Rosa Janis analyzes the Democratic Party Primary election as the symptoms of a dying empire that couldn’t die quite soon enough.
With the Democratic Party primary close on the horizon, we are set to witness one of the most important conflicts in American politics since 1968 being fought out on the battlefield of democracy. This battle will not only decide the fate of the Democratic Party but quite possibly the nation as a whole. While there have been other brutal conflicts waged within the confines of the Democratic Party, such as the all-out slugfest that was the 2008 primary election, this primary season might have world-historical value.
In his 1935 treatise, The Concept of the Political, the infamous political theorist and jurist Carl Schmitt put forward the thesis that the height of politics, the Political, as he put it, was defined by conflict. How political agents draw the distinction between friends and enemies (the “friend/enemy distinction”) determines not only the content of their politics but also their ability to win over the masses and wield the power of the sovereign. This thesis came out of the crisis of the Weimar Republic, now the Federal Republic of Germany. Carl Schmitt saw that the establishment comprised of liberals and normal conservatives was not able to engage with the political, and consequently unable to unite the German people against an enemy and thus protect their own state against the politically-minded Nazis and Communists. Carl Schmitt, being on the political right, decided to align himself with the Nazis despite his own personal reservations about Hitler, since the Nazis were, in his mind, the only ones who could possibly offer a political alternative to the Communists.
It seems that we are living in Weimar America, suffering through the military embarrassment that is the War on Terror, the lingering aftermath of the 2008 recession, and the looming crisis of climate change. The stability of the American Empire is questionable, to say the least. While we do not have Nazis and Communists fighting in the streets, there is a real conflict between political actors that is going on over the corpse of a rotting nation. As alluded to earlier, this conflict is the 2020 Democratic primary.
The battle within the Democratic Party seems, on the surface, to be simply a conflict between two relatively similar factions of the same political party: anti-Sanders establishment liberals and pro-Sanders social-democrats. But it is much deeper than that. The meaningful difference between establishment liberals and social-democrats is in how they both engage with the political; the contest for how they seek to draw different friend/enemy distinctions for the nation. The establishment liberals of the Democratic Party are drawing the friend/enemy distinction on the geopolitical level with their neo-Cold War rhetoric against Russia much in the same way that Nazis and neo-conservatives drew the friend/enemy distinction on the geopolitical level through pro-war rhetoric. On the other hand, the social democrats are drawing the friend/enemy distinction closer to that of the International class lines of old. The two different lines of struggle that these factions are pursuing will become more prevalent as both the American Empire and the world slide deeper into crisis.
The Crisis of Liberalism
The political establishment of the United States has been in a deep crisis since the end of the Cold War. With the death of the Soviet Union, every politician in Washington lost their most valuable enemy. The Soviet Union gave the United States a superpower to compete with on every level and provided a rationale for the commission of horrific acts of open imperialism upon the world in order to combat and contain the supposed evils of the Soviet Union. On the domestic level it created a coherent ideology of American liberalism to contrast the Soviet Union’s “totalitarianism” and allowed for social progress to be achieved through various reforms.
This crisis was not initially seen as a crisis but rather a victory. It was the end of History – liberal democracy was hegemonic across the world and the political establishment of Washington thought that they were going to be able to rule the world through technocratic non-political means. However, this sentiment was abandoned as conservative elements within the state, particularly that of the military-industrial complex, needed a compelling ideological narrative (i.e., a political one) to rationalize expanding its size and power. Thus the happy liberal consensus of the 1990s was traded out for the conservative war on terror of the 2000s.
Initially, the war on terror served its purpose well. The military-industrial complex was able to expand at a rapid pace, invading every aspect of American life through draconian measures such as the Patriot Act, and a new patriotic consensus was created in American politics around combating the threat of “radical Islam”. But as time went on, it became clear that “Islamism” could not fill the vacuum left by the USSR in American political consciousness. The threat of Islamic terror that was manufactured by the United States was vacuous compared to the Soviet Union, as there was no single nation-state that could truly compete with American hegemony. At first, it could be said that this was somewhat advantageous, as the United States was able to exaggerate the extent to which Islamic terrorism posed a threat to the Empire. It could make a geopolitical mountain out of the molehill of an extremely loose network of amateurish terror cells – which comprised Al Qaeda – by painting them as a vast secret network of deadly Islamic supersoldiers, armed with weapons of mass destruction and lurking among the innocent American populace. The incoherence and immateriality of “Islamic Terror” also gave the military-industrial complex free rein to attack whomever they wanted through manufacturing tangential evidence of terrorism.
This advantage, however, would quickly turn into a disadvantage beginning with the Second Gulf War. The American public was led to believe that Saddam Hussein had connections to Al Qaeda and was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, in order to justify an invasion of Iraq. But as the conflict transformed from a quick invasion to an apparently endless occupation, the public grew weary of the war. The evidence that had pushed the American public into the patriotic fervor for war in Iraq was slowly revealed to be non-existent and the fear factor of terrorism was lost on the American people. George W. Bush only won the 2004 presidential election by trading fearmongering about terrorism for fearmongering about homosexuals, thus dividing the anti-war John Kerry camp along culture war lines.
The second term of the Bush administration was dismal. The war in Iraq dragged on, unpopular as the president who was responsible for it. To top it all off, in the final year of the Bush administration one of the worst recessions in recent history hit the world economy, withering any hope for a Republican victory in 2008.
The Obama administration established itself on distinctly non-political terms, hoping to unite the nation after the 2008 recession. Obama ran a campaign that was full of vague slogans and cozy rhetoric of bipartisanship but devoid of policy initiatives. What would be catastrophic failures to any other administration, such as Obamacare being shot down almost immediately after the election (despite having a record-setting number of Democrats in both the house and the Senate), and managing a jobless recovery, did not seem to affect the public’s view of Barack Obama. This was probably due to the fact that the first black president was such a powerful symbolic accomplishment that not even a mediocre job performance could harshen the positive vibe that Obama enjoyed.
The Democrats did not understand that Obama was unique in this regard. In the moment just before the 2016 election, it seemed that the future was going to be apolitical Obama-era technocracy forever. The shifting demographics of America – old, white Republicans dying off to be replaced by a demographic rainbow coalition of Democratic minority voters – and the popularity of Obama were seen as evidence of this future. And despite the bitter memories of her vicious run in 2008 and the surprisingly hard time she had putting down a putatively socialist Sanders in the primary, no one doubted that Hillary Clinton would be the winner of the 2016 election. It was “Her Turn,” and this was only cemented in the minds of everyone in the media and liberal establishment by the out-of-nowhere victory of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries. Trump, being a buffoonish reality-TV show host with the 5th-grade vocabulary and no political experience, was seen as a pushover for Clinton. All the polls leading up to 2016 showed Hillary winning quite easily. With all this momentum behind her, Hillary did what no one at the time thought she could do: she lost.
The temporary fixes of War on Terror and Obama-era liberal technocracy could not meaningfully deal with the crisis of liberalism that came out of the demise of the Soviet Union. The Hillary campaign, with no real friend/enemy distinction to draw from in her ideology of politics-free liberalism, was left completely incapable of rallying their base to stop Trump. Trump, on the other hand, was easily able to harness the power of the political to his own ends. The rhetoric of “Building the Wall” was distinctly Sorelian and Schmittian in its character. It did not matter that a wall already partially existed in the form of border fencing which abutted bits of the Mexican-American border, that much of what Trump wanted to build was physically impossible given the uneven terrain of that border, and that even if Trump was able to get bits of his wall built it would not stop illegal immigrants from coming over since most of them come over via green cards. The wall was not a policy proposal but a myth. When the French theorist Georges Sorel pushed for socialists to advocate for the mass strike as a means of achieving the workers’ revolution he did not think of it as an effective strategy by itself. Rather, it was the confidence that would emerge from the idea of the mass strike – the myth of its power – that would compel workers to revolt against the ruling class and thus bring about socialism. Trump’s wall, much like Sorel’s general strike, was a myth. But that was its power. “Build the wall” became a rallying cry for responding to a combination of deindustrialization undermining the economic security of the poorest settler whites in key swing states like Pennsylvania and social progress getting under the skin of relatively well-off petit-bourgeois settlers. Through the myth of the wall, Trump was able to draw the friend/enemy distinction along distinctly racial lines in the 2016 election.
After the 2016 election, the Democratic Party was left in shambles. With their faith in the political ideology of Obama-era (neo-)liberalism crushed, the Democrats needed something else, and two options were laid out before them. Either they could follow the path set up by Bernie Sanders’ run in 2016, class struggle and old-fashioned social democracy, by moving toward the left of the political spectrum, or they could continue moving rightwards as they had done since the 1990s. The Sanders option was unviable for them, as modern American political parties are essentially fundraising mechanisms with political ideologies loosely attached to them. If the Democrats alienated their wealthy backers with the rhetoric of class struggle, the party would essentially fall apart. As a result, moving to the left was impossible for the Party, despite its half-hearted co-optation of the rhetoric of the Sanders campaign. The slogan of “Medicare for All”, for instance, became widely used among Democrats – despite their clear lack of intent to enact any such policy. The Democrats had to move rightward, but how to do this was not clear in the initial chaos of 2016. Then came the Steele dossier.
Russiagate Liberalism, Pete Buttigieg, and the Climate Leviathan
In the book Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future by Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann, the authors lay out a speculative future based on the liberal technocratic response to climate change. The label that they give to the possible future state is that of the climate Leviathan, the climate Leviathan being a kind of authoritarian world-state that grows out of the need to save capitalism from climate change. This is only one of the possible futures they lay out in their book. The others are: climate Behemoth (reactionary national regimes that respond to climate change through denial and closing borders); climate Mao (a resurgence of 20th-century Stalinism in response to climate change specifically coming from East Asian Maoists); and Climate X (a global revolution coming from the instability created by climate change).
Defined by a global state of exception, a combination of Malthusian and green-Keynesian economics imposed upon an unwilling international population, the climate Leviathan described by Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann appears to be wild speculative fiction, and to a certain extent that is a fair assessment. The authors overestimate the extent to which planetary sovereignty is or would be a desirable goal for technocratic liberal elites. While planetary sovereignty would certainly be a rational response, as climate change is a planetary problem and the United States in particular often acts as the “world police” with its foreign policy, there is no clear way for any of the Western powers to establish such a regime. The United Nations is a farcical institution with little power, so it’s highly unlikely that we’re going to get the Alex Jones-ian wet nightmare of the UN world-state. The authors point to the Paris Accord that was signed by Obama to suggest that liberals want some kind of planetary sovereignty, but this ignores the fact that the agreement was non-binding and therefore a mere symbolic gesture at most. The strongest evidence given by the authors to the idea that planetary sovereignty is something desired by liberals is bits of textual exegesis from Kant’s utopian essay “On Perpetual Peace” and a few powerless scientists calling for action. Even if it is hypothetically possible to create planetary sovereignty under global capitalism as it currently exists, the idea that the American military-industrial complex (which American liberals are a part of) would want to sacrifice even an ounce of its power to completing such a project seems absurd on its face.
What is more likely to be the technocratic liberal response to climate change is something that is in between the Leviathan and the Behemoth, a careful balancing act between a mild version of green Keynesianism and top-down economic fixes of the climate Leviathan to reduce carbon emissions side by side with the hardline authoritarian nationalism of the Behemoth to maintain the sovereignty of the American government in the chaos of our global crisis: a perfect compromise between wishy-washy “Center”-leaning Democrats and the more conservative-leaning military-industrial complex. The hows of achieving this bipartisan hell remained unknown until late in 2016 when the Steele dossier dropped into the hands of the liberal establishment. This bit of hit-piece journalism originally commissioned by the Hillary campaign in 2016 created a “new” narrative of Russian interference in American politics.
The Democratic Party had already witnessed the power of neo-Cold Warrior rhetoric with the Tea Party offensive against Obamacare. Glenn Beck, in particular, would serve as the model for the future of mainstream Democratic punditry, with fact-free paranoia-driven conspiracy-mongering being the perfect ammo for any political movement. But the Democrats were not simply duplicating the rhetoric of the Cold War; they were also hoping to copy its geopolitics. On the surface, to do such a thing makes little sense since the Soviet Union and modern-day Russia are two very different countries. The Soviet Union was an industrial-military superpower with a command economy and proxies on every continent of the world, modern Russia a middling regional power whose economy is kept on life support by an unstable oil market and selling off its once vast military arsenal. The Russian Federation is the modern sick man of Europe. However, even in its weakened state, Russia will still be a power looking to secure resources that will be made scarce by the climate crisis. Also much like Trump’s wall or the “terrorism” that fueled the war on terror, the threat of Russia to the USA does not have to be real per se, so long as it serves political ends well enough.
The threat of Russia allows for the expansion of power by both the military-industrial complex and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party establishment benefits from being able to get their supporters to attack the enemy domestically, continually slandering both the Bernie Left and the Republican Party of being a puppet of Putin’s plot to destroy American democracy. Meanwhile, Democrats like Elizabeth Warren hope to expand the power of the deep state by allowing them to punish social media giants for allowing “fake news” (alternative news sources and opinions outside the media monopolies) to exist on their platforms. Previously Democrats pushed for the censorship of “fake news” through the negging of Silicon Valley CEOs. Now it’s become clear that such negging was merely a means for rationalizing state censorship, a normalization of the state of exception before the state of exception is needed.
Out of all the candidates in the race, Pete Buttigieg is the most thoroughly in line with this future Political (in Schmitt’s sense) to the point where it could be said that he is the anointed sovereign of it. This is not apparent on the surface of his campaign, as he blends in with all the Obama clones that came before him, matching the pablum-spewing rhetorical style and valueless feel-good vibes of the Obama campaign to a tee. He’s a gay man but not in a flamboyant or feminine way that would make straight voters feel uncomfortable, even going so far as to only come out as a homosexual in 2015, well after public opinion had swung toward the acceptance of homosexuality, and only ever daring to kiss his husband on the cheek when on the campaign trail. This is similar to how Obama presented himself, being a black man who was not stereotypically “black” in his demeanor and attitude. Like Obama, Pete Buttigieg is only somewhat experienced as a politician on the local/state level. But this allows him to appear slightly outside the Democratic Party establishment without being politically radical enough to scare away wealthy donors. The only thing that really seems to separate Pete Buttigieg and Obama in terms of their respective backgrounds is that Pete Buttigieg is a veteran who did a brief “tour” in Afghanistan, which is a major plus given how popular veterans are among voters. Pete Buttigieg is the perfect Obama clone, and this is all because Pete Buttigieg was designed to be this way from the very start.
The manufacturing of President Pete started early. After going through a brief socialist phase late in high school in which he praised Bernie Sanders and was influenced by his Gramsci scholar father, Buttigieg became a student at Harvard University where he would make elite connections. This culminated in him getting a job at the Cohen Group, a consulting firm that was founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, with an extensive clientele made up of the wealthiest companies in the arms industry. He would then go on to earn a fellowship at DC-based foreign policy think tank The Truman Center. In their college recruitment material, they state to be looking for “exceptionally accomplished and dedicated men and women who share President Truman’s belief in muscular internationalism, and who believed that strong National Security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic but are two sides of the same coin”; and have been described as being the ones who mobilized the Democratic Party’s interventionist agenda in the Middle East.1
In 2008 Pete Buttigieg took a “vacation” to Somaliland with a “friend”, Somaliland being a separatist territory within the nation of Somalia and Somalia being one of the premier training sites for Wahhabist terrorists. The prevalence of Wahhabist terrorism would make Somalia/ Somaliland a seemingly unattractive tourist destination to most, but Pete and his friend Nathaniel Myers only spent 24 hours in Somaliland. This brief trip gave Pete Buttigieg the opportunity to write a puff piece on Somaliland advocating for its independence as a supposedly neutral observer. Nathaniel Myers who was working as a business analyst at the World Bank at the time of this so-called “vacation” would later go on to work as a senior advisor for the United States Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI). The OTI is a specialized division of USAID which destabilizes nations through a complex network of local proxies and contractors on the behalf of the United States.
The manufacturing of Pete Buttigieg continued with his military “service”. While his campaign spins a narrative of his “tour” in Afghanistan as a normal guy in the military, passing out cheesy photos of him in full body armor carrying a gun to create this impression, the truth is that he probably was never in any kind of danger during his time in the military. This is because Pete was no normal soldier. He was an officer in Naval Intelligence who spent his six months in Afghanistan in 2014 with a little-known unit that operated under the Drug Enforcement Administration. The name of the unit was the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC) according to his appointment papers. No one in the press or the public actually 100% knows what his role in that unit was because the job description on the discharge papers was left completely blank. The unit itself was tasked with undermining the financial and material networks of the Taliban, carried out through heavy collaboration with the “intelligence community”. The French news organization France-Presse described the ATFC as “a multi-agency organization currently comprising about 30 specialists on loan from the Department of Drug Enforcement, Department of the Treasury, Department of Justice, Department of Defense’s CENTCOM, the CIA and the FBI.” This brief stint in Afghanistan probably established his connections to the intelligence community further than ever before and gave him knowledge of counterinsurgency strategy.2
When Pete Buttigieg finally started to run for president he was not only able to receive the donations of 40 billionaires, making him a favorite among the ruling class, but he also received a whooping 218 endorsements from “foreign policy and national security professionals”. This is all rather suspicious considering that his only political experience before running for the presidency was being the mayor of a small college town in Indiana and all his more experienced Obama clone opponents were unable to get the same level support from either the intelligence community or the wealthy. He was also able to pull a “victory” in Iowa despite polling in 3rd in almost all the polling done right before the Iowa caucus, declaring that he had won well before the confused tallying was done – in a move similar to Juan Guaidó’s, leader of the CIA-backed coup attempt in Venezuela – while the app used to count the votes in Iowa was developed by a Buttigieg- and Democrat establishment-connected software developer Shadow Inc. Everything so far has gone according to plan.
One might be thinking to themselves “okay, Pete has connections to the intelligence community and is doing some shady things during the primaries, but where does the climate Leviathan come into play in all of this?” The answer to that isn’t obvious from his platform and rhetoric, since 90% of it is devoid of any kind of meaningful policy content. However, two particular stances in the void of empty platitudes that make up the Buttigieg campaign give a look into what exactly the Pete campaign has been designated to do. First is Pete’s response to criticism of the targeting of black neighborhoods by the police in South Bend, and second is his proposed “national service program”.
His response to criticism about the record of South Bend Police targeting black neighborhoods reveals how authoritarian measures will be rationalized through liberal ideology. Essentially his response was that the police were targeting these neighborhoods because there are high amounts of gun violence within them and that the South Bend Police Force who was pursuing a racist policy was merely being tough on gun violence. Gun control isn’t simply about fighting the big mean NRA and protecting vulnerable high school kids. It becomes a justification for the state of exception. As the interlocking crises of climate change and capitalist meltdown destabilize most of the world’s nations, it will be proletarianized black neighborhoods that will be the centers of resistance to the state, as they are already the weakest links within American society as is. The original Black Panthers understood that poor black neighborhoods were vital sites of class struggle, and when they were proving this through their practice the FBI sought to violently crush them. Militarizing the police and sending them as an occupying colonial force into these neighborhoods is a process that has been going on for a long time, but there have never been progressive arguments for doing this sort of thing that didn’t seem blatantly hypocritical given the lip service that they pay to the “black community”. Gun control gives out a free pass to terrorize poor black neighborhoods at will, since they can say it’s not about controlling a rebellious population, it’s about protecting their children from gun violence within their own communities. Of course, the police and more importantly the larger Security State apparatus could care less about what happens to black children – they have been responsible for waging a war against black neighborhoods for decades upon decades. Everything related to black communities has been a matter of control and use for the empire since its inception.
Further, Pete Buttigieg’s national service program is an effort at the mobilization of the whole of society. While the Buttigieg campaign has denied that his national service program would be a universal recruitment draft like that in the infamous novel Starship Troopers and that most people involved in the program would end up going into the Peace Corps rather than the military, it is clear that the program is an aggressive effort at recruitment that hasn’t been seen in a long time, opening up jobs in every branch of national service. There’s been a slow quiet realization that the market nihilism that has dominated America for the past 40-something years has eroded the strength of the nation, dividing the citizenry into increasingly niche demographics and eroding the ability to engage in any kind of civic duty by enforcing impulsive tendencies in order to sell products. Buttigieg has tried to sell his national service program by appealing to his own military experience:
“National service can help us to form connections between very different kinds of Americans, as was my experience in the military,” Buttigieg said in a statement. “I served alongside and trusted my life to people who held totally different political views. You shouldn’t have to go to war in order to have that kind of experience, which is why I am proposing a plan to create more opportunities for national service.”
Along with appeals to his own military service, Buttigieg argues for his program as a means of combating the larger crisis of climate change. In fact one could argue that the whole point of Pete’s national service plan is to harness military Keynesianism as a means of mobilizing the whole of society and militarizing labor towards the end of combating an enemy. This all might sound familiar depending on how much knowledge one has on the subject of revolutionary conservatism, in particular, that of Ernst Junger, who in a short essay “Total Mobilization” and his book The Worker laid out a vision of the future in which societies overcame the limits of liberal capitalism via the mobilization of society through war economies. This sort of 20th-century totalitarian horizon was lost to us in the age of neoliberalism when the logic of markets seemed to be dominant among the ruling class. However, as the neoliberal order begins to collapse with the dual crises of capitalism and climate change, old ideas are slowly creeping into the discourse. Pete Buttigieg and his handlers may never acknowledge that their vision of green military mobilization rhymes quite closely with that of the early forefathers of fascism, but it does not matter as material conditions necessitate the development of such a seemingly odd cross-ideological pollination.
Even if Pete Buttigieg is not the CIA candidate that will be couped into power, there are still many in the race who are inclined towards the new consensus of totalitarianism with a liberal face. Mike Bloomberg not only turned New York into a miniature police state when he was Mayor but also praised Xi Jinping for China’s response to climate change, suggesting that his own politics are in line with that of the climate Leviathan.
The re-emergence of class politics
The surge of support behind the Sanders campaign has caused a great panic among many in the establishment of the Democratic Party. One of the most entertaining of them all is the televised mental breakdown of MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews. Matthews has been rendered a hysterical mess by the continuing success of Bernie Sanders, going on seemingly insane rants about how Sanders will conduct mass executions and institute full communism. This is laughable to most, as Bernie Sanders’ politics are those of a moderate social democrat. However, there are kernels of rationality in the panicking of Chris Matthews in his party.
On the most practical level, Bernie Sanders is a threat to the Democratic Party’s existence. This is not because Sanders will ruin the Democratic Party’s reputation among voters like the Democrats are claiming, an erroneous notion given that he is one of the most popular politicians in the United States and consistently beats Donald Trump in head-to-head matchups according to polling. Rather it is ruining the Democratic Party’s reputation among donors that is the real threat. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties function merely as fundraising machines which pair candidates with rich donors loosely based on the ideological preferences within the capitalist class. If said wealthy donors flee the Democratic Party, then there will be nothing left of it. So when the candidate not only actively runs independently of donations from the capitalist class, but runs on a platform that aims directly at getting rid of big money from the political process altogether, it is more than simply a threat to the Democratic establishment’s control over the party, but a threat even to the survival of the party itself. This is why despite Bernie Sanders being able to win primaries and garner the majority of delegates and votes, the Democratic Party will refuse to give him the nomination. The Democratic Party has been continually choosing to meet the interests of their wealthy donors over their voters since the late seventies, abandoning policies popular with their base in favor of policies that would be popular with wealthy donors. This trend is likely to continue all the way to the convention, where the Democratic Party will choose to bleed voters in order to defend the interests of their capitalist donors by denying Bernie Sanders the nomination no matter what happens.
On a more theoretically abstract level, the Bernie Sanders campaign is a re-emergence of an old form of politics: class politics. In Concept of the Political Carl Schmitt lays out the unique character of class politics:
“The most conspicuous and historically the most effective example of this antithesis is formulated by Karl Marx: bourgeoisie and proletariat. This antithesis concentrates all antagonisms of world history into one single final battle against The Last Enemy of humanity. It does so by integrating the many bourgeois parties on earth into a single order on the one hand and likewise the proletariat on the other. By doing so a mighty friend-enemy grouping is forged. Its power of conviction during the 19th century resided above all in the fact that it followed its liberal bourgeois enemy into its own domain, the economic, changed it, so to speak in its home territory with its own weapons. This was necessary because turning towards economics was decided by victory of industrial society. The year of this victory, 1814, was the year in which England triumphed over the military imperialism of Napoleon.” (pg 75)
The reactionary Carl Schmitt understood that it is the universal character of class politics that challenges the whole capitalist order. This is specifically because of how class politics divides the whole of humanity into two distinct camps, leading the hungry masses of the proletariat into the battlefield of the economic, the territory of dominance of the capitalist class, to engage in a global war. Everyone on the political spectrum from the farthest left (Karl Marx) to the darkest corners of the far-right (Carl Schmitt) has understood this, and this is why the history of modernity is the history of class struggle.
Chris Matthews and all the capitalists of America now squeal in terror because they had confused the brief victory of neoliberalism as the final defeat of the proletariat until Bernie Sanders busted onto the scene with his rhetoric of class struggle. While tame compared to the all-out class warfare of communism, the capitalist class understands that once the rhetoric of class struggle begins to rear its ugly head in politics it cannot be stopped with mild reforms. They are not afraid of Bernie Sanders per se, because Bernie Sanders is merely the manifestation of something larger. They focus so heavily on the mean comments that they get on Twitter and other online spaces because it is a hostility that will if not completely stomped out, boil over into real violence when shit hits the fan. They’re coming to the uncomfortable realization that all this might not go away once Bernie is pushed out of the Democratic Party. In fact, it might only make it worse.
The ancients knew that it was the Mad who can really see. As one of our modern Oracles of Delphi, Chris Matthews is blind, he cannot see the plainness of Bernie Sanders, but that superficial fact does not matter because he is looking into the depths of our future. He can see the bodies being piled up in the streets, the mass graves, the famine and most importantly the war. He screams that we are on the Eve of Destruction and he is right. But the Gods are cruel. Even when they bless the lucky few with premonitions of upcoming events they can never let them see everything. We know that things now are leading towards an inevitable final conflict between the capitalist class with their Leviathan and the hungry mass of the proletariat with their heroes, we know that it will be bloody and long but we do not know how it will play out. All we can do now is rally our men, pray to the Gods and hope fate is on our side.
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