In this post I will briefly make the case that the world has changed around a so-called Liberal system whose power was once unchallengeable. This moment has passed, and the dream of its global domination is over.
What surrounds us is a legacy of ruin so powerful as to unite all levels of society in a process of urgent change.
This change is underway. It will be led by the sincere and by the insincere. Today I will describe the conditions of collapse which are leading us to the most profound regime change of all: the return to reality.
This long post is in three parts. Part one is about Walter Lippmann, whose idea of propaganda-management contained a caution about believing your own fantasies.
Introduction - 30 Years of Hurt
Liberalism and Walter Lippmann
Bridging the Lippmann Gap
Why Was Lippmann right?
Part two is about the neoconservatives and their deranged democracy-war cult.
Enter the crazies
The Land of Make Belief
Reality is Treason
Part three looks at the similarities between the late Soviet Union and the US Empire today.
Hypernormalisation at Work
The Soviet Union Kept Us Honest
All’s Well That Ends
INTRODUCTION
For thirty years, since the fall of the Soviet Union to the war in Ukraine, the US Empire enjoyed a supremacy in military, economic and diplomatic terms.
This exceptional period saw a strange combination emerge. As the US began to nakedly express its power abroad, its government became more insular.
In realising itself as an Empire, the apparatus of US power became like some distant recluse, authoring “reality” in self imposed exile from the facts and the people who favoured them.
This unipolar moment has passed. A new alignment has emerged, one which leaves the business model of the US Empire outmoded and even irrelevant.
This provides a compelling reason for change. That change is coming, and it means a return to reality.
LIBERALISM AND WALTER LIPPMANN
A Liberal system identifies itself as morally superior in governance. It is democratic, and it refuses to use overt force against its own population to maintain control.
Since the creation of bodies such as the Council on Foreign Relations in the 1920s, the use of “public relations” - propaganda - has been the means by which the Liberal consensus has coordinated and refined the techniques of social control.
Walter Lippmann’s 1922 book Public Opinion outlined this method, with his Wikipedia entry noting
Lippmann was an early and influential commentator on mass culture, notable not for criticizing or rejecting mass culture entirely but discussing how it could be worked with by a government licensed "propaganda machine" to keep democracy functioning.
In his first book on the subject, Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann said that mass man functioned as a "bewildered herd" who must be governed by "a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality."
Democracy here is understood as a sort of machine to be oiled by the creation of convenient messages. Lippmann remained on the Council on Foreign Relations for fifty years. He was a realist and a sort of technocratic managerialist - a man who was concerned with using technology and technique to control what was there.
He was fully aware of the folly of replacing the is with the ought, and rejected outright the politics of fantasy.
If you would like to know why the Council on Foreign Relations matters, what it is and what it does to shape your world, I have written a guide here:
Bridging The Lippmann Gap
The Lippmann Gap is the term applied when “a nation’s foreign affairs commitments exceed its power”.
Such gaps are obvious today. In some areas of US foreign policy, the gap is so wide that there appears to be no power at all.
The Lippmann Gap can be understood in two ways.
As the distance between what happens and what was desired
As the distance between what is real and what is not
Lippmann wrote a prescient book in 1943. Titled U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, it was a warning to conserve power through the certain knowledge of its limitations. Lippmann explicitly condemned the politics of fantasy and its dangerous and seductive narratives. A brief article in Real Clear Defense1 summarised his view:
We must, he continued, “become fully conscious again of our own interests and feel prepared to maintain them.”
We should not, he wrote, continue to “exhort mankind to build castles in the air while we build our own defenses on sand.”
Lippmann saw that the dangers of fairytale foreign policy were a threat to the American Republic as much as they imperilled its power abroad.
After three decades of Liberal Intervention and the make-belief which has fuelled regime change, Lippmann has been proven right on both counts.
Why was Lippmann Right?
I do not think Lippmann “right” in any moral sense beyond a narrow argument that stability is better than chaos generally.
He was right about the dangers of a fantasy ideology. My argument here is that the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States in an extraordinary position of total global supremacy.
This power could not be challenged at the time. What happened to the US Empire? It was so rich and invulnerable that it could tolerate an enormous degree of sheer lunacy. This is what it did.
Enter the Crazies
The neoconservatives used to be called “the crazies”. Their moment came with the sudden expiration of the bipolar settlement between the Warsaw Pact and the West.
With the Soviet Union gone, the US commanded a vast military empire in NATO, and it was poised to exploit the former Communist system as an enormous new market.
The power remained, but the enemy it was built to counter had melted away. Why was the Cold War was followed by so many hot ones? For this, we can thank what Colin Powell called “the f****ing crazies”.
The Land of Make Belief
Neconservatism is a death cult of the power-drunk. The Unipolar Moment intoxicated this group of men who were dedicated to use the enormous military power of the US to create a new model of doing imperial business.
This was dressed up as the spread of democracy, a message more earnestly transmitted by their close allies the Liberal Interventionists. This offshoot cult wished the world to take seriously the idea that the hammer of war is an instrument of civilisation.
Since that time, Iraq has been wrecked and handed to Iran. Libya has been ravaged, leading to an open floodgate of African migration. The failed attempt to topple Assad in Syria gave the Russians an opportunity to foster influence in the region. The Sahel - the Sub-Saharan band of Africa stretching from the West to East coasts of the continent - has turned entirely towards the enemies of the Western world.
No one sane could call Afghanistan a victory. Not only has US/NATO followed this with another devastating mess in Ukraine, but the Biden Administration now seems incapable of influencing events in its “greatest ally”, Israel.
These wars have strained a failing NATO alliance, which is underfunded and relies almost entirely on the US military for its credibility. It is arguable that Turkey is a member in name only, which holds the largest army outside of the US itself.
The result of this thirty year bender has been a rapid decline in power, prestige and unity in the West, with its designated enemies united in a rival system.
The Lippmann Gap is not the only one in matters of state. Another was left by the fall of the Soviet Union - a void left by a vanished enemy and the sense of purpose it provided. To the misfortune of the world, this story of good versus evil was one to which this insane cult of war-liberty would write its sequel - in blood.
Reality is Treason
Max Blumenthal’s father Sidney wrote a piece for The Guardian in 2004.
Called Colin and the Crazies, it shows how neoconservative fanatics like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld used this once credible general to legitimise their Iraq war scheme.
This ruined his credibility, and he was discarded by Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush II - with his resignation being demanded by the President himself. Blumenthal reports Powell’s claim that he was “deceived” into supporting the case for the Iraq war, noting also that
The CIA has not been forgiven for failing to support Cheney's phantasmagorical case linking Saddam to al-Qaida.
Not only did they put up Powell to make the now notoriously false claim2 of Iraqi WMD (weapons of mass destruction), but they also dismissed a seven volume dossier which predicted all the chaos that would result from the invasion.
Powell’s “Future of Iraq” foretold all the horrors of the US occupation, including the long insurgency and the realignment of Iraq in the Iranian sphere of influence. His work was dismissed and so was he.
Powell’s example illustrates how a sane and sensible appraisal of reality is treated by fantasists - as enemy propaganda. It also shows that rational people did and do exist in US state institutions. Yet to speak of basic facts is career suicide.
This is one reason why the last thirty years have been plagued by domestic and international insanity as policy. The truth is politically incorrect in a culture of fantasy.
The truth, in fact, is treason.
HYPERNORMALISATION AT WORK
The parallels between the late Soviet Union and the US Empire are limited but helpful where they apply.
I think both systems continued to promote an idea that everyone realises was exhausted, through the centralised control of power and with that the domination of meaning itself.
Writing about the second administration of GW Bush, Blumenthal concluded his piece above with this3,
A system of bureaucratic fear and one-party allegiance is being created in this strange soviet Washington. Only loyalists are rewarded.
One can never be too loyal. And the loyalists compete to outdo each other.
Dissonant information is seen as motivated to injure the president, disloyalty bordering on treason.
Success is defined as support for the political line; failure perceived as departure from the line. An atmosphere of personal vendetta and an incentive system for suppressing realities prevails.
This is not an administration; it does not administer - it is a regime.
Blumenthal’s definition is telling. It suggests how completely these actions abroad transformed the US at home.
The US Empire, like the late Soviet Union, is a gerontocracy run by a small elite whose fear of the people is evidenced by their paranoid style of propaganda control.
It is similarly animated by an exhausted ideology to which it pays lip service. Our democracies are no longer as democratic or liberal as once they were.
Today, stability and not some paradise of the advertisements is what most people would want for their children. The better world they imagine is one that simply works.
Most people realise that the insane ideas of the dying regime have resulted in ruin.
Our institutions are staffed with people selected on the belief that competence is a hate crime, and many of our governments are wedded to a decarbonisation agenda which is effectively a ponzi scheme using public money to collapse industrial society.
These are but two of the failures resulting directly from the politics of fantasy, whose corrupting influence has banalised barbarism at home and abroad. Everything is prosecuted but crime, it seems, since crime itself appears to be a matter of policy.
I wrote a two part series on our culture of crime at state and domestic levels. Part one is linked below, part two is here.
The appearances of politicians are no longer occasions, but resemble the hold music in an automated telephone queue. We all know that the line will go dead before anyone answers.
The US Empire - “the West” - is trading on the vestiges of the past. It no longer stands for what it is, but what it says it is.
No one inhabits this world of words, whose terms and conditions no longer describe the reality we witness around us. This is the reason for the close policing of speech, and the redefinition of values. There is nothing else the regime can control these days.
Almost twenty years after Blumenthal’s account it is obvious how completely these dark dreams have distorted our reality. The regime that has changed the most is our own. The only monuments to this ideology of make belief are ruins.
THE SOVIET UNION KEPT US HONEST
There are many people alive today who view the Soviet Union with a sentimental longing. Some ardently desire its return. These Sovoks, as the Russians sometimes call them, yearn for the prestige and the power of an Empire that has passed away.
I am not one of them, although I am told that the ice cream was excellent.
The Soviet Union was evil, but it also presented a serious competitor to the West. The evil in my view was rooted in its replacement of God with the cult of Man, a sort of Homo Sovieticus.
Alongside this the Soviet Union won the Second World War, the Space Race and provided near total (if often miserable) full employment.
It was for a time a complete alternative to the Liberal West, which had to make a better offer than that of the Workers’ Paradise. One dimension of this better world was the Great Moderation - economic policies which fostered gradually increasing prosperity.
The Free World was identified by its pluralism, its tolerance of a wide range of views, and the basic liberties of speech and movement denied by the totalitarian system.
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS
Yet all this has come to an end. The dividend of victory has not only been squandered on a thirty-year programme of Forever War4, but the manufacture of consent required to sell them to Western populations has resulted in a blurring of the lines between the secret state and the mass media.
Many US cities are replete with homeless camps. Drug addled zombies stoop in the streets, whilst a recent UK report claims that the social fabric has been damaged “catastrophically” as a result of lockdowns which transferred record wealth to corporations and billionaires.
Germany is facing rapid deindustrialisation as a result of the destruction of its cheap Russian energy supply, which aside from ruining its industry will leave the European Union with no one to pay for it.
Finally, the West itself has become Godless - whilst Russia has returned in large part to the practice of Orthodox Christianity.
These changes were all occasioned or exacerbated by regime change - the policies and practices which replaced the Cold War with hot ones, and which corrupted domestic politics in the West completely.
If you would like to know more about how the doctrine of regime change came to corrupt the West, see here:
Funded by enormous borrowing and led by fanatics who were never made to acknowledge the colossal mess they have made, the US Empire has been a hostage to dangerous fantasists for three decades. The only thing that could stop these zealots is an enemy too powerful to be sanctioned or bombed into submission.
The policies of these fantasies have created these enemies. The unipolar moment has passed, and it is going to take all the intoxicated fever dreams of complacent and pugnacious supremacy with it.
The argument for reality is made by reality. Nothing works, everything seems broken, and we are ruled by people distinguished by their consistent failure to produce anything but disaster.
In the next parts I will argue that what is coming next will not be perfect nor universally welcome, but it will come because the business of Empire from main street to Wall Street necessitates a change from the crisis management model.
No one believes in this fairytale anymore. It is an advert for a product that does not and will never exist.
We Ignore the ‘Lippmann Gap’ at Our Peril, Francis P Sempa, Real Clear Defense, 4th April 2023.
Powell explained his spectacular - and false - claim for the existence of Iraqi WMD in a 2005 interview reported in the Washington Post, titled Colin Powell Regretted Helping Launch the Iraq War,
“I didn’t lie. I didn’t know it was not true. I was secretary of state, not the director of intelligence,”
According to The Intercept, Powell knew very well what was going on.
Blumenthal includes the source of the quote about the “f****ing crazies”, along with a spot of gallows humour from Powell.
On one of Powell's futile diplomatic trips, his informal conversation with reporters turned to a new book, The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency, by James Naughtie.
In it, Powell is quoted as describing the neocons to British foreign minister, Jack Straw, as "fucking crazies". That, the reporters suggested, might be an apt title for his next volume of memoirs. Powell laughed uncontrollably.
Narrative has got to be the dumbest word and concept I've come across. It's just story telling, propaganda, and bullshit. "Head movies" for the juvenile and intellectualy challenged who think like damn gnostics. The absence of reality or realpolitik and the oikophobia that exists in Washington has caused ruin. The leaders on i95 and the bullshitters on the left coast have caused disaster after disaster.
Frank, looks like your posts are starting to get noticed. Nice. I award you one James Franco so good gif!