Category: USA

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A self-mutilation ritual.

It appears that rather than follow the not-so-sage advice offered here in KP a short time ago about how to save their future as a political party, the Republicans have decided to double-down on their Trumpist/MAGA bet. After the House Democratic majority stripped a recently elected QAnon freak from her committee assignments (I will not mention her name here) because of her deranged behaviour and speech (including calls to kill Democratic congresspeople and claims that the Rothschilds used a space laser beam to start California fires in order to make a profit and that the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings were faked), her GOP colleagues reaffirmed their support for her while rebuking the 11 of them who voted for Trump’s impeachment on grounds that he incited the January 6 insurrection in the Capitol building. The freak then held a press conference and announced that the Republican Party was “Trump’s party.” No Republican contradicted her and state Republicans in the home districts of the pro-impeachment GOP renegades voted to censure them.

This is going to end badly for the GOP. Corporate America and (prodded by lawsuits) even mainstream Rightwing media appear to realise the danger that the assault on Congress represents. Non-Republican rightwing extremists have infiltrated the MAGA ranks and exploited them for their own purposes. Conspiracy theory craziness has taken hold in the MAGA movement. Seeing this, some regretful MAGAites have defected once they realised that the Trump pipe dream was not going to become reality or that his claims about the stolen election were deliberate lies that cost taxpayers millions of dollars to refute (in the form of recounts and litigation). To be sure, there are still many who still worship the ground he walks on, but many more are glad to see the back of him and want it to stay that way.

Catering to the remaining MAGA base may solidify GOP support in hard Red states, but the rest of the country is turning Blue as demographics increasingly work against perpetuation of that base as a proportion of the population, much less as a cohesive voting bloc. Insurrectionists are bad for business as well as law and order, so for a party that claims that it is the champion of both, kowtowing to the violent maniac fringe is a losing proposition over the long term. The MAGA brand is turning to mud even if those loyal to it cannot see what is coming at them down the road.

There is the hitch. Most analysts now see the GOP as divided into three parts: a MAGA populist wing, a neo-con Reaganite wing and a bridge faction with feet in both wings that attempts to straddle the fence of specific policy issues (or want to have things both ways–conspiratorial crazy on the one hand and soberly responsible on the other). After the attack on the capitol, what many of the non-lunatic factions in the GOP fear is two things: being physically threatened or attacked by MAGA and QAnon extremists egged on by Trump and his acolytes if they do not accede to his wishes; and being “primaried” out of office by them with funding provided by the Trumpsters (“primaried” refers to the practice of putting up candidates against incumbents in party primaries so as to replace them with more ideologically aligned people).

The combination of physical and political threats has paralysed most of the GOP party leadership, who have opted for the default option of blaming Democrats for assorted ills while looking to them for the knock-out electoral blow on the lunatics in 2022. They understand that things have gone too far and they cannot prevent the MAGA wing from trying to take control of the party as a whole while Trump continues to agitate from the sidelines. So this is their state of play: hope that the Democrats win big in the congressional mid-terms so that they can purge the MAGAites from the party and return to some semblance of conservative normalcy. They know that the purge of moderate candidates in GOP primaries will likely lead to massive losses in the 2022 general election and the consolidation of Democratic control of the federal government for the near future. That allows the non-MAGA Republicans to clear house and get their affairs in order without the burden of having to govern, something that can set them up well for 2024 and beyond. People like Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney understand this well.

Of course, many of those immediately involved in the fray may not see things in this light and may continue the internecine fights over the heart and soul of the GOP well after 2022. The MAGA wing certainly see their future as wedded to Trump, and the Senate impeachment trial will go a long way towards determining which of the GOP factions will prevail over both the short and the long term. But as long as they are divided and the Democrats coalesce while in power and restore some semblance of respect, normality and competence to governing (not a sure thing but more plausible today than in the past because of the stakes at play), then the Republican Party is going to increasingly be on the outside looking in when it comes to national policy-making. And that will suit the lunatic fringe just fine, as they have been exposed as being uninterested in democracy if such a thing involves compromise, toleration, transparency, equality and mutual consent in the policy-making process. That, however, will only increase their marginalisation as a political force. They had their moment during the last four years and soon they will pay a political (and in some cases, criminal) price for their sins.

In the meantime, watching the Republican in-fighting is like watching someone repeatedly cut themselves. The difference is that self-mutilation is most often not fatal to the person doing it, whereas what is going on in the GOP has the potential to be terminal to the party as a democracy-supportive political institution.

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To kill a beast.

Let’s be clear: if Trump is not politically killed off once and for all, he will become a MAGA Dracula, rising from the dead to haunt US politics for years to come and giving inspiration to his wretched family of grifters and thousands of deplorables well into the next decade. So what is needed now is a stake in his black heart, or a silver bullet, so long as whatever the means employed, it kills the beast.

The process of doing so is more akin to cancer surgery than supernatural intervention, but before proceeding to the discussion let me explain why Trump’s political death sentence is recognised as necessary.

The Democrats know what he is so I shall not discuss the logics by which they came to the conclusion that he needs to be extirpated from the body politic. It is the Republicans who are decisive here. They–by that I mean the Republican National Committee, US congressional delegations, state governments and legislatures, and the corporate interests that influence and fund Republican causes and candidates–have to come to grips with simple facts.

Trump was never a “true” Republican. Not only is he not a blue-blood old monied elite with stakes in traditional Republican ventures like oil, automobiles and finance. He was not a member of the party until he switched allegiance in 2010. From the get-go, his politics have been more of the George Wallace meets Barry Goldwater type rather than of the Nixon-Reagan-Rockefeller variant. His victory in the 2016 presidential primaries was a slap in the face by an upstart vulgarian to the Republican establishment, which he then proceeded to eviscerate by using their own opportunism against them. He offered the GOP “family” tax breaks, deregulation, a return to Anglo-Saxon heterosexist patrirachical Christian values and shirt-sleeve patriotism. They responded with political support. That support was contingent on his staying in his lane and understanding the limits on his authority and the boundaries of his power.

He did not. Instead, he picked needless fights at home and abroad over matters both inconsequential and important. He alienated allies and he cultivated American enemies. Rather than work to heal old wounds he picked the scab of racism and bigotry until it festered and burst into the public square in places like Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha (the last two where he joined rightwing conspiracists in claiming that Black Lives Matter protests over the murder of unarmed black men by police were an Antifa-Socialist plot).

Meanwhile, he drove a wedge within the GOP by forcing out non-MAGA types and replacing them with national-populists who would do his bidding. That fractured the Republicans, and yet the marriage of convenience between the GOP establishment and Trump continued until 2020. However, at that point his erratic behaviour and incompetent, some might say delusional approach to the Covid-19 crisis turned a bad situation into a world-leading case study in governmental dysfunction. He turned a public health crisis into an internecine ideological war about masks and lockdowns. He refused to listen to scientists and increasingly relieved on conspiracy theorists for advice on the pandemic and more. In doing so he became bad for business even as the financial markets remained optimistic that at some point he would come to his senses.

He did not. He ran a dog-whistling re-election campaign marked by Covid super-spreader rallies. He impugned the integrity of the electoral process months before the vote was held. He tried to manipulate votes by filling the US Postal Service with partisan hacks who attempted to suppress absentee (mail-in) ballots by reducing collection points and sorting facilities. He urged Republican state election officials to challenge minority voting rights and to limit access to voting facilities in areas that traditionally went Democratic on Election Day. He did everything in his power to tip the scales, skew the results and delegitimise any outcome other than his win.

He lost anyway. Not by hundreds of thousands or a few million votes. He lost by nearly 8 million votes. It is true that he garnered 74 million votes himself, but that was on the back on the highest voter turn out in over a century (60.66 percent). Joe Biden won close to 82 million votes, so in the end even with those 74 million votes cast for Trump, the race was not close.

Rather than concede gracefully, Trump well and truly jumped out of his lane. He denounced without evidence fraud in the electoral system and specifically those in contested swing states. He spoke of dark forces operating behind the scenes to cheat him out of his rightful victory. He decried foreign (but non- Russian) interference. He mounted over sixty specious legal challenges to the results in several states, losing all but one of them. And then he crossed the biggest line of all: he incited a seditious insurrectionary attack on the US Capitol in order to prevent the Electoral College results from being certified by Congress. People were killed and injured in the mass assault and occupation of the Legislative branch. Politicians were forced to flee for their lives and take cover as the mob swarmed the debating chamber and halls baying for blood. And rather than appeal for calm, Trump watched it unfold on TV.

Whether they recognise it or not, that was the point when he crossed a Republican bridge too far. The assault on the Capitol was aimed not just at Democrats but at Republicans as well (people chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” among other niceties). In the days leading up to, during and after the siege, Republican lawmakers were harassed and threatened in public spaces, social media and via personal communications (including Mitt-Romney (R-UT) and Lyndsey Graham (R-SC), as were Democrats (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) were singled out for particularly violent misogynistic abuse). The attack may have been originally driven by partisan rage stoked by Trump and his minions, but became a broad-brushed assault on an institutional pillar of the American Republic.

Because many of the insurrectionists were wrapped in body armour and armed with blunt and other street-level weapons like Mace and bear spray (there were also firearms and explosives cached near the Capitol), which they used to fight sworn law enforcement officers defending the complex, the assault was an attack on the sovereignty of the US government itself. That is because one of the foundations of sovereignty–the core of what it is to be a “sovereign”–is legal monopoly over organised violence within defined territorial limits (the definition is from Max Weber but the origins of the notion of sovereignty as having a coercive core dates back to Thomas Hobbes).

It has now been established that, cloaked by the larger crowd who attended the Trump “Stop the Steal” rally and then walked to the capitol after Trump urged them to, members of various militias were acting in a coordinated fashion to the extent that some used walkie-talkies and their phones to organise aspects of the attack such as blocking the underground tunnels below the Capitol that are used as escape routes for congresspeople in times of crisis. Once they violently engaged the Capitol and DC Police on the steps and interior of the legislature, they challenged the sovereignty of the Federal Government and the components parts of its repressive apparatus.

For any nation-state, much less a supposed superpower, that cannot stand. Regardless of partisan orientation, no individual is above the Institution. As the saying goes, the Nation is one of laws, not people. Sovereignty cannot be contested because if it does, the Republic is at risk. The State is sacrosanct so long as it performs its core functions.

That is why Trump must be excised. He has undermined the basic foundations of the constitutional Republic and thereby challenged fundamental notions of the US as a sovereign State. He has divided the Nation and manipulated his supporters into becoming a riotous seditious mob. He has put himself before God, Flag and Country even while wrapping himself in them.

If not in public, in their hearts Republicans know this.

Removal of Trump’s malignant political presence is a three step process. One is via his Senate trial and banishment, one involves the prosecution and punishment of his seditious supporters, and one is a form of legal chemotherapy that will hopefully prevent him from returning to the political scene. This is what needs to happen. It does not mean that it will happen. We can only be hopeful.

Senate Minority Mitch McConnell (R-KY) seems to understand the situation. With his bleating about “rigged” elections in Georgia, Trump contributed to the GOP losing both Senate seats in that state (to a Jew and an African-American!). That cost McConnell his majority leadership. He now has an incentive to see Trump finished off because among other things it will pull the rug out from under and bring to heel would-be pretenders to the MAGA throne like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.

The impeachment charge against Trump is incitement of the attack. In asking for two extra weeks for Trump’s lawyers to “prepare, ” McConnell may in fact be giving Democrats more time to uncover irrefutable evidence that the Trump White House colluded with insurrectionists on how to storm the Capitol. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have uncovered evidence that some of the “rioters” were paid staff on Trump’s campaign and were in contact with members of Trump’s entourage, including family members and people like Rudy Giuliani. With the articles of impeachment now tabled, more evidence may be uncovered before the Senate court proceedings begin. People can be subpoenaed to testify under oath or offered immunity in exchange for their testimony. Unlike his first impeachment, Trump cannot offer presidential protection to those called as witnesses (as he did when he ordered various officials not to testify). Things are about to get real and that reality is ugly for Trump.

17 Republicans need to cross the aisle and vote in favour of conviction in order for Trump to be impeached. McConnell has said that he has whatever numbers he needs to go either way. If the evidence is compelling then it will be easier to convict on “institutions over individuals” grounds. Doing so will be the start of the de-Trumpification process. Although that is necessary, it is not sufficient. More needs to be done by way of follow ups.

If Trump is convicted he then can be banned from political life by a simple majority vote in the Senate. The decision to vote on a lifetime ban is called by the Democratic majority. Given his long-standing repudiation of Trump, Mitt Romney will gladly provide the cross-over vote but there are others who will be willing to do so as well.

In order to make the ban stick, the second step is a form of legal chemotherapy. He needs to be sued and charged in civil and criminal courts at the state and federal levels, along with family members and others, like Giuliani, who conspired with him during his time in business and government. The constant barrage of lawsuits and prosecutions will exhaust him financially and perhaps mentally and will open space for people to turn on him in order to escape or receive lesser punishment themselves. So long as he is occupied in this fashion he will have relatively little resources, time or energy to try and mount some sort of political re-birth under different guise.

The final part of this process involves the prosecution and serious punishment of those charged with offences related to the assault on the Capitol. These include murder; conspiracy to commit murder; grievous bodily harm; conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm; inter-state transport of weapons with the intention of committing crime; looting; vandalism; theft of government property; theft and distribution of classified material; rioting; affray; sedition; treason and more. The charges must be as serious as possible and the sentences must be as severe as legally permissible.

The reason for this hard line approach is not just the punitive value it has on those who perpetrated the attack on the Capitol. Its main value is deterrent. It provides a palpable indicator of the boundaries of the “no go” zone when it comes to political dissent and legitimate protest. Adopting a judicial hard-line will help deter copycats or those who think that just because some politicians, even the president, say it is OK, seditious insurrection in fact is not OK as far as the constitutional State is concerned.

The three-tiered approach to extirpating the Trump malignancy from US politics is the only way that we can be reasonably assured that the treatment will work (and yes, I recognise that I am borrowing some of that “organic” language used by the Argentina junta when referring to its victims. But if the shoe fits, then why not wear it?). In the end, Trump is an existential threat to the very notion of the US as a nation-state, and must be treated as the domestic terrorist inspiration and enabler that he is. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he is no better and more likely a bit worse than one of Osama bin-Laden’s drivers in Pakistan. If so, and those guys wound up in Guantanamo or dead for their efforts, why should he be treated appreciably differently than they were?

One can only hope that Mitch McConnell and the GOP recognise that Trump is just another data point on that anti-democratic continuum, but one that is far more dangerous to the US than any Islamicist chauffeur.

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Taxonomies of mass political violence.

The assault on the US Capitol and constitutional crisis that it has caused was telegraphed, predictable and yet unexpected and confusing. There are several subplots involved: whether the occupation of the Michigan State House in May was a trial run for the attacks on Congress; whether people involved in the Michigan attack and other rightwing extremists from groups such as the Proud Boys were involved (as video shows individuals rallying and directing the crowds to the Capitol, initiating the first and subsequent clashes with the Capitol Police over the concentric perimeter barricades and then leading the charge towards the debating chambers and congressional offices while yelling threats to specific politicians like Pence and Pelosi; whether there was collusion between the president and elements in the DoJ, DoD and Capitol Police leadership to “stand down” their forces even in the face of intelligence reports that mass violence was distinctly possible; whether this was done purposefully to allow the occupation in order delay the electoral college certification vote hoping that somehow Trump would be declared the default winner (he would not); and so on.

Rather then get into these subjects while the smoke has yet to clear, allow me to offer a critique and then clarify some key concepts needed to understand what happened.

To begin with, the liberal corporate media is doing us no favours by loosely throwing out words like “domestic terrorists” and “coup” (the rightwing media prefers to blame everything on Antifa or portray the rioters as “misguided patriots” so will be ignored). This a prime example of conceptual stretching that devalues the true meaning of the words and renders them meaningless as analytic tools at a delicate moment. Conceptual precision, not conceptual stretching, is needed now. So in the interest of conceptual precision let me briefly offer the following taxonomy:

Military coup: removal of a government by the armed forces often working on behalf of or with civilian elite factions via the threat or use of force. It is top-down and elite in nature and execution, not mass based, and often pre-emptive in the face of a potential grassroots mass uprising. Its scale of violence can range from low to very high depending on the perception of common threat by the coup-mongering elites. It can involve universal or particular (corporate, in terms of specifically military) grievances. Depending on what the coup-mongering coalition intends, it can involve regime rather than government change. Other names for this phenomenon are “golpe de Estado (golpe)” or “putsch” (although in recent history the term refers to violent inter-military leadership disputes rather than regime change per se).

Constitutional coup: removal of government by a disloyal opposition via manipulation of legal norms (e.g. impeachment under false pretences). It is top-down and elite in nature and execution, not mass based, and the scale of violence is low. May embrace universal claims but uses particular grievances as precipitant or justifying factors. Does not involve regime change.

Insurrection: attempted/actual overthrow of government by armed political faction(s). It involves collective violence that is mass but not necessarily majority based. It is bottom-up in nature even if encouraged by elites and the scale of violence ranges from low to very high depending on the level of State and/or civil resistance to it. Embraces universal claims but may use particular grievances as a justification for action. May or may not desire or cause regime change.

Armed revolt: violent protest against government. Non-elite and bottom up in nature and execution. Low to medium scale of violence depending on scope of adhesion and State and social resistance. Often particularistic rather than universal in its grievances or claims. It can be minority or mass based depending on the scope of social adhesion. It may or may not result in government or policy change and will not result in regime change.

Sedition: advocating or instigating the usurpation/overthrow of duly constituted government. Can be elite or grassroots in nature and execution but with a limited mass base in any event. Low to medium scale of violence depending on degree of State repression. May have particular or universal grievances or claims but is not focused on regime change.

Revolution: mass (violent/non-violent) collective action leading to socio-economic and political parametric change (which involves regime, social and structural changes that transcend simple government overthrow). Bottom-up and grassroots in nature and execution based on universal claims or grievances (even if led by organised revolutionary vanguards). Scale of violence low to extreme based on scope of social and State resistance (i.e. class, religious and ethnic divisions increase the probability of violence).

Revolts, insurrections and sedition can lead to coups or revolution but are not synonymous with them.

So what happened in the US? The attack on Congress is best seen as an insurrection/limited mass revolt instigated by a seditious president refusing to step down after losing an election. It is not a coup because those are basically quarrels amongst elites that require overt or tacit involvement by the armed forces in support of one faction or one elite faction overthrowing another via “constitutional” means. It did not intend regime (or even governmental) change but instead the reassertion or re-validation of a particular type of administrative authority in a presidential democracy.

Nor was terrorism involved. Terrorism is the use of seemingly indiscriminate extreme or disproportionate violence on defenceless targets for symbolic purposes. It has a target (victims), object (purpose) and subject (audience(s)). The object is to sow pervasive fear and dread with the purpose of bending the subject to the perpetrator’s will. It can be criminal, state- (including military), state-sponsored, or non-state ideological in nature.

The assault on Capitol Hill did not involve extreme or wanton indiscriminate violence against defenceless targets. It was not designed to sow generalised fear. It was a limited, low-level mass act of partisan violence on a symbol of power that involved thuggery (including corporal harm) for the purposes of intimidation. It resulted in arrests, injuries and deaths, but it failed.

Once we understand these basic differences, we can more specifically consider the proportionate remedies needed to address the problem. Throwing around emotive language during a delicate and charged time only cheapens the debate and compounds the real issues involved. So let’s be precise.

PS: Long term readers will note that I have discussed various aspects of civil-military relations and the causal factors at play in coups in previous posts. Things like push and pull factors, vertical and horizontal cleavages within the military, disloyal oppositions and partisan stalemates–there is much more to the coup phenomenon than simplistic (mostly Left) punditry would have us believe. The truth with regard to recent event in the US is more complex, scary in part and yet comforting in the end.

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Masking Alone.

A while back I was talking to a friend about the reasons why I believe that the US has failed so miserably in managing the Covid-19 pandemic. Our starting point was the idiocy surround the “masks interfere with our freedom” argument. Besides the fact that with individual and collective rights come responsibilities resulting in all sort of public interest regulations that people routinely accept (seatbelts, bike helmets for children, protective gear in the workplace), or the fact that retail outlets and other private entities routinely demand dress standards (“no shoes, no shirts, no service”), the problem appears to be rooted in the dumbing down of the US public over decades coupled with the rise of alternative (often false and conspiratorial) sources of information. As some have mentioned, never before have we had so much information at our finger tips and yet never before have we been so ill-informed.

That means that it is not political polarisation per se or leadership incompetence in the Oval Office that conspired to impede effective public health crisis mitigation. To be sure, once the narrative–encouraged from the White House–became one of “freedom” and “choice” versus THE STATE, the debate about pandemic control was hopelessly lost to the nutters. Rightwing media pushing the “freedom” versus authoritarianism line made things worse. But beyond that, the deep-seated mistrust of government, scientific expertise, health authorities and collective good sense in the US is rooted in something far more pernicious than the MAGA Moron phenomenon.

That something is the the erosion and corruption of what I will broadly describe as “social institutions.” These are the civil and political society groups that, along with their distinctive cultural and ethical mores and norms, are considered to be the foundation of collective identity and, writ large, notions of nationhood. In 2000 Robert Putnam ascribed the hollowing out of American democracy to the loss of these institutions in his book Bowling Alone, where he uses the metaphor of the post-1950s decline of bowling (and bowling alleys) as evidence that US civil society, and along with it civic virtue, was/is in decline. He called this a loss of “social capital.” It is the loss of social capital that is the root cause of today’s US predicament.

I am aware of the many good critiques of Putnam’s book and so will just address and add to the notion that a decline in social institutions is a precursor to the type of political polarisation and social anomaly that exists in the US today.

First of all, Putnam did not adequately explain the relationship between the decline of “social capital” and the evolution of US capitalism over the last half century. The move from postwar industrial logics of production to increasingly service-oriented economics amid a technology-propelled globalisation of commerce and exchange was the main driver in the entrance of women into the commodified labor force amid the destruction of the industrial era social division of labor. Unions declined, part-time work became mainstreamed, two-income families became a necessity rather than a choice, automation and out-sourcing killed off entire industries, corporate savings declined while “leveraged” borrowing and debt increased –the list of changes is long. The US is now a military-industrial, high tech, highly automated service-oriented economy, and the strong industrial class lines that emerged before and after WW2 have now been broken into a small but unified class elite governing over dozens of post-industrial class factions divided by race, region, religion and (types of) recreation.

Income inequalities have increased exponentially since 1980. The US is now a country where the top one percent of income earners own 30 percent of the country’s wealth, more than the entire middle class. The dislocating effects of the economic shifts of the last half century are both broad and deep, extending from corporate cultures, small business practices to inter-personal affective relationships.

To that can be added the alienating effects of advanced telecommunications, particularly the introduction of mass computing technologies that obliterated the barriers between personal, private, public and corporate communications, entertainment and consumption. Take the notion of leisure. What used to be collective pursuits held in public group settings, such as bowling, gradually were replaced by more individualised pursuits done in private settings, like gaming. Profits from physical attendance at sporting or entertainment events have been eclipsed by those generated by televised coverage of the events. Plus, with wages increasingly compressed (again, the reasons are many) and work demands increased, people no longer had the time or money to commit to social networking significantly outside of work-related activities.

Here is a small example. After World War Two my father worked at the General Motors Overseas Corporation (GMOC) based in New York. GMOC was the international production and trading arm of General Motors Corporation based in Detroit. For legal and tax reasons it was a separate business entity from the domestic side of the business, with its top management holding selected senior positions in the overall umbrella structure of the Detroit-based firm.

Back in those days my father was no senior manager. Instead he started as a mailroom clerk and worked his way up. He met my mother, a secretary, at GMOC. During the entire time that he was at GMOC, before he took a job in Argentina and GMOC New York was dismantled and integrated into the Detroit parent company, he played sports for GMOC teams. Baseball in the summer, basketball in the fall and winter, softball in the spring and bowling year round. He and my mom met in Central Park where the outdoor games were held and either had picnics or went out to eat after the games were finished. In colder weather they met in gyms and at the lanes to do variations of the same. When I was very young I was brought along to share those moments along with my parent’s colleagues and young families.

After we moved to Argentina my Dad continued to play softball for a GM team that was established there. It played against other automobile and oil companies (Ford, Chysler, Esso and Shell) and some local Argentine teams keen on improving their skills against US competition. Meanwhile, even before GMOC was reorganised and relocated to Detroit in 1971, the corporate athletic leagues in New York City began to decline as per Putnam’s observation. Younger employees moved to the suburbs rather than live in the buroughs, family pressures and commuting infringed on the time available to play ball, and by the end of the 1970s the entire network of NY corporate sports associations was on life support.

There have been attempts to resurrect or replace these Leagues with mixed success. The point is that their decline was driven not by changes in cultural mores alone but by the irresistible forces operating in production and in the social division of labour that grew out of them.

Even so, cultural mores have been at play in the decline of social capital in the US. The hyper-competitive drive that pushed the evolution of US capitalism has resulted in the emergence of what I think of as a “survivalist alienation” ethos coupled with a liability mentality. People increasingly see each other as competitors rather than colleagues, much less comrades. They abdicate personal responsibility in favour of “other-blaming.” An entire industry–personal injury litigation, aka ambulance chasing–has been built on these twin pillars. This leads to a form of collective narcissism that one might call “hyper-individualism:” it is all about me, me me.

This turn to the self is cloaked in a vulgarisation of social discourse evident in pop culture but extending much beyond it. Even sports have coarsened: cage fighting and scripted wrestling have moved from the fringe to the centre of profit-making athletics.

The impact is seen in what is left of social institutions. The phenomena of raging soccer moms and fighting baseball dads are so common that sports field security for pre-teens is required for insurance purposes and sideline rage has entire social media channels dedicated to it. Little kids now preen and strut, mock their opponents, and generally behave like the lumpenproletarians they see in professional sports. What this amounts to is a rot from within, where the pure soul of sport is carved out and replaced by something far darker.

Likewise, be it in bridge clubs or local volunteer fire departments, the US has seen both declining numbers and declining civility within social institutions. That is the social capital that is being lost. Horizontal solidarities have consequently been disrupted while vertical socio-economic disparities have increased. People are atomised in production and increasingly isolated in civil society. That leads to political alienation and dysfunction, making the terrain, as Gramsci said, “delicate and dangerous” and ripe for “charismatic men of destiny” to stamp their imprint on it. Trump and his GOP minions have done exactly that.

It occurs to me that the dislocating effects of capitalist production in its post-industrial phase coupled with a coarsening of popular discourse in the US lie at the root of the decline in social institutions/social capital that Putnam described, which in turn facilitated political polarisation, media stratification and a retreat into comfortable idiocy on the part of many citizens. That prevented any united approach to pandemic mitigation because the atomising and centrifugal forces at play were (and still are) multiple, overlapped, intertwined–and antagonistically reinforcing around the lightening rod that is the 45th president.

To this can be added two other American pathologies: lack of historical memory and the cultural predisposition towards the “quick fix” rather than more long-term, drawn out and measured responses. The lack of historical memory is not just about the 1918 so-called “Spanish Flu.” It is about any disease, from polio to SARS. Very little in the Trump administration, city or state responses was grounded in historical reads of previous disease eradication efforts (what references were made had mostly to do with case and death statistics, not to the progression of and specific mitigation efforts against the disease). Instead, when not a complete shambles of denial and blame-shifting such as that of the White House, what passed for containment policies were drawn from contemporary experiences around the globe. Even successful Obama-era public health campaigns were derided on partisan grounds. That might not have been problematic in places where the response initially worked, but given that Covid-19 has moved into second- and third-wave mutations, it was no panacea over the longer term.

This wilful lack of historical references is compounded by the American penchant for the “quick fix.” Rather than put on masks, practice social distancing and suffer short term economic deprivation for longer term gain, many Americans preferred to live their lives as usual, without precautions, bleating about their “rights” and “freedom” while they waited for a vaccine to be developed. Here too the lack of historical memory hurt, because many simply did not believe the experts when they said that, based on experience, a vaccine was a year or more away from being developed. As it turns out, vaccines have been developed and rolled out in less than a year, which is truly remarkable. But the disease moved deeper into society as winter came, and now 1 in very 1000 Americans (335,000) have died of it before the vaccine is broadly available. Cases are nearing 20 million and by the time the vaccine is widely available the estimates are that at least 10 million more will be infected and 400,000 American will be dead. Not surprisingly, both the prevalence of the disease and access to vaccines is marshalled along socio-economic class and ethnic lines.

In sum, the wretched excuse of the US pandemic response is the culmination of a long period of decline that is founded on the erosion of social institutions and loss of social capital caused by the evolution of the US mode of production. To be sure there are other intervening variables and factors at play in the cultural and political milieus that contributed to the disaster (because that is what this is–a human disaster in both cause and response). But in the end the problem of the US pandemic response was not one of public health failures but one of US capitalism and its social and political superstructure.

Hence the need during this holiday season for Americans to mask alone.

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Outliving his usefulness.

With his whining about the “stolen” election, Drumpf does not appear to understand a basic rule of politics: politicians are only valuable because of their utility to others. Once they stop being useful they become expendable, and political utility never lasts forever.

With his transactional approach to everything, Drumpf should have been quick to realise this and in his use of pardons he seems to grasp the basic principles of the quid pro quos involved. But he also fails to grasp that he was only useful to the GOP so long as they could ride his coattails and exploit the window of opportunity his presence in the Oval Office represented for themselves and their constituents. Once it became clear that he lost the election, few GOP heavyweights came to his defense. That was left to lightweights and sycophants peddling increasingly deranged conspiracy theories.

Remember that many traditional GOP backers held their noses as Drumpf scorched his rivals during the 2016 primaries, then grabbed their ankles when he won that November because they saw that doing so facilitated Drumpf doing their bidding. The strategy worked well for them, at least when it came to domestic deregulatory and tax legislation. But in order to get that, the “old” GOP stalwarts had to swallow a lot of crow from the vulgar upstart and his uncouth entourage when it came to everything else, be it in culture wars, race relations or foreign policy.

For short -term gain, they gave up hard earned long term guarantees of stability at home and abroad, and then the pandemic exposed the basic incompetence, indifference and crude venality that passed for Drumpf’s Executive leadership. As part of his pathology, Drumpf doubled down on his destabilisation tactics, blaming Antifa and BLM while encouraging racists and other rightwing nutters to take matters into their own hands against politicians who refused to support, much less challenged him on the pandemic response and matters of race, law and order. Truth be told, by late summer the US social order was in melt down mode, and that continued through the elections last month.

Now his relentless attacks on the electoral system as a whole not only render him useless as a vehicle for the GOP’s political advancement. It also threatens to divide it between MAGA and non-MAGA factions, thereby jeopardizing the future of the party itself. For the Republican old guard, the limits of toleration of the buffoon have been reached. They are now slowly but surely turning on him because they know that when it comes to politics, the Party is more important than the person.

That is where Joe Biden comes in. In spite of the attempts to smear him, ole Joe ain’t no commie. Nor is Kamala. The “Squad” got no jobs in their cabinet. Instead, corporate America can breath easy so there is no need for the Republicans to bluster and puff about the American capitalist way of life. Joe’s 40 years of swamp living has made him a known entity across the aisle and his penchant for compromise, as distasteful as it is to me and other Lefties, allows the GOP to exit the Drumpf era with some grace, if not dignity. For all his lack of charisma, Sleepy Joe is exactly the kind of Democratic usher that the GOP can live with. Drumpf is no longer needed, much less essential for traditional Republican interests to be served.

In sum. Having moved from being no longer useful to becoming a threat to GOP unity, Trump has transitioned from expendable to expellable. His best hope now is to be ignored on his way quietly out of office, less further outbursts and outrages force the Republicans to publicly repudiate him. That moment could well be coming, even if the shadow of his future actions also weighs heavily on that decision.

The bottom line in any event is that Drumpf is done. Trumpism may survive as an ideological current within rightwing circles, but its political value will diminish without the advantages of having access to the bully pulpit of presidential office. Drumpf may agitate from the sidelines and there will be pretenders to the throne within the GOP, but it is more likely that Republicans will try to reclaim the party from Trumpism rather than resurrect it. That will be especially true if criminal investigations of Drumpf administration activities unobstructed by obstacles placed from within by the Justice Department and White House result in state and/or federal prosecutions of people connected to it.

Even Moscow Mitch knows that.

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Sedition from within.

The refusal of Donald Trump and his supporters in the media and Republican Party to acknowledge his defeat in the presidential election has taken an ominous turn. What at first could be discounted as the childish petulance of a sore loser is now morphing into the makings of a constitutional coup. The move is two sided, involving the de-legitimation of the electoral process as a foundational institution of the political system; and the hollowing out and/or partisan stacking of key agencies that otherwise would be the most resistant to that type of subversion. This is, in effect, sedition from within.

In the last days Trump has fired the Secretary of Defense and forced the resignations of key aides, including the DoD Chief of Staff and head of special operations and low intensity conflict. He has replaced them with craven loyalists, including Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, a former Army special forces soldier and recently Director of Counter-Terrorism at the NSC. Miller has an intense hatred for Iran and supports Trump’s efforts to immediately withdraw US troops from Afghanistan in order to re-deploy them on Iran’s Western flank, which in turn will be part of the “maximum pressure” campaign Trump wants to wage on the Persian State. US military commanders object to both the withdrawal and to the lop-sided re-deployment, to say nothing of being drawn into yet another (senseless) war of opportunity.

Trump is rumored to be getting ready to fire the CIA and FBI directors. He has purged professional careerists in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and replaced them with hyper partisans. He has politicised and promoted partisans and loyalists in the Border Patrol and Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The pace of this “purge and replace” process has quickened since Election Day. If he continues to do so, by Inauguration Day he will have cleared a path in the repressive apparatus of so-called “constitutionalists” in favor of loyalists.

The Miller appointment is also ominous because Acting Directors do not need Senate confirmation and one of the main missions of US Army special forces is to train indigenous militias in guerrilla warfare. Already there is speculation that his experience can be used to forge links between DoD, Republican-led state governments and various rightwing militia groups in the event that Trump’s refusal to abdicate turns into physical confrontations between his supporters and Biden supporters and/or local government security agencies. This puts pressure on the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and service branch leadership as to what they will do in the event that DoD lends its institutional weight and resources to the pro-Trump insurgents, egged on from within the Oval Office.

The Trump administration has already held a trial run of sorts when it comes to politicised domestic repression. A few months ago armed federal “agents” wearing uniforms without identification were sent into Portland to counter BLM protests. They were not invited by the mayor or the Oregon governor. They stayed for several weeks, making arrests, using batons and tear gas against peaceful demonstrators, seizing people and removing them in unmarked vans to locations outside the city centre. They worked alongside the Portland Police, who in turn cast a blind eye on armed right-wing militants showing up to counter-demonstrate against the BLM crowds. It turns out that these unidentified federal agents were recruited from within the Border Patrol, ICE, Customs and other agencies overseen by DHS. They were removed from Portland when their activities were exposed in the media and were subsequently prohibited by several local jurisdictions–Chicago and New York among them–from deploying there in spite of Trump’s threats to “send them in.”

Then, of course, there was the use of tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray by National Guard and other federal security units against peaceful demonstrators in and around Lafayette Square in Washington DC. When DC based National Guard troops–many of them African Americans–baulked at repressing their fellow Washingtonians, Trump had supportive Republican governors supply National Guards from their respective states (National Guard units are commanded by state governors or, in the case of federal territory like the District of Columbia, by the president himself). He went so far as to stage a photo opportunity outside St. Johns Episcopal church adjacent to the square in which the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, and then-defence Secretary Mark Esper were paraded out and used as props (both Milley and Esper later claimed that they were unaware of what was going on when they were invited to join the president for a walk into the Square).

Trump has refused to allow Biden to receive the daily intelligence briefs that incoming presidents are normally provided. He has made no plans or engaged in the usual niceties of transitions between administrations. Instead, he has dug his heels in on the fraudulent election claims and in this he has been supported by (with a few exceptions) the Republican Party at all levels, rightwing media, and foreign despots like Jair Bolsonaro. Whether out of prudence or preference, the autocrats running China and Russia have remained silent on the issue.

If Trump is able to corrode the institutional apparatus by hollowing it out and stacking it with cronies, then one of the last defences against a full authoritarian take-over of the executive will have to be the courts. But Trump has the Bill Barr-led Justice department running cover for him, not only in cases involving his administration, his campaign or disputes with Congress, but even attempts to represent him in personal matters such as defence against lawsuits stemming from rape allegations dating back to his days as a private citizen. He has named over 200 judges to federal courts and has successfully placed three Supreme Court judges on the highest bench in the land. He is banking on them coming to his side when push comes to shove regarding the presidency. It remains to be seen if they will do so but the fact that it may even come to that is alarming of itself.

Opinion polls show that Republican voters are much less supportive of democracy as a construct and much more supportive of governments that cater to their policy preferences. That is to say, when it comes to democracy, for US conservatives it is all about deliverables. This is a variant of the old “trains run on time” argument made about Mussolini–that efficiency is more important than representativeness, equality or transparency when it comes to governance. It is this instrumental view of democracy–that it only works or is preferable if it works in one’s (partisan) favour–that under-rides popular support for Trump’s authoritarian moves.

The anti-democratic trend is visible world wide in both new and mature democracies, but in the US it has a distinctly partisan aspect to it. Normally anarchists, communists and assorted other Leftists would be the most opposed to what Lenin called capitalism’s “best possible shell.” But in the US it is the right-wing view that this political shell–bourgeois democracy–covers the work and policies of nefarious liberal elites. QAnon elevated the nefarious nature of elite behaviour into the realm of pedophilia and sex-trafficking in Deep State-operated circles, so the crazy is strong and runs deep on that side of the US ideological ladder.

That is what makes Trump’s moves more alarming than they should be under “normal” circumstances. There are a lot of people who welcome his sedition and in fact want to be part of it. For many it is a defence of the historical status quo that motivates them, heterosexist, patriarchical, racist, xenophobic and classist as that may be. For others it is just an opportunity for taking advantage. Whatever the motivation, this coalition of deplorables are ready, able and willing to join the Trump-led subversion of American political institutions. And they are here to stay whether he remains in office or not.

The danger of a US constitutional coup is compounded by the fact that many people in and outside the federal bureaucracy do not believe that “it can happen here.” For every MAGA maniac frothing about the Deep State, there are many reasonable others who believe that the US institutional foundation is too solid to be usurped or overthrown. They simply cannot grasp the notion that a coup can occur in the US, much less one that is carried out quietly, incrementally and from within the State apparatus. And yet for the entirety of his presidency, Trump has been preparing the ground for exactly that, using the justifications of “draining the swamp” and fighting the Deep State as the cover for his seditious intent.

That brings up the question about Republicans. Although it is widely understood that they at first thought that they could control Trump and bend him in their preferred image, by now they must realise that was a pipe dream. So the question of the moment is why do major components of the Republican Party and rightwing ecosystem continue to cling to him after the election and tie themselves to his attempts to overturn the results? Is it their desire to ride his political coattails? Or what he could do to them down the road? Is it fear of what his MAGA base can do to them now and down the road? Or are they sincere in thinking that the election was stolen (only where he lost) and that usurping the constitution and institutional foundations is justified by that circumstance even if it destroys the Republic?

It may pay for the GOP to remember that Trump was a Democrat before he switched to being a Republican ten years ago. It may pay for them to recall that he said that he switched because Republican voters were dumb and it was easier to dupe them. It may pay for them to remember that before he embraced evangelical Xtians he led a degenerate atheist lifestyle that has only been slightly tempered by his move into public office. It may pay for them to remember how he turns on those in their ranks who question his actions, and on Fox News when it stops blindly cheerleading for him. Because what that should tell them is that their loyalty to him is not reciprocal, and that his actions are based in personal self-interest, not principle or partisan conviction. That is the ultimate motivation for his sedition from within.

It may seem far-fetched, but of this the US constitutional coup could be made.

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Counterfeiting information.

Although trite to say so, if knowledge is power, then information is its currency. The more complete the information at hand, the more knowledge that it imparts, which can be wielded for bad or good.

In that light, spreading disinformation is akin to counterfeiting. It is fraud masquerading as fact. The more it is accepted and disseminated, the more genuine informational “currency” (including scientific and factual information) is devalued. The more legitimate information is devalued the more it becomes indistinguishable from disinformation. This is the purpose of many psychological warfare campaigns and is a standard tool for authoritarians that rely on so-called “gaslighting” tactics to keep their subjects confused or ignorant of actual reality and the circumstances of their rule.

Actors who use disinformation campaigns in liberal democracies are no more than imposters and counterfeiters attempting to influence the political market. Counterfeiters and imposters are not accepted in the financial and business markets, so there is no reason to accept them in the political and social realms. Instead, they should be seen as malignancies that need to be excised.

This should be the bottom line for political parties and social media platforms: disinformation is fraud. Peddling information counterfeits should be avoided and blocked rather than enabled, much less encouraged. This is not a “free speech” or civil liberties issue. It is a matter of countering malign deceptions deliberately designed to hinder and cloud the flow of legitimate information in the social and political spheres.

The threat to democracy posed by information counterfeiting is worsening. The proliferation of social media and the descent into “winner take all” disloyal political competition has aided the trend. Information counterfeiting is now used by both domestic and foreign actors who may or may not be working synergistically. It no longer is confined to times of open (inter-state or civil) conflict. For the foreign actor it is a means of weakening a targeted society from within by sowing division and partisan/racial/ethnic/religious/cultural rancour. For domestic actors it is a way to pursue partisan advantage and achieve political gain even if over the long-term it serves the purposes of hostile foreign agents. Be it myopic or strategic in objective, political counterfeiting is inimical to liberal democratic values because it seeks to impede or disrupt the flow of legitimate information in society.

It may seem obvious that disinformation and “fake news” is bad. But it is particularly bad when those who start the spread of disinformation turn around and accuse opponents of doing so when challenged on factual grounds. That is when Orwell meets Alice in Wonderland when it comes to the information stream framing the narrative that informs public opinion.

I have chosen here to rephrase the subject of disinformation as a form of counterfeiting. Not only because it advises caution when validating political claims, much like one would do when checking a label, stitching, material, ink or other components of a branded product, commodity or banknote. Doing so also removes arguments about free speech and rights of expression from the equation when it comes to confronting and countering disinformation in the public square because it frames the matter as one of fraud, not opinion. That should then become the basis for legal approaches to framing fair, just and proper responses to the problem.

Otherwise liars, cheats, agitators and provocateurs will continue to peddle false public narratives in pursuit of selfish gain.

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When the dictator wears capes.

Today Chileans voted overwhelmingly to elect a constitutional assembly and redraft the 1980 Constitution promulgated by the dictatorship of Agusto Pinochet. I regret that my old friend Bob Barros, whose death I wrote about a while ago, is not around to see this moment because he was the first person to write a book length analysis of the Chilean dictatorship’s attempts to institutionalise its rule via legal means, including constitution drafting.

The process for redrawing the foundational charter will involve electing a citizen constitutional convention next year, then voting on its draft version of a new charter in 2022. Presumably authoritarian clauses such as granting the military 15 percent of pre-tax copper revenues will be removed in the process.

But that is not what I am here to write about. Instead, I bring Chile up because events in the US remind me something my father told me years ago when we were watching Pinochet trying to neutralise the transition to democracy by organising a referendum in 1988 on extending his rule for another eight years. The wording of the referendum was deliberately phrased in Pinochet’s favour, with a “Yes” vote being a reaffirmation of support for the Motherland while a “No” vote was construed as unpatriotic and a negative slap at all that was good in Chile.

As it turns out, in 1989 I just happened to be a Research Fellow at a think tank at the same time that one of the architects of the 1988 “No” campaign was in residence. His name is Eugenio Tironi, a sociologist, who was one of those responsible for turning a “No” vote into a positive affirmation of support for democracy and a “Yes” vote as continued support for oppression. His accounting of the obstacles the “NO” campaigners faced, both in terms of physical intimidation (it was a murderous regime that they were confronting after all) and in terms of the institutional deck being stacked against them, was inspirational. The “No” vote won with 56 percent in that contest and the rest, as they say, is history. Yet, even though there have been amendments to the 1980 constitution, it took forty years for it to be designated for comprehensive review.

Again, I digress. During those years my father, who had been the head of the American Chamber of Commerce and managing director of a foreign multinational in Chile in the 1970s and was a friend of Pinochet and some of his ministers, strongly debated with me the merits of the so-called “Chilean Miracle,” military authoritarians as political circuit breakers and the role of the “Chicago Boys” in crafting Chilean economic policy. I have a University of Chicago Political Science Ph.D. from that era and had many run-ins with the Chilean (and Argentine, Brazilian and South Korean) economics graduate students of the time, many of whom were junior military officers directly involved in atrocities and other human rights abuses. Let’s just say that we did not get along on or off the soccer field.

By 1989 I had written a bit about military authoritarianism, state terror, democratic transitions and issues of labour politics and civil-military relations in transitional moments. I had begun also begun my affiliation with various US security agencies, something that lasted until I emigrated to NZ. So the discussions with my father were driven by ideological difference but for both of us the conversations were grounded in practical experience in Latin America–his doing business for over 30 years in the region and mine as a result of the mix of personal and professional experiences dating back to my childhood in Argentina.

During the 1988 referendum in Chile by father and I happened to be spending time together when out of the blue he said “when the dictator starts wearing capes, he is soon to fall.” Seeing the dumbfounded look on my face he explained that it was a variation on the “emperor has no clothes” theme. To wit: when a military dictator starts looking like Elvis in his final (Las Vegas) years, it means that he no longer has anyone around him to give him objective assessments of his position. Surrounded by sycophants and yes-men, the dictator loses an important feedback loop by which to judge the efficaciousness and popularity of his actions. At that point he starts making mistakes and yet no one will point out to him where he went wrong. By the time he realises that he has gotten himself into trouble via faulty decision-making, the knives are out and the rats are jumping ship.

That was what the 1988 referendum was for Pincohet. I mean, look at the guy:

Heck, his whole entourage had the syndrome:

It is possible that “el Viejo,” as we called my old man, may have warned “Don Agusto” that his uniform had limited mileage, even if his advice went unheeded. At a minimum my father understood that the general needed to drop the capes when sharing public space with foreign executives. Around my Dad he apparently did (sorry for the scan but it tells the story nevertheless):

The captions write themselves at this point but suffice to say this was before Pinochet went full Elvis.

The larger issue is that once you reach the wearing capes state of affairs, it is all over but the shouting.

That brings me to Donald Trump. True, he does not wear capes (although he does wear long overcoats, as Barbara has kindly pointed out in a comment) and true, he is an elected wanna-be Pinochet not installed by coup. But if his ridiculous hair and fake tan are not clear indicators of his “cape syndrome,” then the fact that he is now standing on balconies and stages barking about socialism, low water pressure, “rounding the corner” on Covid-19, repeating that more testing means more cases, then refusing to quarantine or socially distance numerous infected White House employees while claiming that he is “immune” and saying that Biden is going to allow dark males to rape and pillage in white suburbia are all one needs to understand that he is mentally and politically done. Either he is not listening to his advisors or they are not telling him the truth, but either way his path is his downfall. For a guy who supposedly is the most powerful person on earth, his world is really small and strikingly insular.

I mean, really:

Come to think of it, Trump probably has a cape or two in his closets, complete with matching hoods, but breaking them out at rallies might be too much for most voters (although one has to admit that it would be a truly epic moment in US political history if he did so). So when it comes to determining if he has reached peak “cape,” we will just have to settle for what he says and does (and not do).

All of which suggests that he is delusional when shouting MAGA! when in fact he is swimming upstream into a blue tide.

PS: It has come to my attention that Darth Vader and some of his minions also wore capes. Make of that what you will.

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A suggestion for Biden’s foreign policy (with bonus “A View from Afar” podcast).

I have been thinking about US foreign policy after the upcoming election. My working assumption is that try as he might, Trump will lose the election and be forced from office. There will be much litigating of the results and likely civil unrest, but on Jan 21, 2021 the Orange Merkin will no longer disgrace the office of US president.

The damage to the US reputation and interests done by the Trump administration has been extraordinary and will take much time and effort to reverse, and even then some of the damage may be irreparable. The scope of what has to happen is too broad to discuss in a short KP post, but here is some food for thought: If Biden wins the US election he should name Barack Obama as ambassador extraordinaire/special envoy to lead the repair, restoration and reform of US foreign relations.

That is a very big task, which is why no one can do more to undue the damage wreaked by Trump than POTUS 44. Obama is the most respected politician in the world according to global surveys and his party is (slowly) moving leftwards. The latter is important because it means that some of the old shibboleths of US foreign policy like unconditional support for Israel or Saudi Arabia can be challenged from within the Democratic establishment of which Obama is part. More broadly, he represents both continuity and change in US foreign policy, and has the stature to confront, cajole and convince international interlocutors. Unconstrained by the strictures of the presidency yet deeply aware of US failures and flaws–including his own while POTUS–as well as its strengths and interests, Obama would have relative freedom and autonomy when negotiating on the country’s behalf. That affords him some room for manoeuvre when addressing thorny matters of international import.

All he needs is institutional (presidential, most importantly) support and the awareness that the US cannot return to the status quo ante. Post-Trump and post-pandemic, with new power contenders firmly entrenched in the international scene and with a broad erosion of international norms and mores, the world is a different place than it was during his term in office, and not necessarily one that looks to the US for unchallenged leadership or moral guidance. That is precisely why someone of his stature is needed to help redefine and reconstitute US foreign relations.

Theoretically Obama could take a step down to SecState, but that is awkward given his previous job and prior relationship with Biden. Making him a global Mr. Fix-It answering directly to POTUS 46 gives him institutional weight commensurate with his stature as ex-president. That frees up the eventual SecState to concentrate on rebuilding the foreign service (decimated by Trump’s minions) and conducting the daily business of diplomacy while Obama concentrates on the hard nuts to crack: the suspended START intermediate range missile negotiations with the Russians, the abandoned Iran nuclear limitation deal, the cancelled Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade compact, Israeli-Palestinian relations, the DPRK impasse, etc. He knows the issues, he knows the principles and principals involved and he knows the history behind and between them.

There will be much on Obama’s plate, to be sure, but with enough resources devoted to the task such a division of labor between him and the State Department could more rapidly address the myriad areas of foreign policy that have been left derelict or deliberately damaged by the mediocrities currently running the White House, Foggy Bottom and other agencies of the federal government responsible for foreign policy issues. That makes the selection of SecState especially important, as the person would need to be able to handle Obama’s plenipotentiary status and also the demands of running the foreign policy bureaucracy while supporting the ex-president’s endeavours.

Biden has already singled that he will use some “old hands” (mostly Obama staffers) in his foreign policy team and will re-assert the preference for democracy and human rights in his approach to foreign relations. But his nostalgic perspective will need to be seriously tempered by two incontrovertible facts, one internal and external. Externally, he will take office at a time when the US is a declining power confronted by rising and resurgent powers and an absence of consensus on how nation-states should behave in such transitional times. It no longer has the will or the ability to be the world’s policeman and the US-led global economic model operative during a half century has seen its frailties exposed by Covid-19. The US must adjust accordingly.

Internally, Biden must agree to a significant number of the foreign policy demands of the left-wing of the Democratic Party not only in order to win the election but in order to achieve stability within government after it. He will try to do so incrementally rather than radically but the bottom line is that he has to do so given the changing times in which we live.

Then there is the military aspect of foreign policy. Since Bush 43 the US has been over-reliant on the military as a blunt instrument of foreign policy to the detriment of diplomacy. The traditional dictum that the military should be used only when diplomacy fails has long been discarded, and the Trump administration simply does not comprehend that “military diplomacy” is not always about the deployment, threat and use of force. The relationship between diplomacy and military force is not a zero sum game. The approach to it therefore has to change.

Recently Hillary Clinton has written about the need to reconsider the “Four D’s” of foreign policy: defence, diplomacy, development and the domestic sources of US international relations. Although she (like Biden and Obama) remains wedded to the liberal internationalist school of thought whereby market economies and democratic politics are considered to be the best economic-political combination for both national as well as international politics (something that is under serious challenge on a number of fronts including from within the US), her call for a review and revision of the priority placed on the four pillars of US foreign policy represented by the “D’s” is worth considering.

In fact, although there is a need to bring in fresh and more progressive voices into the US foreign policy establishment, Hillary Clinton might just make an excellent Secretary of Defence should she be willing to take the job. After all, no one is going to say that her relatively hawkish views are ill-suited for the job running the Pentagon, and her vast experience can be used to bring entrenched interests within it into line, assuming that she believes her own words about the need for institutional reform. Like Obama, she can represent continuity and change, this time in US military policy. She knows the issues, she knows the principles and principals involved, and she knows the history behind and between them.

After the disaster that is Trump and company, her perceived flaws pale in comparison–and they will not be up for electoral scrutiny in any event since SecDef is a nominated position confirmable by Congress, not an elected position subject to the popular vote. Should the Democrats cut into the GOP Senate majority or win control of the Senate in November, then she should be given serious consideration for the job.

There will be much work to be done. The US needs experienced hands to undo the damage, but it also needs an ideological rethink given the changed context post-Trump. In an ironic way, Trump has cleaned the slate and therefore cleared the way for a new approach to US foreign policy. That moment is soon to arrive. So long as Biden, Clinton and Obama have learned from the past and are listening to the left side of the Democratic base, it seems sensible to use them in their reconfigured roles.

For more on this check out this week’s “A View from Afar” podcast.