Can the midterm elections in the former “leader of the free world” signify a turning point in America’s precipitous decline under Trump, and do they matter in the larger scheme of things?
Democrats certainly think the midterms matter tremendously, and progressives are awash in hope and wishful thinking. But they appear to be setting themselves up. Trumpism is a culmination, not a deviation from psychological proclivities and political policies in the USA stretching back to the end of World War II.
Trump is now serving Putin’s ideology as a fellow authoritarian traveler. His tacit support for the “humanitarian” that’s killed hundreds of thousands of people in an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is more than a disgrace; it’s a stain that America won’t be able to whitewash.
As I’ve been speaking to deaf ears for nearly 37 years, both the USSR and the US lost the Cold War, just in different ways. Russians liked hearing that, of course, and I was invited to Moscow and Leningrad in January 1990 on a failed attempt to pour the foundation for a post-Cold War Marshall Plan (which America needed as much as Russia).
Fast forward. By blatantly siding with the aggressor Putin in Russia’s war against Ukraine — stopping sanctions signed into law, opening markets for Russian oil companies, and colluding with Musk to shut down the Starlink early warning system — Trump has revealed the hollowness of American triumphalism, and produced one of history’s greatest reversals and ironies.
Ecologically, politically and morally, the United States now leads the world in reverse. If and when we hit bottom here, will it mark humankind hitting bottom with the convergence of crises and descent into collective darkness?
The United States cannot be restored as it was before Trumpism revealed our long-neglected core. America was never as exceptional as Americans believed, and the triumphalism and exceptionalism of the ’90s set the stage for the eruption of narcissism and abnormalism of the ’20s.
Democrats and progressives in the US have made the midterms a test of the American people. But the real test and possible turning point will come afterward, since Trump and Netanyahu have plans to attack Iran in full force again in December.
But as Reza Nasri, an international lawyer close to the Iranian foreign ministry, said, “A third wave of war would not stay contained. Power grids, desalination plants, refineries and ports across the region would burn. Tens of millions will be left without water or electricity, and a massive wave of refugees would move from Arab countries toward Europe.”
Robert Reich, the secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, bemoans the “moral squalor that uniquely defines Trump and the reprobates he has attracted to Washington, which has poisoned much of the Republican Party.”
But Trump isn’t an anomaly; he’s a culmination of the worst of the American character. The moral squalor has long been brewing, and defines America, not just Trump and his filthy inner circle and Republican supporters.
Trump’s “incessant lying — a firehose of deception,” is the logical end of American “positive thinking.” It has its rotten roots in the philosophy of a man revered by The Donald — Norman Vincent Peale.
Even in my Democratic-voting family growing up, any fact or truth that disturbed the surface veneer of positivity was immediately labeled “being negative.” It’s baked into the American character to believe “reality is what I believe it is,” which is why there’s so much horseshit about “my truth.”
Reich says “morality refers to the ideals we seek to achieve together,” but ideals are inherently departures from what is. Besides, when a people have lost their spirit and intactness as a people, ideals become mockeries of their previous values.
“Affordability,” the “winning message” of the midterms, is a real issue, but it’s also an expression of caring only about me and mine.
Yes, we “must also demand common decency” during and after this pivotal election. But fairness and decency were on life support before Barack Obama became president. And sadly, the professor-in-chief did not address the necrosis in the body politic, which is why “hope and change” ushered in dope and derange.
To be sure, Trump, Musk and their ilk hate the Earth and humanity. But the desperate need of progressives to believe that the trajectory of man’s decimation of the Earth is caused by “a perverse delight in destruction among a small cohort of the economic elite” is absurd. That ideology is also an obstacle to facing the roots of man’s destructiveness, and bringing about the radical changes inwardly and outwardly essential to halt and reverse Homo sapiens’ increasing disharmony with our planet.
It’s painfully shallow to locate the source of man’s destructiveness in “every dictator’s dream of wiping ecosystems off the map as a demonstration of power.” Much less as “a highly effective means of hurting those who resist” Trump and Musk.
By refusing to take the long view of man’s (I use the word deliberately and pejoratively) rapacious fragmentation of the Earth’s balance and biosphere, progressives make a Procrustean bed of reality in order to make the polycrisis fit their narrative. The same old claptrap of class struggle, collectivist and movement mindset simply doesn’t cut it.
In the same desperate vein, philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek, author of “Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future,” argue that “the apocalypse is already here,” and that we must adopt an emergency stance akin to “war communism, a total civil mobilization.”
Other philosophers, factoring in the challenge of AI, are worried that “a generation or two from now we’ll just have a world where people just aren’t thinking for themselves.” But that occurred two generations ago.
The premises and predicates of power and “resistance” have not changed the human condition, and the social progress of the past is being eroded beyond all recognition and recovery. It’s essential to ask: How deep does the challenge to the viability of the Earth and our humanity go?
As deep as human consciousness itself, which is as ancient as “fully modern humans” are old.
It’s not too late to awaken. The response must be both inner and outer, in that order — a revolution of insight and inquiry, plus new economic, social and political structures and strategies.
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