"Sovereignty" and a world-wide rush toward Putin-ism

The key word from Donald Trump's United Nations speech - "sovereignty" - should trigger alarms. That word — repeated 21 times in the 40-minute speech — has been widely discussed by politicians, pundits and the media, focusing on how Trump’s U.N. speech bounced between conflicting impulses "to the point of incoherence." In paying homage to American generosity on the world stage, for example, Trump cited several U.S.-funded global health programs... that his administration has cut. He praised the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe after World War II, even as he repeatedly vowed that the U.S. role in nation-building is finished.
Alas, I know of no one in media who has pointed out the most blatant thing about the "sovereignty" riff. It is a core catch phrase of Putin-ism. Along with "traditionalism," "western decadence" and "western false democracy," this mantra is recited by every national leader who has slid into the Kremlin's orbit, an anti-democratic axis that now stretches from Ankara, Tehran and Belarus across Asia, all the way to Manilla.

The fact that the same words are spouted by Islamist regimes, by Russian Orthodox czarist-nostalgists and by Marxist despots in Venezuela and Cuba reveals that this isn't about "left-vs-right" in any classic sense. It is about Oligarchy's last ditch effort to end the Great Enlightenment Experiment, before it is too late.

Of course "sovereignty" is not inherently an evil term - that's why it can be effective as a Trojan Horse. There's nothing wrong with a nation pursuing its own enlightened self-interest. But there are layers you'll not hear about from shallow media.

1. Deep context. The principal divide in American politics is not specifically racism or sexism, as horrible as those are. Nor (again) is it classic "left-right," not when competitive entrepreneurship and market outcomes always (and that's absolutely always) do better across Democratic administrations. The core isn't even the Republican War on Science and every other fact-using profession. 

All of those are epi-phenomena of the battle over horizons -- whether we're a culture that looks ahead toward future times, that confidently explores newness in knowledge, technology, goods and services... and one that expands horizons of inclusion. 

The last of these has always been a major American project, ever since Washington and the Founders repeated the achievement of Pericles, enlarging the council of enfranchised citizens from a 0.01% nobility to the 20% who were white, land-owning, English-descended males. During Andrew Jackson's Scots-Irish-Appalachian revolution, this circle expanded, as it did (with setbacks) with every generation that followed, leaving Periclean Athens in the dust. That circle now (imperfectly!) encompasses the largest fraction of resident adults of any civilization, reducing both injustice and terrible waste of talent.

None of these inclusion expansions came easy! No other issue has been as forefront in America's continuing (now in phase 8) Civil War. There was always a large minority who resented change and especially being chided with guilt trips. These neighbors of ours - often very decent folks - have horizons that are closer-in and more zero-sum. For a majority of Trump supporters, the sub-text - after being hectored to change their old-comfy habits in so many successive causes like LGBTQ and transgender bathrooms - is "stop nagging me!"

You can see where "sovereignty" and nationalism and nativism come in here. Everything is relative, to near-horizon folks. Within the context of America, everything is red-state vs those awful, oppressive, city-slicker blues. Within a context of the world, everything is America. And nothing is more suspect - more of a symbolic threat to their horizons - than the United Nations.
(Blatantly, if there were an alien threat, those horizon markers would shift!)

2. Why is "sovereignty" so important to Putin and other members of his axis? Because there's nothing more frightening to them than the rule of law. All of them have constitutions which - if properly followed - would threaten their positions of power and control over national wealth. Having seized their own nations' judiciaries and police, they fear three potentially lethal external threats -- intervention by international court systems, attacks by human rights NGOs, and actions taken by this era's still powerful imperial economic/military/cultural power... Pax Americana.

Those three threats have motivated "sovereignty" whimpers for decades. But things have changed, now that Vladimir Putin's long-sought anti-western alliance is firming into place. Moreover, in a coup of staggering proportions, they now have some unknown degree of sway with the constitutionally installed leader of America, who (coincidence?) is using domestic politics as a surface reason to proclaim the very same meme. 

Parse the U.N. speech with care. Note that his bluster is a tantrum of weakness. Because a confident pax power has no need to cry out "sovereignty!" What's normal is that the era's pax power is the one being accused of violating sovereignty! And sure, being mightiest hasn't always made the U.S. right... it's made huge mistakes! But on balance, Pax Americana has inarguably been by-far the best 70 years in all of human existence. No nation - when tempted by imperial power - ever used it with anywhere near as close a semblance to actual wisdom, or such net-overall positive outcomes. 

Anyway, it is the US president's job to make that case! Not to moan that 'we're not so special, after all!' Who is going to respect a pax power that whines? 

Moreover, note that while Trump did not did not discuss climate change, nonproliferation, human rights or the Middle East peace -- all of which were paramount to every past Republican and Democratic president, he did complain at length about “unaccountable international tribunals and powerful global bureaucracies” that sapped the sovereignty of nations. Donald Trump's message is to assert that the U.S. is a victim of the same international system resented by Putin, Erdogan, Khamenei, Lukashenko, Duterte and others. 

Do not think for a moment that the Kremlin lost value in its White House "asset," just because there's a Mueller investigation. They have been stymied in some ways -- the Crimea sanctions remain in place and adults have re-taken some U.S. national security posts. But they will keep trying to use their suborned national asset... as (I assert) the Saudis did with theirs, in 1991 and 2001.

3. Do not see Donald Trump's low credibility as a victory. A central argument of Putinism is Western Decadence. Elsewhere I have shown that every single zero-sum enemy of the American Experiment has pushed the exact same message -- that Americans are rich, happy, exploratory and have fun, all at the expense of some terrible sacrifice. 

Unable to grasp the concept of positive-sum, all of them claimed that yankees traded away manhood, virility, soul, fortitude, etc. in exchange for toys. The British in the 1770s, confederates, nazis, stalinists, jihadists... all have pushed exactly the same line, forcing Americans to disprove it, at great cost, every single generation.

They specifically deride democracy, either by spewing insanely wrong lies like the Tytler Calumny, or touting the nonexistent virtues of "traditionalism and hierarchy"... or else proclaiming that democracy is always a sham. That popular will is always perverted by cheating, so why not be open about it? (See: "Is democracy hopeless?")

 In pushing this line, the Putinists get help from our home grown confederates, but also from liberals who leap upon every Trumpism as a refutation of legitimacy. Let's be clear, Donald Trump is a Putin-axis "asset." But they don't mind him making a mockery of himself, so long as it de-legitimizes democracy.

I could go on. There are so many undercurrents that no one discusses. And of course that is the Putinists' greatest victory. They have even our brightest so busy reacting viscerally and instantly to superficial things, that only the schemers, themselves, grasp the big picture. Alas.

ADDENDUM: As it happens, I'm not the only one to notice how Donald Trump's U.N. speech mirrors the core elements of Putinism.

== The path to chaos  ==

Lest you dare to try to suppose that Donald Trump is the “disease” and not the biggest symptom of and ailment that spans the last 25 years, see this diagnostic closer-look: How America Went Haywire, by Kurt Andersen in The Atlantic. 

“President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”

This madness has been deliberately concocted. The war against all fact-using professions has steadily broadened and now includes the few that had previously been exempt… the “deep state” experts in the intel communities, the FBI and law-enforcement, and the U.S. Military Officer Corps. (Name one exception -- a fact-centered profession not hated-on by the risen confederacy. I challenge you right now.)

A side thought. The smartest folks I know see the stock market surge as the run-up to a crash. Still... I just read about how DT might save himself. It is scary. There’s talk of a tax holiday for U.S. corporations to bring home trillions stashed overseas. If DT just does that, then the money will all be spent on useless crap like stock buybacks and asset bubbles. But populist Trump MIGHT proclaim ”You can bring it back tax free if it all goes directly to U.S. jobs.”

It’s something he might do.  And it could prevent the 2018 recession.  Scary that there’s a scenario for him to get something right, temporarily.

== Map the Crazy ==

Want a map or rogue’s gallery of the factions in Donald Trump’s White House? (See this attempt from The Washington Post.) We know that Steve Bannon’s  neo-blackshirts made a tense alliance with The Family - the Kushner-Trumps - to use a Wall Street front-stabbber (the Mooch) to oust Olde-Republican Reince Preibius, before moochie’s towering offensiveness and ineptitude became too much even for Trump, who then fired him as a price for hiring General John Kelly to grab the reins in that madhouse.

The Washington Post

And yes, Kelly presumably is allied with NSC Chair and former general H. R. McMaster… but not another general (Flynn)….. Yipe!  

Then there are the Underminers! Listen to the black shirts howl that the second, third and fourth ranked folks in the White House are rife with leakers and others who dare to put other loyalties (like to the country or their children) ahead of sworn allegiance to POTUS. Okay, the cited article tries to map out some of it…

…and fails miserably.  The author’s categories suck, in my opinion. (For example combining a crazed warmonger, Putin-puppet and Bannon-ally (Flynn) with the conservative but desperate grownups McMaster and Kelly who are (one prays!) close to their adult peers in the Officer Corps.  Likewise, the map does little to show the Goldman-Sachs roots of so many. The Kushner-Trumps are their own category (forget “New York.”)  And the Olde-Republicans should show their ties to Olde-Money. And the links to Rupert Murdoch are crucial! Seriously, where are the asterisks and dotted lines leading to either Fox News or Russia? And the Saudis?

 Above all, the recently ousted Steve Bannon and Sebastian v. Gorka are not “conservatives”!  They are fascists in the old and dictionary-pure sense of the term – romantics with a fierce dedication to symbolism, cyclical destiny, national purity, volcanic hatred, disdain of expertise and (let's repeat the central trait) utter romanticism, in other words every single litmus test of fascism, by the book.  (Not the silly strawman images of that word that are bandied loosely and careflessly by lefties.)

Moreover, VP Mike Pence is no classic Republican, either; Dominionism is his central trait and that End-Times obsession makes him and his faction the most dangerous of all. 

Now that I am pondering it, this map is calamitously dumb except for one thing, it gets you arguing - as I just did - and learning about some of the faces who aren’t in the news.

Keep a link to this map! (And my criticisms). After all, I may be wrong, wholly or in part.  And we’ll need every navigation aid we can find. For another convoluted map, see the Los Angeles Times take on: How Steve Bannon became the face of a political movement.  Do not imagine he is irrelevant now!

Jiminy while we’re at it, how about mapping the crazy-complex loonies in the Cabinet and chairing committees in Congress?

== What about the audit? ==

Democratic politicians are nearly all dingbats who cannot parse an opening, even when it’s laid before them. Sure, some maneuvers would take courage and imagination – like my “Short Straw Proposal.” (Has Chuck Schumer recently read my proposal?)  But others just require a little common sense and a few spare neurons to rub together. For example –

-- Donald Trump refused to show us his tax returns “because they are undergoing audit.” But first of all, the two are not linked! Legally or in any other way. The one has nothing to do with the other.

Second, why did no one demand verification from the IRS that an audit of every Trump return, across the last ten years, is underway?  Sure, there’s confidentiality. Perhaps IRS cannot do that without Donald Trump’s permission. So? Should not voices have risen, across the spectrum, demanding that DT give the IRS permission to confirm the very story that he was telling?

Above all, some democratic leader should have said: “I’m sure the IRS will be willing to cancel your audit, sir, in the national interest and at the request of all political parties. Just make the request, openly and publicly, and we’ll see if the IRS complies. Can you give us any reason why you’d not do that? Get yourself off the hook from an IRS audit that you blame for your lack of candor? Who wouldn’t do that?”

And finally, since DT has slipped around all of those approaches – because no democrat was smart enough to try them – then how about demanding the appointment of an independent ombudsman to look over the auditors’ shoulders, to ensure the audit is handled properly, and no advantage is given to the President?

Of course all of this is probably obsolete, because Robert Mueller has likely subpoenaed the tax records by now. They are almost certainly being sifted, as we speak… during the short time that Mueller has left before being fired.

== This will be a harsh phase ==

In honor of the courage, resilience and determination of the people of Houston, I will leave off with a quotation from Sam Houston, urging his fellow Texans to stay calm and not go along with the mob rush to secession:

"Some of you laugh to scorn the idea of bloodshed as the result of secession, but let me tell you what is coming….Your fathers and husbands, your sons and brothers, will be herded at the point of the bayonet….You may after the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, as a bare possibility, win Southern independence…but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of state rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction…they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche; and what I fear is, they will overwhelm the South. ”

There is much more, from a mighty Texan-American. 

And in that spirit, here's your Halloween costume. Order soon. They may run out. Walmart has pulled the gray version but you can still get one for your mad uncle. Get him to come out. It'll be healthier for us all. 

An Interesting Guest Posting...Post-Modernism, Science, and Religion

One of my interlocutors at the recent International Conference on Complexity was Blake Stacey. A very bright fellow to whom I will now give a brief guest spot, on account of some interesting books that relate to the Modernism Project.


David, I mentioned Meera Nanda's Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (Rutgers University Press, 2003). The week after the conference, I happened to discover that this book comes with the recommendation of Daniel Dennett, who mentions it approvingly in the preface to Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking, 2006). I originally made my way to Nanda via Alan Sokal, who draws upon Prophets Facing Backward in his essay "Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?", which is available from his NYU website.

The central irony which Nanda explores is that our common notion of postmodern ideas --- science as a social construct, "incredulity toward metanarrative", all that --- which we associate with the "political Left" is really an illusion due to a Eurocentric bias. If we look farther afield than the Parisian faculty lounge, we find that these same ideas have been appropriated by fervently nationalistic ideologues. In the ivory towers of the West, "postcolonialism" is a trendy pomo thing, a way of feeling warm and fuzzy after decades of imperialist stomping over these other cultures. Uphold the validity of their beliefs! Give them affirmation, confirm their customs and their "ways of knowing".

The problem arises when actual members of these former colonies pick up the postcolonial speech habits. Fundamentally, it comes down to the question of what you do when science, whether foreign or domestic, challenges a comfortable ideology. One approach, beloved by Young-Earth Creationists, is flat-out denial. Another, more akin to Intelligent Design, is to appropriate the words but leave behind the music: by practicing a kind of epistemological judo, one can adopt the useful fruits of technology while ignoring what the basic scientific discoveries imply about your belief system. At the same time, all the people who acknowledge the abundant evidence that science **works** --- and who therefore have a default respect for the men in white coats --- have a new reason to trust your ideological pronouncements.

Sokal's essay discusses how practitioners of "alternative medicine" have done this in the United States. There's nothing quite like a dose of quantum physics to make your aura vibrate at a higher harmonic and up the effectiveness of your uber-holistic Touch Therapy! And if the Medical Establishment comes along to question the effectiveness of this Touch Therapy, then you can whip out the "all world views are valid" line. It's not as good as real scientific evidence, but it can compel a degree of belief.

Nanda addresses how this has played out in modern India. One crucial difference between quantum altie woo in America and Hindu "Vedic science" is that the nationalist practitioners of Hindu "Vedanta" **do** uphold the primacy of one worldview: Western science is merely an imperfect realization of the truths spelt out in Vedic texts millennia ago. From page 197:

" [...] the Hindu right wing is modernist in a reactionary, anti-Enlightenment way. Hindutva is gobbling up modern science by declaring the Vedic knowledge systems to be at par with modern science in rationality and credibility. Proponents of Vedic science claim the Vedas to have presaged all the advances in modern science without admitting that in fact, modern sciences challenge the metaphysical foundation of the Vedic view of the world."
Notions of "decolonialization" have found a favorable home with these people, because they downgrade the primacy of Western science and insulate the Vedic alternative from disproof. The political beliefs of the French and American postmodernists don't matter, once their ideas have been spread --- ideas which those of all political persuasions can use to rationalize the antirational. (I'm tempted to use the word "meme" here.) The propositions of this "Vedic science" would be laughable if no one believed in them. Nanda summarizes Raja Ram Mohan Roy's **Vedic Physics** (1999) in the following words (p. 114):

"Roy's book is a compendium of absurdities where references to animals mean bosons and fermions, animal sacrifices stand for quark containment, where annihilation of dark-skinned people means annihilation of anti-matter, food is matter-energy, and where the reference to 10 directions stands for superspace, so on and so forth . . . ad nauseam."

Roy's ideas, and those of Vedanta enthusiasts like him, have been adopted wholesale by the Bharatiya Janata political party (now in opposition).

Nanda's book contains large amounts of interesting stuff which is not easy to summarize. Methinks the verbal ejaculations of postcolonials, whether in American literary journals or Vedic-science textbooks, are particularly resistant to my old-fashioned linear paradigm of thought.

Blake goes on to add:

One quick note before I forget: on the subject of Ayn Rand, you should check out (if you haven't already) Michael Shermer's essay "The Unlikeliest  Cult", which was published in **Skeptic** magazine and reprinted as a chapter of his book Why People Believe Weird Things.

I was able to dredge a copy out of a Google hit parade:

Here's the money quote:

"The cultic flaw in Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism is not in the use of reason, or in the emphasis on individuality, or in the belief that humans are self motivated, or in the conviction that capitalism is the ideal system. The fallacy in Objectivism is the belief that absolute knowledge and final Truths are attainable through reason, and therefore there can be absolute right and wrong knowledge, and absolute moral and immoral thought and action. For Objectivists, once a principle has been discovered through reason to be True, that is the end of the discussion.

If you disagree with the principle, then your reasoning is flawed. If your reasoning is flawed it can be corrected, but if it is not, you remain flawed and do not belong in the group. Excommunication is the final step for such unreformed heretics."

-- Blake Stacey

MY RESPONSE:

Randroids are what I call Platonists. And alas, the libertarian movement, which OUGHT to be supremely modernist and pragmatic and logical, is instead one of the modern movements most rife with romanticism, impracticality, misplaced idealism, obsessive cultism and an absolute dedication to incantations whose sole result is to provoke a drug high of indignation. Never practical and incremental improvement of markets or freedom.

Platonism is the very worst enemy of democracy and modernism because it is the romantic variant that KNOWS democracy and understands it, and yet loathes and despises it down to the very roots. It has poisoned so much of the Enlightenment and provides intellectual fiber to the mad neocon priests like Perle and Wolfowitz and other followers of Leo Strauss. True, much of their coalition is made up of OTHER enemies of the Enlightenment... neo-feudalist oligarchs and kleptocrats and future-terrified nostalgists. But these are the guys who betray us with open eyes.

see my article: Neoconservatism, Islam and Ideology: The Real Culture War

Slowly, we are coming to see that the real enemy is human nature itself, which seems always lured and tempted by certain things: Self-delusion. Incantation. Nostalgia. Self-serving demonization... and a level of self-interest that ruins markets instead of playing fair in them.

Human nature would destroy the Enlightenment, if it ever gets a chance, and snuff it out far LONGER than those same forces kept Pericleanism quashed, the first time. 2500 years of darkness. It happens so easily! The French wing of the Enlightenment got lured back into Platonism - believing you can attain truth through incantation.

Even American modernist ikons like Frank Lloyd Wright and Robert Moses gave into the temptation to become tyrannical gurus, in the wizardric tradition, rather than collaborative modernist pragmatists. Modernism barely survived their antics and the NAME was driven into the wilderness.

What a slender thread is the trail that leads from Pericles, through scattered candles of light, to John Locke and Adam Smith and Ben Franklin, who pointed us down a new path.

One that is under attack even as we speak.

I think the very unlikeliness of this event helps to explain why the stars seem so empty of intelligent
life.

And (as I have often said) this time our enemies have vowed. When it is quashed, they will NEVER let it be tried again.