One can almost hear an audible sigh of relief from the rogues’ gallery of criminal conspirators behind the phony Russiagate collusion story cooked up in the bowels of the US-UK Deep State with the aim of overturning the 2016 election. Now, after two years of the GOP’s dithering in the area of investigations and hearings relevant to how the Trump campaign was put under politically motivated surveillance, those peccadilloes will be forever buried. Instead, with a unity of purpose alien to the Stupid Party, the Evil Party taking over the House of Representatives in January 2019 will be utterly ruthless in using their power with the single-minded purpose of getting Trump out of office before 2020.

They’ll still wail about “The Russians! The Russians! The Russians!” of course, but that will be just for show. (Robert Mueller’s report will be an obscenely expensive dud.)  Instead Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her minions will focus like a laser on getting their mitts on Trump’s tax returns and dredging up anything they can from his long involvement in the sharp-elbowed, dog-eat-dog world of New York property development and construction, confident they can find something that qualifies as a high crime or misdemeanor. (Some racist language couldn’t hurt, either. He’s literally Hitler, y’know.)

The model for impeaching Trump will be Richard Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was forced out of office on charges relating to his time in Maryland politics years earlier. The GOP’s retention of the Senate and even picking up a few seats will be far from a guarantee that Trump won’t be removed. It’s easily foreseeable that a dozen-plus Republican Senators (think Mitt Romney) will be thrilled to get rid of Trump and restore the party’s status quo ante with Mike Pence in the Oval Office. As with Nixon, Republicans will panic at whatever dirt the Democrats dig up and demand Trump resign for the “good of the country and the party,” as opposed to the way Democrats formed a protective phalanx around Bill Clinton. Unlike Nixon, Trump might choose to fight it out in the Senate and might even prevail. In any case, a change in control of just one chamber means an extended political crisis that will keep Trump boxed in and perpetually on the defensive.

Independently of the impeachment sound and fury in Washington, the walls will continue to close in on domestic dissenters. The digital ghettoization of alternative views to “protect our democracy” from supposed outside meddling conflated with “hate online” will accelerate, with social media a particular target for censorship. The Deep State’s intelligence and law enforcement organs will step up actions to penalize any resistance to Antifa violence, while perpetrators of such violence will rampage with impunity. Trump has done nothing to protect free speech online or in public places while his enemies continue to contract the space for both—but things can and will get much, much worse. Such vestigial protections of religion, free speech, right to bears arms, and others that we still possess—for now—aren’t likely to survive much longer as the edifice of the old America continues to crumble under the malfeasance of the very Executive, Legislative, and Judicial officials who pretend to be its custodians.

It’s important to understand that the division of power confronting America in two months will not be the usual circumstance of government divided on a partisan basis, “checks and balances,” and all that sort of thing familiar from our history but the next phase of a second American civil war (or third, if we count Patriots vs. Tories). In this phase we are confronted with a revolutionary situation in which one part of the apparatus of government potentially forms what Alexander Shtromas called “the second pivot,” an alternative source of official power. (Contrary to the Marxist myth, revolutions happen not when “The People” rise up but when some part of the ruling establishment defects to the revolt and becomes the new conferrer of legitimacy. There are obvious historical examples: Parliament in the English Civil War, the Third Estate’s declaring itself the National Assembly of France, the Petrograd Soviet’s coup against the Provisional Government, Boris Yeltsin’s Russian government when Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet government was under threat of the State Committee on the State of Emergency (itself an aspiring second pivot that failed), and the communist cabals in the various Warsaw Pact countries that ousted little Brezhnevs and installed little Gorbachevs.)

In seeking to overthrow the constitutionally elected president who was himself an insurgent against the cozy duopoly in Washington, it might seem the Democrats and their GOP “Never Trump” fellow travelers are actually counterrevolutionaries against the populist “revolution” two years ago. However true that might be in a mechanical sense, it fails to encompass the anti-American, revolutionary—indeed, Marxist—substance of the party that has just captured the House.

Increasingly and irreversibly American politics is no longer about a narrow range of governing styles or competing economic interests. It is tribal. Today’s “tribes” are defined in terms of affinity for or hostility to the founding American ethnos characterized by European, overwhelming British origin (a/k/a, “white”); Christian, mainly Protestant; and English-speaking, as augmented by members of other groups who have totally or partially assimilated to that ethnos or who at least identify with it (think of Mr. Hamadura in The Camp of the Saints).

(Unfortunately we don’t have a specific word for this core American ethnic identity to distinguish it from general references to the United States in a civic or geographic sense. (Russian, by contrast, makes a distinction between ethnic russkiy and civic/geographical rossiiskiy.) Maybe we could adapt Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Usonian”? “Or Americaner,” comparable to Afrikaner? “Or Anglo-American”? Or “Murican”?)

Since the Left, of which the Democratic Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary, gave up on its original focus on industrial workers as the revolutionary class, the old bourgeois/proletarian dichotomy is out. Tribes now line up according to categories in a plural Cultural Marxist schematic of oppressor and victim pairings, with the latter claiming unlimited redress from the former.

As the late Joe Sobran said, it takes a lot of clout to be a victim in America these days. The following is a helpful guide to who’s who under the new dispensation:

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In most of the above categories there are variations that can increase the intensity of oppressor or victim status. For example, certified victimhood in a recognized category confers extra points, like Black Lives Matter for race (it is racist to suggest that “all lives matter”) or a defined religious group marginalized by “hate” (mainly anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim, but not something like anti-Buddhist, anti-Rastafarian, or even anti-atheist or anti-Satanist because no one bothers about them; anti-Christian victimhood is an oxymoron because “Christian” is inherently an oppressive category). In addition, meeting the criteria for more than one category confers enhanced victimhood under a principle called “intersectionality.”

In the same way, there are aggravating factors in oppressor categories, such as being a policeman (an enforcer of the structure of oppression regardless of the officer’s personal victim attributes, but worse if straight, white, Christian, etc.) or a member of a “hate” subculture (a Southerner who’s not vocally self-loathing is a presumed Klan sympathizer; thus, a diabetic, unemployed, opioid-addicted Georgia cracker is an oppressor as the beneficiary of his “white privilege” and “toxic masculinity,” notwithstanding his socio-economic and health status). Like being Southern, living while genetically Russian is also an aggravating factor.

Creatively shuffling these descriptors suggests an entertaining game like Mad Libs, or perhaps an endless series of jokes for which you could be fired if you told them at work:

Two people walk into a bar.

One is a Baptist, straight, male Virginia state trooper whose ancestors arrived at Jamestown.

The other is a one-legged, genderqueer, Somali Dervish WIC recipient illegally in the US on an expired student visa.

So the bartender says . . . [insert your own punch line here].

While Patrick Buchanan is right that the level of domestic violence today is not up to what the US experienced in 1968, the depth of the existential divide is much greater. This is why it’s perfectly acceptable for a homosexual, black MSM news anchor to describe “white men” collectively as a “terror threat,” but when a straight white, female counterpart makes a clumsy but mild observation about ethnic role-playing it’s a firing offense. (Note that while “female” is an assigned victim category, white females can be “gender traitors” if they are seen as putting their “racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status”; to remain victims in good standing and an “allies” of higher-caste victim groups they need to learn to just “shut the f**k up” when POC sisters with superior oppressed status are holding forth.)

The victim side accuses its opponents of a litany of sins such as racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, etc., for which the solution is demographic and ideological replacement—even while denying that the replacement is going on or intended. This is no longer ordinary political competition but (in an inversion of von Clausewitz attributed to Michel Foucault) politics “as the continuation of war by other means.” Things will continue to get ugly.

 

Jim Jatras, a former US diplomat and foreign policy adviser to the Senate GOP leadership, comments on financial and foreign policy topics and on U.S. politics in his publication TheJIM!gram. Tweet him at @JimJatras.