Thursday, November 16, 2017

The Final Solution: The Withering Away of America


Conservatism and liberalism are increasingly ambiguous descriptions of the polarities of American political life. A French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville afforded a particularly telling analysis of the advent of Democracy in America, underscoring as he did the meritocratic nature of prosperity. But it’s ironically the bedrock principles of Marxism as enunciated by Engels and Marx that provide the best description of at least one end of the political spectrum today--and it’s not the left. What better descriptions of life in our current, not conservative, but right wing Trumpocracy than “the withering away of the state” and “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” If there were reincarnation could we say that perhaps Steve Bannon was Lenin in another life? There is, in fact, some degree of substantiation for this idea when you look at the record. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that's my goal too," Bannon has been quoted as saying (“Bannon explains that he’s a Leninist: that could explain The White House’s new tactics, The Guardian, 2/06/17). "I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Would it be going to far to align Bannon with l9th century anarchists like Bakunin who appear in Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia?


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