[Marxism] Militaristic Bonapartism in the USA?

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Nestor wrote: "Would you dare to think of some kind of institutional coup in
the USofAm that establishes some kind of militaristic Bonapartism in the
White House at Wash?"

I don't think so. That's what happened, in two stages: first, the stealing
of the 2000 election, and then 9/11 and how it was used by the
administration. It didn't work. 

It would have helped if the ruling class had not installed in the presidency
the village idiot from Bushville, but something like that was inevitable.

I say inevitable because big wing of the U.S. ruling class decided to fight
the impact of the colonial revolution and the radicalization of the 1960's
in the United States by pushing religious obscurantism and economic
nonsense. And the truth is that among a lot of the population, the rulers
"won" the "culture wars," at least at an ideological level. George W. Bush
is the price the rulers are paying for the success of that choice they made.

Faith-based reliance on simple-minded free-market dogmas has been the North
Star of this administration, in everything from tax cuts to the Iraq War to
responding to the current freeze-up in the credit markets and the
accelerating collapse of the dollar. Bush is simply the personification of
the programmatic and ideological bankruptcy of the "conservative"
(right-wing) circle of U.S. politicians, the adherents of the economic and
social religion that big sections of the ruling class pushed to try to
reverse "the sixties." 

Their simple-minded dogmas ("just say no") and thinly-veiled racist appeals
("three strikes and you're out") were enough to win elections with almost
exclusively white votes in good times.

In this sense, it is useful to contrast George Bush the First with George
Bush the Lesser. George the First famously had trouble with "the ... uh ...
vision thing." He wasn't a "true conservative," just a scion of old
establishment money. But he was without question 100 times the statesman,
diplomat and geopolitical strategist that his son is. It's not just that
George the Lesser is intellectually challenged, but that, unlike his father,
he is a complete ideologue, a "true conservative," and refuses to listen to
anyone but ideologues, even, for example, as the dollar is drowning in a sea
of government budget deficits. And like a true believer, he explains that
the problem with the deficit is simply the government spends too much, no
matter how politically unrealistic his flights of fancy about spending cuts
are.

Another example: Having barely beat Kerry in an election he should have won
by a landslide after 9/11 as a war time commander in chief, Bush decides to
slay the bette noir of "true conservatives": he will dismantle social
security, using as his pretext that  30 or 40 years from now the system
might run out of money.

No REAL politician worthy of the name in THIS country would have embarked on
such a quixotic quest. The proposal was Dead on Arrival, such a stinking
corpse that NOT EVEN his own party's true believers in Congress were willing
to get near it.

And in the process, he let what could have been his signature issue and
accomplishment in the second term, and a long-lasting contribution to the
Republican Party, immigration "reform," get hijacked by xenophobic lunatics.
He did not have the political vision or will or skill to rally HIS OWN
supporters around his plan. Instead, by allowing the know-nothing
white-sheet crowd seize the leadership of the Republican party on this
issue, he evoked a mass movement among Latinos, driving them by the millions
into the arms of the Democrats, and provoking a wide-ranging discussion that
now, a guest-worker-only plan like Bush raised initially AND WAS WELCOMED BY
THE COMMUNITY would be rejected out of hand by the SAME community and
therefore also the Democrats.

Bush's plan, unveiled before the 2004 elections, was viciously
anti-immigrant in the sense that it would have created a permanent bracero
work force of millions of people with no rights save those needed to be
exploited and zero chance, or as close to as makes no difference, of
becoming permanent residents and eventually citizens. NEVERTHELESS, it was
welcomed by the big majority in Latino communities: being a legal "guest
worker" is a million times better than being illegal, denied the right to a
drivers license, always in hiding and afraid of la migra and so on. 

And on that basis, Bush won 45% of the Latino vote in 2004; after he let the
anti-immigrant Republican jihadists drive the bus for two years, the
Republicans got 30% in the 2006 congressional election. If Latinos in 2006
had voted as they did in 2004, Republicans would have retained control of
the Senate and possibly the House. (Sergio Bendixen and other Latino
pollsters argue the numbers I give --from the network's national election
pool exit polls-- are too high in both cases because Latinos are much more
urban than other groups, and this isn't taken into account in the national
election pool sample. However, even if Bendixen's numbers were used, my
basic argument here would be the same. Depending on which numbers you use,
republicans lost 1/4-1/2 of their support in the Latino community. 

Or take what Bush did yesterday. 

With the U.S. housing market in full meltdown mode, and the country already
in recession, he goes to the economic club of New York to proclaim ... a
hard line against large-scale government intervention in the mortgage
market. But the truth is that the way the economy is right now, foreclosure
of owner-occupied homes by and large will cost the mortgage holders and the
economy as a whole MORE than reaching an accommodation on a LARGE scale with
people unable to pay the full mortgage. The reason for that is that most of
those houses will only net, after foreclosure, selling expenses, etc., half
or less the face value of the loan. And in an area with lots of
foreclosures, even of brand-new housing stock, the net recovery will be zero
-- brand-new McMansions will be abandoned, as if they were some 1940's
wooden shack in a blighted urban ghetto. The ONLY way to "fix" this is by
government intervention -- the government rewriting the rules of when you
can foreclose and how, of under what circumstances the principal and/or
interest rates must be written down, etc. 

Various formulas have been worked up by the policy wonks to achieve an ideal
bourgeois mortgage rescue. 

But Bush is such an idiot he won't even let his people look at them. He does
not see that the interests of HIS CLASS urgently call for this intervention,
and, moreover, that ways can be devised so as to extract even more money
from working people -- and have them thank you for it! Just as he proved
unable to understand and therefore follow through on the vicious sort of
political cunning that went into devising his immigration plan, his
ideological bloody-mindedness prevents him from seizing advantage of this
opportunity.

The unwillingness and inability of the American political ideologues to deal
with the mortgage issue on a system-wide scale, in turn, makes all the
mortgage-backed securities radioactive. And these in turn contaminate the
rest of the financial system through the mechanism of the derivatives
market, which is completely unregulated and completely irrational. 

So, for example, someone came up with the idea of insuring bonds against
default. Fine. For a small premium you reduce risk. And then someone said,
hey, if I could buy insurance against default for bonds I don't own, I'd
make a real killing. And the bond insurers sold those policies, too.

Imagine someone buying an insurance policy against a fire at some building
that the person doesn't own. Now imagine selling hundreds of such policies
on one building. What began as a hedge against risk has now become an
element that adds to risk. Moreover, the more such policies you sell, the
higher the risk, for the chances that you are selling the policy to someone
who will subsequently get caught in a financial squeeze or is just a
racketeer, and will arrange for the fire to take place, go up with each
policy you sell. You build a huge base of people who cheer every time there
is a whiff of smoke, including some who go around throwing lit matches into
bins full of shredded paper, or worse.

That's what you've got at the top of the U.S. financial market food chain
right now. Billions of dollars riding on bets that corporations, local and
state governments, mortgage holders and all sorts of other will go broke. So
sure, they all tell the Commander in Chief, fire department? We don't need
no stinking fire department! We've got the free market! And Bush BELIEVES
them!

Another example of his ineptness.

He just made Admiral Fallon, head of Central Command (yes, the "combatant
commander" of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) walk the plank for saying
the blindingly obvious: the United States military does not have the
resources available right now to win a war with Iran, and therefore the
cornerstone of U.S. strategy in relation to that country should not be the
threat of war. Moreover, he made Fallon walk the plank in an unnecessary and
humiliating way. 

In journalistic circles it is said the Commander in Chief is going to get an
earful from Fallon in the form of televised interviews as soon as the
paperwork is done on his retirement in the next week or two.

What sort of fool is it that, in the middle of a war that, for the moment,
is going fairly well in the newspapers if not on the ground, picks a fight
with one of his military commanders who knows 1000 times more about the wars
than he does? And does this even as the credit markets are freezing up,
hundreds of thousands are being dispossessed from their homes, and the
dollar is in free fall?

It is important to realize that any OTHER country beset with such
"leadership" would probably have been reduced to "failed state" status by
now. 

It is only because the United States exploits the entire world that the
place remains afloat. But this also means two things: first, it isn't
necessarily true that the current economic problems will lead to a
catastrophic crisis, or collapse, and, two, any new administration will have
substantial resources to work with, a substantial underlying and ongoing
source of economic wealth over and above what the U.S. economy itself can
generate.

And even beyond that, the rest of the imperialist world is hardly in a
position to permit a substantial downgrading or collapse of U.S. economic
and military power. So much of the imperialist system's military and
economic resources are tied up with the U.S. as a nation state that to allow
a sudden American collapse would call into question the survivability of the
system itself.

Despite that, the goings on in the past few years have been enough to propel
a very substantial politicization of the population. Not yet a
radicalization, and perhaps it will not even lead there, but the evidence is
clear enough in the primaries. Turnout in the Democratic race has
consistently beaten records from previous years -- and I don't mean 10 or 20
percent more, this year a turnout double the previous record turnout in a
given state is a low turnout. And it is a phenomenon largely restricted to
the Democrat Party.

Especially significant has been the turnout from the Black community (in the
South) and the Latino communities (especially in the South West and the
West). Obama is more identified with the phenomenon but I think
"Obama-mania" has been both a product of the underlying politicization and a
vehicle for it to spread rather than the thing itself. Any other year, the
dollars and vote totals Clinton amassed would have made her the nominee well
before now. Instead, she's been reduced to having surrogates launch
race-baiting attacks on Obama which she is then forced to disavow. 

*  *  *

I don't claim to have any particular insight as to how this election will
turn out in the United States, for it mostly depends first on the vector-sum
results of partly contradictory pushes by various circles in the ruling
class and among their top political and media operatives, and then how these
efforts interact with the mood of various sectors of the population and such
motion as exists.

I will confess to being quite startled by the degree to which the ruling
class has allowed the motion around Obama to continue, even though as such
it is entirely within the orbit of bourgeois electoralism. Because it is a
law of politics that whenever you set controlled forces into motion, you
ALSO set uncontrolled forced into motion. Yes, the "movement" around and for
Obama, in and of itself, is completely safe. But history shows that setting
the Black community in this country into motion, and setting young people
into motion, is never completely safe for the American ruling class.

One thing that is clear, I think, is that the conditions don't exist right
now for any sort of interruption of bourgeois-democratic normality within
the United States, or even the emergence of a right-wing Bonapartist
demagogue that in effect interrupts bourgeois-democratic normalcy even while
formally preserving it. For the moment, the elements of right-wing
bonapartism Bush introduced, and his sheer incompetence, has made "another
Bush" 

Joaquín


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