“You had said that you saw no difference between economic and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns—no difference between reward and punishment, no difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference now. “
-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
“The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.”
-Ann Coulter
I will get to Viceroy Trump’s national “emergency” in a bit. But I had been thinking of a prior recent event, which caused me to think of a more distant event, which ties into the current situation.
In actual news south of the border, the socialist nation of Venezuela is in the grip of mass starvation because of its economic and political actions, and thus the US and other nations have not only recognized Juan Guaido, the challenger in the last elections, as the legitimate President over current leader Nicolas Maduro, they are sending in convoys of food and humanitarian aid through US ally Colombia. Maduro, seeing Colombian action as a means of undermining his regime, has militarized the border to stop aid from getting through.
And this reminded me of something else, actually. A time long ago. Live Aid.
The actual concert has been given more attention recently because of the Bohemian Rhapsody movie, but it was the culmination of Bob Geldof’s relief efforts for Ethiopian famine relief, starting in 1984, with the production of the all-star single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” The single was specifically recorded so that all sales would go to famine relief. I remember David Bowie getting on TV to tell people to go out and buy the record, saying “you can throw it away afterward if you want to.” And that’s exactly what I did. I went to the record store, bought the disc (you did that in those days) and then immediately threw it in the trash can outside. It was a shit record. But still better than “We Are The World.”
But anyway. The Live Aid broadcast had all sorts of telethon-like fundraisers in the middle of the concert performances in which Geldof and others pointed out that with the resources available in developed countries it was indeed possible to “feed the world.” It was the most utopian I’ve ever felt about life. There did indeed seem to be a practical means of solving the world’s problems, if we could just get enough volunteers together to do the right thing. The Live Aid project has been estimated at raising 150 million British pounds for famine relief. The problem is what happened afterward.
Much of the relief shipments ended up waiting on the docks in Africa, some of it eventually being used by Ethiopia’s Marxist Derg government to buy arms from the Soviet Union, other aid being used to fund leftist rebels against that government. It later turned out that much of the food shortage was created or exacerbated by Derg government policies, such as the confiscation of food to prioritize urban populations, and the resettlement of people to state farms, which actually reduced food production as people were moved from productive areas. So while the famine relief did do some good, it was used by a monstrous government in order to preserve itself and draw out people’s suffering.
Reading about this at the time is in retrospect one of the things that confirmed my position as an anti-communist and anti-socialist, at least as much as any theories by Ayn Rand. And overall, it’s a good example of why I point to government as a primary source of blame if things go wrong in the world, because even when private actors and public collectives wish to do good, the local government can either make things more organized or make things a whole lot worse.
You might ask, what does any of this have to do with Trump’s declaration of a national emergency? The February 15 announcement in itself was just more of a racist-uncle-on-Thanksgiving-telling-shaggy-dog stories than usual. And I’d seen several people on social media saying that this country is already under the effects of various emergencies, and it hasn’t led to the death of the Republic yet. My response to those people is that the fact that this latest “emergency” is in many ways no big deal is exactly the problem. The government under the Constitution was kept limited for a reason. A free people should not have to think about their government all that much. It’s sort of like your health: you only notice it when something’s wrong. If the government can do anything – like put you in a secret prison just because you’re a Jew – you have to care more about who runs it. This applies even if you think the government is supposed to be an active force for good, because you have to use politics to make it provide things (like national healthcare) that aren’t specifically enumerated in the Constitution. If we had been more serious about such limits in the past, we would not be reaching a point where we seriously have to ask whether the President can seize Congress’ power of the purse just because he feels like it. But whereas Republicans used to be the main people screaming about Democratic control of the process, now they’re going along with Trump’s power grab – apparently as a consolation prize to Trump nationalists who otherwise would have forced a second government shutdown.
There’s a theory I have that applies to the workings of government in general and the Trump Administration and current Republican Party in general. In game terminology, (mostly in role-playing games but also traditional board games) there’s a difference between the “rules as written” and the game as it’s actually played. For instance, in Monopoly, it’s usually assumed that all the miscellaneous fees that get paid due to Chance/Community Chest cards, utility fees, etc., get put into a “kitty” in the middle of the board and whoever lands on the Free Parking space gets whatever’s there. In standard Monopoly, that’s not a rule. Another Monopoly example, when the game is starting and you land on an unowned property, you have the option to simply not buy the property and if you pass that option, your turn just ends. However, in Rules As Written, https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Monopoly/Official_Rules if you choose not to buy the property at listed price, it must be auctioned and given to the highest bidder. Most people dispense with this rule because they don’t want to do all that fiddling around. However, if the game were played as written, all the properties on the board would be snapped up more quickly and the game would move to its natural conclusion more quickly. Thus, a house rule that is intended to save time and hassle compared to Rules As Written ends up doing the opposite.
Well, in terms of the US government, the Rules As Written are the US Constitution. And in the Constitution, the three separated and equal branches of government are the judiciary, executive and legislature. However the Founders either disdained or did not consider the fact that party politics are the political default in most representative governments (certainly in the British Parliament). And because of how party politics turned out here, the real three branches of government are the judiciary, the Republicans and the Democrats. And the judiciary is chosen by the dominant party of the other two. And there are various examples of how arranging the government around their “house rules” skews the rules as written. For instance, only the Congress can declare war, but they decided by the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that they didn’t want to follow that rule cause it was too much fiddling around. So we’ve house-ruled the status quo where the president effectively declares war and the Congress rubber-stamps it, and that ends up causing more complication (and death) than the system everyone wants to avoid as being too complicated.
One corollary to this is that in practical terms there are other “branches” that preserve or affect the balance in politics beyond what is enumerated in the Constitution. State governments, for example, have some leeway to act except where specifically mandated by federal law. But there are also private actors who influence politics. Organized labor is another one of these “branches”, and as it has become largely obsolete, that helps to explain a large measure of how the Right was able to consolidate power in the US. (The factor of organized labor in politics is also why one of the first things any Leninist or fascist regime does is to nationalize the unions.)
Another critical factor in this balance is the role of the press. As has often been said, the press is the watchdog of liberty and the enemy of tyrants. But if liberal writer Jim Wright concedes that “the Press is not required to” be responsible, that also means that this lack of responsibility can have effects. I have talked several times about how the sensationalist, nominally liberal mainstream media are largely responsible for Trump’s presidency, largely because they treated him as a more serious candidate than the third-party choices, let alone Republicans who had better resumes, because he himself was a sensationalist on their level. As Les Moonves (formerly of CBS) said of the Trump campaign, “it may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” More directly, much of Republican policy, especially Trump’s, is affected by what I call the “grievance media,” the right-wing counterculture of Fox News, talk radio, Ann Coulter and similar types who are not working in government now, usually never were in government, but think that the main problem with the Republican Party, no matter how much it alienates everyone else, is that it’s too compromising and not hardass enough. In fact, this was a prime cause of the last government shutdown; Mitch McConnell had raised a voice vote to pass a 2018 budget bill and a bill was going to be approved by the House without funding for Trump’s wall, but then Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh heard about it and went berserk, telling all their listeners to give the Republicans what for. Thus Trump shut the government down, with support from the House, and McConnell, who suddenly refused to support his own bill.
But this association between right-wing government and right-wing media – perhaps one could call it collusion – took a more sinister turn recently. It’s been known for quite some time that the National Enquirer, America’s biggest “tabloid” paper, has been in the tank for Donald Trump. The Enquirer’s publisher, David Pecker, is a personal friend of Donald Trump, and in 2016, the paper published several articles attacking Hillary Clinton’s moral and physical fitness to be President, while also defending Trump and his family. Since Trump became President, it has been revealed in court (thanks to Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen) that the Enquirer had a “catch and kill” policy of protecting Donald Trump from sex scandals by buying the silence of his former liaisons. Partially due to these incidents, federal prosecutors granted Pecker immunity in exchange for his testimony on pending cases.
In contrast, one of the (many) media people that Trump has decided to hate on is Jeff Bezos, an actual billionaire (as opposed to the TV kind), most famous as the founder of Amazon.com but who also bought the Washington Post in 2013. Since then the property has become profitable for the first time, partially because of an investment in online subscriptions, and largely because in the wake of Trump’s election, it has cast itself as a watchdog on the Trump Administration, with the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Well, Bezos recently announced a divorce from his wife, ahead of revelations from the Enquirer in January of “sleazy text messages and gushing love notes” between Bezos and his mistress. Mr. Trump, as always, felt obliged to comment in a January 13 Tweet: “So sorry to hear that the news of Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better and more responsible hands!” After this, Bezos decided to have his people investigate exactly how his private communications got out. Bezos also had reason to believe the Enquirer was antagonized by the Post’s investigations of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which was responsible for the killing of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and is also involved in close business deals with both the Trump Administration and Pecker’s media company, AMI. According to Bezos, once AMI found out he had a private investigator on them, they sent him a communication that they had specific nude photos of him and that they would be released if he did not back off. Bezos responded with an expose’ in medium.com entitled “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker.” (In the Trump Era, the jokes just write themselves.) And in this piece, Bezos makes his case as to how it all adds up, including the “CONFIDENTIAL & NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION” email sent to Bezos’ investigator. He also says at an earlier point how Pecker and AMI had an immunity deal based on their involvement with the Trump campaign – a deal that may now be endangered because part of the terms is the following: “should AMI commit any crimes subsequent to the date of signing of this Agreement, or should the Government determine that AMI or its representatives have knowingly given false, incomplete, or misleading testimony or information, or should AMI otherwise violate any provision of this Agreement, AMI shall thereafter be subject to prosecution for any federal criminal violation of this Office has knowledge, including perjury and obstruction of justice.”
This is apparently a long-established pattern in which the National Enquirer has defended its interests – now including Trump’s interests and allegedly Saudi Arabia’s interests – by blackmailing both celebrities and journalists. As Bezos said in his article: “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? “
Given how anti-labor Amazon can be, and given the image Bezos has developed, it is very easy for the Left to target him. (The most famous example of this was Senator Bernie Sanders proposing a new bill against low-benefit corporations to be called the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act or ‘Stop BEZOS Act‘). And yet, Bezos as owner of the Post is by his own influence preserving a major part of the media against Trumpist pressure, and the attacks on him illustrate how bad that pressure can get, and what could happen to the media if he were not resisting it. As I say, it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.
It may seem odd for socialists to think of self-centered billionaires as “good guys” or Resistance leaders, and it is not an ideal state of affairs that the private sector has more public spirit and responsibility than the government. But that is where we are right now. Various government and non-government actors have their own motivations and agendas, and (as I hope liberals are finding out now) government is not automatically good because it is government, and private actors are not automatically evil because they’re not government. By the same token, business is not automatically good and government is not automatically evil (as I hope right-wingers are finding out now).
If absolute, unchecked power is a danger with a socialist government (like Venezuela, or 80’s Ethiopia) and also with a right-wing plutocracy like the Trump Administration, then what you see is not so much that a “left” or “right” politics in themselves are destructive, but that any politics becomes destructive once one camp gets control of both the private sector and government. In this regard, the differences between the two sides are indeed based on their ideology and premises even if the results on the extremes are similar. On the leftist extreme of Marxist-Leninism, fusion of capital and state is the entire point, and however much this is stated as a vehicle towards “pure communism” or statelessness, anything that is appropriated as a “public” resource necessarily cannot belong to all in common, but must be administered by a separate group – in short, a government. On the Right, you have fascism, which has been broadly defined (not necessarily by actual Fascists) as a fusion of state and corporate power. It is a subject of hot debate as to what the economic policies of fascist countries even were, since they were expedient and not terribly consistent. But they are clearly in contrast to Leninism in that private property and wealth are allowed to great degree, even if everything is ultimately controlled by the State. A more salient element of fascism is that in comparison to Marxism it preserves social inequities and actually promotes traditional human desires for status-based cultures, making a virtue out of sexism, racism, and the exploitation of resources, even as fascists sought to justify such on nationalist-collectivist rather than “selfish” terms.
However, leftists in this country have traditionally not seen much danger in Big Government or the threat that Big Government could be turned toward fascist ends (even as they seek to deconstruct the whole American project as inherently unjust). This is partially based on the assumption that they would always be politically dominant, and partially because they see the growth of government as necessary to their social goals. Given their antipathy to capital, between the two they would prefer a government that was ascendant over the private sector, possibly to the extent of making it irrelevant. For their part, American right-wingers only fear Big Government when they aren’t in charge of it, and since they have not only spent long years out of the political mainstream but are falling prey to a persecution complex that is fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, the idea that they may have to stand in opposition to democracy is an idea that many on the Right will seriously entertain. They are hardly afraid of collectivism as long as it, like fascism, preserves the trappings of property and capitalism, since most “capitalists” these days would rather have the rewards of capitalism without the risks. It stands to reason that the only way such rewards and protections can be guaranteed is to already be of the elite. That too, is hardly a barrier and is in many ways a selling point, since fascism and its imitators deliberately or otherwise seek to preserve existing power structures. The risk that an all-powerful government might end up turning against you, despite your own power and privilege, is real, but these days Republican elites are finding a way around that; rather than merely financially propping up the government in exchange for favoritism or contracts, they can simply buy into the existing Administration.
What this comes down to is that both political camps can see the same problem – the concentration of power and the fusion of capital and state – but neither Left nor Right wants to do anything about it because each sees the fusion of capital and state power as a great thing when THEIR side is in charge. The other reason that they don’t do anything about this threat is that this would require some ability to cooperate between tribes, which the drive to power makes impossible. And so each side becomes steadily more miserable and paranoid about the other, each convinced that Apocalypse will result if the Enemy gets control. And in the process, each creates more evidence for the other’s fears. And neither considers that the real reason that neither can get all they want is not just that the American government is a institution for sharing power, but that most Americans do not share their ideological commitments and many think that the two ruling parties are just organized clods and thugs.