Lessons Unlearned

Karl Marx knew a thing or two about politics.

Writing over a century-and-a-half ago, he studied the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions that sought to drive a stake in the vitals of the European monarchies and consolidate the rule of the emerging bourgeois classes.

Contrary to his critics-- especially the dismissive scholars-- he applied his critical historical theories with great nuance and subtlety, surveying the class forces, their actions, and their influence on the outcomes. While Marx conceded that the revolutions were suppressed in the short run, he was able to show how they importantly shaped the future.

Many would argue that Marx’s account of the aftermath of the rising in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is the finest example of the application of the Marxist method-- historical materialism (fn 1)-- to actual events.

It is said that Hugh Trevor-Roper, the British author, who was a colleague in British intelligence of Soviet spy Kim Philby and a notorious windbag, was once asked if he ever suspected Philby, if Philby left any clues to his loyalties. After a pause, Trevor-Roper said that Philby had on an occasion insisted that The Eighteenth Brumaire was the greatest work of history ever written.

More than a clue, and Philby may have been right.

The Eighteenth Brumaire sought to explain a great mystery: How a country undergoing a profound historic transition from one socio-politico-economic order (feudalism) to another (capitalism), could go from the popular overthrow of a monarch to a constituent republic and back again to the establishment of an emperor, Louis Bonaparte, in a few short years.

Marx couldn’t help but find a bitter irony in the fact that the coup installing Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew as emperor mirrored the uncle’s ascension to emperor after the French Revolution. With equally bitter sarcasm, Marx amended the old saw about history repeating itself with the phrase “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Where Napoleon I tragically hijacked the revolutionary process, Napoleon III brought the farcical maneuvers of a dysfunctional bourgeois parliament to a farcical end by creating a farcical empire.

At a time when our own political processes-- executive, legislative, and judicial-- resemble a crude farce, at a time when opinion polls confirm the popular disdain for these institutions, we may well find Marx’s analysis to be of some use.

Consider ex-President Trump, for example. He, like Napoleon III, represents a mediocrity, only known for his pretensions and his rank opportunism. Trump likes to portray himself as a great president who arose as a savior, an agent for the restoration of US greatness. 

Based on nostalgia for his uncle, Napoleon I, the nephew ruled France with the promise of an expanding empire to be feared and admired for its spreading of enlightened ideas; Louis Bonaparte promised to restore the unity of France, lead it towards greatness, and stability.

But are Trump and Bonaparte unique individuals who pushed themselves onto the stage of history? Are they historical accidents? Larger-than-life personalities?

Marx would argue that, in fact, Bonaparte succeeded because he enjoyed the support of a class, specifically the conservative peasantry, “the peasant who wants to consolidate his holdings… those who, in stupefied seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the empire.” Bonaparte’s supporters seek to save what they have and relive an earlier moment. In short, they want to make France [the Empire] great again. He answered the moment.

Marx explains:

In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them from other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above… Historical tradition gave rise to the belief of the French peasants in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all the glory back to them.

It must be noted that Marx is neither mocking nor condemning the conservative French peasantry for its support of the election of Louis Bonaparte (1849) or his coup (1851). Instead, he is explaining how and why Bonaparte could manage to rule, both legitimately and illegitimately, even after France had declared its second republic. The peasantry was, by far, the largest class. The peasantry had not yet recognized its existence as a class; it could not yet express its grievances, its interests, or its latent power in class terms; it could not produce its own class leaders. And it turned instead to a caricature, a small man with big aspirations, a toy Napoleon.

Like Napoleon III, Trump enjoyed class-based support: segments of both the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. The professionals and small business people who saw “elites” -- typically urban elites-- as threatening their way of life, culturally and economically, were drawn to Trump over the conventional corporate Republican leaders. Similarly, working-class voters victimized by deindustrialization, twenty-first-century economic crises, insecurity, rising costs of healthcare, etc., looked for someone “as an authority over them,” to send “them rain and shine from above,” that is, a modern-day Napoleon. They could not find that with the Democrats. They thought that they found it in Donald Trump.

Workers in the US have lost what the French peasant had yet to achieve in 1851: “...no community, no national bond and no political organization among them…They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name.” Nearly eighty years of red-baiting, business unionism, and Democratic Party supplication after a rich history of class struggle have left the US working class with little class consciousness, with little ability “to form a class.” It is no wonder that Make America Great Again resonated with so many.

Both Louis Napoleon and Trump have their camp followers and thugs. Marx designated Louis Napoleon’s lumpen proletariat group of mischief-makers the Society of December 10 for the role they played in stirring the pot after his election. Trump has his ultra-nationalist, racist trouble-makers as well.

Marx saves his derision for the “so-called social-democratic party,” founded as a coalition of the petty-bourgeoisie and the workers. With the militant revolutionary workers killed, imprisoned, or exiled after the June, 1848 rising waged to establish a social and democratic republic, the workers accepted compromise and the parliamentary road. In Marx’s words:

A joint programme was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. From the social demands of the proletariat the revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to them; from the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie the purely political form was stripped off and their socialist point thrust forward. Thus arose the Social-Democracy… The peculiar character of the Social-Democracy is epitomised in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not with doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony… This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie.

“…within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie.” This description of the limits of an incipient social democratic party in 1849 could be applied fairly to the aspirations of the small left wing of the US Democratic Party today. A little more than one hundred fifty years later, workers are still being herded into a party that seeks, at best, the weakening of the antagonism between capital and labor and transforming it into harmony [paraphrasing Marx]. The Democrats assume the votes of the working class and the most oppressed, while intensely courting the support of the urban and suburban upper strata super-voters and super-donors. This has been their strategy since the loss of the reactionary South to the Republicans.

In nineteenth-century France, the proletariat/petty bourgeoisie alliance was short-lived. Faced with a blatant violation of the constitutional limits of presidential action, the alliance allowed its threats of militant action to melt away when Bonaparte called its bluff, revealing a paper tiger.

Marx identified the folly of workers uniting with the petty bourgeoisie:

…instead of gaining an accession of strength from it, the democratic party had infected the proletariat with its own weakness and, as is usual with the great deeds of democrats, the leaders had the satisfaction of being able to charge their “people” with desertion, and the people with the satisfaction of being able to charge its leaders with humbugging it… No party exaggerates its means more than the democratic, none deludes itself more light-mindedly over the situation.

Not to be taken lightly for its defeat at the hands of Bonaparte and the bourgeois party, the petty-bourgeois took consolation with “the profound utterance: But if they dare to attack universal suffrage, well then-- then, we’ll show them what we are made of!”

If this sounds eerily like the empty threats of the Democratic Party before the brazen actions of Trump, his friends, and the Supreme Court, then lesson learned!

If we see parallels with the politics of nineteenth-century France and the twenty-first-century US, then we surely are reminded of Marx’s quip that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Surely, only an allergy to history, a blindness to past tragedies, can account for the continuing allegiance of workers and their leaders to a spineless Democratic Party that continually betrays the interests of working people.

Surely, we can do better. Marx thought so…

(fn 1)  These reflections were inspired by a recent encounter with Jonathan White’s excellent 2021 book, Making Our Own History, A User’s Guide to Marx’s Historical Materialism, especially chapter 6..

 Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Is Trumpism Dead?

Donald Trump appeared large on the national political scene five years ago and soon he will be gone. Or will he?

Joseph Biden will take the Presidential Oath of Office on January 20 and assume the Presidency. Despite all the media noise about disrupting the election and mounting a coup, there was never any real danger of Trump holding onto the office. Certainly, anyone who followed Trump’s career would know that his exit will be a circus, likely ending with his leaving the White House to play golf a few days before the inauguration and never returning (there are reputable accounts that he is planning a rally to compete with the inauguration). That’s Trump.

The noise from the media and its enabling punditry was merely a distraction from the President-elect’s awful choices for posts in his administration. Extracting the last bit of Trump-fear, corporate Democrats and their loyal megaphones sought to divert the Party’s left from the shafting they were receiving from Biden’s team.

But the question lingers: have the liberals driven a stake into the evil heart of Trump or will he, or someone like him, rise again?

The answer depends, of course, on what constitutes Trumpism. Is it a vulgar, outlandish personality; a crude bullying of women and minorities; a pandering to the fringe right; or a set of dissident policies aimed at seducing the working class and re-energizing what looks to many to be a declining or, at least, challenged empire?

The simple answer is that Trumpism is all of the above. But the more interesting and useful response is that Trump is the product of the failures of a broken political system, disabled by corruption, corporate dominance, opportunism, and cynicism. Trump nested in the presidency because the two-party system offered no options that measured up to the demands of a growing share of the electorate. For millions, the disinvestment in manufacturing, the emigration of jobs, the immigration of cheap labor, the loss of community, a growing chasm between the government and the governed, value relativism, and a coarsened everyday life spoke to the desire for a political change of course.

We know this phenomenon from forty years ago, when another outlier won the Presidential election with a “...strange mixture of business conservatism, economic populism, militant chauvinism, and moral and religious traditionalism…” in the words of a collective of Soviet historians. Ronald Reagan, as these same historians recounted, promised to “put a stop to ‘the decline of America,’ strengthen its economy and military capability and ‘move the nation’ again… The Democrats were pictured as ‘the chief architects of our decline’ and the Republicans as the party of national revival…”-- an earlier version of “Make America Great Again.”

Contrary to the liberal denunciation of Trump as the “worst President in history,” his administration cannot hold a candle to the destruction wrought by this previous President. Reagan gutted social programs, empowered the extreme right, stirred racism, induced a deep recession, and exploded the size of the military budget. 

But he didn’t stop the decline in US living standards, overseeing the painful deindustrialization of the 1980s.

Since then, other politicians met growing dissatisfaction with promised change. No candidate in recent years capitalized on the sentiment for change more than Barack Obama. His mantras of “Change we can believe in” and “Yes we can” promised to satisfy this thirst for the new, after a devastating, unprecedented-in-our-lifetime economic collapse.  

Looking back, we see that that promise was unrealized, but a significant number of those seduced by it turned to Donald Trump in 2016. In fact, many see the shift of Obama’s voters to Trump as an important, if not decisive, element in Trump’s victory in several states.

Such an unusual ideological shift from Obama to Trump underscores the desperate search for an alternative to the two-party norm, a rejection of business-as-usual. Moreover, this anomaly further reflects the profound crisis festering as a result of the ruling class’s growing economic, social, and political distance from the people. Antonio Gramsci’s often-quoted comment in the Prison Notebooks seems singularly appropriate to 2020 US politics:

If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer “leading” but only “dominant,” exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this period a great deal of morbid symptoms appear. (p. 275-276, my emphasis)

While the ruling class may still “lead” in many ways, there is no question that decadence is setting in and we have seen “morbid symptoms” emerge more strikingly with the Trump administration.

But morbidity and its discontents are not features peculiar to the US political crisis. It clearly exhibits a pattern throughout the capitalist world: From Boris Johnson in the UK to Bolsonaro in Brazil, from Modi in India to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, from Duterte in the Philippines to Duda in Poland, popular dissatisfaction has birthed new political mutations professing few allegiances to the traditional political parties sharing power since World War II. 

If there is a recent template for this mutation, it might be found in the political rise of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. Like Trump, he was a super-rich vulgarian with the appearance of a measure of independence from the traditional parties. He, too, offered the aura of change to an electorate anxious for relief from political malignancy. But Berlusconi’s reign, like Trump’s today, was a nightmarish opera buffa of hot air and bluster.

It should not go unnoticed by those who are celebrating Trump’s demise that, while Berlusconi is now gone from Italian politics, his legacy has brought even more disorder to the political stage: unelected governments, a popular, extreme right wing, xenophobic party and a party founded by a popular comedian-- a far more dangerous extremist, Matteo Salvini, and a far more ludicrous movement, the Five Star Movement.

Before beginning a love-fest with Trump’s successors, the US broad, unanchored left should consider the Italian precedent. Is the Biden government more than a caretaker before the next wave of “morbid symptoms”?

A Marxism-Leninism Today comrade has argued convincingly that Trump and his ilk should best be understood as right-wing populists, a faux-populism posturing to fill the void in countries suffering from an undeveloped left, a fractured left, an opportunist left or no left at all. Right-wing populism cynically trades on the dissatisfactions of populations neglected by traditional parties, but with no realistic leftwing recourse. The false promises, failures, corruption, and hypocrisies of the previously powerful social democratic left has cleared the space for reactionary faux-populism. 

The electoral successes of right-wing populism have prompted some in the Republican Party to envision their party as a haven for, even a future bastion for the working class. They hope to exploit the continued irrelevance of an ideologically backward, splintered, and defensive US left.

Republican prospects for 2022 and 2024 are in inverse proportion to how the Biden administration adopts left, pro-working class policies, a possibility that is very unlikely. In other words, it would not be surprising to see a clone of Trumpism make a strong return as a consequence of a hollow Biden Presidency.

Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto of the early immature stages of struggle by the working class:  

At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies… Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

Exiting this backward stage is long overdue for the US working class. The widely expressed joy among liberals of a return to “normalcy” marks a victory for the bourgeois Democratic Party. We must recognize that defeating Trumpism in the 2020 election, though a worthwhile victory, is still a victory for bourgeois rule. Whether it is a final victory over rightwing populism is far from determined by Biden’s success.

A final defeat against Trumpism and its kind and the transcendence of business-as-usual politics are one and the same thing. A left anchored in Marxism-Leninism could spark the movement toward authentic working class politics. Only a left dedicated to advancing the cause of the working class over the interests of the bourgeoisie can drive a stake into Trumpism and its mutations once and for all.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

A Shameless Patron of the Ruling Class

After the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the European socialist countries, the US government and its Cold War allies were in a celebratory mood. The most militant foes of the capitalist order were now absent from the playing field. Was this a temporary setback? Would socialism relaunch? Would the People’s Republic of China continue its flirtation with capitalist economic relations? Does the setback to socialism bespeak some deeper meaning for the course of history?

A year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1992), a relatively unheralded PhD working for the RAND Corporation authored a book that marked the “victory” of capitalism and Western-styled democracy over socialism as the “End of History,” humanity’s arrival at its political and economic destiny. Intellectual life in the US had largely scorned such grand narratives, but Francis Fukuyama boldly stated that history had settled the great ideological disputes of the twentieth century and decided in favor of capitalism and its version of democracy. The End of History and the Last Man, though hardly a huge best seller, impressed the ruling class and its courtiers with its pretentious Hegelian framework-- interpreted via the work of the decidedly non-radical Alexandre Kojève. They found his conclusions to their liking. Through Fukuyama, the capitalist celebrants gained intellectual gravitas, though undoubtedly few grasped the argument’s bastardization of Marxism. 

As a reward for his service to capitalism, Fukuyama received plum professorships at George Mason, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford universities. Moreover, he shrewdly, opportunistically shifted his politics with the currents of the day: first supporting Bush’s wars, then turning against them, and spinning again to support Barack Obama. Where ruling-class sentiment goes, so goes Francis Fukuyama.

So it should come as no surprise that Professor Fukuyama has pressed himself again into the services of the ruling class. 

His latest foray into the politics of the moment requires no challenging study of Hegel; it is simply a naked defense of the ruling class’s mechanism for imposing consent and control over the lives of its subjects. American Liberty Depends on the ‘Deep State’ is an unabashed advocacy for the unelected operatives who conduct the daily business of steering the capitalist ship of state. It is dismissive of the idea that these operatives might work for anything other than the people’s interests. At the same time, it scoffs at the notion that oversight and vigilance-- democratic control-- is appropriate for those filling the bureaus, agencies, and enforcement bodies.

For Fukuyama, the now popular term, “the Deep State” is broadly defined as the unelected employees of the Federal government who are “professional, expert, and non-partisan…” and “...whose primary loyalty is not to the political boss who appointed them but to the Constitution and to a higher sense of the public interest.”

 Fukuyama asks us to “think of NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.…” Alongside these innocuous,  arguably non-political institutions, he adds-- almost as an afterthought-- “the uniformed military… the Federal Reserve… the State Department,” institutions which have both a political role to play, a political character, and a history of political intervention. He might have added the CIA, NSA, and the FBI, except for the fact that they would have so obviously undermined any credibility for his thesis of non-partisanship.  

If Fukuyama were correct in his adulation of the capitalist states’ servants, of his vouching for their integrity, he would have to explain, for example, the long, pernicious career of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and his employees, notorious abusers of civil and political rights. He would need to account for centuries of judicial and enforcement malfeasance, officialdom’s history of blindness to racism, sexism, homophobia, and class inequalities, government institutional evils like segregation, mass incarceration, surveillance, and a host of other violations of the public interest.

Of course, endless wars and countless victims are also the unquestioning work of government agencies or, at least, require their acquiescence. Surely, the civil servants who ran the Nazi death camps were also “professional, expert, and non-partisan” in their dedication, though their behavior was hardly in the interests of the people. 

It is sheer political romanticism to portray the politically appointed ambassadors and their CIA-infected embassy staffs, the careerist congressional staffers, the obscenely lobbied agency leaders, the cabal of compromised advisory boards, the political party functionaries, the profit-driven government consultants and contractors, and the rest of the Federal bureaucracy as non-political and imbued with dedication to lofty values. 

Professor Fukuyama, the enthusiastic defender of the capitalist lords and their court, shows his disdain for democracy. Indeed, his defense is intimately linked with distrust of popular rule:

During the 1820s, the franchise was broadened from white males with property to all white males, bringing millions of new voters into the political system. But how to mobilize these masses? [Andrew] Jackson pulls it off by bribing them with bottles of bourbon, Christmas turkeys and (most important) government jobs… President Jackson declared that he got to decide who served in the bureaucracy and that government work was something that any ordinary American could do.

How shocking to suggest that every man and woman could participate in government work! While Jackson was a populist charlatan like our present-day Trump, he was exploiting the fact that US citizens were disgusted with governance by elites. Like Trump, he opportunistically traded on the growing dissatisfaction with self-serving rule by wealth and power, rule by the appropriately called “swamp.”

The fact that millions gained the right to vote distressed and frightened the US ruling class in Jackson’s time and, consequently, the lapdog media heaped scorn on his administration. Like racist Trump, the mass murderer of Native Americans, Jackson, proved to be a cynical user of mass sentiment, leaving the popular desire for democratic, egalitarian governance unfulfilled. 

Fukuyama fears the popular rule falsely promised by Jackson: “...modern government was highly complex and required officials with education, expertise and a dedication to public service.” He is crudely, unsubtly suggesting that such qualities are not commonly found among the masses. Better, the rulers and their minions should have a proper elite education, they should possess the skills taught in the elite school, and a noble dedication to serve… the calling of the elites! 

“Public service,” like so many high-sounding, but empty phrases beloved by politicians, cries out for clarity: public service for whom? Fukuyama never considers that question. He assumes that what is perceived as good by those at the top is good for all. Noblesse oblige!

Fukuyama continues to serve the ruling class well. And it is a ruling class and not some “deep state” that determines the course of the US state. Living in a time where brands, slogans, and memes are the fashion, attention to words and to meanings is crucial. Through policy shifts and changing circumstances, the US ruling class remains. Its constituents and complexion may change, but it persists as the protector of private property, profits, and the privileged until it is overthrown.

To pretend that the state has a malignancy, a deeply embedded and independent body wresting control implies that the “deep state” may be temporary, removable, or overcome and that the state can be returned to its “normal” democratic nature. That is simply liberal or social democratic nonsense. 

There are ‘deeper’ elements of the state just as there are deeper objectives or ‘darker’ operations of the ruling class. But there is one state owned by one ruling class.

Yes, the ruling class can be conflicted, even split, but it continues to cling to the state in order to protect and promote capital. To acknowledge a vague, mysterious, conspiratorial “deep state” is to blur our understanding of the ruling class and its relation to the capitalist state. 

The CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the DoD, etc. are institutions of the capitalist state serving the ruling class and are not a bunch of “deep state” renegades. 

In his consistent service to the ruling class, Fukuyama is not lured into fearing the “deep state,” he knows who he must defend.

Greg Godels

zzsblog@gmail.com

Jeffrey Epstein, Chinatown, and Eyes Wide Shut

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” This final comment in the brilliant 1974 film Chinatown was more than a crude slur on Asian “inscrutability.” After a long, tense interval of murder, deception, ruthless power, and near resolution, Jake Gittes’s colleagues are urging him to withdraw and accept the defeat that comes with the recognition that further action is futile.

Jack Nicholson masterfully plays a supremely self-confident and successful private detective in late-1930s Los Angeles. Forced out of his work-a-day life as a cop, Nicholson’s character becomes a paragon of business success-- money, nice clothes, cars, and all the trappings of a smug, comfortable, and knowing petty-bourgeois. The ensuing tale depicts the shattering of his smugness, his intensifying discomfort, and the utter destruction of his grasp on his world. 

Midway through his journey, Jake (Nicholson) encounters Noah Cross (John Huston), a man of boundless money and power. Jake believes that his own boundless cleverness and wit can match Cross. In his deliberate, no-nonsense manner, Cross imperiously tells Jake that he has no idea with whom and with what he is dealing in his investigation.

Chinatown proves that Cross is right.

Most critics praise this marvelous movie, citing its consummate neo-noir realization, its technical excellence and innovation. Many see a political undercurrent: the ruthless manipulation of events by power and for the acquisition of wealth in pre-war Los Angeles. The wonderful Robert Towne script skillfully melds events from Los Angeles’ history and his own fictional counter-history to construct a counterpoint of exploitation and corruption, easily interpreted as a critique of unfettered capitalism and unscrupulous capitalists.

But unnoticed by many critics, the complex sexual mystery surrounding Noah Cross’s daughter, Evelyn Cross Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), unfolds a more shocking critique of capitalism: When Jake extracts a confession from Evelyn Mulwray, she jarringly tells Jake that her daughter is also her sister, her sister is also her daughter, challenging him and the viewer to understand fully what she means. Noah Cross-- the arch-capitalist-- impregnated his own daughter. The film’s fatalistic ending underscores the harsh reality that Noah Cross’s depravity will go unpunished. The rules do not apply to the Noah Crosses of the world. “It’s Chinatown, Jake.”

Does today’s US news of the real Jeffrey Epstein reveal a facsimile of the fictional Noah Cross? Is Epstein an obscenely rich, ruling-class, trusted insider-- once a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission-- supplying depraved sex to his elite colleagues? Is he, are they, beyond the reach of the laws that apply to the rest of us? 

Is this an extreme aberration from the norms of our “betters” or are the revelations merely a peek behind the curtains, the curtains that conceal the decadent rot of a dying socio-politico-economic system?

These questions intrigue, though they are far from answered by our media, long devoted to hiding the depths of elite depravity. The glimpse of Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood degeneracy similarly identifies a long-standing elite immunity, though it quickly led to a sacrificial witch hunt, a supposed “cleansing” of the witches. Lost in the media circus was the complicity of the entertainment establishment, including the self-righteous Hollywood liberals who surely had some knowledge of Weinstein’s debauchery just as Epstein’s financial colleagues must have known. In an industry fueled by gossip, it defies credibility that awareness of Weinstein’s proclivities was not widespread.

It is both unforced and enforced blindness that emerges from Stanley Kubrick’s last film, the aptly titled Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play a young couple who believe that they have arrived, enjoying the security and confidence that come with petty-bourgeois success. By virtue of his status, Dr. William Harwood (Cruise) enjoys access to the social world of the rich, powerful, and famous. Or, at least, he and his wife believe they do.

As he stumbles into an unknown world of violence and sexual exploitation, he recognizes that forces are at play that he never imagined. Those forces operate arrogantly and with impunity. They are larger than and outside of what he has experienced. Like Jake in Chinatown, the esteemed Dr. Harwood’s ego is bruised, his smug worldview is shattered.  

The young, wide-eyed arrivistes have not arrived at a good place. Instead, they have glimpsed a shadowy world of the ruling class, a world so dangerous that it forces them to close their eyes in dread. 

Where some critics found an arresting erotic mystery in Eyes Wide Shut, they may have missed its powerful political dimensions.

Apart from demonstrating the insecurities of the petty-bourgeoisie, Chinatown and Eyes Wide Shut give us a fictional glimpse into the sordid world of the ruling class. Today’s growing disclosures paint an equally sordid, but reality-soaked account of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual empire and his scandalous immunity from punishment.

Epstein’s story takes us from a college dropout who lies and charms his way into a teaching job at an elite high school, parlaying more lies and charm into a top executive job at a major investment bank, and ending as a member of the super-rich club. Along the way, he becomes a trusted confidant and advisor of those at the top of the wealth and power pyramid. 

If Chinatown screenwriter, Robert Towne, were to write this script, he might suggest that Epstein both ingratiated himself with and collected dirt on the rich and powerful. He might depict a man who offered attractive ways for the super rich to preserve and grow their money while providing discreet, but illicit pleasures as a special perk. He might describe him as someone who befriends and services important public figures, people of the ilk of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. 

If Robert Towne were to put words into Jeffrey Epstein’s mouth, he might have borrowed Noah Cross’s words and had Epstein tell the Palm Beach prosecutor in 2006 that “he had no idea of who or what he was dealing with…” Towne’s script would have allowed Epstein to escape justice. He or important friends might have informed the US Attorney, Alexander Acosta, of the same thing in 2008; or, Acosta might have been advised that Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”

Of course, it is unlikely that we will ever know the whole truth about Epstein’s activities. 

As with the “scandals” of Robert Kraft or Harvey Weinstein, the media will give us a sensationalized taste, but fail us before the weight of influence and power. Towne and Kubrick were right, there are places we cannot go.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

We Knew Mueller’s Basket was Empty

The RussiaGate conspiracy theory, which came unwound over a past weekend, underscores the truth that the rot in the US political system includes the security services and the monopoly media, as well as the Democratic and the Republican Parties. Of course that comes as no surprise to the too few of us on the left who loudly cried foul when the anti-Russia hysteria reached painful levels.

Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, two who earned the right to gloat over Mueller’s conclusion of no Russian collusion with Trump, promptly exercised that right. Taibbi recounts many of the more ridiculous claims assembled to form the fictitious mountain of evidence for the Trump/Russia connection. Greenwald has mounted a media blitz (e.g., here and here), rubbing the nose of the establishment media in the RussiaGate excrement.

In response, Joshua Frank, managing editor of CounterPunch, engages in a nitpick with Taibbi and Greenwald and their choice of comparisons and superlatives. Frank crows that the RussiaGate debacle can’t hold a candle to the Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction deception preluding the Iraqi invasion of 2003, as though pointing that out is of itself of any great significance. It must be remembered that CounterPunch went into a public meltdown in 2017-18 when they were allegedly victimized by an internet poseur. The late Alexander Cockburn-- a founder of CounterPunch--  would have simply moved on, but the RussiaGate hysteria drove CounterPunch into a paranoid frenzy over the “Alice Donovan” affair. Consequently, CP tread very carefully around the RussiaGate question.

In an ironic twist, Frank’s snarky response counts as a further example of how damaging the RussiaGate fiasco was to media independence, objectivity, and integrity.

Obviously little was learned from the Judith Miller/WMD episode that brought shame on a lap dog media in the run-up to the Iraqi Invasion of 2003. Today, as then, there is little contrition shown in the backwash of a near-total media debacle. Today’s generation of budding media stars-- elite educated and fast-tracked into media prominence-- seems to have the same deference to the rich and powerful, the same servility to conformity as its forbearers.

So it’s not surprising that many caught on the wrong side of the Mueller report are redesigning the rules of the game, rather than accepting defeat.

One writer for a major RussiaGate-promoting magazine decided that the evidentiary bar was set entirely too high for Mueller to draw proper conclusions from the data collected by his large team of lawyers and FBI agents.

But that is absurd. The Justice Department charge to the Special Council (Order 3915-2017) was shockingly broad: “...to conduct an investigation...including:  

(i) any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and (ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation; and (iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).

Rather than too high, the evidentiary bar was virtually non-existent. Mueller could report whatever he wanted on whatever he wanted.

Apparently lacking any sense of whimsy, a Bloomberg writer begged social media not to punish the RussiaGate conspirators by banning them for their transgressions. He noted a Republican commentator calling for the ban and pleaded mercy for his irresponsible colleagues.

Another reporter stung by the RussiaGate outcome argued that the sainted Robert Mueller was too good, too principled, too objective to operate in this corrupted world. The former FBI director was a man of nuance and fair play, and his report’s conclusions should not overshadow the “knowable facts” embedded in his report.

Of course this is nonsense: a bizarre brew of metaphysical “facts” revealed mysteriously to the author and a cloyingly fawning portrait of a player previously compromised by the weapons-of-mass-destruction lie.

Sainthood ill-fits Robert Mueller. He knew last summer that he had no evidence for collusion, but strung the investigation on to benefit the Democrats in the interim elections. As I noted last June:

That certainly captures the allure of the Mueller investigation to the big corporate media-- it is the gift that keeps on giving, until it doesn’t. And it seems, more and more, that it has stopped giving. That would likely be the meaning of Senator Mark Warner’s comments last week at a retreat with important fellow Democrats: “If you get me one more glass of wine, I’ll tell you stuff only Bob Mueller and I know,” Warner reportedly told the 100 or so guests, according to the Boston Globe (6-25-18). “If you think you’ve seen wild stuff so far, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild couple of months.”

Warner knows better than most that Mueller and Russiagate are the only meatless bones that the Democrats have tossed to the ravenous corporate media. Also, he knows that the Democrats need the issue to stay alive for the next “couple of months” to help the Democrats in the interim elections.

But most significantly, he knew when he spoke that confidence in the Mueller investigation had waned and was in need of some juice. As The Hill reported on June 13: Mueller’s public image sinks to all-time low in new poll. “The Politico–Morning Consult poll found that 40 percent of voters believe that Mueller's probe has been handled unfairly — a 6-point increase from February…”, and a greater number than those who thought the investigation to be fair...

...And in an opinion piece in The Hill, former National Security Prosecutor, Joseph Moreno, hopes to let the faithful down gently with Prepare to be disappointed with Russia investigation conclusion (6-26-18).

Clearly, this mini-series is losing the public, a development that backs the Democratic Party into an awkward corner. The Democrats needed wildly sensational stories to court the sensationalist monopoly media and to cover the embarrassing loss to a vulgar entertainer who makes Ronald Reagan look like a seasoned, measured diplomat.

The final act in the Mueller play was to place the private parts of three despicable Trump associates-- Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone-- in the judicial vise. As a modern-day torture, nothing secures cooperation more effectively than tightening the vise with the threat of more and more legal indictments, regardless of their merit. Yet despite the Inquisition-like pressures, the Mueller team was unable to generate Russian collusion.

Mueller closed the shop. Like former FBI head, James Comey, Mueller doesn’t like his reputation to be sullied. Therefore, $20-40 million later, no evidence of Trump/Russia collusion, no conclusion on obstruction, and case closed.

The “journalists” who have been hustling the RussiaGate conspiracy have taken a big hit in popularity. Ratings for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow-- the Queen of RussiaGate-- are down over 20% in the wake of the Mueller Report. Her network and CNN are being appropriately punished for their role in fueling a wildly unhinged smear of Russia and Putin.

The beneficiary of the collapse of RussiaGate, of course, is Donald Trump. While the media and the Democrats spun their fairy tales, Trump pressed on with his sordid agenda. Instead of battling military spending, wars, bitter sanctions, tax increases, destruction of social programs, immigration, etc., the Democrats offered two years of fear-driven distraction. Instead of constructing a program around Medicare-for-all, taxing the rich, relief of the cost of education, minimum-wage reform, etc., the Democrats and the sensation-hungry media indulged in two years of gossip, innuendo, and lies.

Trump couldn’t dream of a greater gift.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com