The Indispensable Nation

Americans like to think that we revolted against injustice, embraced liberty, and became a model for a new republic in 1776.  The ideas of that experimental, tiny precursor to the modern American empire have been lost in translation over the centuries.  Human tendencies to love liberty and decentralization, to crave personal independence and the right to build and create their own legacies, to be kings of their own castles, remain, but they are in the mist in 2015 America.

For well over a dozen decades, the mythology that we live in the best, most powerful, most influential, and most envied nation that has ever existed has been force fed to a billion past and present Americans.  These beliefs are part and parcel of a century of neoconservativism.  These beliefs unite what remains of the Tea Party movement, and the Reform and the Bull Moose Parties before that.  They underpin the popular rhetoric of democratic socialisthave provided a big ideological challenge to American fantasies and frightened the deciders in Washington to their very core.

In calling the neoconservative, Republicrat bluff that ISIS is an enemy of the US (rather than the US-facilitated means for toppling the last independent secular leader in the Middle East, setting the stage for endless wars, reliable higher oil prices, and a ballooning US national security budget into the next several decades), the new indispensable nation (or at least Putin and his military) has inadvertently exploded the driving and unifying myth of American indispensability.  He has, in one swift move, both clarified the issues and exposed the D.C. mob.

In another era, the shrieks from Washington about the cheeky Putin and the potentially cheeky Chinese, might have worked to turn the herd.  But as with the era that preceded the British loss of the American colonies, the current king in the United States, a modern George III, is widely believed to be crazy, obsessed, wasteful, debt ridden and unlikeable.  His popular opposition – while statists and militarists all, owe their popularity to how well they articulate (without really believing it themselves) the growing and real perspective that the king is a naked, lying, incompetent puppet and should be overthrown.

But popular politics in an empire is no match for bureaucratic survival of an all consuming and powerful central state.  Putin’s move has delivered the happy and undeniable rationale for the immediate end of the U.S. warfare state, and has in one act, collapsed the core tenet of neoconservatism, the RNC and the DNC.  But the word on this isn’t yet out to the hinterlands, and we must expect that it will be directly suppressed and creatively propagandized by government media outlets as a rationale for even more Washington, D.C. spending, assertiveness, and militarism.  The leading presidential candidates will predictably use their platforms to articulate the needs of the state, over all else.

Washington D.C. is preparing to be burned.  The state’s terror may be due to how they learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, or growing fear of domestic revolts against the symbols of overweening government. I suspect that the state’s terror is the result of internecine bureaucratic warfare gone hot in a collapsing Empire’s desperate capital.  Terror within the (deep) state has an immediate symptom, and it is state terror.  With Russia directly and successfully exploding the myth of America the indispensable nation, we may cautiously celebrate the long contest for real liberty.  But we should expect the very worst in immediate outcomes, and not underestimate the fury of our faltering and desperate central government in coming months.