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 Trickster's Guide to Geopolitics 