The Transition of the Elites
Article publisher:
Strategic Culture
Article date:
23 February 2021
Article category:
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body:
Alastair Crooke, Former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, offers a number of insights in this article. Excerpts are included below:
The neo-cons were for ever knifing Trump in the back. They’ve now gone to Biden, Alastair Crooke writes....
... the [impeachment] trial may have been flawed in its execution, but also prove to be flawed in its purpose. Many of the most notorious show trials, U.S. historian Professor Vlahos notes have headed in a far more fatal direction, ending up achieving the very opposite of what they intended...
Yes, the Republican Party may be entering a period of contention or civil war, but if the ‘show trial’ showed anything, it demonstrated again the hold that Trump has over the party base....
Yet Biden, in many ways, is in the politically weaker position. His party is less than homogenous – it is a more conflicted bunch. Many of its components simply detest each other. The Clinton-Obama neoliberal wing is fixated in its belief that they, and the U.S., have been on the global side-lines for far too long – and are agog to jump back in....
In party terms, though, the urban Millennial base (and even more so, the angry X-Gen), view the Clinton-Obama neo-cons derisively as ‘just Boomers’ – establishment tools of the despised Oligarchs and billionaires, who have so screwed their lives. These generations are not ‘up’ for more war. They want a Life back....
Likely there will be more ‘theatre’: The Campaign, the Primary, the Inauguration and Impeachment were all mounted as reality-TV drama. With the help of the Silicon Oligarch’s platforms, the public can be endlessly distracted by de-platforming drama, ‘cancellation’ and woke melt-downs at ‘Orange Man Bad’. AOC’s twitter tantrums no longer touch on substance: It is all theatre. This is where it’s going....
The ruling élites therefore are trying to square this circle by transiting from their historic role (since 1700s) as a financial and banking plutocracy, to become a technocratic oligarchy of ‘expertise’. In this mode, they can both contain and absorb disruptive Tech innovation, and oversee the concentration and re-grouping of business cartels under the new rubric of Big Tech.....
The élites – and their vast wealth – would be saved. This is the job entrusted to Biden et al to bring to a conclusion. It is why Wall Street is financing him so handsomely....
Which brings us back to the GOP: What should we expect, by contrast to the Biden approach? Trump is angry. Angry at ‘the system’ which he believes threw him under a bus – and which will now try to punish him with an entanglement of legal suits. He will be more radical. McConnell just had a first taste. ...