Why Americans need strong leadership:
The issues of the American election campaign
What can be learned from Trump
about democracy and the discontent with it
The political and journalistic guardians of democracy are astonished at the openness with which Trump touts his authoritarianism as not just the style, but as the very substance of his presidency. And above all – especially after his election victory – by the success with which Trump advertised his campaign. Are American voters not taking him seriously? Or don’t they care? Or is that what they want? The election doesn’t provide a clear answer to these questions. But the media has come to the conclusion, supported by the opinion polls, that the voters see things the way Trump wants them to: a critical mass of voters not only don’t see Trump as a threat to democracy, but as its savior. Namely, from the very politicians who upheld the defense of democracy as the only issue on which they thought, until the end, they could be sure of a majority. And now this: a proto-fascist as the savior of democracy – how can that be?
The free press is saying this around the clock: Trump has understood the American people’s widespread resentment of the country’s political elites and institutions, which the Democrats have woefully underestimated. According to pollsters, this is especially true for members of the proud working class who the Democrats still take for granted as their secure voting bloc while having neglected them for decades in their increasing impoverishment. Trump has offered an interpretation of their impoverishment, which they have complained about for decades, that simply appeals to disappointed citizens: the political establishment has betrayed them, so they need a strong man who will thoroughly clean house – both of the constitutionally embedded obstacles to autocratic governance and of the special interests that are more important to a corrupt political elite than the craving of a patriotic population for their prerogatives against all foreigners and all deviants. A politician who presents himself as the avenger of the disenfranchised with his hostility toward the elite is well received – this is where political expertise knows its stuff.
Yet it would be better, for once, to wonder about this: at how easily and – despite all their contemptuous distancing – how sympathetically professional democrats imitate this extremely affirmative, arch-nationalist reinterpretation of capitalist cases of damage; at how familiar they are with fascism as a radicalization of a discontent with democracy that is always present in democracy and apparently child’s play to mobilize; and at how unwilling they are to accept the relationship between the system of freedom and that of the anti-freedom they spell out to their audience.
Because in fact Trump’s standpoint, just like his voters’ approval of him, is the perfection of an impressive democratic politicization. Trump offers the most fundamental answer imaginable to the basic question with which voters are summoned to a higher, national responsibility: “What would you do as president?” His answer is simple: ensure that the power that must serve the true people really is a power that is unquestionably capable of asserting itself. A people that really rules therefore needs the unrestricted right of a president who declares himself completely united with them. Nothing more convincingly proves that Trump himself is this true man of the people, i.e. the power broker suited for this program of rule, than his desire not just to make enemies, but to take them on offensively: against internal and external enemies, including and especially against the established institutions which, in his view, dilute or even prevent the unified will of the people. Trump thus embodies the people’s right to a political upheaval that finally puts the power of the good people entirely in the hands of their governing personification. Or more succinctly: “Trump will fix it” – there’s no problem for which resolute rule would not be the solution. Not in such a way that the president is unrestrainedly at the service of the citizens, but vice versa, in such a way that he gets serious about the sovereign perspective into which he politicizes all private interests. The will of the people is the assertion of state power against all enemies and deviations, and is the disempowerment of the institutions that are preventing precisely this. So the lesson that Trump has learned from his first term in office calls for an echo from below: He had too little power to deal with his enemies.
Whether this is already fascist or just barely democratic is the wrong question – that’s a matter for the domestic security services of the democratic nations to concern themselves with. It would be better to take note of the achievements that the most powerful democracy in the world is apparently capable of – especially since the warning can be heard everywhere that America is more a harbinger than an exception when it comes to political mores. One achievement concerns the assertion of rule: here, democracy brings to power a leader who adamantly insists that his power alone can save the nation from the “enemy from within” who he will do away with – if necessary, by using the military. The other achievement concerns the formation of citizens into members of the national community who, in their proud self-consciousness that they are the freest people on earth, insist on their right to unrestricted power for the leader of their choice.
The Capitol attack: The last battle (for now) in the “Fight for America’s soul”
America in election year 2020: Chronicle of a “Fight for America’s soul”
Populism: Six remarks on an alternative way of exercising democratic rule
Trump’s struggle against the establishment media and for the establishment of a new one
‘Honesty first!’: Trump renovates the moral standards of democratic rule
Donald Trump and his nation — united in the pursuit of happiness
Dissenting views on the Israel-Hamas war
Israel’s Gaza war — a challenge to the powers and moralists of the imperialist world
Once again Hamas strikes Israel, and this time succeeds in a bloody attack on its heartland, which is otherwise successfully shielded from Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, on a somewhat unusual scale. The first profound analyses range from “completely unprovoked terror!” to “it was bound to happen eventually!”, supplemented with anxious to hopeful expectations of an overwhelming Israeli counterattack and questions about the “prospects for a rapprochement between Israel and the Arab states,” which the Palestinian question has been so thoroughly erased from. There is, of course, no room for the question of why the “Palestinian cause” exists in this way and only in this way: as periodic terrorism against Israel. The explanation for this can be found here:
And in this latest edition of the orgy of violence in the Middle East, the media, despite all the orchestrated horror, proves its astonishing ability to distinguish between this act of violence and that act of violence, these victims and those victims, these and those perpetrators of violence... The nasty, nonspecific logic that sorts the violence of war in other countries into moral categories, its relation to the actually valid political standpoint that the state power here takes to the violence in the Middle East and the people there, and the specific position taken by the Free World under the “indispensable” (Biden) leadership of the USA toward Israel and its enemies, about which the slogan “we stand with Israel!” says it all, is criticized in this article:
In addition, some basic knowledge about Israel’s unique reason of state:
And on Israel’s most recent progress with regard to the de facto settlement of the Palestinian question and the period of state crisis shortly before the outbreak of the current war:
Remarks on how Israel’s state crisis is connected with the success of its no-state solution for Palestine
The USA wants war!
What else are we supposed to think when every day members of the government declare the war in Ukraine to be our, i.e., America’s, cause? When what is demanded at every opportunity is that more and heavier weapons be sent to Ukraine and on an increasing scale? When it is the official government line to support Ukraine’s ability to wage war as long as it needs it?
Of course, it is claimed that all this is about helping the Ukrainians. Help them with what?
Of course, it is said that the purpose is to end the war. But what state wages war so that it never ends? For all of them, including the US and its aid, there is the self-evident constraint that the end will come only on our terms. It is precisely the intention to get to this end as quickly as possible that intensifies wars and drags them out.
Of course, no one explicitly wants the casualties. Except those on the enemy side, even as many as possible; what else would the weapons being supplied be good for? And the victims on one’s own side, the Ukrainian side in this case, are called heroes, they die heroic deaths — isn’t that just a yes to war?
But what is there to prove anyway? America clearly and unambiguously states its war goal: Russia is not allowed to win. It is to lose in such a way that it is no longer capable of waging this kind of war. To this end, America and its allies intend to contribute whatever is necessary and whatever they can provide. Even if that takes months or even years.
The USA? Aren’t there also other expressions of political will? Yes, certainly. There are those for whom the government’s will to wage war is never decisive enough; they complain about delays and restraint in the delivery of ever heavier weaponry. And there is a small right-wing opposition that does not reject war from the get-go, and then does so with the argument: This is not our war. Is it wrong to take this as saying: the problem is not the war, but its insufficient yield for the American cause, whatever it may be? Maybe Kamala Harris just needs to explain to Tucker Carlson how this cause benefits the nation, without emphasizing morality.
And what do the “realist” academics, government officials, and military observers actually criticize when they point out that NATO has also done its share to escalate the conflict in Ukraine – which, by the way, is pleasing to the right because it shows the war’s globalist, i.e. anti-national, character? The war must not be blamed unilaterally on Putin; the West is also to blame. So what? War always takes place only because all parties want it. All sides want it because they find it necessary in the interest of their nation. Is that a reason to plead extenuating circumstances for one, the other, or even both sides? Perhaps in the sense of the question that those in power like to pose to a skeptical audience: What else could we have done, given the wickedness of our enemy? The only thing that really follows from the universally invoked inevitability of war is the seditious insight: they are certainly right. With their war, they follow a dictate of their reason of state. In other words: political rule can’t exist without a cause, contained in its reason for being, for asserting itself by trampling over corpses on its own side and especially on the enemy side. For sovereign powers, war is – to put it politely – an option they absolutely can’t do without. The dissidents with their vote for fairness in the question of war guilt mean the opposite: nevertheless, this war would not have been necessary. And they do not want to admit that the willingness of both sides to wage war makes their diagnosis cringe.
What’s left? The USA wants war. And without Americans having asked for it. And they don’t need to be; there is no place for that in the ruling democracy; here, the elected officials decide and decree and execute what the nation wants through orders and obedience.
Of course, this also means, don’t forget, that the USA did not start the war. But what does that mean? Now that Russia has invaded Ukraine and the West has responded to it, the USA wants to seal the deal; with the repeatedly declared aim of a Russian defeat.
Sure, there’s been no true declaration of war from the American side in accord with textbook diplomacy. And as much as the rulers in Washington DC and elsewhere declare and make the war their business and contribute to its escalation with arms deliveries: they do not want to be a war party in the actual sense. So what are they then?
They are a non-actual war party and want to remain one – in plain language: the USA wants the war, but not its real costs. Money and material are donated; death and devastation pummel Ukraine and not its wildly determined sponsor. The USA wants war against Russia – in Ukraine.
Morally speaking, this is cynicism of the highest order. Objectively, it’s a contradiction of its own kind. Putin’s Russia is told that it – the reason of state on which is acts, its existence as Moscow’s sovereign sphere of influence – is absolutely incompatible with the USA’s reason of state. So no explanation is necessary. For the judgment of incompatibility that follows, it’s enough to refer to “our values” and the “crimes” that Russia’s president is committing with his “war of aggression”; the idealism of values only stands for the uncompromising nature of this judgment. Normal co-existence with the Russian state is terminated. Conversely, the USA assumes that a corresponding notice of termination will not follow from the Russian side, and certainly not a practical encroachment that would really test America’s commitment to the ongoing war as our cause. That works out, for now. The USA can afford the contradiction of a unilateral termination of peaceful coexistence, accusing Putin of doing what it does itself, only because – and as long as – Russia does not do the same against the USA: end the state of peace. In other words, because and as long as Putin sticks to the standpoint of a “special military operation” limited to Ukraine, which Washington chalks up to his pure hypocrisy. In truth, it’s the contractual basis of the USA’s will to wage war.
On this basis, the USA allows itself to increase its engagement, which is still far from sufficient for the nation’s pro-war politicians. They see themselves confirmed and encouraged by their own side’s successes in the Ukrainian theater. There they have proof that, step by step, what they aim to do by equipping the heroic fighters with better and better equipment for the common cause is actually being achieved: they have harmed the enemy without him fighting back. The USA takes this as a good reason to do more. The fact that the Russian government feels compelled to order a partial mobilization, for now without giving up the fiction of a mere “special military operation” and without committing itself to the land war that it is actually waging, is acknowledged with an offensive willingness to take risks and triumphantly evaluated in the political public sphere as progress in the desired course of the war, which obliges it to follow up. It’s as if they can’t wait any longer for the substantial expansion of the war – and as if they do not need to reckon with any further danger to themselves.
The danger, brought up every so often, that Russia could get serious about its repeated threats to switch to the use of nuclear weapons of an unspecified caliber is filed away in the same way, without fear. The fact that the USA and the European NATO powers for their part reject any move in the direction of a direct confrontation between the West and Russia and a Third World War that would then be almost impossible to avoid is already seen as a precautionary measure to ensure that this will not happen from the other side either. Above all, what remains of residual risk awareness must not be an objection to the nation’s readiness for war; in any case, the politicians and the media warn the nation much more about signs of weakness, which any consideration of the enemy’s nuclear arsenal could be misunderstood as, than they do against the scenarios whose plans are in the drawers of both Russian and Western war planners for the eventuality of an expansion of the war beyond Ukraine.
The US in its will to wage war is counting on the logic of military deterrence, which simply goes: If war is to be waged, then it must be waged to be won, and in the certainty that it can be done successfully. This requires the willingness and ability to control the “fortunes of war,” i.e., to always be one step ahead of the enemy in staging and escalating warfare. Anyone who wants an effective deterrence must not even get into the predicament of having to resort to the next highest caliber weapon out of a defensive position; in an emergency, he must put his enemy in this predicament; at least until he no longer wants to keep up, i.e. fight back; ultimately and in truth, until he can no longer defend himself effectively. The type of warfare that starts with nuclear battlefield weapons – those, that is, which destroy and render entire regions useless even as battlefields – should not lead to the final strategic exchange of strikes and is still rejected as impractical by the superpower and its main enemy because of its unsuitability for any imperialist purpose; consequently, they only calculate and prepare all the more carefully.
For the time being, the question that remains is how much the USA wants the war against Russia that it is helping wage in Ukraine. The question is probably already the answer: for the time being, as much as can be done in Ukraine.
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