The Allies Get Played - The 'Genius' of American Strategy

Centred on a highly spurious and somewhat paranoid concern with security, Washington is 'playing' its allies. Whether European or East Asian, they are now being drawn into co-dependence on Washington within an increasingly closed bloc instead of being free as independent nations to compete and trade as part of a one world system. That might be fine if each of these nations had a proportionate 'vote' in their own destiny within this bloc but they do not. American nuclear and economic superiority creates an intrinsic subordination to its strategy. As the US prepares to plunder the Ukraine through 'investment' in recompense for the expenditures on its regime, it arranges with local elites that allied populations be terrified with fears of a Russian bear which cannot do much more than hold the territory it has gained to date and the admittedly more formidable Chinese dragon. The eagle can sit back comfortably and watch the profits roll in from the coming age of increased and unnecessary arms sales and demand for its surplus LNG. No wonder the American financial markets are shrugging off inflation and interest rates.

A form of shock treatment (not the invasion but the sanctions) has detached Europe from its cheap and reliable supply of energy and commodities as well as access to a near if not particularly important export market and has made it dependent on more expensive US 'spot' energy. The next stage is to weaken European ability to export to China and Chinese ability to invest in Europe, impoverishing the latter more than the former. Russophobia must now be replaced with Sinophobia. In East Asia, where some concern about China is reasonable but still over-excitable, a slower moving cold war approach is designed to detach these vibrant economies from what will be the largest and nearest consumer and industrial market, certainly at its high tech end. Instead they are to bind their industries into an American-centred industrial strategy and weaken their access to cheap and probably reliable energy and commodities from the Russian Far East.

The con trick is working. Based on narratives of fear and loathing, both wings of the so-called West are now seeing their economies battered by inflation and high interest rates - most notably the basket case that is now the United Kingdom after the depradations of the Member for Kiev Central and the idiot economics of his successor. The prospect of fiscal destabilisation and deindustrialisation now emerges for some key countries as vast sums have to go on more expensive energy and food supplies and on military expenditures at the expense of social cohesion.

This new division of the world into blocs does not do China or Russia too much harm in practice. Both lose some market access only to create new synergies with each other. Both are now circumventing the West to go straight to the emerging world for influence, deals and natural resources. Russia merely pivots East to China as the latter's junior economic partner - a commodity supplier playing a role similar to Australia and Canada within the Western system. Indeed, we now hear that any Chinese restrictions on taking Russian crude oil died in February in frustration at the confrontational approach of Washington. Germany, on the other hand, is threatened with deindustrialisation under its inept left-liberal coalition yet Chinese industry gets cheaper inputs for its industry in a reversal of the traditional cost of energy relationship between it and Europe. Those caught up in 'Western' (aka Washington's) strategy are seeing declining (Russia) and rising (China) nuclear superpowers brought into closer alignment, able to dominate the land mass of Eurasia, This new and strenghened Eurasian bloc can also co-operate in developing a shared approach to the emerging world, notably in the Middle East and Africa, as the 'West' retreats behind its cultural 'limes'. Europe and 'Western' East Asia are now just continental North America's 'front lines' rather than nodal points in a flourishing global economy. The developed world has circled its waggons and abandoned the emerging world to its rivals.

This new Cold War 2.0 does not do the US much harm at all - only its allies. The US may be a political basket case with gun violence and dreadful mortality figures amongst its young males but it is still the most significant economic and military power on the globe. Its constitutional arrangements ensure that systemic internal chaos has no real effect on its structures of military and economic power. We are looking at Rome revisited. The US will probably stay quasi-hegemonic for some time to come because it is largely self-sufficient in a crisis (as is the Sino-Russian bloc). It may be challenging its rivals on at least equal terms but at greater cost to its allies, as it drives those allies to blow huge sums of cash on feeding the maw of its arms sector because of exaggerated security threats.  Those allies (notably those in Europe) are losing the chance to become an independent global player to match at least China and India - and it is quite probable that Washington likes things that way. The US has all the comforts of the old Cold War in the new one. It and the SCO carve up the world between them just like the good old days with the old Soviet bloc. Of course, the first Cold War resulted in the collapse of one side from internal strains - the second one may see a similar outcome in another seventy years. It may not be the Eurasian bloc that crumbles this time. It may be the European Union and UK that need liberating when it happens.

The cover for all this imperial posturing is, of course, a rather spurious 'defence of democracy' argument. Yet, to be frank, democracy has never been at threat within the West from any of its authoritarian rivals. It is threatened from within by the manipulative and authoritarian instincts of its own elites and the countervailing forces of an angry populism. If there is a threat to democracy it almost certainly comes from the greed, lack of strategic thinking and ineptitude of the political classes within the West. Ukraine and Taiwan are merely 'imperial border' issues which have no necessary implications for the security of either NATO or Japan or South Korea any more than Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan proved to have for the West. However, American strategy does have the unfortunate possible consequence of creating the conditions for security threats that did not exist before. Washington might eventually say 'I told you so' to its allies but only because it had prodded its rivals into action. It is now more likely than it was in February 2022 that China will assert its claimed sovereignty over Taiwan. It is more likely than it was in April 2022 that Russia will switch off the gas for Europe and plant tactical nuclear weaponry on the borders of an EU that remains fragmented and weak.

The major threat to Japan and South Korea has actually been North Korea. The new Cold War mentality has increased that threat because Beijing and Moscow have no incentive to collaborate with Washington on containing the country. The North Koreans have proportionately raised the local stakes in the last year. The Russian Pacific Fleet has lodged itself alongside the Kuriles while China mounts ever more provocative exercises around Taiwan. In other words, the break-down in relations between the West and the SCO has created the SCO as general threat out of a very particular and containable situation in Ukraine. Similarly, not only has Russia not had any material interest (quite the contrary) in challenging NATO until now (after all, the flow of energy to the EU and East-West trade argued to the contrary) but everyone's real interest should have been in the de-nuclearisation of Europe. This is what Russia always wanted. The skill for Europe would have been to ensure that price for denuclearisation West of the Urals would actually mean demilitarisation but the military-industrial complexes of the West and Mr. Stoltenberg cannot have that, can they?

It gets worse by the month - two Baltic nations have now been bamboozled into joining NATO quite unnecessarily (adding to their risks if there is a confrontation between blocs) while Europe in general is being bounced into an economic confrontation with China when it has no essential geo-political interest in getting involved in conflict with a superpower on the other side of the world just to buttress the defensive concerns of Washington. It all comes down to the fact that 'democratic' leaders in Europe and East Asia are almost certainly not strategically very bright. They are trapped in ideological formulations derived from experiences seventy years old (three decades in the case of Eastern Europe). They have been 'spun' into policies that work directly against their first duty which is to the lives and livelihoods of their own peoples. Europe and Pacific Rim East Asia have been played by Washington. Their peoples have been played by their elites.

 

Critiquing Steve Bannon

A great deal of attention is being paid to Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's new head of strategy. I suspect there is some misunderstanding about the amount of power that an ideologue like Bannon can have in Trump's administration and an exaggeration of the link that can be made between the past views of Bannon and the opinions of the President-Elect, let alone the views of those to be found expressed on Bannon's vehicle, Breitbart.

The liberal cultural wing of the 'American oligarchy' are having a bit of a hissy-fit at the moment and any straw is being grasped at to demonstrate that Trump is a 'fascist' or worse. Eventually cooler heads will prevail. In the meantime here are three things to note before we look at what Bannon may actually think.

Bannon as Employee and Populist

The first is that his job as chief strategist is a 'corporate' one - he no longer speaks for himself and now loans his talents to the President. He has been bought. If he fails to deliver or blunders, he will be disposed of. His job is now to support the President not because he believes in him but because he is paid to perform a function and that function is political. He has to think about practical outcomes - increasing the President's rating sufficiently to get him re-elected in 2020, assisting in building a coalition that will get the President's programme through Congress and maintaining the momentum of the movement that put Trump into power.

Instead of shouting agit-prop aimed at the slightly over half the population required to get into White House, he is now dealing with the structures of power and with a struggle for control of information flow and interpretation against a mainstream media ['MSM'] that must, out of class interest, aim to destroy him. His ownership of Breitbart represents a direct challenge to MSM authority and revenues, especially if Breitbart becomes the main means by which the Trump administration communicates to the mass of the population.

The second is that he comes into office not as part of the closed competing network of networks that makes up late liberal democratic representative democracy but because he controls a means of communicating with and maintaining contact with a populist movement. This is his strength but also his weakness. The strength is obvious - he can reach millions of Americans with a policy line faster than any political rival and he can help form their opinion and actions in a way that may be unprecedented.

Perhaps only Father Coughlan's radio broadcasts in the 1930s come close to this but Breitbart is providing data in real time and continuously. Of course, Bannon will be delegating control of this medium but it would be naive not to see this as part of his armoury even if indirectly. He has a reserve power that, if he is dismissed, lies in the possibility that this machinery may become a thorn in the side of the President that it has helped to elect.

The Paradox of Bannon's Populism

The third thing to note is that the claims of 'fascism' miss some very central non-fascist aspects of American populism. The confusion of populism and fascism is sending liberal critics down a blind alley, stopping them from developing an appropriate critique and strategy for countering it. By propagandistically using inappropriate terms, liberals are creating the very culture of resentment that partly led to their defeat in the first place, opening up territory for Bannon's Alt Right to conquer. One key difference from fascism, a difference also to be found in European right-wing populisms, is the approach to democracy and free speech.

Both are viewed as positive and dynamic forces whereas liberals are being caught out being anti-democratic (questioning the 'deplorables', intellectuals questioning democracy itself and, in the UK, maintaining a resistance against the majority vote in the Brexit vote) and opposed to free speech (promoting increasingly onerous anti-hate laws, limiting freedoms on the campus and often downright bullying of non-liberal dissidents). This is a complete detournement of conventional thinking about what it means to be right and left. It is central to the drift of many social libertarians from one side to the other despite the conservatism underpinning Alt Right culture.

Bannon's robust and aggressive populism might be framed as 'hate speech' amongst liberals but it is framed as 'free speech' amongst conservatives with some plausibility. The liberal MSM has tried to counter with the framing device of 'fake news' (extended from genuine abuses to cover political opponents who are often merely  providing information that would be pre-censored as inappropriate or inconvenient by the MSM). The MSM's somewhat sinister interest in trying to place rival social platforms under pressure is obvious. Twitter has taken the bait (aware of the sympathy for liberalism of large consumer-driven corporations with products aimed at urban liberals and minorities) by removing 'hate' accounts although many of these accounts equally class themselves as 'free speech' opportunities.

In the pre-Trump world, the control of the total system under a liberal hegemony would have instantly marginalised the critics of liberalism but Bannon has contributed to the creation of an entire alternative information and communications political ecology whose success can be seen in the election of a President despite the massive post-nomination assault on his candidacy by every element within the hegemonic system. The cultural power of this parallel system has thrown the dominant structure into something close to panic. Almost every idea emanating from it stands against the assumptions and values of oligarchical liberalism.

What Liberals Might Like To Do

This is where it gets interesting. In any other period of history or under any other hegemonic system, the solution would be simple - authoritarian repression. When faced with an existential threat, the system forgets any 'rules of war' and suppresses free speech, jails opponents, if necessary tortures and kills. But the West no longer has these tools at its command - not only because of its own claimed values (though we wonder if this would be restraint enough) but because the rule of law cannot be deployed in this way (certainly not after January 20th and as Woodrow wilson deployed it) and because the infrastructure of the State cannot be relied upon to comply with such orders.

Trump is faced with his own problem in that it is clear state level law enforcement in some key states may resist some of his policy measures. Any push to survival by the hegemonic regime through repression would probably mean civil war and certainly extensive political violence. In other words, the liberal hegemony of the US has fallen into the same position as the communist hegemony did in the Soviet Union in 1991 without even the tools at the disposal of the reactionaries. Anti-liberal forces have seized control of the State using liberal methods and are now in command of Presidential power for at least four years and possibly eight or twelve.

Bannon, who has cited Lenin, appears to understand his position and that of Trump. Through sheer energy and exploitation of the undoubted failures of liberalism (which are not the subject of this posting), they have surged forward in under nine months from nowhere to capture control of supreme executive power with reluctant and nervous allies controlling the legislature and a real opportunity to set a conservative tone within the judiciary. This cannot be called a political revolution because the forms and substance of the American 'regime' remain the same. There are also many points of resistance from centres of power still controlled by the liberals (in the very broadest sense) which can slow down the Presidency and destroy his credibility with the centre-ground.

However what Bannon, Trump and others have achieved is the possibility of a cultural revolution in which they set the tone for American politics and society on terms to which liberals have to adjust to survive. It cannot be Leninist - in other words, it cannot be the imposition of one ideology on the rest of society by a minority - but it can be significant if it forces conservatives to take on the concerns of the population at large and if it forces the liberals to begin a self-critical appraisal of how they lost power (which they currently seem reluctant to do) and if they transform themselves to include the concerns of the voters who switched sides out of frustration with their neglect. How liberalism might transform itself post-Trump is for another time.

So, with these caveats and comments, that Bannon is not the President but the servant of the President, that he is only part of a movement which he guides but to which he does not dictate terms and that his room for manouevre is limited in any path to replacing liberal hegemony, what is it that Bannon believes? We don't have timer for an exhaustive analysis of his views or trying to work out what what views on Breitbart are his and what are those of his contributors. 

We will take an analysis of his opinions to just one audience (a conservative religious group) in the summer of 2014 and see what it reveals. Of course, being a politician, Bannon is tailoring his opinions to the audience - the Human Dignity Institute at the Vatican - and that has to be taken into account. Yet we can see what values underlie his views and so what beliefs are going to be influential in advising the President (whose views may be different) and in squaring various political circles - appointments, deals with Congress, speeches and policies.

The Problem of Capitalism

Bannon's world view is fundamentally communitarian. This creates the space for a critique of capitalism that is not socialist but belongs to a parallel right-wing tradition. This originated with petit-bourgeois anarchism but became central to the corporatism of fascism and national socialism as ideologies. But it is also an ideological position held widely within the Catholic Church as a critique of the dehumanising aspects of treating persons as not souls but mere units of production within large-scale combines that are disruptive of social bonds, duties and obligations. It is this critique that matters to Bannon in his Vatican talk. This critique is not interested in liberal capitalism's undoubted achievements in driving progress and innovation because progress and innovation are not seen as good things in themselves - as they tend to be seen by most liberals (though not increasingly by the eco-conservatives within the ranks of liberalism).

Where capitalism is criticised from the Left (as it used to be until the 1990s), it is as an anti-progressive force that fails to make best use of human talents and is wasteful. Innovation is seen as something just as easily and better done by the collective. Marx had his own critique of the de-humanisation involved in capitalism but, unlike Heidegger whose critique is of technology, science and so technology are positive factors which socialists will be better able to understand and make use of. If Bannon quotes Marx it is to point up the dehumanising aspects (in his view) of capitalism and not to share his socialism. No more than the Vatican and the Proudhonists, Bannon is not remotely a national socialist, a very different hybrid of socialism and communitarianism presented as anti-Marxism, nor a fascist, a corporatism without a moral base.

Naturally, I do not share this view of Bannon's since I see all human development as being broadly enhanced by scientific understanding and technology. I would go further and say that the objectification and allegedly dehumanising aspects of capitalism are positive rather than negative precisely because they break apart social binds that are repressive (indeed oppressive) and permit new social forms to emerge in their place, forms that are more suited to individual freedom and to human progress as technology develops.

The criticism I would have late capitalist liberalism is that it has compromised far too much with conservative forces - historically-based identity politics, regressive environmentalism (rather than sustainability as strategy) and faith-based approaches to values - and that, while communism as a political system became sclerotic and inefficient as well as cruel, some form of scientific materialism is central to the forward-looking Left Project. In other words, the rise of the Alt Right has been partly predicated on liberalism's compromises with conservative forces because ground had already been conceded by Clinton and Blair for short term electoral reasons in favour of identity, sentiment and faith.

Cronyism & Fairness

Many Leftists will share Bannon's views on 'crony capitalism', the capitalism of the few creating wealth and value for themselves and not for the people. This is classic populism but it not only represents an ideal shared with the Left but liberals are now on the defensive because, whether under Blair or Clinton, they have bought into the spurious global trickle-down theory of development and have allied themselves with corporations and oligarchs on terms that seem to enrich leading liberal politicians more than those who elect them.

This is where Bannon, appealing to the moralism of faith-based communities, has probably scored his greatest political victories in the last year - in the comparison of the insecurity and anxieties of struggling families with the wealth and comfort of a liberal elite who seemed to care more about people in faraway places than their 'ain folk'. Framed as 'racism' or 'white nationalism', it was nothing of the kind. It was merely filling the yawning chasm left by liberal abandonment of the respectable working classes and lower middle classes who had failed to fall into a pre-set liberal identity category and who did not give a stuff about liberalism's cultural politics.

There is a 'fairness' in Bannon's critique both that is it is a fair criticism but also that fairness (a very ordinary sentiment) is a value. He sees liberals as being at the apex of an unfair system and this clearly makes him angry. In another age and time perhaps he would have been a socialist. Perhaps not. American liberals have not made generalised fairness an existential value but have particularised it within identity politics. Perhaps this is why they are now licking their wounds.

Fairness is important as a social value. It is something imbued in children during their own battle to be recognised when power lies elsewhere. They do not object to power so long as it is fairly applied. The child-like resentment at unfairness may be at the very heart of the Trump 'revolution' - it is not resentment at people with darker skins or who like the same sex but resentment at the unfair privileging of other people at their expense. And, yes, this is what liberals have done, often without realising they have been doing it.  They have been 'unfair' at multiple levels towards many Americans in the political home and the political playground. Some of Bannon's anger is justified.

Securitisation & Moral Value

Bannon's attack on securitisation is perhaps the most interesting aspect of his critique of liberal capitalism. Let us take the ideological base in Judaeo-Christianity for granted (more of that in a moment). His analysis is questionable - almost sub-Tawney - but let it stand. When he complains about securitisation, he is doing two things. The first is to give us a theory of commoditisation that could have come straight out of the late Marxist Frankfurt School - another of many detournements of left-wing thinking to meet right-wing objectives.

But it is the moral underpinning of the critique that matters. The Frankfort School (though their arguments were often specious) were claiming to describe reality and moral responses only emerged out of the hysteria of the liberal Academy - you might call this a displaced morality or valuation in which belief uses intellect cover up its own sentiment. Bannon will have none of that. He goes straight to valuation. He observes what he thinks is a fact on the ground and then sees it through the prism of morality from the very beginning.

Jump back to the causes of 2008 and you see securitisation at the very heart of the crisis. Bannon takes something that is intrinsically immoral from his perspective - the commodification of humans, their deepest needs and attributes - and shows, in a religious morality tale, to people who can put two and two together that the collapsing nature of capitalism is essentially a problem of moral failure. It means that if we change our morals (or rather imbue a certain morality in the State and economic system), prosperity and order will return.

This is a classically populist argument. It is, of course, nonsense but it sentimentally works for many working and middle class Americans who have no alternative 'scientific' narrative, who are accustomed to framing difficult questions in terms of good and evil and who desperately want change. This attack on Wall Street is definitely not a progressive or socialist one but, since progressives are ineffective and socialists marginalised, the liberal acceptance of Wall Street and liberal lack of interest in commodification in economics (oh, the irony! - the interest seems only to be in persecuting sex workers and getting better jobs for urban middle class women), it is the most effective one, the last interpretation left standing for relatively poorly educated people under real pressure who liberals refuse to accept or help.

'The World Burns' & Freedom

Bannon adopts one aspect of fascism that is really no more than an emotional stance - the desire to tear things down and destroy the Establishment. I have some sympathy with this since this so-called Establishment (a system of interconnecting networks with its own shared ideology) has failed to solve so many real world problems, indeed compounded them. Such an emotional stance can be a productive one in creating the motivation for change under conditions of sclerosis. But do we take this seriously? I don't take seriously my own emotional impulses in this direction which I express more as approval for 'shocks to the system'. Only 'shocks' seem to capable of forcing liberals to change their ways and they may remove the older generation of failed liberals and put in a new generation with a better understanding of the situation. In Bannon's case, yes, I think we must take him seriously.

Whereas for a Leftist like me, the liberal project simply took a wrong turning just as the Russian Revolution was a wrong turning, things are not black and white. Our failed liberalism has still produced a more tolerant and open society which the best efforts of Bannon and the Alt Right cannot reverse, just as Sovietism provided some genuine advances for the Russian people and offered a valuable experiment in the achievements and limitations of socialism. In other words, I can attack late liberal capitalist democracy on its failures because I see it as blocking the forward advance of humanity but I would want to reform and control it rather than want to destroy it completely. It irritates the hell out of me but it is still part of the human condition that has to be accommodated. Bannon on the other hand wants, like Lenin, to replace one system entirely with another - he wants to reverse progress and re-stabilise humanity on conservative-communitarian lines.

And will he achieve this? Of course he will not. It is rhetoric. The resilience of the American Constitution, the resistance of 50% of the American population, the fact that there is no means for enforcing a 'gleichshaltung' on the many different centres of power within modern liberal democracies and the reality that most people actually want more freedom rather than less work against his revolutionary romanticism. Furthermore, he may have to come to terms with the fact that his President is an instinctive social libertarian and he is only a part of a mass movement whose key word is Freedom just as that of the liberals is Justice (when perhaps it should be Peace, Justice & Freedom).

For the leading edge of European populism and, we believe, for Trump, Freedom means economic freedom as conservatives view it but only more so. It is not just that - 'freedom populists'  have determinative concepts of national or state freedom and individual freedom presented as private rights over public claims. This is not the ideology of Judaeo-Christian communitarianism which we will see is central to Bannon's position. We have here internal contradictions within populism - between communitarianism and libertarianism where the former is actually on the defensive. The unhappiness of Christian Evangelical conservatives at Trump's lack of enthusiasm for some of their views as he gets closer to the Oval Office is an expression that this is not a Christian conservative regime.

Bannon & Communitarianism

Bannon regards libertarianism (in the US this is nearly always seen in economic terms) as an ally within populism but contrasts it with his brand of Judaeo-Christian 'enlightened capitalism', creating the core of that primary internal contradiction within American populism between Freedom and Fairness. It is an internal contradiction that creates a point of potential conflict with Trump himself who is clearly not a man of faith and who equally clearly rather gets on very well with a typical European proponent of the Freedom agenda like Nigel Farage. Although we might suspect Bannon playing up to his audience at this point since he clearly likes and admires Farage, I think Bannon is serious and not playing to the crowd here. His belief in Fairness draws him to a particular view of economic relations that is not scientific but comes from Biblical revelation (ultimately).

This does not require some deep-seated faith in God but only a belief that the code of values created in Judaea in the Iron Age and adapted by Christianity provides a template for an economic and social order that sees integrity in a community as something to be preserved. For the West, Judaeo-Christian ideology is what Confucianism is for the East (though he does not mention China) - a text-based wisdom ideology that is fair but tough-minded, constraining human desire and ensuring the weak are protected by moral leadership. He is far from alone in this - there is an extensive network of Judaeo-Christian (and, interestingly, Islamic) conservative critiques of liberal capitalism that seek to preserve the market but on terms that permit the community to dictate the conditions under which it operates in the community interest.

Needless to say, as an atheist existentialist, the idea that some Iron Age text, let alone some Eighteenth Century constitutionalist text, is an adequate guide to the maintenance of justice, freedom and security in an age of rapid technological change, strikes me as absurd. The reality is that such texts simply become, and have done so since Constantine in the public sphere, cover for the political hegemony of whatever class happens to hold the levers of power at any one time. However, he is right that contemporary neo-liberalism, whose ideology of unfair and untrammelled power relies ultimately on economic libertarianism, does not protect the weak and vulnerable.

Neo-liberalism does destabilise societies. American liberals seem to have been unable to develop strategies adequate to the task of creating a strong society in which the weak and vulnerable are protected and in which the ordinary man or woman is not threatened with insecurity and anxiety. Naturally my answer is different from his - the radical democrat control of capitalism through reason and science - but I can understand why, having been failed by the Left and with historical cultures that emphasise the Bible, millions of anxious and insecure people have looked backwards to the past rather than forward to the future. If there is a failure in American liberalism, it is its constant living in its own present, denying the identities of those clinging to past forms but also unable to offer any grand vision of the future.

Racism?

The idea that Bannon is a racist or white nationalist is convenient for liberal critics but not merely is it unproven, it is clear that Bannon has no interest in such ideologies. This would fit with his mainstream Judaeo-Christian ideology. What he is accepting is the fellow-travelling of such ideologies within the broad populist movement. Liberals can neither understand not forgive this. But the response implicit from Bannon is two-fold - everyone has a right to a voice ('Freedom') and these people don't really matter in the long run.

Both are actually cogent positions. The first points up the authoritarian instincts of liberals who like to ban things they do not like under the banner of 'Right Conduct, Right Speech, Right Thought'. There is yet another irony in this. The Left has adopted Iron Age Judaeo-Christian attitudes and it is Bannon who is offering Voltairean freedom. This really is beyond the mental capacity of many liberals to comprehend.

Whether these extremists matter is another story. We tend to agree with Bannon. Their existence boxes him in a bit and allows liberals some easy propaganda wins in the less sophisticated centreground but it could equally be argued that free speech is a value and that the minorities have now sufficient political force to defend themselves. The weeping hysteria over the rise of fascism has been over done.

Nevertheless, the fact that Trump has such fellow travellers (though there is no evidence of racism on his part) is as potentially damaging to him as having Communists as fellow travellers were to candidates of the Centre-Left in earlier periods. On the other hand, the cultural war on the Confederate flag was probably, in retrospect, a major blunder by liberals, mobilising a legitimate and not necessarily racist 'white identity' that had scarcely existed before. The rise of Trump can be told as a succession of own goals by arrogant and presumptuous liberals.

Islamic Fascism

All this perhaps helps to explain one of the more absurd psychological turns of the New Right, its obsession with Islam. To the 'real' Leftist, Radical Islam is easily explained. I think rightly so. It is the partial creation of a long period of self-serving Western imperialism and is, in itself, obscurantist and has become dangerous: however, it is powerful in our lives only because we have panicked and made it powerful through our continuous interventions and the ease with which its atrocities trigger our own insecurity and anxiety.

Liberals have both indulged it by trying to accommodate faith-based views into their own political strategy and been panicked into illiberal measures by fear and special interests. The Alt Right fear and distaste for Islam, meanwhile, operates at many levels - in Europe, a xenophobia which has its roots in the reality of growing ghettos of poor people with a completely alien culture, amongst European intellectuals as a feared threat to free speech and the accommodation with that threat of liberals and, more in the US, an exaggerated fear of political violence (admittedly in an always potentially violent country where gun ownership is normal) from an enemy within.

These are all simplistic responses that reify Islam and often fail to pinpoint the real policy failures - in the handling of colonialism (by France in particular), the absurd early adoption for ideological reasons of free movement of peoples in Europe and the interventionism of liberal internationalists in the Middle East (although many liberals have become vociferous in their own right against this last) - but Bannon is going deeper, seeing Islam in almost medieval terms as a cultural rival to Judaeo-Christianity instead of (as we would see it) the third arm of three equally obscurantist but mostly benign Abrahamanic religions.

The Manichean view of religion can only take place if the critic takes religion seriously. Now, self-evidently, Bannon is speaking to an audience in the Vatican and so he may just talking his book to a particular audience but I do not think so. Everything I have written before this point hangs together to give us the picture of a man who may or may not believe in God but does believe in Judaeo-Christian communitarianism whether his boss does or not. In fact, it might be argued that the internal contradiction outlined above in populism is partially resolved by having a libertarian President with a communitarian ideologue in his ear whispering truths about half his country base and guiding his language to hold the movement together.

Apocalypticism

We are painting a picture of a highly intelligent man, who in the tradition of de Maistre, is not interested in creating a reasoned political philosophy but in expressing a more or less coherent and very flexible philosophy of political sentiments. In this regard he is a throw-back to the right-wing response to the French Revolution yet one where the radical has now adopted the central tenets of the Revolution - democracy and free speech - to overturn its values which (I think rightly) he sees as having, in any case, degenerated and given him his opportunity for his politics of sentiment. However, each sentiment is not just simple brute emotion.

Each relates to the other and each, on closer investigation, has 'just cause' - the anger and resentment are based on justifiable concerns about household and personal security and at the overweening sense of entitlement of the liberal elite. But part of the personality type involved - a testosterone and energetic male type of a certain age - requires an habitual gloomy apocalypticism, that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. It isn't, of course, (the Cold War was scarier and so were the 1930s) but it feels as if it is because lots of men of a certain age have seen no progress since 2008 and feel insecure. This means they get to feel apocalyptic. Once a word for women trapped into certain behaviours by their condition, hysteria now transfers easily to early and late middle aged men in the West as well as liberal snowflakes in the universities who send each other into paroxyms at the drop of a Tweet.

Bannon's apocalypticism (which he seems to enjoy) centres on two beliefs - that capitalism is in crisis and that we are at the beginning of a global war against Political Islam (which he calls Islamic fascism as most neo-cons and Israelis do). The first is partly true although it is not capitalism in crisis but the prevailing neo-liberal form of it: all that is happening is a challenge by national capitalisms to globalised regulatory capitalism on one side and a challenge to liberal accommodation with neo-liberalism (by both Right and Left) on the other. Looked at more closely, even a Trotsky-inspired radical like Shadow Chancellor McDonnell in the UK is not reviving any form of state socialism but doing little more than offering us his own brand of National Keynesianism that will probably have more in common with Trump's programme (insofar as we know it) than either neo-liberalism or state socialism.

The war with Islamic fascism is, however, pure hysteria since Political Islam presents serious threats to Europe in terms of incidents but little more than that - crush IS and you have no place where it holds sufficient state power to threaten any other State existentially. Any State it did seize control of (and Saudi Arabia is not an example of it) would be surrounded and pummelled if it did prove a serious threat. Only Pakistan with its nuclear arsenal is a country to be truly scared of in this context and a war on Political Islam in Islamabad is as likely to create the problem for us as resolve it. What it is about really is Israel but not quite in the way we may think. We have to go back to the ideology of Judaeo-Christian communitarianism to see why Israel is so important to Bannon. His Jews are not the cosmopolitan intellectuals so distrusted by Stalin or the combination of those and poor refugees and shtetl dwellers hated as the enemy within by Hitler but Judaic communitarian heroes of the Book who built a land of settled immigrants (ironically). Protecting Israel is protecting a strong global communitarian ally and so the communitarian transformation of the West.

The Putin Problem

The internal contradiction we have identified within populism represented by Trump's libertarianism and Bannon's communitarianism is exemplified by the different attitudes to Putin. I suspect Trump really does not care over much about Israel and only looks at it through the lens of political expedience. But Trump sees Putin as a deal-maker would see a rival businessman with whom he can co-operate on a major development.

Trump rationally sees that IS is the real threat to America insofar as Islamic radicals have already declared war on the country and that the only people fighting IS in Syria (as opposed to Iraq) are the Syrians and the Russians. He has a 'sphere of influence' view of international relations and, like any good businessman, weighs up the profit and loss of whether to be in one theatre or another. He probably sees the American Empire as over-extended and that it is time to dump some loss-making subsidiaries. That does not make him weak. It makes him pragmatic, rational and non-ideological.

Bannon however is idealistic, sentimental and ideological. He acknowledges Putin as a social conservative and traditionalist who appeals to many populist communitarians but he resists his charms (this evidence, of course, comes from the period before the current phase of the Syrian crisis and well before Trump announced his nomination). He sees Russia as expansionary (probably falsely since Russia is really only protecting a sphere of influence that is existentially threatened by Western expansion) and as an example of the crony capitalism that he excoriates at the centre of his ideology. He probably has limited understanding of Russia and fails to see that the 'kleptocracy' is a creation in part of the way Yeltsin responded to events, backed by the West.

After all, an American executive said in my hearing in 1992 in Moscow that the right strategy for Russia was to drive it into a robber baron phase in order to ensure capitalist development - Putin has been cleaning up stage by stage ever since. Nevertheless, from an absolutist point of view, Russia epitomises the sort of crony capitalism Bannon sees as a global problem that is destroying the basis for a legitimate or 'enlightened' capitalism that would be beholden to Judaeo-Christian moral values. The point is not whether he is 'for' or 'against' Putin at any one point in history but why he is critical - and it comes down to a less informed but wholly consistent critique that derives from his observation of American conditions. In the talk, Bannon admits his lack of knowledge of foreign affairs and it is to be doubted whether he has had time to become more sophisticated since then.

Where We Are

Bannon is important but he is probably not quite as important as liberals fear. Having said that, what he has done is bring Judaeo-Christian communitarian thinking into the inner counsels of the most powerful military and economic leader on the planet and we should take this seriously. Although his President undoubtedly has different values, that President is a pragmatist and the maintenance of his movement requires respect for Bannon's ideology even as he is challenged, in turn, by alternative visions from radical nationalists, economic libertarians and social conservatives of a more elite type.

Bannon's ideology is emotional, sentimental and ignorant in key areas (especially foreign affairs) but coherent and based on some political realities - that American liberalism has become corrupted, that capitalism is failing and in the hands of unaccountable elites and that the deep anxieties and insecurities of perhaps half the American population have been ignored at best and treated with contempt at worst.

As for responses to him, calling him a fascist is just plain ignorant and counter-productive. He sits within a Western right-wing tradition that may be said to include fascism but he is better described as the radical democratisation of traditional right-wing authoritarianism. It is that radical democratisation in substance and in method that has knocked liberals sideways.

Only weeks after the vote, most liberals still do not know what they are dealing with - that identity politics can be turned against them, that conservative religious interpretations of the decline of capitalism have force because Left critiques of capitalism were fully marginalised in the 1990s and that the new populism has proved more adept than liberals, not at campaigning per se (Clinton still got the majority of the popular vote) but at creating a sustainable movement during a technological revolution in the means of communication. Campaigns come and go but movements tend to stick.

But perhaps most interesting is that at the end of the Q&A in his talk to the Human Dignity Institute, he positioned his struggle as primarily (in 2014) one against the 'crony capitalist' conservatives in the Republican Party. If one was looking at the response of the Left in 2017, it would have to echo that of Bannon - the struggle is primarily against the 'crony neoliberals' in the Labour and Democrat Parties. If Bannon could do what he did for the Right, democratic socialists could do the same for the Left by the next round of critical elections in both the UK and US (2018-2020).

Legend and Contemporary Politics

[This is a much revised version of a piece first published in March 2012 in Eyeless Owl]

Politics over the last hundred years has been relatively resistant to mythic or legendary considerations. Legend can be used tactically for propaganda in a crisis or it can enter into the perceived history of a nation out of laziness, ignorance or manipulative deliberation. Yet, despite the influence of legend on nineteenth century romantic nationalism, most modern politicians most of the time like to avoid appeals to irrationalism. A distinction between mythic and legendary narratives allows us to place to one side in this posting faith-based political ideology - notably that of the Shi'a but also the now much reduced, except in the backwoods of America, biblical fundamentalist narratives about race and providence.

A legend is something based not on the will of God or God's intervention in the world but on re-interpreting what men have actually done. It also has to stand a certain reasonable time. The attempt at promoting the legends of JFK and Camelot and of Churchill's wartime record eventually fall into the hands of historians and soon cease to drive political decision-making - or, at least, they are eventually restricted to the mobilisation of factions or parties rather than whole communities. They start to die with the generations involved. The classical legends of Greece and Rome may be embedded deep within Western culture and are often used rhetorically but they cannot reasonably be said to be at the heart of modern Western political theory or practice. The exploits of Theseus and Heracles or of Horatio at the Bridge have ceased even being imperial exemplars.

The Modern World and 'Noble Lies'

The modern world might be regarded as rational with irrational characteristics whereas legends are 'noble lies', redrafts of history to instill exemplary values for largely conservative purposes. The remnants of legendism in the last century are intriguing for signs of where irrationalism may re-emerge as the basis for a trans-valuation of values in politics. We might draw a distinction between cultures where an otherwise long-since dead culture lives in the minds and values of the population and those where an event in the recent past has the potential to be recast in legendary terms.

We could also note that legend becomes distanced from politics with lessening vulnerability. Romantic nationalism owes a great deal to legends and romantic nationalism tends to appear strongest when a nation is submerged within an empire or under direct and immediate threat. Otherwise, quotidien money-making shifts legend quite quickly to the entertainment sector. This is why the most ambivalent attitudes to legend lie in nations that once relied on legend for their sense of continued existence but which now have developed into relatively wealthy late capitalist economies where legend has become the staple of the tourist and arts industries. Feeling Beowulf as part of one's identity is different to watching Ray Winstone strut his stuff in a movie.

Israel and Its Shadow

Perhaps the oddest example may be Jewish culture which has found legendism to cut both ways. The 'blood libel' guilt is no longer present in our culture but the awareness of it has created a sort of contra-legend about the ‘normality’ of anti-semitism. The legend that the founder of the Rothschild dynasty was given an inexhaustible barrel of oil by Elijah for a good deed in the eighteenth century might be seen as fraught with worrying potential in the current climate. Legendism has a long history in Jewish culture from biblical through rabbinical and hasidic cultures to modern Zionism. The living construction of legends in modern Israel and in the diaspora for contemporary purposes (no doubt mimicked in the Arab world) is a live political issue.

Its deepest and darkest enemy, national-socialism in Germany, was highly mythologised and, like Jewish culture, interested in adopting legend for nationalist purposes. This partly mythic, partly occult culture descended into bloody mayhem under such conditions that it seems unlikely that it will ever recover its political importance. Nevertheless, the Nazi mythos has to be noted as a continued inspiration for the marginalised Radical Right across the West and beyond. Its modern absurdities have moved on from Wotanism and from myths of an Aryan Atlantis to contemporary stories surrounding the origin UFOs. The legendary aspects started with the rewriting of history by strange outsiders like the Greek-French pseudo-Aryan Savitri Devi and have continued with tales of the escape of Nazis to Latin America.

Declining Western States

Three 'cases' to watch might be Eire as its 'Celtic Tiger' dream implodes, Spain - and Japan as its economic status begins to sink relative (though only relative) to that of China. A fourth may be (strangely) the most advanced of all - the US as it comes to terms with its own equally relative decline. Yet, Ireland saw no return to romantic nationalism under economic pressure - on the contrary Sinn Fein has 'degenerated' into another pragmatic fixer trying to get the best financial deal out of Dublin and London.

Traditional legends were still being created about Eamonn de Valera within the last hundred years but it seems unthinkable that such thinking can be recreated now, except that there remains a residual belief in the power of the land, national destiny and spirits that might be re-encoded into politics under extreme pressure in both Eire and Cymru - and perhaps Scotland. In the Irish case, the discrediting of the Catholic Church, as wave after wave of scandals related to past abuse of the vulnerable, leaves a cultural vaccuum that is being filled with European liberalism and not the return to traditional values.

Spain is interesting because the Legend of El Cid was played to great political effect by both the republicans and nationalists in the Civil War. Franco not only built an imposing new tomb for the legendary hero in Burgos Cathedral but organised national celebrations in 1943 both for the 900th anniversary of his birth and 1,000 years of Castilian independence. At the moment. Spain is very troubled but the corrupt old Right is not playing the legendary nationalist card but embedding itself deeper into Europe.

In Japan, the cult of the samurai, much of it quite recent in origin but with more ancient legendary roots, maintains a powerful role in modern Japanese history, reaching its post war epitome in Yukio Mishima's attempted coup in the 1960s, but this too has diverted itself into manga and anime and thence into the global games industry. Mishima himself is seen rightly by the Japanese as closer to the Western decadent tradition than as exemplar of traditional values. The modernisation of the Meiji period has allowed a persistent interest in ancient heroes but they do not drive an essentially pragmatic politics.

Bandits

The fourth case, the United States, brings us to a theme that is more germane to outlier and semi-developed cultures - banditry. Much of American legend is now made redundant out of regard for the American Indian (General Custer) or because an age of resource exploitation (Paul Bunyan) has passed. But the country of Jesse James and a tradition of murderous robbery from the American Civil War through to Dillinger have also created the standard 'Robin Hood' myth that we see in all frontier societies. But while the frontier has closed, the legend could yet have lived on against presumed rapacious bankers but it did not - protest remained law-abiding.

In the Balkans and the Turkic area, bandits and outlaws can still be politically relevant. The myth of the bandit became inspirational in the partisan ballads of the last century in Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria (and elsewhere) while Kuroghli is the Turkic Robin Hood, a romantic, noble and generous rebel, challenging all authority. Kuroghli, a seventeenth century brigand, remains a 'living' legend, protector of the poor and enemy of the rich, perhaps available as an Islamist iconic figure, given the claims that he has the special protection of the Islamic pre-Mohammedan culture hero of Khidr or that he is the reincarnation of the significant Shia figure Ali, son-in-law to the Prophet.

The Caucasus

There are two nations (Armenia and Georgia) and many ethnic groups in the Caucasus with a strong sense of their own heroic past, mostly of resistance to authority derived from larger powers. This has expressed itself both as legends of banditry in the pre-revolutionary Soviet cause and as anti-Soviet risings after the Revolution. In Armenia, the saga of King Arshak II has been central to the story of struggle for freedom. It was a factor in the exile and death of the poet Osip Mandelstam in 1938 after he published a symbolic treatment in which the oppressor King Shapur was too easily seen as Josef Stalin, an association implied more than once in his poetry.

Stalin was a Georgian but the nationalist poet whose work he admired, Mikheil Javakhishvili, nevertheless died at the hands of the NKVD despite Stalin's appreciation of his novel about the romantic legendary early nineteenth century bandit Arsena. On the other side of the coin, perhaps fortunate to die in Tiflis in an accident in 1921 before Stalin started cleaning up behind him, was the revolutionary bandit Kamo (Ter Petrossian) who raised funds for Lenin in much the same way and not long after Stalin was doing the same in Georgia - through organised crime as a bank robber.

The link between past American resentments of bankers and our Caucasian revolutionaries is simply that crime becomes a political issue where the population no longer trust the State and where warlordism becomes an alternative to democracy. The alleged individualism and manliness of the cowboy offers another legendary model for libertarian resistance. It may seem extreme to suggest that the US is at risk from such a scenario but its legends of approval for free-booting criminals, maintained through its popular culture, show that the extension of the current chaos in Northern Mexico into the South West of the United States may well rely on a 'legendary attitude' hidden within American values. As we have noted, this did not result in rediscovery of Hobsbawm's 'social bandit' in the post-2008 economic crisis so we must conclude that the American people basically trust their system and prefer it to the rule, even theoretical, of warlords.

Asian and African Models

In Iran, the Shahname or 'The Book of Kings' remains a live legendary text for many Iranians who oppose the dominance of the Shia theocracy. This is not an immediate issue but, as we saw in the Arab Spring, it is not to be assumed that democratic liberals will be the beneficiaries of revolutionary changes.

A cult of Genghiz Khan was tolerated and even supported in Chinese Inner Mongolia to placate Mongol nationalism. A cult centre with battle standards was permitted on the steppes. But the old pro-Soviet Mongolian People's Republic took the opposite view, terming Genghiz Khan as a destructive tyrant (somewhat cheeky given the dominance of Stalin) and sought to suppress his cult at every opportunity.

In Africa, both the Zulus and the Afrikaners, who might yet combine politically in mutual defence against the poor and black urban majority, share opposite sides of the same historic event that has achieved legendary status to both peoples - the Battle of Blood River (1838) when General Pretorius defeated Dinganam, heir to Chaka's Zulu Empire.

The Americas and Pacific

We noted above the risks of warlord chaos spilling over into the South West of US and the drugs community is one of the few zones where legendary figures and tropes are being created in the contemporary world (outside the capitalist-financed media). This directs our attention to Mexico and other parts of Middle America where Indian resistance has always had a legendary aspect, ranging from 'Aztec nationalism' through the legendary appropriation of European themes (the Virgin of Gaudelupe) to support legends of victory over and resistance to predatory tribes backed by the invaders. Lower register forms of Aztlan nationalism extend into Chicano territory within South West Mexico and there are some reports of it appearing within the ranks of the crime lords whose bloodthirstiness may be seen within a longer traditionalist framework of hatred towards the gringos - and may yet be turned on the gringos more directly.

Finally, a very different sort of legend, the cargo cult, offers a form of resistance through emulation and manipulation in the Pacific that may well throw up the odd cult leader but the type hero of both the Aborigines and working-class whites remains - yes, you guessed it - the bandit. White Australians have a slew of legends of courageous legendary resistance to authority encompassing Ned Kelly, the Eureka Stockade and the historical events surrounding Gallipoli but it is the aborigines who can call on genuinely ambiguous criminals who were also cast as freedom fighters, men such as Tucklar, Yagan and Pigeon. It may be that Australia represents the last country in the world whose entire political culture is built on the sustained triumph of legend over historical reality. It may only be the undoubted dominance of the incomers over the indigenes that ensures that it is does not become a brutal clash of banditries.

Lost Leaders

The disappearance of Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the anti-imperialist Indian National Army is an unresolved issue. He boarded a Japanese plane for an unknown destination and was never seen again. (The analogy with the disappearance of various Nazi leaders is noted, notably Hitler himself). The story of Bose suggests the many lost leaders who have disappeared. Many of them are still believed (not by modern men but as mythic ideas) to be ready to return when a nation is troubled. Their spirit may be seen as recoverable on the traditionalist Right. Amongst these are King Arthur, Charlemagne, Owen Glendwyr, Robert the Bruce, Frederick Barbarossa, Siegfried, Sir Francis Drake, King Sebastian of Portugal and Tsar Alexander I. The Romanov blood line was once believed to have survived in at least the genes of Princess Anastasia.

There are also the tales of the flying Dutchman and of the wandering Jew - who was seen in Salt Lake City in 1868, in Glamorgan in the early last century and said to have been a New York stockbroker in the 1940s. Not politically important perhaps but implying mysteries that continue to fascinate the media, the public and the internet.

Concluding Thoughts

Nor should we forget the magicians - there may be Rasputins yet to come at the courts of declining dictators and dynasts ... nor the Freemasons. Some like to cast Alexandre Dugin in that role at the court of Putin - Peter Mandelson developed a sinister (and probably unfair) 'legendary' role as Prince of Darkness within the Labour Party. We have not even touched the surface of legends of secret societies, Illuminati and other groupings seen as either agent of light or sinister manipulators in the contemporary legends of men under stress.

All in all, legendary tales and their role as irrationalism in politics may not have disappeared quite so much as we may believe even if we see little sign of active political importance. A 'legendary attitude' (acceptance of crime lords or a call for the spirit of lost leaders) may reappear and some nations may still be susceptible under pressure. Any real resurgence of traditionalist irrationalism is unlikely, partly because the world is interconnected enough that no leader of such a revolt can be wholly isolated from reality or get away with excessive departure from the facts - faith-based mythic irrationalism is a far greater danger. Note how Subcomandante Marcos, consciously created as a mythic figure to support the aspirations of the Mexican peasantry, is now seen as precisely what he was - a hyper real contemporary creation - rather than a creation of the 'volk'.  But the phenomenon shows us that a legend-based mobilisation of a population, handled with skill by an ambitious politician, prepared to develop an educated post-modern appropriation of its imagery, is still more than possible under conditions of extreme stress.

Against 'Progressivism' ...

Back in late 2010, the UK's Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg announced that he wished to be seen as a 'progressive'. The New Labour Party displaced its old commitment to democratic socialism with the claim that it was 'progressive'. There have been 'progressive' mutterings in the Tory Party.

But what is this thing called 'progressivism' and why should we be wary of taking it at face value? Are we not being conned once again by simplistic rhetoric?

Progressivism is an ideology with a history and a tradition that is as distinct as, say, neo- conservatism with which it converges in practice at the highest state levels in liberal internationalist practice.

The Communists has perhaps the best description of it - bourgeois liberalism at the point of transition between laissez-faire and fascism, a response to threats from below to property and to 'culture'.

Progressivism was initially a creation of the federalisation process in late nineteenth century America when the 'moral' bourgeois, having not quite lost God and Church, sought to reform capitalism in direct opposition to the self-organisation from below of competing radicals.

In fact, effective self-organisation was under way through early trades union, socialist and anarchist movements and even through 'welfarist organised crime' such as Capone's (analogous to Hamas or Hezbollah but built around services to migrants rather than to besieged faith groups).

Capone ensured soup kitchens for the poor and was the major figure in dealing with adulterated milk supplies in Chicago in the 1920s. On the other side, the democratic Socialist Eugene Debs achieved a million votes in the 1918 Election before Edgar Hoover destroyed the movement in the 'Red Terror'.

The period from the 1860s to 1890s and later had been a period of 'settlement chaos' in the West and of migration chaos in the East of the United States. Political dissent was expressed as banditry and racism in the country and mobsters and strikes in the cities.

Progressives were simply high caste East Coast and Mid-Western liberals terrified of the potential threat to property from disorder and of the rise of anarchism and socialism. The American Left tradition had to be appropriated before recalcitrant bosses brought chaos to the country.

Instead of permitting organisation from below to redistribute power and resources as in the European Labour or Social Democratic Parties, the progressives intervened both to reform but also to control.  A classic progressive imposition would be the prohibition of alcohol ... rule by matriarch.

For them, the masses could not be trusted. Because the bankers and trusts were behaving provocatively towards the masses, the Federal State had to be brought in to play in order to restore order. Government authority was the solution to chaos ... for progressives as much as Bismarck

Just as neo-conservatism has its base in the German conservative philosophical tradition, the progressive mentality has its base in American philosophical pragmatism, reaching its epitome in John Dewey, interestingly mildly seduced by the Trotskyist camp in his later years.

The high point of American progressivism was perhaps the New Deal but this attempt to create a corporatist partnership with trades unions has to be seen in the context of Woodrow Wilson's earlier consciously progressive admiration for the early Mussolini.

Progressivism had its English analogue in Fabianism in the UK which played gadfly and junior partner alongside Social Liberal thinkers such as Beveridge to the post-26 organised labour movement. In both traditions, the flirtation with Mussolini was a shared interest in corporatism.

Unions were certainly not regarded as positive forces until they had been 'reformed' into partners of the corporatist State. Progressives were Statist, media-driven and 'top-down' - which brings us to our modern day British examples.

Forms of welfare-warfare state emerged when economic dislocation and war permitted an alliance between 'progressives' (aka social stabilisers through concession) and union movements to impose a social liberal (US) or social democratic (Europe) consensus.

But, as New Democrats, New Labour and now Liberal Democrats have quietly dismantled what remained of this consensus in the UK after the depredations of Reagan and Thatcher, we can see that the alliance between progressives and trades unions has shifted to the detriment of the latter.

British organised labour is no longer in a position to assert itself in the street and has not been so since Orgreave. The intellectual approach that dominated the American Left has now come to dominate the British Left, its current leader being the quintessential scion of Hampstead revisionism.

Each imposition of progressive policy by the intellectuals has been a revolutionary act that created regimes that controlled society from the top and provided service delivery without democratic consultation or engagement. It is a political culture that imposes 'oughts' on the population.

The welfare state, for example, was merely the adjunct to the warfare state of total social mobilisation - mobilisation by the state for order and not mobilisation of the state for the people. This perhaps over-simplifies the story but social services only ever appeared as a reward for engagement in war.

War is, in fact, central to progressivism. Hard power is there to be used to impose its idealism and the 'sacrifices' required of the people need to be rewarded as payment for services rendered in sustaining a cohesive polity that protects property and culture.

Progressivism is the theory that the professor knows best and ill-fits liberal values even if it accords with the actual values of its high caste intellectual gentry. It is an ideology of psychological manipulation and of negotiations between the educated (not to be confused with the intelligent).

The pragmatic commitment to the masses soon drifted with the acquisition of power. Once power was attained and the progressive state in command, then a bastardised form of pragmatic populism allying political intellectuals, techno-bureaucrats and media was all that was required.

We must stop here and remind ourselves that the progressives 'cared' about the population but through the prism of social order. The theory was that social order required 'care' but when it became clear that social order no longer required 'care', the incentive to 'care' began to dissipate.

Instead of the ideological comitment to care found amongst socialists, progressives became interested instead in responses to sufficient wants and needs that would ensure power was retained in a democracy. If that meant the lumpenproletariat could now be ignored, so be it. 

Warfare also changed. The mass of the population became spectators again instead of participants. Having captured the machinery of hard power, the progressive ideologist could use it selectively for idealistic ends, knowing that, without direct pain to themselves, the voters would sign it off.

Social services as the price for total social mobilisation under Liberal Militarism collapsed because 'care' was no longer a central value in its own right. 'Care' strategies switched from caring for the indigenous working population to caring for people in faraway countries - as potential threats.

As the organised union component has weakened under conservative pressure and its own sclerosis, the atomised masses were left vulnerable to crisis, a crisis which appeared in 2008 but was underway for some time in the relative and growing pauperisation of significant sections of society.

Contemporary post-1992 British progressivism is thus just the latest adaptation of essentially the same phenomenon that I described above that emerged in the US: reactionary, authoritarian and statist - the precise opposite of what was intended by the Labour Representation Committee.

To be progressive is also not what is meant by the Liberal Democrat ideology of localist and individual freedom. And the adoption of the term (admittedly without enthusiasm) by left-conservatives (actually communitarians) is the last phase of our upper middle classes' decadence.

The organised mass component of the Left has now been removed by history, to be replaced by a vague form of populism. Once, progressives provided the devious shock troops for working class entry into the establishment. Now, public school liberals and conservatives compete for the label.

Clegg's claim is a demonstration of the meaningless of progressive rhetoric. New Labour was captured by a small 'progressive elite' by 1998 which ran it into the ground and the 'Orange Book' network surrounding Clegg briefly thought that they could capture the model for their own purposes.

Clegg's desperate grab at the term was an attempt to identify his Party to a gullible centre as the natural reformist wing of the propertied in a world where all see themselves, naively, as propertied and with 'something to lose' from a radical re-thinking of our declining imperium.

The lack of real progress in Clegg's vision can be summarised in one policy issue - tuition fees. In one lie to the student and middle and working class family vote, Clegg showed that he had no conception of the role of education in 'progressing' the best and brightest in a society.

Take away access to credit, reduce the value of property, remove the implicit property rights in state service delivery (including the imposition of tuition fees!) and the idea that Clegg (or indeed New Labour) represents the forward march of progress becomes a truly absurd proposition.

Indeed, there is a sign of a realisation of the vulnerability of these claims in the economically dangerous strategies of letting cheap credit continue to defer an inevitable reckoning for many households and the dangerous unsustainable boom in house prices that must crash after 2015.

Progressivism is very much at the centre of the crisis surrounding democracy and competency within Anglo-Saxon Western politics. It is not the solution to the crisis. Its strategy of order and control to preserve property is actually reaching the point where it endangers property.

The obvious danger arises from our analysis of progressivism as bridge ideology between laissez-faire liberalism and fascism. Right-wing populism already shows the troubled middle voting with its feet and the alliance of Western progressives with Ukrainian fascists is troubling.

At least the unreformed piratical propertied ideology of the truly liberal centre-right is innovative, creative and forward-thinking economically, Progressivism represents, on the other hand, sclerosis ...

... ideologically-driven war, bureaucratic federalism in Europe as well as the US, detachment of politics from the people in favour of bureaucracy, serious errors of judgement arising from grand narratives and the infantilisation of peoples who should learn from the experience of struggle.

Above all, it castrates specifically working class struggle and community self-organisation. The dead hand of the liberal intellectual activist results finally in little more than warfare-lite states poddling along on the rhetoric of freedom but terrified of giving individuals any real choices over their lives.