Perspectives On The Coming Election Year

2024 is almost upon us, and with it the presidential elections. Increasingly—as articulated eloquently by Tucker Carlson in his monologues and interviews—the American Ruling Class appears to be sitting atop what could prove to be a volcano of social unrest. What are we, as a nation, looking at?

The failure of empire, including the disastrous war on Russia—in which we have arrived at the point of awaiting national humiliation on a major scale, with economic ramifications that few realize are coming.

The failure of empire in the Middle East, the war on Palestinians. US weapons are being used to commit genocide against a civilian population in a war that is deeply unpopular—not least among key members of the Dem base, but increasingly among Republican voters as well.

War weariness in sum. Few Americans want this, and are increasingly ashamed of our role in forever wars and wars prosecuted at the demand of unelected ideologized elites.

Economic malaise, in which the middle class is being crushed and sees little future for their dwindling offspring. Join the ranks of the barely or unemployable migrants streaming into the country. Another concern for our native born working classes.

The implosion of education in America, especially in the major cities.

The progressive imposition of anti-human wokeness, especially in the sexual realm.

The list could continue, no doubt. Our Rulers do seem to be aware, seem to hear the rumblings of discontent, but like Ruling Elites in the past are intent on holding on to their power. The obvious Deep State candidate, Nikki Haley, stands for little more than war—wherever, whenever, locations to be determined by others later. During the past week we even saw the remarkable spectacle of the leading newspaper in the Imperial City on the Potomac publishing a Neocon call for Trump’s assassination—how else is one to characterize the branding of Trump as a “dictator”? What is the proper response of a free citizenry to a dictator, if not assassination? The idea was planted by Robert Kagan who happens to be the husband of the Zhou regime’s directing force behind our forever wars, Victoria Nuland.

I have two reflections on the coming year and the coming election. The first is the most recent article by Alastair Crooke, in which Crooke attempts a broadly cultural view of where American stands going into this election:

Black Pattern Forming?

He begins by referring to recent opinions expressed by Victor Davis Hanson and Tucker Carlson, but he quickly shifts to what could be termed our cultural malaise as a society:

…: the West has been sinking beneath the waves of its’ Cultural Revolution – the deliberate cancelling of virtues and legacies of traditional civilization, to be replaced by a cultural hierarchy that upends and inverts the societal paradigm that is close to conquering all.

The unanswered question: Why has western society been so supine, so unreflectively supportive to the sheering away of its civilisational ethos? This must be the first revolution in which half of society knows and sees well there is a revolution, and the other half seem too distracted, or simply have not noticed. There is no simple answer to this conundrum.

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A nascent counter-revolution however, is under way – in which a segment of the electorate is driving towards the re-installation of those civilisational and metaphysical principles which gave national sustenance over centuries. They are (rightly or wrongly) not prepared to recant those values, nor prepared to assume ‘guilt’ by submitting to the demands for reparation.

The point here is obvious: The scale, complexity (and viciousness) of the problem is growing. And with it, anger mounts.

The answer to Crooke’s question—how has the West lost touch with its foundational traditions and beliefs, seemingly without noticing—is that, just as those “metaphysical principles … gave … sustenance over centuries,” the process of their loss has proceeded gradually over centuries as well. We notice now because the downward slope has become steeper during the years of our imperial dominance. But a society that has lost the principles that give it life is like a super tanker that has gone off course—regaining the proper course can only happen gradually, if at all. It hardly helps that the struggle for command of the helm is going on among factions that disagree regarding the proper course, and that the societal institutions that were supposed to have been entrusted with the charts have somehow mislaid them. Crooke speaks of a “nascent counter-revolution under way”—he has the whole LGBTQwerty aberrosexual movement in mind, especially the T part—but one wonders whether pushback against certain of these abberations will actually lead to a recovery of “metaphysical principles”, or will simply be a speed bump on our downward trajectory. Recovery of “metaphysical principles” is a pretty radical change of course for a country that has gone down the path of denying metaphysical principles, of outlawing them from the public square. Personally, I see unhappiness, but not definite signs of recovery yet.

Crooke does describe the situation well. He sees an America in disarray, with various ideological factions vying to install their policy preferences with little regard for the preferences of the little people. The various factions buy off officials from the lowest local levels to the highest elected levels—the Neocons pay for war, the Aberrosexuals pay for unigender bathrooms and smut in children’s libraries, and so on. People say their unhappy about it, but they keep voting for more of the same. Crooke does also put a finger on a factor behind all this that could lead to a broader outburst in society—all this costs money, and the debt problems America faces are deepening:

These cumulative transitions require mammoth money-printing. All was ‘well’ when the project could be financed at zero cost interest rates; but the scheme’s Achilles’ Heel is inflation, and spiking interest rates. And that precisely is what has arrived. The exponential western debt explosion to fund ‘transitions’ now threatens to take the entire ‘revolution’ into financial crisis and recession.

A crisis in formation – of spiking inflation and crashing living standards – is fermenting a dangerous brew of widespread disenchantment.

And, he adds, into this we can add the crisis of our open borders. Ironically—or not—the very people who voted for “sanctuary cities” are the ones most directly affected, for the time being.

But bigger problems are lurking out there. The social convulsions of the American Empire and of the collective West more generally—reminiscent of such convulsions preceding the Russian Revolution—are increasingly becoming a problem for the rest of the world. That could be said to be the bigger meaning of the BRICS movement, since the social convulsions have lead to financial convulsions. The Ruling Class of the West has done what it has typically done in the past: painted the global landscape as a place of “Manichean” struggle, of struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness. That is the path to war:

The big question is how the global, multi-polarity bloc can manage a West edging towards moral, political and possibly financial collapse?

The post-war history is not encouraging. It is one of the West attempting to keep itself whole, through creating a Manichean enemy around which it can gather and unify.

Crooke holds out some hope that if Trump is elected, he can pull the US back from war. It’s possible that the War establishment at the Pentagon and CIA may have learned from the debacle in Ukraine, despite discouraging rhetoric. But the possibility that America could be drawn into a wider regional war in the Middle East in the next few months remains a real threat—it remains the Neocon dream. The problem of leadership remains:

Russia now has a ‘Europe problem’ of lingering, unrealistic ‘geo-political’ ambition. Other than war, the December 2021 draft treaties proposed by Russia offer the only peaceful means to finding a modus vivendi between the Heartland [Eurasia] and the Rimland [the collective West].

But will there be any adult in Washington to answer the phone when the time arrives?

Here I want to shift to a video discussion that, while there are four participants, largely features Tom Luongo. However, Alex Krainer also makes some key contributions:

A NEW WORLD IS EMERGING AS THE OLD ONE FLOUNDERS - WITH TOM LUONGO, ALEX KRAINER & EFRAT FENIGSON

The relatively brief parts that I’ve transcribed/summarized mostly deal with the Middle East and the money wars. However, it seems to me that this all feeds directly into the issues that will be confronting Americans in the leadup to the election. Luongo argues that we are likely to see a significant spike in inflation heading into the summer, and that will pour gasoline on the fire of discontent with all the other issues. However, the leadin to this section is the growing isolation of the American Empire in the Middle East and the growing ascendancy of the BRICS combine—led by Russia, China, and Iran. Krainer picks that up and makes an interesting comment re Trump’s actions, that may have been cannier than most suspected. This, if true, should go far in explaining the almost palpable fear and panic that the Ruling Class is exhibiting at the prospect of Trump 2.0. By the time November 2024 rolls around their foreign policy failures may have metastasized, giving Trump back that part of his 2016 mojo.

~12:00

Krainer: And I would give credit to Donald Trump for creating the conditions for this. Because, if you will remember ... he wanted to withdraw US troops from Syria, and he got sabotaged by the Deep State. But then he said, 'Alright, we're leaving the troops in Syria, but we're doing it for the oil.’ Nothing to do with terrorism, nothing to do with freedom and democracy--we're there to take the oil. That seemed undiplomatic, unstatesmanlike, and everybody piled more hatred on Trump. But what he did, actually, is he broke the Western nations' support for the US mission in Syria. So, today, rather than the West supporting the US in Syria because they're fighting terrorism, they're [the US] on their own, because they're there for the oil.

This wasn't a small thing. The CIA for many years--and Brookings Institution and Atlantic Council--they had these brainstorming sessions about how to consolidate Western European support for what the United States was doing in Syria. So blowing the foundations from under that was actually a very interesting move. And a lot of the 'crazy sh*t' that Donald Trump did actually, in retrospect, he was consistently rolling back American imperial commitments around the world. Remember, he also wanted to withdraw US troops from Germany. Again, that couldn't happen either, but it created a situation that has now put the Western cabal on their back foot.

I don't think they have an idea of what to do, and the initiative is clearly with Russia and China. And this is why we see this huge delegation of Russia going to the UAE, going to Saudi Arabia [KSA], going to Iran. They're cutting deals. They're probably talking energy, they're probably talking nuclear power plants, they're talking defense pacts, they're talking security architecture. I think the United States and NATO are probably on the slippery slope out of that region, and I think the consequences are gonna be absolutely tectonic. [15:06]

Luongo: It's clear there's a split between America and Europe in terms of what they want. The Americans want one thing, Davos/EU wants something else, and the French - German Deep State want something separate. Three factions, at least, make up the West. Israel has at least two factions. But Israel is a British - American project. Syrian regime change was a joint project of America - Israel, Turkey, and the French - German faction. Each faction had separate things they wanted to get out of regime change. But then Putin intervened and united all the disparate Middle East factions against the West. His success in Syria and Ukraine has bolstered his cred, but also key was Putin showed that Russia could extricate itself from the Western financial system--that was feasible thanks to China's huge dollar reserves. China used those dollar reserves to support the Russian ruble in 2014, and it is now doing the same thing in Southeast Asia and in the Middle East for countries that are strapped by higher dollar denominated interest rates. The American Empire's play going into 2024 will be to "bomb" the price of oil to punish the Saudis and get them back in line. But this tactic has failed in the past--with Russia. Russia and KSA are on the same side this time (they were on opposite sides in 2014) and are coordinating. The key is for KSA to depeg from the dollar. Putin's "judo move" to the US bombing of the price of oil is for Russia and the Middle East to keep cutting production. That will end up causing huge inflation in the US by Q2, because the CPI is basically a function of the price of gasoline. Plunging oil supplies will lead to inflation. But China is there with its huge dollar reserves to protect the countries that depeg from the dollar.

Luongo actually believes, as many others, that the Dem tactic will be to insert Gavin Newsome into the presidential ticket by having Zhou step aside at the convention, and pledging his delegates to Newsome. Newsome will then largely renounce Zhou’s policies and blame Trump for Zhou’s failures. Luongo appears to believe that the Dems want a Trump candidacy because they think Trump loses to Newsome. I’m cautiously skeptical. The question will be twofold: How deeply does overall cultural dissatisfaction run, and how hard will economic dislocation, fueled by the Middle East situation, bite? The signs are mixed. Can Newsome and the Dem party really dissociate itself from the continuing disaster of the Zhou regime? Can they regain the base that is disaffected by the forever wars? Can Trump show the flexibility to reshape his message into a more straightforward populist one, akin to his 2016 run? Can he reclaim his art of the deal selling point? Can he turn the cultural discontent to his advantage, again as in 2016? Look for a turbulent year.