Less refined in analogy, we at V’pac say “pull that finger Donald” drain the swamp/let the fresh water in
Trump may have wandered onto the breach but we believe him sincere in helping it along, and we don’t mean stopping it.
Don’t let them “zombifie” you Mr President
Besides, your Deutsch not Dutch
Readers will note and we appreciate and often point to articles from Victor Davis Hanson, classicist that he is, for grand perspective on current political issues. He is not a libertarian and neither are we but we share instinctive distrust of regulatory and nanny state ideals, bureaucracies and political correctness of the liberal state, and rent seekers in general.*
Our understanding of human nature leads us to generally oppose big government thinking including “public private partnerships” but also aspects of libertarianism. The latter driven by that understanding of human nature and that we believe protecting the culture is a right with judicious prudence and tolerance to avoid obtrusive government. Sometimes that also entails protecting Western culture on the world stage. On that we would also have differences with libertarians, but we agree about the dangers of what has come to be known as “the deep state.” It is largely synonymous with “the swamp” which we are pledged to advocate draining. We refine the analogy as the deep state comprising the vanguard of deep pools, fed by underground streams with rooted structures and sticky mud resisting drainage of the swamp.
So having mentioned our appreciation of Hanson and with the disclaimer offered above we can highly recommend this article by Alistair Cook as up there with Hanson . Writing in a libertarian publication he analyses and adds to an article by David Stockman. We have warmed up to Stockman a bit since his Reagan Administration days when he seemed to us to play too much to the celebrity of being a Reagan critic when it was Reagan who hired him.
If we have not overdone the introduction then we proceed to offer these excerpts from an excellent article profoundly worthy in its entirety.
Coming Apart: The Imperial City At The Brink
Alastair Crooke: Stockman routinely refers to President Trump as the ‘Great Disrupter’. But this is not a bad quality, he insists. Rather, it is a necessary one: Stockman argues (my paraphrasing) that Trump represents the outside force, the externality, that tips a ‘world system’ over the brink: It has to tip over the brink, because systems become too ossified, too far out on their ‘branch’ to be able to reform themselves. It does not really matter so much, whether the agency of this tipping process (President Trump in this instance), fully comprehends his pivotal role, or plays it out in an intelligent and subtle way, or in a heavy-handed, and unsubtle manner. Either serve the purpose. And that purpose is to disrupt.
Why should disruption be somehow a ‘quality’? It is because, during a period when ‘a system’ is coming apart, (history tells us), one can reach a point at which there is no possibility of revival within the old, but still prevailing, system. An externality of some sort – maybe war, or some other calamity or a Trump – is necessary to tip the congealed system ‘over’: thus, the external intrusion can be the catalyst for (often traumatic) transformational change.
Stockman puts it starkly: “the single most important thing to know about the present risk environment [he is pointing here to both the political risk as well as financial risk environment], is that it is extreme, and unprecedented. In essence, the ruling elites and their mainstream media megaphones have arrogantly decided that the 2016 [US Presidential] election was a correctible error”. …
Former Presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan concurs: “President Trump may be chief of state, head of government and commander in chief, but his administration is shot through with disloyalists plotting to bring him down.
. . .
That the objective of this city is to bring Trump down, via a deep state-media coup, is no secret. Few deny it.”
The extraordinary successful ‘manufacture’ and ‘parachuting-in’ of Macron into the French Presidential election by the French élite, precisely has given to the globalised Deep State (including their US counterparts), renewed confidence that Europe and America’s slide towards ‘populism’, is indeed a ‘correctable error’. European élites now can barely contain their revived schadenfreude at the Brexiters’ and at the Populists’ presumed discomfort (see here).
. . .
Trump shall not be forgiven for challenging the sacrosant meme of a world divided between (good) ‘liberal’ democracies (led by the US and its European allies) and (bad) illiberal autocracies (led today, by President Putin’s Russia): by snubbing Nato and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, Professor Michael Klare writes, “we’ve been told, President Trump is dismantling the liberal world order created by Franklin D Roosevelt at the end of World War II”.
. . .
Mike Vlahos (Professor at the US Naval War college and John Hopkins) tells us that, as a military historian and global strategist, he became curious to know just why it is that ‘world systems’ do ‘come apart’. His first, intuitive sense was that their collapse generally was brought about by some massive external force such as war, pestilence or famine, and by the concomitant mass migrations of peoples.
But when he and his students completed their research, he concluded that though these factors had often played an important part, they were not the prime cause of the system coming apart. Rather, he identified a number of key triggers:
· The élites became stratified, and politics frozen· The peoples’ allegiance became taken for granted, at the same time that the élites chose to ignore threats to the peoples’ way of life· Social mobility declined, and change is fiercely resisted· Rather, élites work to maximize their wealth and status.· Elite authority becomes excessively militarized – and justified as ‘saving civilization’.
He concludes from this study, “the situation that we inhabit today […] here in the imperial city in Washington DC, is that it is absolutely hollowed out … it is incapable of offering anything to its own people, the American people … I think we have reached a point where there is no possibility of revival within the current system that exists. The current system is set upon … is determined to eat itself out in a kind of civil war that is coming, and at the end of that, it will be done, will be finished”.
. . .
So, from whence does ultimate societal renewal come? The classic answer is that after ‘disruption’ nothing much is left standing amidst the (metaphoric) ruins of whatever stood as the reigning ‘modernity’. Historically, renewal was effected through a communal ‘reaching back’- beyond the roots of whatever represented the contemporary crisis – to delve back, deep into the archetypal cultural history of a people. The rummaging in collective memory, allows a narrative to shape, about why the present ‘hurt’ befell its people, and to bring forward, transformed into contemporary meaning, some ‘solution’: a new meta-historical understanding.
Plainly, this (a type of spiritual renewal) is not President Trump’s ‘bag’. (Steve Bannon’s the more so, perhaps?)
What does all this mean in practical terms? First, it suggests that most of us still prefer not to address the stark reality that “the objective of this city (DC), is to bring Trump down, via a deep state-media coup” and the bitter political trench warfare, which this portends. We prefer to rest in complacency, (as zombies for now), until a crisis squarely hits us – in a personal way.
. . .
. . . the intent is – like some Amazonian reptile venom – to ‘bite’ him with so much innuendo and assorted investigations and further allegations, that Trump, like the reptile’s victim, remains awake – but incapable of moving a muscle: A true zombie, in fact, as the reptile feeds on its living corpse.
. . . this zombified US President, will shortly face the requirement to negotiate with Congress an exit from a bubbling financial sphere soaring upwards, whilst a moribund real economy trails downwards – under pressure from the fast-approaching debt-ceiling deadline. The Senate’s slap at the President’s face with the Russia sanctions vote suggests it is more likely that he will be tossed another spanner: this time aimed at the wheels of the ‘Trump reflation’ programme.
With regard to the deep state and their superior attitude we recall the parapharsing refered ot in an earlier post where John Daniel Davidson writing in The Federalist says:
Her mistake was the same as Clinton’s, which was the same as Ossoff’s, which is the same as the Democratic Party’s in general: they don’t much care what voters really think, or what they really want. To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, Democrats seem to think the people have to earn the confidence of the party. And if they don’t, would it not be easier simply to dissolve the people and elect another?
Substitute “deep state” for Democrats and you produce a bipartisan truth.
R Mall
