The Right's Rollercoaster to Hell Part II

the role of the Right

To get a firm grasp of what Trump is doing, let’s examine the role of the Right.

To understand the Right, we also need to understand the Left, liberalism, neoliberalism, progressives, and radicals.

Painting by George Hayter, 1833.

It’s okay to skip ahead to the final section, “The Results of the Right.” That section will help get you ready for Part III, due out next week.

I’m going to insist on a historically accurate, analytically useful usage of all these terms. In the past when I’ve argued for people not to use these words in a way that erodes their historical meaning, I’ve gotten the reaction, “but words change their meaning all the time!”

Words Change, boo

[Apparently boo comes from the French, “beau.” Anyone know more about that evolution?]

Language is constantly changing. This is a basic observation for anyone who pays attention to language. As far as my level of linguistic nerdiness, let’s just say I read Beowulf in Old English for fun, and leave it at that (Hwæt!) My point is, as an passionate language nerd, I very much want us to nourish and care for language, and to be healthy language needs change. The crux is, languages change for a great many reasons: some of the ones I like the most include migration, with people speaking multiple languages cohabiting and evolving new meanings and significations through sharing. Or: people of lower classes and oppressed groups innovating language to distinguish themselves from or even become intelligible to the upper classes and the cops. These are both beautiful examples of decentralized intelligence.

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For more on decentralized intelligence, check out:

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Reasons I don’t have much tolerance for include historical amnesia, milquetoast political correctness that changes forms without addressing oppressive power dynamics, and [shudder] that particularly American tendency to scorn the beautiful linguistic richness of the English language and turn every word into a flattened synonym of another word, losing all nuance and distinction, and plunging us towards an Orwellian hellscape in which we have a thousand ways to say nothing other than “good” or “bad”. While we’re on this one, check out “Politics and the English Language.” And, of course, in the next year or so I’ll have a series on “Lost Words” and “Forgotten Words.”

So in the US, in the late 20th century conservatives corrupted the meaning of “liberal” to signify someone who is antiwar and unpatriotic, who supports huge government budgets, high taxes, and a government that regulates how people live, that pushes religion out of public life, that supports abortion and an extensive welfare program for the poor. If you take out the rightwing venom, basically they mean the kind of person who would have supported the policies of FDR, Kennedy, or Johnson.

Zoomers and Millennials have pushed “liberal” into an even smaller nook, just left-of-center, probably because “leftist” made a surprising comeback in the vocabulary and now many people use “leftist” to include progressives and radical anticapitalists, even anarchists. The usage given to “leftist” is even more ahistorical than the changes made to liberal. More on that later.

A historical definition would have to point out that liberalism has provided most of the building blocks of the dominant paradigm for the last couple centuries: rights inhere to individuals and it is the duty of the government to protect those rights; foremost among those rights is private property, which basically means land, time, labor, food, healthcare, and other goods are commodities that can be bought and sold; individual human adults enjoy equality before the law but not equal access to resources or quality of living, which have to be earned through access to capital; the only legitimate form of social organization is under a state that is the sole sovereign within a set of clearly defined borders; the legitimacy of the state rests on the consent of the governed, ipso facto some form of elections are necessary; commerce is essential to society and states should remove barriers to commerce…

In other words, until very recently, nearly everyone in the mainstream Right and Left have been liberals, operating within a liberal paradigm: Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Labour, the BJP and the National Congress, the Party of Functional Groups and the Democratic Party of Struggle, the Liberal Party and Workers Party, Liberal Democrats and Constitutional Democrats, Christian Democrats and Socialists, Republicans and Socialists… (to name the two main parties in the US, the UK, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Germany, France, eight of the ten largest democracies in the world – note that in Brazil and Japan it’s the rightwing party that calls itself liberal, whereas no leftwing party names itself liberal).

Through most of the 20^th century, and in most of the world, “liberal” has shifted to emphasize its components relating to so-called free trade and economic deregulation, basically Adam Smith over John Locke, the “invisible hand” of a society made up of selfish individuals rather than a “social contract” existing for the common good. So you can expect a Liberal Party to be in favor of free trade zones, of decreasing social spending like welfare or subsidized housing. (They may be socially progressive or far to the right on questions like abortion, gay rights, and immigration.)

We can see this meaning in the term “neoliberalism,” which basically described most world leaders in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s: Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Kohl and Schröder, Mitterand, Jiang Zemin, the Bushes, Tony Blair, as well as the architects of NAFTA, the IMF, the WTO… These were people who were getting back to what they saw as the basics of liberalism: removing any regulation or barrier to the endless accumulation of capital.

Here’s a summary of how I’ll use all these terms—liberal, neoliberal, progressive, and radical—and why I think these are more precise, helpful, and historically informed usages.

Liberals: Today’s liberals may lean left or right, meaning they may support or oppose policies like abortion and gay marriage, they may believe in limited welfare or no welfare, they may believe courts and government need to be proactive in ensuring that historically oppressed groups may enjoy their right to equality before the law or they might not even believe that historical oppression or social groups beyond the individual even exist. Above all they believe in laissez-faire economics: that the government should intervene in the economy as little as possible beyond protecting the right to property, and that the government should not try to redistribute wealth from the wealthy to the poor through progressive taxation.

Neoliberals: Neoliberals are supporters of the economic and political regime that controlled the entire debate from the ‘80s to the ‘00s: corporations should legally be considered people with the rights of people but none of the responsibilities. If corporate policies kill people, that’s just business, and no one needs to be punished. There should be minimal or no tariffs, and minimal or no government regulations that significantly diminish the ability of corporations to accumulate as much money as possible. Individuals with wealth should be able to invest internationally, and both commerce and industry should happen on a massive and global scale, without human rights or environmental considerations creating any barriers. Governments should intervene aggressively to make this all possible. Banks and other major lenders may impose conditions on borrowing countries, “structural adjustment programs,” to achieve “fiscal austerity.”

Progressives: Progressives believe in the social contract, in human rights and civil rights, and they believe in the institutions of democracy. They believe that if we support the progress of those historical institutions, with active intervention from good government, international coordination, and global institutions like the UN or World Court, we can overcome prejudice and historical inequalities, level the playing field, increase the wealth of society, decrease wars, and protect the environment. They believe that injustice and oppression have been a big problem, but that things are getting better (or they were getting better until so-and-so got elected). They believe that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.

Radicals: Radicals, literally, are those who go to the roots. We don’t want reforms, we don’t want to stick a bandage on the problem, because by going to the roots we understand the long historical origins of these various problems so we realize that democracy is a system developed by and for colonizers and slave owners, it never belonged to us and we can’t change it into something that will be good for us or good for the planet; we realize that there is no version of capitalism that can be sustainable or healthy; we see the ways that the State just changes masks over time rather than actually fixing any of these problems, and we tend to see how colonialism remains an active force in our society. A radical analysis makes it probable that someone will support social revolution—the total transformation of how society is organized, abolishing the roots of hierarchy and oppression—and not electoral reform or a political revolution – changing who is in power, and maybe changing the structure of the State without abolishing all hierarchical institutions.

Non-Profits Are a Silo

Socialists and Communists: In the 19^th century, each of these terms had very different meanings than they do now. They generally denoted anticapitalist revolutionaries, and for decades utopian pacifists, anarchists, and electoral reformists often mixed together in the movements and organizations that labelled themselves as socialist or communist. In the fallout of the Paris Commune, Marx’s destruction of the International, and the creation of electoral, reformist socialist parties in dozens of countries, the key, critical question became: what is the relationship between the revolution and the State.

I’ve written about this elsewhere (check out the links below), but I think the revolutions of the 20^th century require a change in the meaning of these terms. Socialists are authoritarian progressives who will betray the oppressed through negotiation with the State, in the course of reforms and electoral campaigns. Communists are authoritarian progressives and political revolutionaries who, if they ever muster any power outside of academia, will destroy the revolution by trying to control all struggles.

Every time socialists or communists took power during the 20^th century, historical colonial relationships remained in place, radicals who prioritized revolutionary transformation over the interests of a party were imprisoned or massacred, and the working class was not permitted to leave their fundamental, exploited role in a hierarchical society. Some of these regimes became socially progressive, but many others were/are extremely conservative, homophobic, and patriarchal (e.g. the USSR, China, Cuba, North Korea). Several major socialist and communist states were/are guilty of genocide and ethnic cleansing (e.g. the USSR, China, Vietnam, Chile). All socialist and communist states maintained fundamentally capitalist economies.¹ These are economies based on quantitative growth, participation in international banking and currency systems, wage labor in which workers do not retain most of the value they produce nor are they able to decide what happens with that value nor determine their conditions of work, and ecocidal extractivism that treats the living world as a resource to be exploited.

Check out “One Hundred Years after the Bolshevik Counterrevolution” on CrimethInc as well as:

Socialism: Let’s Not Resuscitate the Worst Mistake of the 20th Century

So What’s the Freakin Difference?

Okay Peter, you’ve been going on for two whole pages. When the hell are you going to get to the role of the Right??

Well, I’ve got you thinking about history, about origins and the shifting meaning of words, correct?

Yeah, I guess.

So… Right of what?

Oh.

Yeah. The terms Right and Left go back to the series of political revolutions that rocked France in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Many people, perhaps most people, fought to make these into full blown social revolutions—revolutions that sought to completely change the way society was organized so no one would be on top anymore—but except for some brief moments in Paris and Lyon in 1871, and probably other moments in smaller rural communes, the State was never abolished. It was, however, undergoing a very bloody transition from an aristocratic state to a modern state.

In all the iterations of the modern, democratic state, a great deal of power was concentrated and legitimated in a building of representative government like a Congress, Parliament, or National Assembly. This assembly was physically divided by an aisle going up the middle, and different tendencies or parties sat in different areas. For a period of time, conservatives were sitting to the right of the aisle and progressives were sitting to the left. The nomenclature stuck.

This history is extremely important, because it shows how Right and Left, conservative, neoliberal, progressive, and socialist all refer to orientations within the State. Any of them may set themselves against particular kinds of states, but none of them are against the State itself.

These are usages that are true to our history and true the present, and they are also extremely helpful definitions because they allow us to signify, with precision and clarity, what I think is one of the most relevant distinctions:

do we understand that the existence of the State intrinsically and inevitably constitutes an ongoing war against everyone, a war against life itself, that can only end with the destruction of the State? or do we belong to that confused group of people who somehow, after this many centuries, believe the State is good for us, necessary, and who let themselves be led by those who profit off their gullibility?

Of the various pro-State political tendencies, what distinguishes the Right? How do we define it?

Tracing the Right as an ideological lineage won’t give us the answer. Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Alexander Hamilton, Otto von Bismarck, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Samuel Huntington: studying the arguments and propositions of all these rich, powerful, and also despicable figures can be fascinating and useful. However, their reasoning tends to be based on historical erasure, prejudices they refuse to question, and wishful thinking. Their quasi-religious beliefs include: the world is filled with stupid violent masses who need exceptionally enlightened men to think for them; freedom is dependent on private property (enclosure and profit); there’s a “free market” with invisible hands that organizes itself; European civilization and the white race are superior; power is its own justification; the nation-state has a right to do whatever it has to do to further its own interests…

The same, though, pertains to the Left. Leftists also carry out a great deal of harm with a thin veneer of justification, recurring to several insistent dogmas that are in no way based on a thorough reading of the evidence: their pretensions that democracy ever truly belonged “to the people” and is something we can “take back;” their refusal to break fully with colonialism or abolish settler states that only exist thanks to colonialism and mass enslavement; their refusal to break with the institutions that have always played a central role in genocide, colonialism, the slave trade, the prison industrial complex, and the military industrial complex… The reformist Left pretends, against all historical evidence, that the State and capitalism can be reformed into good, healthy things. The revolutionary Left ignores that their methodology, at its most successful, revived the State, protected capitalism, and reproduced colonialism in slightly altered forms.

The Right and the Left both uphold, protect, and update the machinery of borders, prisons, nationalist education, war, ecocide, and genocide. They’re so clearly different, yet how do we define that difference?

A potential answer came to me when I was considering the similarities between rightwing and leftwing dictatorships in the mid-20^th century. Highly oppressive societies, liquidation of critics and opponents, genocide, a continuation of colonial and imperial behaviors towards internal populations and neighboring societies…

And yet, the main examples, fascists and communists, dressed up their oppressive projects in opposite ways.

Compare the torchlit Nazi rallies at Nuremberg in worship of some mystical German nation, or Mussolini’s pomp and frequent symbolic allusions to the Roman Empire, to the military parades of the Communists. Lenin wears a workers’ cap, even though he wasn’t a worker. Stalin wears a military hat, as though he were just another part of the army marching by. Mao is dressed like a simple rural teacher.

What. Is. The. Difference.

The word that I think describes the Left is Unity.

The word that I think describes the Right is Entitlement.

The Left goes to the people, to the discontented, the exploited, the oppressed, to bring them invitations: rejoin the existing institutions! This is how they will help you. This is how we can make them work better. The alibi is the common good, justice, equality, liberation, or some other ethical principal.

The Right builds an altar to Power. Those who don’t come to join in the ceremony, whether it’s a black tie cocktail party in a country club or a public frenzy of worship, are undeserving. Perhaps even enemies.

Sometimes the Right invites everybody. Other times they keep the doors locked, opening up only for those who have figured out how to get a key.

In the years of Reagan and Thatcher, they extolled “the American Dream” or the free market, they celebrated wealth as a sign of moral superiority. And they removed as many barriers as they could to allow extreme wealth accumulation for the super rich. But they didn’t teach people how to get loans, how to turn a profit, how to join the club. Those who didn’t get rich, or who weren’t born into wealth, just didn’t deserve it. The poor could also be a part of the Right, as long as they waved the proper flag and never blamed the system. They had to blame themselves or, better yet, blame others who were lower in the hierarchy, like immigrants, or blame the political rivals of the Right (Democrats or Labour), or blame a conspiracy of boogeymen like the commies putting fluoride in the water.

In the years of Trump, the altar is in the middle of a giant stadium and everyone is invited. Those who don’t come are evil, an existential threat, but those who do come are allowed into a celebration of wealth and power in which participants don’t feel constantly ranked based on how much wealth or power they personally have access to. Instead, they’re allowed to be part of something greater. This higher level of motivation, of symbolic participation, of fervor, is appropriate to the strategic needs of the time: a system facing collapse or senescence.

We’re going to get back to the question of strategy, of a system facing collapse. First I think it would be helpful to spend more time on the difference between unity and entitlement, between Left and Right.

Unity always needs a center of gravity. We live in an entropic, chaotic universe. One might call unity an anti-natural concept. A less opinionated version would simply observe that unity requires a great deal of violent energy to achieve. It doesn’t happen on its own. So the dirty secret, the contradiction in the Left, can be summed up with the following question: who do we have to silence, discredit, exclude, or kill so we can occupy that central ground?

Greater infighting on the Left is a clash between different discourses, analyses, and ethical principles that claim to be the best strategy for Unity, the most important way to renovate and fix the Machine.

On the Right, this devastating level of disunity can be averted because whoever happens to be leading the army in a particular moment deserves to lead, by definition. For the Right, power is its own justification and evidence of its own validity. Neo-Nazis and classical conservatives alike will follow Trump, even though they strongly disagree with him, because in this moment he is clearly the leader, the one with the most power, and they will continue to follow him until he falters. Then, pragmatically, whoever wins the next power struggle is by definition the right leader.

Only a few people on the Right are capable of strategic analysis that transcends their absurd ideology and ridiculous beliefs: only a few of them are capable of fully understanding the true strong points and weak points of the State in any given moment, and most of those who do understand the weak points still make a pragmatic choice to circulate their critiques discreetly and invest wisely, because being correct doesn’t give them any more power. Attacking the leader, if it’s a rightwing leader, when they don’t have enough power is a senseless act to them.

The Right, tactically, can usually outmaneuver the Left. The reason most people on the Right are incapable of fully strategic thinking, though, comes back to the central element of their identity: Entitlement. It’s appropriate that entitlement can denote someone’s exaggerated sense of what belongs to them, of what the world owes them, and it can also denote deservingness. Rightwingers tend to believe they deserve all the good things and none of the bad—they’re entitled—but they also use the concept of deservingness to guide their concept of justice. Society, they think, should not rid itself of inequality because inequality is a condition for greatness. Individuals show whether or not they deserve wealth and power (or healthcare, food, adequate housing…) by rising above the masses. It’s a convenient way to blame individuals or groups for systemic problems.

The contradiction here is, what about when the wrong people enjoy wealth and power? One of the ways the Right evades this contradiction is through its affinity with conspiracy theories. If you believe that only your team deserves victory, whether “your team” is the USA or Western Civilization or the Aryan race, the only way you could possibly lose is if the other side broke the rules or stabbed you in the back. What are the rules? Well, if you’re winning, there are no rules. (And here we have the reason for the Right’s affinity with irrationality.)

Entitlement is also a great word for the central belief of the Right because the root, title, like “land title,” is right there in the middle. It’s a legal fiction stamped and sealed and given to you by “the courts of the conqueror.” This is the extent of the Right’s interest in history and heritage. History is only valid if the moral of the story is that anything you set your eyes on belongs to you.

I think we’re almost ready to get to a well grounded, historically nuanced view of what the Right is doing right now. What are the effects? What are the dangers? How do we respond effectively?

To illustrate some patterns, though, let’s take one final tangent: what were the fortunes of rightwing and leftwing governments in the 20^th century?

The Right and Left in Power

Here’s a rapid review: the main fascist regimes, in Germany and Italy, played democracy to their advantage, got into power, but then started a war they lost. Totally destroyed, they failed in their goal to increase state power and increase the wealth of German and Italian capitalists for more than a few years.

The Spanish fascists gained power through a military coup. They made a secret alliance with the British and stayed out of the war. The Spanish fascists succeeded in their first goal: prevent an anarchist and anticolonial revolution in Spain and North Africa, which was a real possibility in the 1930s. In the long run, they were less successful at their second goal, increasing the power and wealth of the Spanish state and its capitalists. After 40 years, both the fascist rulers of the state and the capitalists decided their interests were better served by democracy, and they left fascism behind.

The leftwing revolutions that occurred between the 1920s and 1940s, though, were much more effective. Russia and China defeated their imperialist/fascist neighbors, and China, Cuba, and Vietnam defeated their colonizers. All four of them established the supremacy of the Communist Party, vastly increasing their power. All four of them massacred, liquidated, and destroyed all other revolutionary currents (anarchist, Trotskyite, agrarian socialist, etc.) and prevented total social revolution, returning the proletariat and internally colonized populations to the bottom of the social hierarchy. Russia and China recovered or maintained most of the imperial/colonial possessions of the earlier autocratic regimes they were replacing. And all of them—and this is significant—proved that a technocratic single party system was more effective than private capitalists and democracy at creating economic growth, in their particular circumstances.

(It’s important to stress those circumstances: Cuba and Vietnam were colonized countries treated as plantation economies, China was partially colonized and scarcely industrialized, and Russia was the poorest, worst organized, least “developed” of all the major European powers. State communism in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, by contrast, displayed the opposite outcome. These were countries that before communism were industrialized, had well or fairly well organized states and easy access to capital, yet they were unable to build up capitalism and lasting state power as quickly and effectively as the central European states that practiced democracy and liberal capitalism, like West Germany, Austria, and Italy.)

How about more recent examples?

In less powerful countries around the world, rightwing governments arise thanks to backing from major powers like the US, UK, Russia, or occasionally regional powers like Turkey or Saudi Arabia. Military, economic, and propaganda support from a powerful state is essential to them either carrying out a coup or winning an election. However, a mistake that is shared by anti-imperialist, neoliberal, and progressive ideologies has been to treat these smaller players as mere puppets when in fact all players in a system have agency. Weaker states face a pressing need to deploy discreet, sober strategies, biding their time, waiting for opportunities to arise. Many states the US considered to have fully in its orbit, from Turkey to Peru, have sabotaged US plans by acting independently in pursuit of their own geopolitical interests, or even allying with countries the US perceives as enemies, like China.

Nonetheless, when a government feels it can depend on economic and military aid from an immensely powerful state like the US or Russia, the ruling elite frequently despoil their own country. They become more interested in short term profits than building up the nation to increase its power and stability in the long term. In many cases, they have implicit or explicit agreements with their powerful sponsors that encourage an economy of plunder. Guns for oil. Helicopters for banana plantations. Financial aid for diamonds. Good examples include Malawi under Banda, Zaire under Mobutu, and Guatemala from 1954 to the present, all propped up by the US. Dependent, corrupt Russian clients include Belarus since the end of the USSR, and the Central African Republic under Touadéra. Meanwhile, both Russia and China are increasing their relationships of military and economic patronage with countries like Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, and Eritrea.

Leftwing governments follow a different pattern: they prioritize national development to move away from the plantation economies and mining economies imposed by global colonialism. They don’t tend to auction off their countries as a “free trade zone” for international capitalists to plunder, nor are they especially keen on close military collaboration with NATO or Russia, given the danger of coups.

Leftwing governments often arise when there are strong subversive or radical movements that threaten stability but can be tricked into supporting a progressive party in an election. It also helps when military/economic powerholders understand that a reformist government is the best way to prevent open revolution or achieve lasting economic growth. However, once the threat of popular uprising subsides and more people are integrated into the functioning of the progressive state, leftwing governments tend to increase corruption, using their positions of power for personal enrichment or softening regulations to increase exploitative investment from major corporations. Sometimes they move to the center, other times they keep up a progressive rhetoric. Examples of this include Brazil under Dilma Roussef, Chile under Gabriel Boric, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, South Africa under the ANC, and in a different, non-postcolonial way, the Labour Party in the UK under Tony Blair.

The Results of the Right

To get a firmer grasp of the kinds of results the Right actually produces when it’s in power, let’s consider a counterfactual scenario: what if Al Gore had assumed control of the Oval Office in January 2001?

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For those who don’t remember, there was a major challenge to the November 2000 elections, particularly in the state of Florida, where George W.’s brother Jeb ruled as governor. Numerous counties had vote recounts because of intentionally defective voting equipment in primarily Democratic districts, there were allegations of corruption and cheating, lawsuits, but eventually, before the question was resolved, Gore conceded the race.

Through the ‘90s, Gore was Vice President to Bill Clinton, a centrist, neoliberal, pro-police, pro-death penalty politician whose victory was essentially a signal that the Southern Democrats were still alive and well. Gore was well known as an environmentalist, though as a Tennessee congressman in the ‘80s, he was conservative on social issues. Throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s he became more progressive on many issues.

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If the center Left had been in power, what might have gone differently in the next decade?

A Gore administration would have invested in green energy manufacture based in southern and central states, and he would have given greater government support to the development of AI, fiber optic networks, and other tech innovations that were vital to Silicon Valley and also important to Gore himself. In one of the biggest policy differences with Bush, Gore would have spent the budget surplus paying down the national debt.

After September 2001, Gore would almost certainly have invaded Afghanistan – he was no dove. However, it’s highly unlikely he would have invaded Iraq, given the transparently false alibi for that war and the fact that most of the real incentives for the 2003 invasion were corrupt business relationships involving Bush administration figures and especially rightwing corporations, not the capitalist class as a whole. Winning a second term, the Gore administration would probably have supported very modest civil rights proposals around racism, sexism, and gay rights.

What would things look like now, if those had been the major policy decisions of the US government from 2001 through 2008? The US would have a stronger manufacturing base and a greater lead on what are now clearly the most important and strategic sectors for economic growth: green energy production, computing power, and scientific research. The US would have a stronger credit rating, and lower debt payments would allow the US more budgetary leverage in strategic spending, whether for the economy or foreign policy. The US would have a better relationship with the EU and most of the rest of the world. Wealth inequality in the US would be slightly less extreme.

The reasons:

• Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq and his constant snubbing of the UN and international climate framework did immense damage to the US’s international reputation and trustworthiness, and weakened the international institutions the US had set up after WWII to cement its dominance, all because the Right was unwilling to follow a rules-based framework even though the rules were written by the US in the ‘40s and ‘50s. These actions also damaged most of the US’s close alliances outside of the US-UK partnership.

• Bush and company were hostile to green energy and largely ignorant of AI and other forms of supercomputing. They were far more interested in promoting fossil fuels. For an understanding of how that’s an economic dead end, compare the stagnating petro-economy of Russia with the dynamic tech-economy of China.

• Bush’s plan for the budget surplus was to use it to cover a tax break for the wealthy, increasing the US wealth gap while also spreading frustration with the corruption of the Republican establishment, both of which were necessary stepping stones for Trump’s takeover of the Right.

• The Bush budget policy, plus the second war against Iraq, vastly increased the US debt. There may have been a chance to reverse this, but with Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, I think we can say it is no longer a question of “if,” but “when” the US defaults on the trillions of dollars it owes to lenders around the world. When this default happens, the world economy will collapse, temporarily, and in the longer term, global investors will no longer trust the US financial system. It will be up to another power, maybe the EU but probably China and other BRICS countries (as I discuss here and here) who will pick up the pieces.

In summary, the Right exalts and celebrates Power, power as its own good, power for the sake of power. And yet, their sense of entitlement and deservingness means they often overreach, they think they can build power by flaunting it and flexing it and beating others over the head with it. They fail to understand how power is actually produced and accumulated in a capitalist economy and a world system maintained by states. They tend to actively undermine the basis of their own power.

Trump is doing this tenfold, as we’ll see in…

Part III

The strategies and effects of the Right right now…

Here’s Part I if you missed it:

The Right’s Rollercoaster to Hell

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1. Except for brief, exceptional periods in Cambodia and probably a couple other places I’m unaware of. What matters is they were briefed, unsustained, and at least in Cambodia, crushed by Communist Party intervention.