two party system

The Worst Number of Parties is Two

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Tim Kreider, 2002. Some things never change.

Despite the sometimes intense instability of coalition governments, I generally have a view that the more political parties there are in a system the better. While it is true that there are often broad and predictable coalitions, the mere possibility of surprise single-issue or bloc based re-alignments can do a lot to combat complacency. To imagine how this would work in the current American system picture a world where the Greens and Libertarians have enough pull in Congress to sway close votes. They might side with one big party or another in a predictable fashion on economic or regulatory policy, sure, but both would likely throw their weight behind whoever was the opposition when issues related to foreign policy or surveillance came up. Trump’s current attack on Due Process would be opposed by both, for example, tipping the scales away from the Republican government. Likewise, Democratic efforts to sabotage diplomacy (a la Cuck Schemer on Iran or Adam Schiff on Russia) would also see both Greens and Libertarians ally with Republicans to overturn such knee jerk platitudes.

This does not mean, however, that more is always better. I can think of one arrangement where less parties is better than more: And that is that one Party is probably better than two. At least in times of intense partisanship in the media.

This seems a strange position to take. I do not take it in defense of one party states, which I generally oppose unless a state is newly founded (see Kemalist Turkey or post-unification Vietnam). I take this position because two parties is just so unrelentingly awful.

The reason two can become worse than one is that it effectively functions as a single party state in that the broad consensus keeps ticking on unchallenged while the pantomime of free choice is pushed front and center. Picked up by a media both pliant and partisan, the most inconsequential of differences are held up as vital decision points. This has the bizarre effect, as we see all around us today, of radicalizing the ignorant in ways where their radicalization actually supports the establishment of both parties. Any cultural flashpoint or nakedly partisan example of corruption is held up to be the end all be all, while the machine of private contractor grifting and surveillance creep expands at an ever growing clip. The relatively minor differences between the parties creates a yawning cavern of difference between voters too dumb to see they have more in common with the opposite-party rubes than they do with their own leadership.

Reverse partisanship is another bizarre aspect of this phenomenon. In just the past decade (and ignoring all the many examples prior to that) we have seen two party systems across the world basically reverse entire positions almost overnight simply because an upset in the other party triggered their oppositional defiance disorder. The focus of the neoconservative movement went from Republican to Democrat in about two years as preparation for what they saw as an inevitable Hillary Clinton Presidency. Choosing negotiation over reflexive war and sanctions was once a strongly Democrat coded position, but now that Trump exploited the neoconservative realignment to take over the GOP it is the Democrats who come across as the party of Freedom Fries. Meanwhile, the Democratic embrace of Clintonian neoliberal economics led to a (utterly false) GOP pivot towards claiming the mantle of populism…but now that The Big Beautiful Bill is passed and that claim is exposed as utterly hollow, one expects another reversal for both parties around austerity. The tariff issue has really driven this home for both parties recently, with people contradicting their views on trade multiple times in the same month.

As mentioned before, these pivots do nothing to challenge the bipartisan establishment, but they do make the populace more stupid. How many extended family members or second tier friends do you have that parrot talking points they would have been adamantly opposed to just a few years ago simply because their party-coded media has reversed position? In most instances they seem incapable of even acknowledging this if it is pointed out, with uncomfortable silence standing in for their utterly hollow engagement with the pantomime of partisanship. It is a confession of nonsentience. The regime rules through the endless dance, the dittohead serves as its thuggish yet cowardly enforcer in the public sphere.

One of the weirder things you will notice when traveling to a state that bans parties or has only one is that, in general, the average person is much more in touch with reality. There may be things they cannot say in public, and they may long for a viable opposition, but there is a certain honest cynicism from the government supporters that they back the regime because they personally benefit from it. Likewise, the opposition to it shares a kind of inclusiveness and solidarity that they are all in this together. Distrust of canned media narratives are, I find, far higher in these societies than in my own. There is almost a reflexive private trend to disbelieve all official sources. Though this obviously comes with its downside, it is a preferable state of being for the cultivation of critical thought than those who mindlessly parrot the media of who they imagine to be their co-ideologues. That they imagine themselves as free and rational while doing so makes it all the more galling.

Compared to two party states, one party states are total amateurs when it comes to nullifying opposition and setting unquestioned media narratives.

Maybe a slight lyrical revision to Three Dog Night’s hit is in order.

The Progressive Betrayal is Complete

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Today the House, in the fully bipartisan way it often endorses the worst ideas, voted by a large margin to continue and expand mass surveillance and the funding of two foreign conflicts which are unnecessary to any rational and non-ideological definition of the national interest.

Every single Democrat, with no exception, voted with our street preacher tier evangelical neocon Speaker of the House to give endless amounts of money to Israel and Ukraine. The Speaker himself cited his faith as a reason to make this corrupt bargain. In an inversion of the world I grew up in, the only votes of dissent against the foreign policy of the Book of Revelation were by Republicans. Democrats, who hold themselves up as the resistance to the worst of the far right, were rooting for a Speaker who probably thinks the world is 5,000 years old as they worked together on this abomination. Remember this next time they come to demand that anyone who is not conservative vote for them as a lesser evil. Remember this also when the legions of liberal anti-fascism experts give a carefully curated list of what they define fascism as, while omitting one of the single most relevant ingredients: a death drive for endless expansionism abroad. It is not hard to see why this particular part is so commonly overlooked by our esteemed extremism experts.

I never want to hear about how the Democrats protect anyone from the worst excesses of the Republicans ever again. This sellout is proof that a two party system is just a more dysfunctional version of a one party system. One where competence and reason are suppressed and an illusion of choice is given by differentiating two basically identical camps with a false choice between two increasingly extremist culture wars. But on the matters of true power and import (finance and foreign policy) there is no real choice. There is only an empire of for-profit contractors and missionary ideologues working together to perpetuate a particular and declining class’ dominance over the rest of society.

There is at least resistance in the Republican side, if hardly enough. But the fact that there is none, not one vote, against this spending abomination from the Democrats is truly something to behold.

I was recently thinking about how I was lured out from a decade of not supporting any national level candidate from either of the two major parties by the potential of something worthwhile in John Fetterman…Only to end up getting the equivalent of a Mossad spokesman in the senate for my trouble. I think its safe to say that baring some kind of extremely unlikely and unforeseeable event, I will absolutely never hold out even rhetorical support for a Democrat at the national level again.

It is not parochialism or even that made up Cold War Era nonsense word of ‘Isolationism’ to ask for that money to be spent (or saved) at home. As the proponents of these spending bills so love to remind us, most of it is just going to our own defense contractors anyway. You know, those companies with increasingly terrible ratios of cost efficiency and slipshod production who are no doubt going to use much of that money to re-invest in lobbying for more terrible unwinnable wars. It is an understanding that a country that willingly deindustrialized itself cannot re-industrialize through circular defense speculation alone. That its true strength lies in reshoring, yes, but also reinvesting in infrastructure and meritocratic social mobility. That the U.S. has the geographic and resource power to be extremely competitive…so long as it can give up the mad and ultimately doomed quest for hegemony. Ironically, it is this quest, not a ‘lack of resolve’ that weakens it abroad. Over-expansion, as anyone who has critically examined macro-historical trends can tell you, is the ultimate death of great powers. By fighting constantly they fritter away their will and resources and wither in proportion to their out of touch bombast. Turns out that the further you go from the core, the more expensive the operations become and the more skeptical the public is to what it has to do with them. There is no world-cause that has yet to override the inherent territoriality of states.

It should surprise no one that the modern day Democrats have become the Republicans of 20 years ago to a tee. I tried to warn people of this. The values on the culture war might be inverted, but the overall marriage of moralistic and teleological world view with an accelerationist militarism represents the same model: distract at home, bluster abroad. This is the point of the two party system…whatever the trends are of the day, the neoconservatives and democratists can pivot effortlessly between two supposedly opposed camps for whatever the best allies are for their project.

It behooves those of us who are opposed to them to show the same pragmatism. Preferably, a greater level of it. Here’s hoping (from my very non-conservative perspective) for a long and productive career for Thomas Massie in government. And here is also hoping that we can finally put the myth of lesser evilism in a two party duopoly to bed for good amongst the people of our society still capable of critical thought. While I personally prefer many parties to few overall, I do believe the honesty of a one party system may be preferable to the dishonesty of a two party one. They are both functionally the same, but even the low-information voters know who to blame for problems in the one party state. In the two party state, most people can be bought off by the political equivalent of jangling keys in front of their face and pointing at their neighbors to cast blame rather than their rulers. And that is what these progressives, many of whom originally ran explicitly to oppose neoconservatism, have done.

The only real lesser evil in the foreign policy debate is that of elevating those who know the limits of their national capabilities versus those who see no limits and stumble ever onwards towards self-imposed decline.

The Two Party Fundraising System is the Only Winner from Striking Roe v Wade

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Knowing it was coming doesn’t make it any less awful now that its here.

People who know me know what I think of this and how fundamental I think abortion rights are, so I don’t really feel the need to say anything else about them now.

What I do what to mention is that since 2000 we have had a branch of government that is held up to be high and mighty and more ‘objective’ and ‘deliberative’ but has a record of voting along partisan lines more even than congress, even deciding the presidential election in such terms. We had one of those parties decide to wage war against reproductive rights over 40 years ago. And we had the supposed opposition to them refuse in all that time to enshrine abortion rights into law, relying on our fragile and stupid court consensus to maintain them (and other things) and even failed to to act when they held a supermajority and the cultural winds at their back in the late 2000s even though a certain hopey changey candidate promised he would.

This is because having a nation-wide policy either uniformly pro or anti was never the point for either of the two big parties in our country. They always wanted a state-by-state variance for abortion access. Why? Because if it was fully secure or fully banned they wouldn’t have anything to fundraise off of. It is in the interest of the party elite to retain loyal partisan mega-donors who are highly engaged in culture war issues and not looking at more structural ones. 10 or so years ago people in the know all knew a nation wide abortion ban was not what the GOP actually wanted, as they would lose a significant slice of their reliable voter base if it went through. Its time to realize the Democrats play the same game too.

Now both of these parties have what they want. And the cash will be flowing. Particularly towards the electorally competitive states.

Most likely, the dumbest people you know will view this as an outcome of the 2016 election and not a multi decade bipartisan process. But what have these people themselves done but been protoplasmic masses of purely reactive nerve endings who have shown themselves incapable, time and time again, of looking at long term processes? When someone calls you fundraising off this issue who was in office in years overlapping with 2008-2011 ask them why they didn’t do anything then then don’t give them a dime. Your money is far better served going towards organizations built around this issue as a health and access right and not just as a political football. The way this game is structured, even being a single issue voter on this one thing would likely only have delayed this preordained result by four years. The court has had a conservative majority for all of my conscious life, and the decision by many to allow rights to privacy sit on this consensus in perpetuity was always a foolish and dangerous assumption. The Roberts Court in particular has one consistent theme present from its birth under Bush through Citizens United and the rest: their core principle is to enable fundraising and donor power at all costs. Here, they are simply being consistent in upholding their desire to make civil society as neofeudal as possible.

Now we will all get to experience a further intensification of hyper-partisan screaming while the environment continues to deteriorate, civil society frays, and class inequality continues to skyrocket.

Politics is Not a Safe Space: Neoliberalism and the Electoral Race to the Bottom

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Poverty Rates in Appalachia, 2007–2011

Outside of self-imposed social media bubbles, history is not progressive like technology. While the march of technology changes how societies evolve in ways that no two eras are ever really the same, the cycle of the rise and fall of governments, regions, and classes continues with a somewhat random yet patterned process not dissimilar to biological evolution-itself not a progressive process in any demonstrable way. When I first reached adulthood and began to study history at the college level this was a harsh lesson to learn. In America and other countries like it we are fed a steady diet of individualism and liberal idealism from an early age. We want to believe, as the Puritans once did before they consumed themselves and burned out as a culture, that  we are at the forefront of a new era. We want to think history can be guided in such a way as to be manageable for everyone. This ignores that politics would not exist if convergent interests greatly outnumbered divergent interests. Most importantly, it ignores Ibn Khaldun‘s most prescient observation: that complacency breeds decline, that the losers of history often deserve to lose, and that the winners of today are the losers of tomorrow. It is the very act of winning that can be the most dangerous thing of all.

The Democratic Party at the national level became this complacent ruling elite, even while they kept losing house seats and state governorships. They had a bland faith in demographics and this restricted their campaigning only to certain swing state’s suburban enclaves. This strategy cost them an election they probably should have won. Women were assumed to be a safe bet, but white women ended up favoring Trump. Minorities were expected to just show up out of a sense of obligation and duty to a party that does not overtly hate them, Bill’s mass incarceration and drug wars and Hill’s ‘superpredators’ aside. The threat of Trump was supposed to keep the Obama coalition together. But the Obama coalition was first forged in a democratic primary against the Clintonian status quo. Even eight years later, it could not so easily flip to supporting that. Clinton did worse with all minority groups than Obama did, Trump did better than Romney with them. This is a massive failure on behalf of the Democratic Party.

The seeds of this failure were sown by Clinton. Not Hillary, but Bill. When Ronald Reagan became the first partially neoliberal president and Thatcher rose to power in the UK the mantra to their deregulation and free trade deals was ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA). The defeated left of center parties took heed and decided two could play this game. This led to Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Clinton would soon outstrip Reagan in his zeal to adopt the newest faddish ideas of governance of the post-Cold War era. The new Democratic Party was a party of globalized cities, and while big coastal regions thrived due to a complex combination of factors not necessarily related to these policies (Chinese growth, the arrival of the internet, etc) the rural areas of the country were written off as irrelevant to the future. Abandoned, left to rot, and with the government slashing domestic budgets for infrastructure and welfare, places like Appalachia withered on the vine. They were sacrificed on the altar of neoliberalism by a two party system in thrall to it. And nowhere was the betrayal bigger than Bill Clinton’s policy record. If you need proof, look at electoral maps from 92 and 96 then compare to 2000. So many states that backed Clinton against the Reagan-Bush consensus went to Bush Junior once Bill’s terms were up. Meanwhile, people took ‘thinkers’ such as Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman seriously despite the blatantly historically ignorant Kantianism they peddled about the end of history. History, however, has a nasty habit of never ending. This ideology was remarkably self-congratulating to the ruling class and their middle class henchmen in large cities, most of whom were liberals. It told them that the values they had been raised with were fundamentally correct, and that by living those values they were making a positive difference in the world, and that by merely thinking the right thoughts and using the right language they could make the world a better place. It may only now be becoming apparent to most of those people that this was delusion, but I have to say, I always saw this as delusion. So did others, but those others were shouted down consistently as being ‘unreasonable’ or ‘not serious’ or ‘not with the times.’

Had Dubya not had the good fortune to be president during the most massive terrorist attack in American history he likely would have been a single term president. He was able to use security issues to further ramp up the neoliberal drive which was now securitized. When asked during the surge of patriotism after 9/11 what the average American should do, the Bush administration responded with ‘go shopping.’ Civic responsibility was sought by the people only to be met with more market fundamentalism. The vagaries of a supposedly logical global market was not only now in charge of domestic policy-it ran foreign policy as well. Here the strains and cracks in the edifice really began to show. The blithe predictions for Iraq bore bitter and contradictory fruit. The war itself became so toxic it cost Hillary Clinton the democratic nomination, rightfully, and the Republicans the general election, also rightfully.

Obama ended the most odious influence of the evangelicals on domestic policy and reigned in (though did not significantly reduce) the neoliberal/neoconservative drive on foreign affairs, but while he did not accelerate the objectives of neoliberalism at home, he did absolutely nothing to stop them. He failed to undo enough of the odious Bush legacy but ironically was able to scale back many worst excesses of Clinton era policies such as Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, The Defense of Marriage Act, the fever pitch of the War on Drugs, and the massive deregulation of speculating financiers. Even the affordable care act, which I admit I have directly benefited from, was really a gift to insurance companies and further entrenched the for profit civics model this country has adopted since the 80s.

Appalachia, non-farming rural enclaves of the midwest and south, and significant chunks of remote regions continued to suffer and be neglected. Rather than appeal to these people who obviously have nothing to gain from Republican theories of governance, the Democrats wrote them off as irrelevant and cast blame on them for supporting many of the policies the democratic party itself once espoused. Obama won by getting people in Florida and Ohio to recognize the horror of Bushism, but all the while the Democratic Party did nothing to substantively address many of those concerns. And yet it expected, if not demanded, people vote for them anyway. Worse still was their liberal minions outside of the party who assumed that what was good for New York City (where both campaigns and most mainline media were headquartered, it should be noted) was good for the country. They also assumed that the neoliberal consensus and the bland liberal language it used for legitimacy was not the problem-just who managed this consensus was. For a decade I have tried to convince people this was not so, and I and many people far more famous than I failed utterly in the face of this delusional alternate reality by the 21st Century bourgeoisie. We warned, correctly, that if a smart alternative to this hegemony was not presented than a dumb reactionary one would be. Trump is a new Obama, electorally speaking. He built a coalition of those dissatisfied and in so doing showed the fragility and unpopularity of the status quo.

Is this to discount the role racism and possibly sexism plays in these regions? No. And it is precisely those factors that made it important to control the backlash against the bipartisan financial interests in America. Having failed to take heed from the more observant people on the left and even the occasional clever paleocon, the liberals and centrists sowed the seeds of their own destruction. The best they could hope for was meliorist Clintonite ‘triangulation’, and this became increasingly unappealing to everyone. As it is, identity politics has clearly failed. The world is not a safe space, and a bunch of liberal theorists ignoring actual material and structural issues, writing off class or in fact actively being classist (especially towards people who do not live in cities) is an ideology for the complacent and lazy and nothing more. This is further shown by the fact that these people only get fired up about the presidency and never really bother with midterms. It is a testament to the intellectual bankruptcy and irrelevancy of 21st century liberalism that people sharing JK Rowling quotes and suggesting *all* opposition to them must be rooted in prejudice of some personal identity is assumed to be ‘woke’ and that the solution to this is some sort of vague ‘awareness’ and moralistic posturing. The fact is, liberals are not intellectually superior to conservatives and they never really were. I may find them personally somewhat more palatable largely due to social issues, but I see both of them as deeply complacent ideologies that avoid critical thinking in favor of sounding righteous and upholding some form of doctrinal status quo. People arguing for political discourse on college campuses to be made as safe as their parents suburban mcmansion are not people talking about real issues that impact people in real physical space. People who do not have the privilege of being perpetually outraged by the casting of movies or a dumb joke because they struggle to survive are not won over by this middle class fatuousness. Navel-gazing is for those who prioritize their personal feelings and the liberal concept of individualism and virtue signaling becomes a form of self-branding regarded as superior to civic responsibility. Worst of all, and as I once warned, this tip to identity politics was inevitably going to picked up by the other side, the side who deals in overt race baiting. This has been my fear ever since I first learned of politics via identity back in college. Liberals cannot castigate rural whites for being identity voters when they so clearly opened that door of political acceptability for them. Like imitates like, and under neoliberalism they both spiral down together in a race for the basest form to turn out the largest amount of famously ignorant undecided voters. It is, after all, the logic of free market capitalism that one’s civic duty exists for purposes of self-fulfillment. This is an ideological point no other successful society has ever engaged in, probably because it is blatantly untrue.

What is most insufferable is the liberal pretense to great wisdom merely by *not* being conservative. It is a low standard, and when you set such low standards it drags both sides down. Much in the same way that Clintonism made the Democratic Party abandon the working class and its union core for faddish ideology and therefore lost much of its traditional support. The SensibleSerious™ consensus creates a large swath of disaffected voters with nothing to lose. Both parties, working together, made this happen. Both parties, in their own way, will suffer for it. So will the country at-large, who had much less say the implementation of these policies.

And that brings us to the centrists, a group of people who I have previously made my feelings of intense disdain quite clear. Since Bill Clinton, the liberals have basically meshed with the center with the partial exception of immediately after 9/11. But the center is a place of laziness which always represents the current status quo-and these days that status quo is an ecological and regional destroying neoliberalism. Now, back in Bill’s day this was a new thing worth giving a shot, but no longer. It is dead. Even if you support it, you must acknowledge that. Brexit and Greece were merely the precursors. Want electoral proof? In all the post-Bill presidential elections the candidate who was a less doctrinaire neoliberal won over the one who was more. Or to be more specific, centrists always lose in the 21st Century. Gore, Kerry, McCain, Romney, Clinton (II): all the more traditionally centrist candidates. Centrism isn’t just intellectually sloppy, its a recipe for losing as well. No one likes centrists, and given their record in this century, no one should. In primaries this was especially obvious. Hillary Clinton’s perpetual running on the presidency and career as a milquetoast senator striking unsustainable bargains with a loathed two party system smacks of Henry Clay, a historical figure no one admires any more nor wishes to emulate. The democratic party itself reminds me of the Whigs-an unstable coalition that devours opposition movements with actual ideas in order to present a bland front against the party that holds the initiative.

There is a final key to Trump’s victory people might talk about later but haven’t so far that I have seen: endorsements hurt and castigation helps, *especially* from the media. The late night comedians which were so entertaining and good at poking holes in the paranoid post-9/11 consensus did not keep their credit as those who speak truth to power, but rather became establishment cheerleaders. They sacrificed their vital role as the opposition for one of a deeply partisan cheerleader. As these various talk show hosts and actors lined up to condescendingly urge people to vote for the democrats they unintentionally aided the narrative that the media was all for Clinton, that the ruling classes controlled everything to get the result they wanted. It is B.S. of course, plenty of the ruling class supports Trump and he has no trouble attracting upper income voters. But the comedian/actor axis made it an obnoxious reality that people in affluent cities wanted something, and considering their previous track record on what they want and how those policies effect other parts of the country. If one wanted to, say, ‘Make Comedy Great Again’ it should go after the entire system, not just one half of its Janus-face.

America does not deserve Trump as a whole, but liberals and conservatives do, and neoliberals especially. They made him by creating the conditions for his rise. If history is a guide however I do not expect them to learn this lesson as they never have before. Instead, they will lash out at everyone they can to avoid taking personal responsibility. They will fail to recognize that it was their candidate’s record, not her gender (though it likely played a subsidiary role), that was the primary reason for her loss. They will probably blame minorities for not showing up to vote, rather than themselves for not giving much of a reason for said minorities to vote as they had before. The smug condescension of Manhattan and Los Angeles returns to its traditional role as reflexive defense mechanism. People like me who saw the dangers lurking in this neoliberal system will be the ones they will blame for their own failures. I cannot count the amount of times that I personally got talked down to on issues involving minorities by people who are entirely white, affluent,  and straight. I am none of those things. I fear what might happen in a Trump presidency as much if not more than these people-but this did not happen in a vacuum and it was the liberals who were at least half of the enablers.

But this potential for at least intellectual and grassroots organizational upheaval will be surrendered and sacrificed to the right alone if major changes are not made to the dark and desperate future of having Henry Clay liberals be the primary opposition. Ironically it is the America-First candidate who has destroyed the myths of American Exceptionalism once and for all by making our right wing so blatantly European. That honesty could at least free up all sides to be more intellectually rigorous, not just one. But that requires looking beyond the consensus of the SensibleSerious™.

FOREIGN POLICY:

American elections are important to everyone, so it was worth talking about on this blog. But this is a primarily foreign policy blog and so we should now deal specifically with foreign policy issues. This is no mean task given the many contradictory statements Trump has made.

The most important and concerning thing is the cavalier attitude Trump has regarding Asia-Pacific relations. The most important countries in the world for U.S. interests are in that region and the second and third largest economies also dwell there. Hyper-nationalism and territorial disputes are legion. And no matter what the British say, the U.S.-Japan Security Agreement is the world’s most important and stable alliance. It comes closer to the bedrock of global stability than any other bilateral relationship. It is also unique in modern history for bringing together two countries which are so globally powerful for so long. Trump has been openly dismissive of this alliance, asking why the Japanese do not pay for themselves, when in fact they have been quite good at doing so. In fact, Japan payed most of the expenses of the first Persian Gulf War.

The status of this alliance is the most concerning foreign policy issue of a Trump presidency. Coupled with a trade-tariff war with China it could be a recipe for disaster. One fear I can at least tone down, however, is that of Japan acquiring a stronger and more autonomous defense. This has been in the workings for almost a decade. A great power can only be governed like a banana republic for so long. For obvious historical reasons Japan may prove more reticent to acquire a nuclear deterrent, but I do not believe it would be inherently destabilizing if it did so. Still, the alliance should be maintained.

In China, Xi Jinping is a far more intelligent leader than either Clinton or Trump, but especially Trump. It remains to be seen what opportunities this might open up to to the PRC, if any.

Europe represents opportunity in equal parts to danger. A vast over-estimation of Russia’s conventional capabilities due to a few flashy brushfire victories over smaller armies in remote theaters often guides American grand strategy, but Russia probably could be contained so long as Germany, France, and Poland stick together. Especially so if the UK stays with them, but that is less certain as we see how Brexit shapes up. The most likely reason Putin wants Trump is not some childish liberal conspiracy theory of Manchurian candidacy but rather because he expects he can run circles around him at the negotiating table. It is ever so slightly possible that some kind of mutual bargain could be struck between the two Bros-in-Chief.

The one decided potential benefit here is that Trump will probably be better than Clinton in the Middle East and possibly Africa as well. Gone will be the tone of the preaching humanitarian racist that has bungled US policy towards Africa for decades and driven important countries into the arms of the Chinese. The expansion of AFRICOM might get a more critical eye-though that remains a big maybe. Most importantly, the odds we will attack the government of Syria have gone from somewhere around say 70% under Clinton to about nil now. This is the only true demonstrable gain I can see from this election in either foreign or domestic policy for the average person-but it is (potentially) a gain. One of the few issues that Trump was consistently right on was the need to go after ISIS alone and not fight 3 sided conflicts where our intervention is not needed. Considering how utterly disastrous, deadly, and expensive 21st Century regime change policies from Iraq to Libya have been, with unintended consequences of causing surges in terrorist attacks (which in turn fuel the far right) this could be a truly concrete benefit not only for foreign policy people like me of the realist persuasion but in breaking up the neocon establishment in DC proper.

So us geostrategists have to be even more wary than usual in the near future. Uncertainty is high. But there is hope for some new ideas and a re-orientation of a neoliberal hegemony quite long in the tooth to keep representing U.S. (and others) strategic interests. That vague hope does not, however, allay my fears for various minority communities in this new era. But as there was a big backlash to Bushism on social issues that ended up winning the argument far more effectively than Democratic meliorism would have, so too that fight should never be given up. Let this be the shock to renew it with vigor rather than simply wait for the mythical liberal fairy tale of ‘inevitable progress’ to happen. Those of us against the rising global tide of reactionary identity politics can have a bright future indeed if they reject neoliberalism, complacent cosmopolitanism, ‘woke’ classisism, and the other faith based homilies that got them in this mess in the first place.