‘…what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’
Yeats | The Second Coming | 1919
Utah Phillips, the grand old activist and storyteller/satirist/songwriter, once observed that the most radical thing in American life is a long memory.
Those of us of a certain vintage who remember 1968 have some rough sense of what an American revolution five decades later might look like. I was 12, a Canadian born of Liverpudlian Anglo-Irish parents, growing up an asthmatic IBM brat in Poughkeepsie, NY, more interested in the Beatles and skiing like Jean-Claude Killy than anything else.
The war in Vietnam was peaking; the Tet offensive that January and the media coverage of the initial North Vietnamese successes in a presidential election year cleaved by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy made for a year even wilder, even more disjointed, in my view, than the centrifugal months since Donald Trump was nominated at the GOP convention in Cleveland.
Then too, in 1968, the incendiary mix of race, police violence, and a deeply unpopular government took America to the edge. This was the year that what President Lyndon Johnson predicted would happen, did: the Republicans would use the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as political leverage to turn the American South Republican.
Not since before the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, had the South swung to the GOP. The politics of race in the hands of the politically astute Richard Nixon in 1968 meant that LBJ’s prophesy would come true: the Democrats would lose the South for a generation. He was optimistic: it’s been half a century that the coalition Nixon assembled has had a profound influence not just on the South but on the tenor and tone of racial politics in the US.
In 1968, the old manufacturing base in the Northeast was already crumbling; Texas and California were reaping the rewards of massive wartime military technology spending. The old alignments around the US East Coast elite were breaking down as well, even as the big labor unions — then mightily powerful politically and key to voter turnout — began to fissure as Vietnam divided the country, down to neighbor versus neighbor.
My beloved grade one teacher, Mrs Barr, came to our house one night just before RFK’s assassination to ask my parents to join the anti-war movement. She was rebuffed at our kitchen door by my obviously irritated mom: I still remember the tension of that moment. Politics couldn’t have been more personal, then as now.
Death in Vietnam was no abstraction: the smallest and youngest on the court, I played basketball once or twice with Cliff Rhodes, a cheerful neighbor, a big blond athlete and a high school senior when I was but 11. I remember the shock when Cliff, a Marine corporal, was killed in action at Quang Tri in May, 1967; I can still picture the small dignified stone in his memory on his parents’ front lawn.
When, as a Canadian, an “alien” resident in the US, I registered for the draft in 1973, my dad, a WWII RAF veteran whose elder brother, my namesake, was killed in action at Monte Cassino in 1944, quietly hinted he’d ship me off to my homeland to the north rather than send me to Vietnam. No way he’d be party to repeating the family tragedy, to a second Brendan killed in action — this from a deeply conservative but radically honest man.
Dad was a populist Reagan Democrat who never gave up his UK citizenship, so never voted in the US; eccentrically, he was a believer in the Diem brothers (Vietnam’s leaders, assassinated in a CIA-mediated coup three weeks to the day before JFK was murdered), largely because they were Catholic.
However, by 1973, I wasn’t too young to understand that bit of passport legerdemain made my mother’s rejection of Mrs Barr and my father’s native hard-right politics just that much more hypocritical.
Add to 1968’s racial witches’-brew an American middle class bound and determined to save its sons from the hell of Vietnam so visible nightly on the network news shows — let the blue collar kids fight: I have a college deferment — and, that summer, add again to the mix the madness of the “police riot” at the Democratic convention in Chicago and you have some dim idea of what the matrix of forces in play for an American revolution might look like.
This midwinter, on the brim yet another divisive social crisis echoing 1968’s, two first-class minds have tackled thinking about where the US is going, almost a half-century later, when another American resistance movement appears to be coalescing around healthcare, women’s rights, immigration, and the very nature and purpose of what Calvin Coolidge termed the “business of America”: business — capitalism itself.
Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former NY Times Middle East bureau chief who gave extraordinary public witness against another American war, the invasion of Iraq, at the 2003 commencement at Rockford College, has posted a recipe for an American revolution on Truthdig, the leftist news and commentary website. Douglas Valentine, a veteran investigative reporter on intelligence matters and the politics of the US’s “war on drugs” dating back to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, has just published a book with the blunt title The CIA as Organized Crime, a scarifying catalogue of the intelligence agency’s worst abuses, ranging from opium commerce to extrajudicial mass murder, from 1960s Vietnam through Iraq and Afghanistan, to the bloodbath of Syria right now. Valentine’s is no book for the faint of heart but, I think, one of those books which will define an era in US history very very few want to remember, certainly not publicly. Both men published in the interregnum after the 2016 election, as the last days of the Obama administration edged into history.
Neither is an optimist about America’s future: both see the post 9/11 American state presiding over an increasingly dim national future. The battle is on, both might agree, for the table scraps of empire — and the devil take the hindmost.
Hedges first: his is a deeply pessimistic vision of an America far beyond having lost its way, a country literally unhinged, its polarization a symptom not merely of a political divide. No: it’s rather, to paraphrase the memoirs of man who set the model for US corporate political repression in service of a military coup in Chile in 1973, Henry Kissinger, the social expression of the failure to manage the imperial decline in any way but the brutal exercise of moneyed power. A sample:
…even more ominously, the militant movements that were the real engines of democratic change have been obliterated by the multi-pronged assault of communist witch hunts and McCarthyism, along with deindustrialization, a slew of anti-labor laws and deregulation, and corporate seizure of our public and private institutions. This has left us nearly defenseless.
The corporate state ignores the suffering of the majority of Americans. It rams through policies that make the suffering worse. This is about to get turbocharged under Donald Trump. Institutions, the courts among them, that once were able to check the excesses of power are slavish subsidiaries of corporate power. And the most prescient critics of corporate power — Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader and others — have been blacklisted and locked out by corporate media, including a public broadcasting system that depends on corporate money.
We will have to build movements and, most importantly, new, parallel institutions that challenge the hegemony of corporate power. It will not be easy. It will take time. We must not accept foundation money and grants from established institutions that seek to curtail the radical process of reconstituting society. Trusting in the system, and especially the Democratic Party, to carry out reform and wrest back our democracy ensures our enslavement.
Hedges is not only deadly serious but, in many respects (he’s wrong about the courts’ resistance to Trump, for one) very likely right, as a visit to the walking tragedies of Flint, Michigan or Youngstown, Ohio or Tonawonda NY or the ghostly hill towns of western Pennsylvania or the small, once-commodity-driven cities of Nebraska and Indiana — all written off by both Washington and their own state governments — surely demonstrates. There is little to distinguish these places from third-world towns: the talented and the ambitious have long since abandoned them; those left behind are well and truly on their own.
Why? Drive down the main street of North Platte, Nebraska, the epitome of “flyover country,” whose residents (I’ve met them, twice, on roadtrips west this past year) express themselves as equal parts furious and alienated; they voted Trump out of real suffering, just as Flint, Michael Moore’s hometown did, as Moore himself predicted.
In North Platte, what’s well advanced and well evident is the near-vanishing of small, locally-owned businesses. The main thoroughfare is corporate brand after corporate brand: the money isn’t staying in town, if the empty mall parking lots are any indication. The local economy has the look and feel of serious value extraction, of soullessness. No wonder there’s scintillating fury beneath the prairie quiet.
Such places are the seed-beds of righteous anger, Hedges senses; his formulation for a radical response to plutocratic power is equally brutal: fear. Fear, in his view, is the only actuating principle that entrenched power understands. In this, he’s no doubt correct. Whether or not Trump’s plummeting approval ratings translate into Democratic wins in the 2018 mid-terms is immaterial to Hedges, however. What matters to him and his formulation for revolt lies outside the orthodox political process.
Hedges’ counsel extends well past “no more Mr Nice Guy.” It’s the mobilization of anger across constituencies that are, in Shakespeare’s syntax, “strange bedfellows.” Cultural alignments will mean little, Hedges observes, if radicalization of the disenfranchised is to win any traction. It’s all about the taking back of public power via civil action.
Take a picture of this: left wing nose-pierced environmentalists will have to find common ground with NFL-loving line-workers displaced by robots now even more likely to pinkslip semi-skilled workers if Trump’s expressed policy of preventing offshoring is enforced. (Sidebar: American businesses, rather than relocate, will lay off and robot up, as a recent Barron’s piece detailed. Buy robotics stocks, was Barron’s straight-faced advice.)
Quoting community organizer/strategist Michael Gecan, himself the author of Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Citizen Action (Random House, 2004) and After America’s Midlife Crisis (MIT Press, 2009), as well as essays in the Boston Review and Village Voice, Hedges writes:
Genuine protest, (Gecan) said, has to defy the rules. It cannot be predictable. It has to disrupt power. It has to surprise those in authority. And these kinds of protests are greeted with anger by the state.
No movement will survive, (Gecan) said, unless it is built on the foundation of deep community relationships. Organizers must learn to listen, even to those who do not agree with them. Only then are organization and active resistance possible.
What Hedges terms “boutique protests” — essentially media events with little political impact — won’t, he argues, amount to anything. What will work requires great risk, a manifest adventurousness in aligning new tribes of radicals committed to real change outside orthodox media and modes of political “change”. Hedges isn’t himself an optimist. But then he’s lived and worked as a journalist in the Middle East, where life is even cheaper than in Youngstown or Baltimore — he knows stuff about untrammelled state power.
Enter Douglas Valentine, whose work really defines what the new radicalism Hedges advocates for is up against in 2017 America. And his is an even more bleak vision than Hedges’. Not surprising, because Valentine’s own formation as an investigative journalist is perhaps unique in American reporting: he literally followed his nose, as a would-be ‘litterateur’, through an acquaintanceship with former CIA director William Colby, all about things literary, into the belly of the beast: the CIA’s Phoenix Program, a highly sophisticated ‘Murder Inc’ in Vietnam, responsible for the institutionally directed and controlled mass murder of tens of thousands of Vietnamese in an attempt to destroy popular support for the Viet Cong. Phoenix was Colby’s brainchild.
Valentine’s work laid bare the program, based on hundreds of interviews with CIA staff, who, Valentine says, simply thought Colby had approved Valentine’s digging. Files by the hundreds fell into his hands; the son of a working-class father who knew a thing or two about corruption in Valentine’s home town, Valentine realized he had uncovered American complicity in war crimes sanctioned by the CIA in the name of ‘pacification,’ for which read: mass murder. (For a detailed narrative of this amazing trek through some of the CIA’s darkest secrets in Valentine’s own words through the lens of the international narcotics trade, see https://www.opendemocracy.net/douglas-valentine/history-of-buncin-us-bureau-of-narcotics-covert-intelligence-network.)
Valentine’s afterword in Organized Crime, itself exhaustively researched, scrupulously assembled and compellingly written, dates from the first week of December, 2016. Trump has been president-elect for a month as Valentine wrote; Valentine’s considered assessment is, if anything, far more pessimistic than even Hedges’.
He believes that the CIA is, contrary to the headlines published as he finished his book in December, hardly committed to a coup d’etat against the Trump regime. Quite the opposite, he says: the CIA has every institutional motivation to support the growth of American business overseas — and here comes the kicker — and to help preserve the US status quo because that’s the CIA’s mandate. In other words, in Valentine’s view, the CIA is the hit team for the worst elements of American business — and those elements have their ideological hopes pinned to the man in the Oval Office.
So much for an intelligence counter-revolution in response to the “Trump revolution,” responds Valentine. Far more likely, in his view, that CIA provides the means and modes of repression to keep those most likely to overturn the domestic political applecart well in hand.
Why? Because, Valentine argues, this is precisely the CIA’s operational stock-in-trade: the brutalization of local politics as phase one; blackmail and murder as phase two (already, he says, institutionalized in the Phoenix program expertise and refined to a near-clinical degree post 9/11 with the rendition/black sites program globally) — and an American Phoenix program, ready and waiting in the wings, he says, to be operationalized against those on US soil who oppose the status quo.
No one has a crystal ball for these things; a glance backwards at history might, however, prove instructive.
In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt was the focus of an attempted military coup. The reportage around the attempted coup — which had clear echoes in the summer of 1963, when JFK told friends in the wake of a film he himself insisted be filmed at the White House — John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May — that he, a sitting president, feared a coup — is notable for what it leaves out, with the exception, perhaps, of John Spivak’s reporting for the hard-left New Masses.
Spivak revealed suppressed redacted testimony which points to serious money being moved around to align a US war hero, Marine Major General Smedley Butler, with a “veterans’ bonus march” designed to topple FDR’s government. (Butler, who won the Medal of Honor not once but twice, is famous for decrying his own service as a Marine officer of American corporate interests. “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service,” he wrote in his best-seller, War is a Racket, “and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers…Al Capone operated in three districts. I operated on three continents.”)
One thing’s certain in all the murk and political deep-sixing of Congressional testimony (which FDR himself, with typical acumen, may well have sought): there were senior Wall Street men keen to see Roosevelt out of office with the ways and means to bankroll and — through cut-outs, none of whom seems to have advanced the coup much — a military takeover of the government.
Much has been made, notably by veteran reporters Carl Bernstein and Dan Rather, of the Watergate-scale scandal brewing around the present administration, with its strange affections for Russian oligarchs and their security service hitmen and the byzantine ways of Cypriot banks and offshore Russian oil moneylaundering. All of which — or none of which — may be connected to Russian loans to prop up various cash-strapped Trump enterprises no American financier would touch. We shall see. (As a former investigative journalist, FWIW my sense the beating heart of all this is dirty Russian oil/gas securities bankrolling Trump — a knowing Trump.)
However this Fellinesque carnival plays out, Valentine makes clear he believes there’s no salvation to be had from the American security services conspiring to remove the president from power; to the contrary, it’s his opinion that the CIA has no real institutional interest in a coup d’etat.
I’m not so sure: big money has trailed intelligence shenanigans since Smedley Butler’s Marine’s “policed” Haiti and Nicaragua a century ago and certainly pre-dates the founding of the American security state in 1949. Wall Street’s connivance with both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis is a matter of historical record (the profit motive) and the CIA is no friend of anything Russian, especially of the FSB, Putin’s alma mater, or (most of all) the GRU variety: Russian military intelligence. There’s history here.
Commentators like John Schindler, a former NSA analyst and “disinformation” specialist with very good contacts indeed “on the inside” suggest, with good reason, that spooks like their Cold War cold. In one pyrotechnic tweet, Schindler quotes a former intelligence officer source as predicting “(Trump) will die in jail.” Time will tell whose view is correct: Schindler’s or Valentine’s.
Moreover, I’m a believer that history unfolds much as Shakespeare’s history plays do: with blackmail the currency of power politics and Utah Phillips’ long memory the engine of revenge. What will bring Trump down won’t be the Russian Connection or the sheer incompetence of his cabinet: he will, himself.
What both Hedges and Valentine are responding to is the victimization of the average American, well outside the inner sanctum of a bought-and-paid-for access to power and what both perceive, in their dark view—civilized men both—as a coming paramilitary American state dedicating itself to protect the privileges of those on the inside as the American empire devolves.
But to the here and now: who knows how Trump’s regime will end?
It’s perhaps not an unsafe bet to wager his political demise might well be an exercise in hubris coated in gold-leaf paint; his own sad preoccupations of brute misogyny; a rank personal dishonesty; an appetite, in compensation for his own mediocrity, for self-aggrandizement to a pathological degree — and an overweening schoolboy narcissism whose scale puts most Hollywood celebrity-actors to shame.
Not the stuff Shakespeare had to work with in dissecting the Plantagenets or the Tudors in his history plays, to be sure. By comparison, as one wag on Quora put it, Trump’s regime is like some mad Chamber of Commerce, run by the Hell’s Angels.
In any case, America is in deep, deep trouble. Whether or not democracy survives the cannibalism of Stephen Bannon’s machinations is, against all odds, a valid question in March 2017. The more immediate question is also Shakespearean: many of the GOP Congressional incumbents are hell-bent, like children afraid the parents will come home early and take their new toys of power and influence away, intent on wreaking the maximum havoc while extracting the greatest profit possible in the shortest possible time.
In Paris, in the summer of 1793, the nascent French Revolution, as all revolutions do, began to spin against itself: Robespierre, increasingly bent on ideological purity as a way out of the box of increasingly bloody political infighting (hello Freedom Caucus), let “the people” have their way. The immediate result were the barbarities of the September massacres; longer term came the slowly dawning realization that the thirst for blood as a means of cleansing the revolution meant that no head was safe. And so it proved. Revolutions eat themselves. Trump’s shambling revolution will be no exception.
The real story of Trump’s regime is, I believe, its extraordinary mediocrity. If one studies the newsreels of Hitler’s rise to power, the mediocrity of the men he built his power on is evident in the brutish faces caught in the frames of the old films. Bannon is Trump’s Ernst Rohm, the man who mobilized the brownshirt masses for his Führer but who, if history is likely to repeat, can no more harness the whirlwind than did Rohm, murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in June, 1934, a blood purge designed and executed by Hitler personally.
That mediocrity is the Petri dish in which the Trump regime’s destruction will fester and grow and, ultimately, actuate what I fear might well be a very messy end indeed: there are almost no statesmen in Washington of the order of the senators and Congressmen during Watergate who might broker a clean end.
Instead, there are Republican congressmen who wouldn’t be out of place in The Mountain, the radicals who, having midwived the Reign of Terror, ultimately sent Robespierre to the guillotine before he could send them. These congressmen, so too the likes of Sessions and Lynch and Bannon himself, are all too often small men, mediocrities themselves, inclined thereby to a temporary expedient loyalty to Trump’s own mediocrity. There are very, very few principled statesmen among them; nor for that matter amongst the Democrats, either, in comparison to the likes of Watergate’s Tip O’Neill or Sam Ervin or Barry Goldwater or Howard Baker.
It’s facile to say the Trump people are on the wrong side of history. In a terrible way, they are not: they are making it, having loosed the bacillus of racism, class hatred and xenophobia as reflex reaction to the complex problems of governance as the American empire itself loses influence. Make America Great Again is really code for the average Trump voter’s ‘give me more, now, government élite — or I’ll destroy you.’
While nowhere near Stalinist or Nazi state terrorism — unless perhaps you’re a Muslim or have a Muslim surname or birthplace — Trump’s politics-as-class-vengeance can, in my view, never outpace the essential second-rate-ness of him and his colleagues. Yes: this is what passes for optimism about America’s future in the late winter of 2017, a century after Lenin seized power in St Petersburg — Jimmy Breslin (of happy memory) named it best: the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
The real question is about America’s future: post-Trump, what will be left to be rebuilt? And the answer to that provocative musing is simple.
Here both Hedges and Valentine agree. What will be left to be rebuilt will be precisely what Americans choose to fight for and preserve. No more. No less.
