The 21st Century Fusion
I’m going to wager that many of you who are reading this have noticed the fact that the primary loyalties and core agendas of both major US political parties seem to be blending more and more with every passing four or five years or so. Especially in the realm of foreign affairs where the neocon ideology of spreading neoliberalism all over the globe by force has become the political class’ unquestioned bipartisan M.O. throughout the last twenty to twenty-five years.
If you’ll recall, it was the Republican Bush Jr. administration that, just after 9-11, went hog-wild ushering in an era of unprovoked US invasions and proxy conflicts all over the planet. When this began in 2002/2003 there was some tepid initial push-back from some voices within the Democratic Party. On the other hand, the left-leaning half of the public objected overwhelmingly to the US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, once they learned of the duplicitous, recklessly counter-productive nature of these handled blood-soaked endeavors.
Cut to 2022 – 2024. Now it is the Democratic Party that, under the guidance of many of the same neocons that designed the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions during the Bush Jr. years, is in the process of forging unprecedentedly dangerous, unprovoked conflicts and proxy-wars with multiple nuclear-capable nations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. All of this is happening with the near-unanimous backing of the now completely donor-dominated politicians of both political parties within the House and the Senate. In short, in the US now we have two major political parties that are, in actuality, two aspects of the same structure. They are two parts of the same uniparty.
The Consolidation of the American Uniparty
The ideologies of America’s politicians on the left and the right, except a few remaining peripheral policy differences on the domestic front, have fused. This often-overlooked merging of the two parties’ purposes and intentions has been generated partially by forty-plus years of broad deregulation in the US banking system, the political campaign finance system, and the media.(1)
This removal of a huge portion of the long fought-for restrictions on the ability of the uber-wealthy and powerful to dominate the US’ socio-economic landscape has given what are essentially modern-day robber barons an all-access pass to monopolize the spectrum of what was formerly, to a sizable degree, public institutions. In fact, since the 2008 economic crash, the super-rich, in collusion with the military-industrial complex and Big Tech, have been wielding what is essentially unchecked power and influence over the US Democratic process and the content of all mainstream American media.
The 21st Century Tower of Babel
Though the general public’s identification with “left” and “right” is beginning to break down, which is a theme we’ll get to later in this article, these allegiances are still quite strong amongst a fair-sized portion of the US population.
To give one example, Democrats who used to loathe the Bush Jr. administration’s war-obsessed main players and their policies (people like Bill Kristol, Nicholas Burns, and Victoria Nuland) now go quietly along with these same main players’ unchanged agendas 20 years later. Kristol, Burns, and Nuland, to name just a few of the Biden administration’s neocon ideologues, were Republicans in 2004. Now they are Democrats. (2)
All of this has generated a kind of political schizophrenia amongst the public, who in large part still identify with either team left or team right. The result has been a 21st-century Tower of Babel, in which many members of the public espouse and promote positions that run counter to their previously declared beliefs. They do this without noticing that they’ve adopted a new ideology, the ideology of the faction that they mistakenly feel they still oppose.
The Results of the Russiagate Scandal and the Failure of the US Proxy War in Ukraine
The following has been the US neocons’ modus operandi so far in the 21st century: The first part of the goal has been to bring about the distraction of the American public from their own domestic/economic concerns. The second aim has been to create a justification for the US economic sanctioning and military violence toward non-compliant nations.
The difference this time with Russia-gate and the US-generated proxy war in Ukraine is that both of these operations failed indisputably and totally. (3) The Russiagate scandal and the war in Ukraine have done way more damage to the people who concocted and pushed forward these endeavors than to the people the endeavors were intended to hurt. These failures, especially the disastrously handled US proxy war in Ukraine, have made it clear to the non-Western world that the US is no longer omnipotent. On top of this, there are no other viable options for partnership exist outside the US’ domain of control. (4)
By the end of 2023, when it became clear that Russia and China had outmaneuvered the US in its failed attempt to use Ukraine as a proxy battering ram against Russia, over forty new countries applied for membership in the BRICS economic alliance that is spearheaded primarily by China, Russia, and India. This growing contingent of nations who no longer trust the US are already on their way to developing a new basket currency. These countries no longer wish to be plundered and bullied by the US. All of this has ushered in the start of a new multi-polar era.(5)
The Fall of the Unipolar Era and the Rise of the American Uniparty
About a year and a half ago I wrote an article for Pressenza called, “It’s the End of the Unipolar World as We Know It (And I Feel …)”. In that article, I went into a bit of detail about how we are at the end of a thirty-year unipolar period (1990 – 2020) during which the US was the unchallenged number one global superpower. The decline of the US as the dominant global hegemon is not only occurring, it has been greatly accelerated recently by the Biden administration’s continually failing attempts to intimidate, bully, and bomb the US back to its former king of the global hill status.
The decline of the US-ruled unipolar world order and the rise of the multi-polar era began well before Joe Biden took office though. As China and India’s economic strength surged throughout the first two decades of the 21st Century, the US, despite its high gross national product totals, has been increasingly accumulating astronomical levels of debt at the same time that it’s been encountering a steadily rising number of domestic problems. Since 2008, the people of America have been in a perpetually worsening state of economic vertigo in a landscape of institutional breakdown.
At the same time as institutional foundering, job scarcity and real-wage decreases have been occurring for the general public over the last twenty years, an unprecedented seizing of wealth and power by a super-wealthy few has also taken place. Together, a small contingent of top-level bankers and big-tech multi-billionaires in tandem with the military-industrial complex, have usurped control of the American media via deregulation and of the political process by making it entirely donor-dependent. In other words, the small aforementioned super-wealthy contingent has done away with real democracy, replacing it with a formally democratic, wealth-governed system. (6)
An Over-Extended, Depleted Shell
The US’ constant threats and its use of economic and physical violence to punish nations that haven’t adhered to its ideology along with the greed-propelled financialization and de-industrialization of our now precarious US infrastructure, has rendered America an over-extended, depleted shell of the nation it formerly was in the 20th century.
Add to this a disgruntled, confused, debt-racked American citizenry who feel asphyxiated by economic inflation and abandoned by a government that is more concerned with conquest abroad than helping the people it’s supposed to be representing and serving. We, the US, are not an accident that’s waiting to happen. Rather, we’re an already existing accident that is increasing in size the more our corporate political military industrial banking complex attempts to forcibly return to what it believes to have been the US’ halcyon days of unipolar dominance.
Rather than attempting to find common ground and to work in partnership with other nations in a world that has changed dramatically in recent decades, the US has instead opted to attempt to threaten, bully, and murder its way back to its former lone king of the hill status.
There’s No Mystery To Any of This
There’s no mystery to any of these folks. And we’re approaching a point when the lion’s share of these facts will be understood by the majority of the general public if they aren’t already. It’s the above-mentioned consolidation of super-wealthy forces that have been driving American foreign and domestic policy decision-making in the 21st century. This small contingent of Uber-wealthy bankers and big-tech giants in tandem with the military-industrial complex are, together, the generators and flame keepers of the American uniparty.
CITATIONS:
1- https://www.theregreview.org/2019/03/11/dudley-brief-history-regulation-deregulation/
2- https://responsiblestatecraft.org/neoconservative-ukraine/
3- https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/15/politics/john-durham-report-fbi-trump-released/index.html
4- https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/m6rb2a5tskpcxzesjk8hhzf96zh7w7
5- https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2023/11/13/the-brics-are-expanding
6- https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rising-inequality-a-major-issue-of-our-time/
