When policy paradigms of generations standing shift, confusion can be expected, especially down the lower levels of punditocracy and popularizers of ideas. A great deal of disinformation can also be expected from vested interests, entrenched in the old paradigm, and from those that have ridden a particular institutional regime to wealth and often crime.
Consider the sense of danger that accompanies a true shift in political power, when a real regime change occurs. People formerly in power, with skeletons in the closet, start to shift nervously, and contemplate drastic actions. Even if their actions are flailing and enfeebled by the new reality, they flail nonetheless. We witness this more often in other countries, but it is the same at home. Human nature and political nature are the same everywhere, even in the exceptional nation of the day.
To wit, the clumsy efforts of the past days and weeks by certain segments of America’s intelligence community to try old tired methods and dirty tricks, that used to work, to tarnish Trump.
Well, sorry boys. Trump is loved by those who love him, and hated by those who hate him, and never the twain shall meet. You aren’t convincing anyone, just giving us all a belly laugh. Sometimes it seems the denizens of 4chan and Reddit have more adroit brains than you lot.
Sadly, so does Russian intelligence and others not as comfortable by long years of security and plenty.
There once were patriots and wild sons of bitches in the CIA. Often they did dirty deeds, but time was they could at least hang those moral lapses on a thread of patriotism and identity with the ruling class, with its ruling idea and coherent ethnicity. Networks of banking, law firms, old families and corporate power, Ivy universities and special societies—good old boys who made the trains run on time and stamped a nation with their character and agenda. World Wars were fought for timely bond payments from clients abroad, and immigrants drawn from all the world to these shores were hammered into a nation in conscription and a uniform, disciplined culture.
Today, the American ruling class is in disarray and a crisis of legitimacy. The world doubts and scoffs, and the locals are restless. The agenda of demolishing the middle class has taken its toll and the wages are a country divided. No consensus can be formed by the formerly magisterial members of the intellectual elite, who seek to manufacture consent like priests of old. We read what we want to nowadays. There is no dreary grey paper that arrives each morning with the milk, to tell us what to think and make us all one.
The Soviet Union was a great boon for the intelligence community, for the Deep State, and the old Republican party. The American Left, long apologists for the Soviet workers’ paradise, took a long, lagging time to adjust to the reality that Stalin had turned the Commintern Internationale into national party, Russian all through.
Thus, neoconservatism was born by former radicals in reaction: the higher intellects who had been communists through up through World War Two re-oriented to the new reality, but the lower level Left—Democrats and popular culture—continued to see in communism an ally and had a deep suspicion to any opponents of the “Reds.”
So, we had a transitional era of Hollywood blacklists and wild haired professors singing peons to the eternal USSR as late as ‘79, and Bernie Sanders honeymooning in a nationalist USSR, while Russian Jews were fleeing to Israel, where Mr. Sanders had once kibbutz’d on a socialist, nationalist farm.
Players like the CIA, defense contractors and big world bankers were able to play the American Right’s fear of godless internationalist communism into support for their neoliberal economic agenda (debt peonage for all), and all the social issues dear to the Catholic and the American midwest bulwarks of the Right were played by the GOP for what they were worth in election time and sidelined when it came time to deliver.
The red menace, aided and financed by American wealth and technology transfers, held it all altogether. But as Bob Dylan, leftist folk hero turned evangelical Christian sang, times, they are a changing.
After a while the Democrats caught up, and starting under Carter, we embarked on one of our many hubristic follies in proxy warfare, arming Islamic mercenaries and fanatics to fight on the ground against our real or pretend enemy, the late, terminal stage Soviet Union. Just before its natural death, the Democrats came to diagnose a need to kill it.
We fueled the fire of Saudi trained Islamist fighters called Al Qaeda, and funded the Taliban, driving the Russians out of Afghanistan. Just like we’re now trying to use al-Qaeda, re-dubbed al-Nusra by CIA-CNN to confuse the befuddled viewers (the old and the dull), and ISIS, to topple a secular Alawite head of state in Syria because he doesn’t want to run a natural gas pipeline through Syria, to the detriment of Russia’s monopoly over eastern Europe.
The moribund CIA, still baiting the Russian bear, while the dragon rises in the East, and radical Islam rolls rapidly over an effete decolonialized landscape…