical argument, the very dialectical thought process that Marx and Engels introduced into the realm of the social sciences. Rand denied the existence of contradictions and claimed that whenever one perceives a contradiction, one must “check one’s premises,” because surely at least one of those premises is wrong. Thus money cannot possibly be simultaneously a store and a measurement of value on the one hand and a means of exchange, circulation, and repayment on the other. Waves are waves and particles are particles, goddamit! Why? Because Ayn Rand said so. Now get a fucking job, slacker.

Which brings us to the premises Mitt Romney assumed to be true when he shared his opinion about the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes with what he believed at the time was a private audience of Atlas Shrugged characters. Either Romney himself assumed, or he assumed that his audience assumed, that the same 47 percent of Americans who pay no federal income tax are (a) committed Obama supporters who can never be persuaded to vote otherwise and (b) welfare cheats who produce zero value for society while consuming an ever-growing proportion of society’s resources.

Had Romney or his audience applied dialectical thinking when studying this large chunk of the American electorate, they would have acknowledged the seemingly contradictory state of affairs in which masses of Bubbas and Skeeters numbering in the tens of millions who are part of that 47 percent have been a reliable and absolutely crucial part of the Republican base ever since Richard Nixon’s campaign staff started inventing various innocuous-sounding euphemisms for putting uppity blacks in their place. They may have even pondered the fact that the loyalty of said Bubbas and Skeeters to the Republican Party has always been tenuous because the GOP has not in the past several decades actually benefitted them in any substantial way (other than, ironically, lowering their tax burden!) but has merely validated their (largely valid) resentments against a “liberal” class that threw them under the bus in its drive to appoint slightly more women and minorities to manage its hedge funds and private equity holding companies.

The “47 percent” video will not, by itself, determine the outcome of the election, but it is a prophetic foretelling of things to come. Romney’s statement is symptomatic of the attitude of an entire ruling capitalist class that has long ago given up trying to check its ideological premises.  The apologetic politics of American capitalism today is in increasing jeopardy not, as Rand might have claimed, because any one of those premises is false, but in fact because each of them, taken on its own, is empirically true. Yes, there is a class of parasites and moochers in America who accumulate and consume without working, and yes, a good number of these parasites and moochers—perhaps even Romney himself in previous tax years—are part of the 47 percent who pay no federal income taxes. Yes, Obama supporters are more likely than Romney supporters to believe in a stronger role for government in the economy. Yet when the Republican presidential candidate attempted to weave all these separately valid empirical truths together into a coherent narrative that fits into the intellectual straightjacket that characterizes the mass politics of the contemporary GOP, the contradictions stood naked and exposed for all to see.

Getting rid of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, federal college assistance, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other “free stuff” is not exactly a “surgical strike” that will affect only the black welfare queens, union thugs, and dope-smoking Marxist grad students who probably would never vote for Romney anyway while leaving the Bubbas, the Skeeters, the limbless war vets, the old timers with more “traditional” values, and countless other “decent white folks” unscathed. Romney is now on record as saying essentially to America’s poor and working-class white voters: “You are no better than niggers, and I intend to enslave you.” Maybe it’s about time they took the hint.

Class War and Culture War

There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.

-Pat Buchanan, 1992

The idea is that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we’re seeing it in our society.

-Rick Santorum, 2003

The Cricket has thus far avoided making any commentary on Rick Santorum other than “huh huh huh, huh huh huh, he said Santorum.” It is now March 2012, however, and Not-So-Slick Rick has persevered in the GOP primaries for long enough that he has earned his place in the political-economic analysis this blog specializes in.

After the crash of 2008, it seemed that social conservatism had reached a permanent dead end, almost as though it had been a luxury that the country could only afford when the unemployment rate was at “reasonable” levels. With millions more suddenly out of work, nobody much cared who was smoking what or who was fucking whom and in what orifice. But now all of a sudden, we hear that the Obama feds are cracking down hard on medical marijuana, that American right has launched a “war against women,” among other things.

The culture war politics the Republicans have engaged in for the last several decades is at heart a small variation on their “Southern Strategy,” which dates from roughly the same point of origin. If the Southern Strategy said to white working class men: “Willie Horton just escaped from prison and he’s coming after your lily white daughter with a sawed-off shotgun in one hand and his big black dick in the other,” the culture war said to the same group of voters: “Your lily white daughter–and wife–are kind of turned on by Willie’s willie, your son just purchased that new Ice-T album with the song about killing cops, and your other son is a homosexual who also wants a piece of Willie’s magic johnson.” All of that–plus the fact that another Willie just signed NAFTA and now the plant you worked at all your life just moved to Red China–is the fault of . . . wait for it . . . the left!

That last part, about how the Democrats have been complicit in selling the American dream down the Rio Grande and ultimately the Yangtze River, has been absolutely critical to the success of the right’s culture war politics all these years. The truth is, it was the Democrats who abandoned the NASCAR dads and security moms, not the other way around. It was this class-blind third way neoliberal Clintonist bullshit, which substituted diversity for equality and told poor white people–collectively–to blame their own bigotry for their deteriorating circumstances instead of the greed of the one percent, that drove so many American workers into the arms of their worst enemy. (As an aside, it should be noted that Clintonism has increasingly, over the years, albeit subtly, told poor black people–collectively–to blame their lack of family values for their perpetually dismal circumstances–one might call this Cosbyism).

Rick Santorum is currently trying to capitalize on this culture war tactic, which has proven so successful year after year during our lifetimes. We are, however, living in a period of history unlike any that has existed in our lifetimes (unless you happen to be old enough to remember the 1930s). Because the capitalist system is beset by internal material contradictions, the ideological superstructure that the ruling class uses to maintain its popular legitimacy likewise is beset by contradictions. Chief among these ideological contradictions is the tension between saving and spending, between frugality and indulgence, between abstinence and ecstacy. A capitalist is compelled to constantly set aside a part of his profit for reinvestment instead of spending it all on limos and prostitutes and blow. The ultimate id motivating the capitalist to postpone gratification in the short run is the promise of even more limos and prostitutes and blow in the future.

Under the pretty fiction of equality under the law, workers really are capitalists, and their saving and spending habits are to be evaluated in the exact same manner. In reality however, the saving and spending habits of capitalists are a truly personal matter–if a certain capitalist overindulges too much, his business fails, the market punishes him justly, and another capitalist, with better self-discipline, takes his place, end of story.

The saving and spending habits of workers in the aggregate, however, are of interest to the capitalist class in the aggregate. The owners of capital–collectively–depend on as many workers as possible constantly spending, constantly indulging, constantly fulfilling their desires through the act of exchange, in order to stay in business. Each individual capitalist, however, wants his own workers to be as frugal as possible, to be good savers, to abstain from pleasure and excess. That way they can be paid as little as possible and still show up for work every day.

The serious strategists of capital understand that the system will not recover from the global crisis now afflicting it any time soon and that the means by which it recovers will not involve another speculative bubble, another mania where people start spending money with a ferocity worthy of a gay crystal meth orgy. The real “correction” that must take place before genuine growth can resume is the “deleveraging” of the American dream itself. For decades, the good times were kept on life support by easy credit, but now that bill is finally due, and there is no way out for America’s investor class other than to force American workers to be more “competitive” with workers in other countries. The “competitiveness” of workers is really a euphemism for their willingness to settle for less while producing more–to be more like those Chinese Foxconn workers who make your iPhone.

That the family values conservatism Santorum and his ilk preach seems so antithetical to the libertarian “freedom” talk that conservatives–often the same ones–also promulgate should not be so confusing once one understands that the former message is only aimed at and only really applies to the working class. The rich will continue to drink and smoke and fuck and do blow and have mistresses and father out-of-wedlock children and engage in all kinds of exotic homosexual acts and maybe even do “man-on-dog,” and Rick Santorum will never chastise them for any of it. In fact, the only reason the rest of society is being pressured by the top one percent to have stable, two parent families and not to have extramarital sex and not to enjoy any kind of sex for that matter and to spend our Sundays in church instead of, say, at the mall, is so that we may, by our sacrifice, by our abstinence, by our self-denial restore the economic conditions that permit that top one percent to resume both their literal and their metaphorical orgy.

The Freudian Slip Heard Around the World: Mitt Romney Puts Free Enterprise on Trial

[Mitt Romney] and his friends at Bain were bad guys. Any real capitalists should disavow Romney’s ‘creative destruction’ model that made him wealthy at the expense of thousands of American jobs.

–Independent political attack ad supporting Newt Gingrich’s campaign

“I will suggest [private equity firms are] just vultures[.] They’re vultures that are sitting out there on the tree limb, waiting for a company to get sick. And then they swoop in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that and they leave the skeleton.”

–Rick Perry, January 9, 2012

Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores

Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more

They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks

Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back

–Bruce Springsteen, 1984

Those who continue to remind us that Mitt Romney’s professed penchant for being able to fire people was taken out of context, that the GOP frontrunner was making a comment about consumer choice in health insurance (which, by the way, has about as much to do with reality as unicorns) that we have no right to read further into, are insulting our intelligence. The Obama camp’s intention of framing a general election campaign against Romney as a Main Street vs. Wall Street thing–a kind of Bowdlerized answer to Occupy–is not exactly classified information.

The Democrat establishment believes that the 99 percent (the Great Unwashed to whom they must pander every four years) does not currently grasp intellectually such concepts as “private equity,” “leveraged buyout,” and “hostile takeover.” It all must seem to simple folks in the heartland like some mysterious shit guys in suits do with their cellphones somewhere in Manhattan. After all, if American voters did by and large understand that stuff, there never would have been Reagan Democrats and NASCAR dads, right?

Running against Romney is supposedly going to shine the light, at long last, on the connection between those sorry yokels hoarding a lifetime’s worth of cheap merchandise on reality TV and the guys in suits hoarding the cash that said yokels exchanged for said merchandise. Romney could have used any number of metaphors to make his point; his instinct was to go with what is most familiar to him: firing people.

Romney has thereby hastened an event that was inevitably destined to happen at some point this election year. That event is the sudden and violent decoupling of “job creator” and “capitalist” in the mind of the American electorate. By instantly jumping on the statement as a political admission against interest, conflating in the process his record as a private businessman with his record as an elected official, Romney’s more-conservative-than-thou rivals have put themselves in the embarrassing position of sounding a lot like Michael Moore.

But what’s a right-winger to do when adherence to free market principles interferes with the competitive instinct of the individual to exploit every opportunity that presents itself for short-term gain? Fomenting a little old-fashioned proletarian class warfare in the service of a regressive and reactionary agenda is a time-honored tradition that dates back to Europe during the Depression. Hitler, after all, didn’t call his party the National Libertarians.

Time will only tell whether Gingrich et al. continue to run against Romney’s success as a corporate raider as opposed to his failure as a politician. What is certain, however, is that what is now called the “dark side of private equity” is on the table for political debate in households all over the country, and voters don’t like what they’re learning about what the guys in suits talking on cellphones have been doing to their future for the past thirty years.

But can either Obama or Romney’s GOP rivals really run against the King of Bain in this way without running against private equity itself? And can they really run against private equity without running against capitalism? It’s not as though what Romney did at Bain was public policy. He saw an opportunity to get rich and he took it. Ain’t that the American way?

It would be one thing if this was simply a moral question about the past–something akin to Trent Lott’s sympathizing with Strom Thurmond’s defense of segregation–that is a teachable moment but has no contemporary political or social relevance. Private equity, corporate predation, and mass layoffs however, still happen. All of the giant firms that survived the crash of got bailed out after 2008 are gobbling up the carnage as we speak. And if you look at the people Obama actually surrounds himself with, they are nothing other than the new Mitt Romneys, Wall Street scumbags gorging themselves without any restraint.

Now that the 99 percent are on the move, the traditional pandering tactics that we have grown accustomed to all our lives are suddenly fraught with peril for those who would govern. You’re not hallucinating; that flag you saw the guy waving at the NASCAR race was red and it had a hammer and sickle on it.

Ron Paul: The Highest Stage of American Exceptionalism

“In the United States, the imperialist war waged against Spain in 1898 stirred up the opposition of the ‘anti-imperialists.’ the last of the Mohicans of bourgeois democracy who declared this war to be ‘criminal,’ regarded the annexation of foreign territories as a violation of the Constitution, declared that the treatment of Aguinaldo, leader of the Filipinos (the Americans promised him the independence of his country, but later landed troops and annexed it), was ‘jingo treachery,” and quoted the words of Lincoln: ‘When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs others, it is no longer self-government; it is despotism.’ But as long, as all this criticism shrank from recognizing the inseverable bond between imperialism and the trusts, and, therefore, between imperialism and the foundations of capitalism, while it shrank from joining the forces engendered by large-scale capitalism and its development-it remained a ‘pious wish.’”  (Vladimir Lenin, Spring 1916)

“Simply put, freedom is the absence of government coercion. Our Founding Fathers understood this, and created the least coercive government in the history of the world. The Constitution established a very limited, decentralized government to provide national defense and little else. States, not the federal government, were charged with protecting individuals against criminal force and fraud. For the first time, a government was created solely to protect the rights, liberties, and property of its citizens. Any government coercion beyond that necessary to secure those rights was forbidden, both through the Bill of Rights and the doctrine of strictly enumerated powers. This reflected the founders’ belief that democratic government could be as tyrannical as any King.” (Ron Paul, February 8, 2005)

What are we to make of the ideological oddity that is Ron Paul? The Texas congressman, who is by many accounts slowly and steadily attaining frontrunner status as a candidate for president in the GOP primaries, in spite of the media’s willful ignorance, wants to end U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and beyond–along with the military-industrial complex that supports and profits from it–and then remove every last governmental restraint on the ability of America’s ruling capitalists to reinvest the “peace dividend” in what he promises will be productive, socially beneficial endeavors. He wants to dismantle the expanding Homeland-Security police state at home and force cops to actually give a shit about the Bill of Rights, even presumably in the ghettos, which he tells us can do without taxpayer-funded “welfare-state” provisions like public schools and hospitals. He wants to restore America to its purer, more noble past, a throwback utopia that emerged historically straight out of the heads of Jefferson, Madison, and the rest of the crew. If he is unreasonable, it is only because he is incorruptible.

We are living in a time of universal corruption in government and in private commercial life. Indeed, as the two grow ever more corrupt, they appear ever more inseparable. Obama and the “serious” GOP candidates this time around don’t even seem all that interested in engaging with that teeming mass of unwashed known as their constituents. They know the jig is up. They know that American politics has at long last declared independence from the stultifying, deceptive analytical paradigm peddled incessantly by the Wolf Blitzers and David Gergens of society. These official gatekeepers would have us believe that Barack Hoo-sane Obama is the best the working class could ever hope for and that Ron Paul is the worst it has to fear. History has not yet come back from the dead for these reasonable, pragmatic adults in the room. They are clinging desperately to Fukuyama’s opium dream of a world where each of the billions of exploited wretches on the planet wants to be like Michael Jordan or Bono or Bill Clinton eating a Big Mac while getting his dick sucked. If Mitt Romney can be said to have any base at all, it is these Bourbons of the Beltway who have recently stepped down from their lofty political perches in order to smear Mr. Paul as a “racist” or worse.

Because mainstream debate has never taken seriously even the remote possibility of a Ron Paul presidency, nobody it seems has given any real thought to how a Ron Paul administration might actually govern. American history is filled with presidents who built their political careers advocating one thing only to do a complete 180 when they got to the White House. Jefferson started out as a fierce opponent of American territorial expansion but his greatest legacy as president was the Louisiana Purchase. Lincoln opposed the further expansion of slavery as a candidate in 1860 but went out of his way to disavow abolitionism during the campaign. Wilson kept us out of World War I until he didn’t. Reagan told us government is the problem and then presided over the most astronomical deficit expansion to date at the time. Obama . . . nuff said.

But no candidate for president other than Ron Paul has ever been so committed to an idea as to be seemingly indifferent to who his base is. Like some silver-tongued Roman orator, Paul speaks of a republic lost and an empire in decay and promises to return us to our former Ciceronian virtue by demolishing both the “warfare state” that the left so despises and the “welfare state” that the right professionally loves to hate. In doing so, he has made the strangest of bedfellows out of a remarkably diverse coalition of white boys, from young college kids, to rural armed survivalists. To publicly support Ron Paul is to be personally at least tolerated by all of the politicized sections of the 99 percent, from the Tea Party to the Occupations and everywhere in between. Put this guy in the oval office, and there’s no telling, it seems, what he would try to get away with, much less accomplish.

America (more specifically, the United States thereof) has for most of its young history been exceptional in following ways: it is a country that began just as the industrial revolution was accelerating in Europe and the capitalist system was consolidating itself as the dominant mode of production around the globe, but its vast, “uninhabited” lands enabled its people to postpone the social reckoning that the contradictions of that system caused in Europe for over a century. For nearly a century after the closing of the frontier, the United States further postponed this reckoning by being the economic beneficiary of two world wars that obliterated the productive capacity of the rest of the industrialized world while leaving American capital untouched. When the rest of the world finally caught up economically beginning on the 1970s, and American wages began to stagnate (they still are!), the U.S. ruling class postponed the reckoning even further by extending easy credit to working class households so that the same extraordinary consumption patterns could continue. A little over three years ago, the party ended, and the reckoning is right now upon us.

When people say that “socialism never took hold” in the U.S. because of some essential cultural attribute of its people, or that Americans are distinguished by their tendency to value “pragmatism” over “ideology,” they obscure–whether inadvertently or willfully–the exceptional material circumstances that have historically allowed Americans to put off the inevitable confrontation between labor and capital. This kicking of the can down the road has occurred with little interruption for so long that we have fallen accustomed to believing that we really are different, that we really are immune from the laws of history that govern other countries, that we can work it out, just like John Lennon promised.

Ron Paul’s capital crime as a candidate, for which the media will now lynch him, is not his advocacy of a radical “left wing” foreign policy platform or a radical “right wing” approach to domestic spending. It is the more general ideological narrative he is promoting on the campaign trail, a narrative that portrays the actually-existing United States as just another imperialist welfare-warfare state instead of the liberal-democratic “city on a hill” that the 1-percentrists on CNN have told us it is all throughout our lives. By forcing us to critically confront the actual words and thoughts of the same founding fathers that our rulers so incessantly fetishize, and by forcing us to compare those ideals to the endless wars, mounting police state, and exploding social crisis this country now suffers from, Paul invites ordinary Americans to fantasize that we can continue to be exceptional, that we can continue to prosper without resorting to class struggle like they do in other countries–at the expense of their “liberty.” That we need not concern ourselves with what socialism is really all about.

The problem is that the material circumstances that have made America so exceptional for over two centuries have now been exhausted, and like fossil fuels, they can never be replaced. A Ron Paul presidency (or even merely an Obama-Paul general election) would force this realization into the forefront of the American political debate because the litany of government evils Paul has spent his career railing against are, as a material historical fact, absolutely vital to the survival of the very capitalist system Paul has spent his career defending.

Ron Paul’s platform, taken as a whole, does not, indeed cannot, consistently represent any one person or constituency’s interests. At best, it represents our aspirations as a people. But these aspirations are informed not by our future but by our past, and as such, they can never be realized in our present. The sooner these anachronistic aspirations are put to the test and exposed for the fantasies they are, the sooner the more culturally conservative layers of the American 99 percent will get serious about the historical duty they share with the rest of us in the coming global confrontation with capital.

You’re Doin’ a Heckuva Job, Himmler: Will the Specter of FEMA Concentration Camps Unite the Right and Left within the American 99 Percent?

Go to YouTube and type in “FEMA concentration camps.” You will bring up countless videos making some variation on a truly disturbing claim. Apparently, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA–you know, the same people who fucked up Hurricane Katrina–have for years been planning America’s version of the Holocaust, complete with the trains, the camps, and the gas chambers. Sooner or later, the government is going to declare martial law, at which point the Constitution will become dead letter and millions of Americans will be rounded up and “relocated” to one of scores of detention facilities that are currently being readied all throughout the continental United States. Most of them will never come out alive.

On a federally-owned piece of land in Madison, Georgia, the government is stockpiling thousands of black plastic casket liners, each of which can hold several human corpses. When the killing starts, the bodies will be disposed of and buried in these things (where else but in America are the mass graves littered not only with decomposing bodies but also with tons of non-biodegradable plastic?).

Interestingly, the coming American Holocaust will differ from the Nazi Holocaust in one critical respect: its victims will be determined solely by their political activities and convictions, not by their race, ethnicity, or religion. The government–yes, the Obama administration–has put the names of every American onto one of three lists. The red list contains the names of outspoken dissidents–activists and community leaders openly in the forefront of challenging the “new world order” the government is trying to impose on us all. They will be taken out and shot immediately and may not even make it to the camps. The blue list contains the names of Americans who “know too much”–a far larger group who have been identified as sympathetic to resistance against the new world order but are more passive in their support for such resistance than those on the red list. They will be sent to the camps to be “re-educated” and killed if their re-education fails. Finally, the yellow list contains the remaining American “sheeple”–the ignorant masses who don’t know or don’t care that anything is amiss in the land of the free. These obedient wage slave-consumers will be implanted with tracking chips and sent on their merry way.

Until recently, talk of FEMA coffins and gulags could be found only on the American right among the patriot militia groups, survivalists, and religious extremists. But this fall’s coordinated crackdown on the Occupy encampments and the likely passage of the 2012 National Defense Authorization act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, among other repressive pieces of legislation making their way through Congress, have caused alarm among much of the newly resurgent American left that the knives of reaction and repression are being sharpened for them too. Gun control, to make a long story short, is beginning to seem like a tyrannical prelude to fascism in the eyes of an increasing number of liberals.

Surely the American government would never under any circumstances resort to systematic politically-motivated genocide on a continental scale, right? And at any rate, if it ever did, it would never put the Keystone Kops at FEMA in charge of carrying out the slaughter. It would have to create an outfit like the SS to do it with German-style efficiency. The point, however, is not so much the details of what the American government is planning to do to its dissidents as the fact the crackdown on activists of all stripes is currently gathering steam.

It is commonly said that the terms “right” and “left” no longer hold any meaning in the twenty-first century. This claim is confused for the following reasons. The terms “right” and “left” originated in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The revolutionary National Convention was organized such that those leaders who occupied the seats on the right hand side were satisifed with the abolition of monarchy and the establishment of formal equality under the law whereas those in the left hand seats wanted to go further and equalize the distribution of wealth within French society. Understood in this original sense, the American people are perhaps only right at this very historical moment discovering what right and left really mean. For most of our history, right and left were tied up in one way or another with a two-party system, both sides of which have governed in the interest of the 1 percent and in that sense are each fundamentally right wing. Millions of Americans in the 99 percent were considered “right wing” for superficial cultural reasons like being obsessed with guns or distrustful of different races and nationalities. A sizeable portion of America’s 1 percent was considered “left wing” because they supported the Democratic Party, even as that party has drifted increasingly rightward in the past few decades.

What we may be finally seeing is the American 99 percent sorting itself out into two political blocs, one of which is concerned primarily with liberty and other of which is concerned primarily with equality. At the same time, we are seeing that the 1 percent in both parties gives a shit about neither liberty nor equality for the 99 percent and is actively working to undermine both.

What will hopefully come out of these developments is the widespread understanding that a strong and critical libertarian outlook is as vital to the health of any anticapitalist movement as a strong and critical egalitarian outlook, and that the two are in fact inseparable. Individual freedoms are not something that can be sacrificed for the greater political good any more than are social equality and economic security for all. Those who hoard all the power to make decisions for everybody are always the same people who end up hoarding the lion’s share of what everybody produces. Its not that one causes the other. Its that one is always a symptom of the other.

While we all, if we are decent people, hope that racist gun nuts will see the error of their ways before its too late, let’s not throw the defend-liberty-by-any-means-necessary baby out with the racist, xenophobic bathwater. Spike Lee reportedly walked out of The Patriot, the Mel Gibson movie about the American Revolution, in the middle because he considered it to be a grave lie about history (which, of course, it was). But the part that offended him was when the Mel Gibson character shedded his racist beliefs after seeing the heroic actions taken by a black colonist in the struggle against King George. Such a tale of newfound solidarity may have never happened in the first American Revolution, but it will have to happen all over the place during the second American Revolution if the 99 percent ever hopes to thwart the efforts of the 1 percent and the government that works for it to restore the stability of capital markets on the back of our Constitution, however it may attempt to do so.