The Four Factions of American Politics

I was able to take advantage of my 13 hour flight from Detroit to Tokyo without Internet access (I decided to go off the grid -- WiFi was available for $30) to contemplate the current state of the nation. Below are the feuits of this contemplation. Please note that I could be and probably am wrong about numerous things, and probably am being unfair if not bigoted. Opinions are like that, and these are my opinions. Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions, and I am sure that people who I refer to below with derogatory terms have good reasons for having different perspectives. It's okay, and quite natural, to disagree. My purpose in this name calling is to encourage us, as a nation, to act constructively and I hope that any responses are made in that spirit.

At the risk of excessive verbosity and losing my audience before I get around to expressing my opinions, I would like to expand upon why I feel the need to write yet another provocative political screed that risks generating more heat than light. I feel that 3 of the 4 political factions are misguided and hope by this writing to persuade those who may not currently be in any faction to consider my perspective. Of course, most of us probably don't fall neatly in any of my 4 categories, so I'm hoping than most of us will be able to relate to my categorization without necessarily agreeing with my opinions. I don't really expect to convert people who are firmly in the camp of another faction. In other words I'm not trying to pick a fight, but rather am addressing this to people who already see certain controversial assumptions I make as plausible. Without further ado, then...

There are four active and influential factions in American politics today:

1. Airheads -- Trump and his supporters -- generally opportunists without political convictions. Trump is a demagogue, defined by the ancient Greeks as a politician with no core principles other than self-aggrandizement. 
2. Warmongers -- The anti-Trump neocons who are successfully pushing the U.S. into a new cold war and hot wars in the Middle East. 
3. Bad Losers -- The Clinton Democrats who are mad at the progressives and the airheads, and so are making common cause with the warmongers. 
4. Progressives -- The Sanders faction of the left wing which is making progress in moving public opinion in the direction of democratic socialism.

(Libertarians and social conservatives are additional groups that I will ignore here. These groups are unfocused and demoralized at the present time since Republicans have been taken over by the airheads and warmongers. This situation predates the Trump presidency by a considerable time.  Witness the warmongering presidency of George W. Bush, and the succession of oddball candidates that populated the Republican presidential primaries in 2008, 2012, and 2016.)

The airheads and bad losers are going nowhere, almost by definition. Thus, the crucial confrontation is between the warmongers and progressives. Ultimately, the warmongers will lose as:

1. They are corrupt.
   and/or
2. They are deluded.

(Note that I'm not a pacifist. There may indeed be a time for war as well as a time for peace. I just don't think our current militant faction is on solid ground.)

However, there will be a lot of bloodshed before they are defeated. The best case scenario is that they make a huge and obvious mistake. Here a couple of examples that come to mind:

1. Evidence emerges that the Syrian gas attacks were staged, and thus the U.S. and western intelligence was wrong again (as in Iraq). 
2. Evidence emerges that the Skripal poisoning was not the work of the Russian government, and thus the kneejerk reaction of the U.K., the U.S., and our allies to punish Russia was misguided. 
3. The Trump-Russia collusion investigation being pursued by the FBI goes nowhere and, in fact, reveals Democratic blunders and corruption, in addition to Republican blunders and corruption. We've already seen some of that with Clinton associate Tony Podesta.

Unfortunately, the best case that something such as one of the above brings down the warmongers is fairly unlikely for the following reasons:

1. The warmongers and the bad losers have a lock on the mainstream media and, with the assistance of and/ or under the direction of the intelligence agencies, could whitewash the mistakes. The bad losers / formerly mainstream Democrats are now willing to give the intelligence agencies the benefit of the doubt in terms of accepting whatever the spies say. This is not so far fetched as that's how we got into both the Vietnam and Iraq II wars.
2. The warmongers may have the truth on their side in some or all of the events listed above (Syrian chemcial attacks, Skripal poisoning, collusion with Trump). I think it likely that there is at lot that we have not been told about these events which would make the case for war less convincing, but who am I to argue with the intelligence agencies? After all, they have the billion dollar budgets to figure out and report what is going on.

So the more likely case in my opinion is that the warmongers lose in longer run, for the following reasons:

1. The wars will go badly.  As the world's #1 superpower, the U.S. has more to lose than to gain:  

1. Regime change in Syria, Iran, or even Russia would mean little to the average American.
2. Expectations may be unrealistic:  Russia may be smarter than they used to be militarily.
3. Wars tend to be unpleasant for all involved.

2. As the wars go badly, the U.S., and the warmongers in particular, will lose standing:

1. The bad losers will eventually get over their temper tantrum and decide that going to war with the neo-cons is stupid. Note that mainstream Democrats were early defectors from the fiasos in Vietnam and Iraq.
2. The international prestige of the United States is currently on a downward trajectory (thanks largely to the airheads) and this could accelerate due to the the warmongering.  On the other hand, China and other east Asian ecconomic and technological powerhouses are eroding the position of the U.S. as the invincible superpower and could eventually stand up to U.S. military expansion.
3. I believe that our economy is in another (or continued) financial bubble which will pop any day now (see Tesla, Bitcoin).  If the U.S. goes into recession, there will be more pressure to focus on domestic issues as opposed to wars in far off lands.  

So, the most likely case as I see it is for the warmongers to cause a bunch of trouble in the near future. They will be opposed by the other ascendent political faction -- the progressives. Ultimately, the airheads and the sore losers will fade away and the progressives will take over from the warmongers. The timing and ultimate fate is uncertain, however, due to the unpredictable effects of war. The worst case scenario is certainly possible, in which case all bets are off.

Demagogy and Populism

A good friend sent me this article:  A Vacuum at the Center -- How a demagogue resembles a typhoon, and why it matters to the future of the republic.  Author W. Robert Connor describes demagogy as a typhoon, based upon Greek mythology and a play 2400 years ago by Aristophanes.  It is wonderfully poetic and seems to fit Trump to a T:

Typhoons and many other extreme weather events suck into themselves whatever they encounter, grind it up, then spew out a trail of destruction. That is how demagogy works and is one major difference between it and populism.

At the core of demagogy is a vacuum. That is not usually the case with populism, since populist leaders typically have firm commitments to specific policies. They stand for something. It can be asked whether what they propose seems wise or otherwise. Of the demagogue, however, a more fundamental question needs to be asked: whether there is any inner coherence at all, for a demagogue can blow hot and cold, this way and that, adopt phrases or policies from one source one day and repudiate them the next. There may be nothing at the core except a vacuum that sucks into itself clichés, slogans, facts, factoids and fabrications, fragments of ideologies, policies developed by others, sometimes those others themselves—whoever and whatever might help him gain power at any given moment. Then, at his whim, he disgorges it all. The political vacuum at the core of demagogy, moreover, may correspond to, and perhaps derives from, a moral vacuum, the absence of concern for anything other than the self.

This calls to mind one of my issues with David Brooks.  As I have noted in the past, Brooks tends to equate Trump supporters with Sanders supporters, considering each as extremist and failing to note the differences between Trump's demagogy and Sanders' populism.

In looking through my past commentary on this subject, I found this blog post I wrote on December 12, 2011 concerning demagogy and populism.  I actually quoted David Brooks in this:

As nearly everyone who has ever worked with Gingrich knows, he would severely damage conservatism and the Republican Party if nominated. [ David Brooks - "The Gingrich Tragedy" - NY Times 12/8/2011 ]

As I see it, Trump is a predictable product of the Republican party in recent decades, with Gingrich playing John the Baptist to Trump's Jesus.  Here's another quote from Brooks in that article:

Gingrich seems to have walked straight out of the 1960s. He has every negative character trait that conservatives associate with ’60s excess: narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence and intemperance. He just has those traits in Republican form.

But Gingrich is not really an exceptional Republican in age where contenders for the Republican presidential nomination have included Rick Perry, Michele Bachman, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz.  Going back further were Republican leaders Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, Ronald Reagan, and Dick Nixon.  Perhaps Reagan proved to be more of a populist than a demagogue, thereby gaining credibility for the Republican brand?

John Cole's summary of the Republican landscape heading into the 2012 presidential election provides the proper context for Trump:

The thing to remember about the chaos ensuing in the GOP primaries, where each week a different candidate is the new new savior before publicly shitting the bed, is that this is all the fault of the Republican party itself. They allowed the party to create this alternate reality about, well, everything that happened the last decade. They are the ones who encouraged their party to believe that a center-left Democrat is actually an America hating socialist. They are the ones who made this mess, so when they are all horrified when each week a different candidate looks the fool by pandering to the base, remember, they are the ones who encouraged the base to think all this crazy shit. [ Balloon Juice, 12/9/2011 ]

I don't think Trump is a particularly effective demagogue.  He lacks charisma and intelligence, in my opinion.  So perhaps we're lucky that he was the Republican demagogue to break through to the presidency.  Trump is discrediting the Republican brand and Democrats are favored to regain control of the House of Representatives in the elections later this year.