The Ashes Will Come First
As I have noted on multiple occasions, I pledge allegiance to no political party on the face of the earth. None speak for me. I am a devout monarchist.
That said, I will watch the 2024 US presidential campaign with great interest. It may very well be the last one we see with the United States in its present form.
One thing is increasingly clear: despite his apparent popularity with a substantial plurality of the American electorate, the powers-that-be in the empire will attempt to do “whatever it takes” to prevent Donald Trump from even getting on the ballot, let alone actually win again.
Of course, Trump’s supporters believe he is the answer to America’s woes. They believed that in 2016, too. And yet the woes not only continued, they became more severe. Although he paid much lip service to the notion, Trump did nothing whatsoever to threaten the omnipotence of the so-called “Swamp” in Washington. He wrapped himself and his administration in its tentacles.
Many will reflexively reply, “But he didn’t start a war!” And yet all during his term in office the empire greatly accelerated its preparations for the war against Russia now raging in Ukraine — a war whose consequences will include the end of NATO as a credible military/political alliance, and the end of the European Union as a functioning political/monetary alliance.
Meanwhile, wars against Iran and China continue to simmer on the back burner — conflicts which the Trump tenure as president greatly exacerbated, and which the Biden administration has aggravated even further.
The trajectory of events is not amenable to the voice of the people. The Empire At All Costs cult is calling the shots, and war remains their only recourse to the relinquishment of hegemony.
Representative democracy in the United States is irredeemably corrupted. The sprawling permanent apparatus of empire in Washington has become an irreversibly metastasized malignancy on the American body politic, and an existential threat to the world.
Many believe it can be cured by finding and electing “the right people”. I’m sorry folks, but we’re far past that. The people for whom you are permitted to vote are individually and collectively powerless against the real potentates who rule and reign in America.
On November 6, 2024, the American public will be informed that someone has been elected President of the United States of America. Whoever it is, you will be assured that the majority of the electorate voted for him or her. But don’t expect it to be Donald Trump, nor Robert Kennedy, Jr. I seriously doubt it will even be Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.
Of one thing only can we be absolutely certain: whoever it is, it will not be an agent of change for the better.
As Alexis de Tocqueville presciently foresaw way back in the 1830s, American democracy would inevitably lead to a massive permanent state, impervious to the will of the people:
"The democratic tendency … leads men unceasingly to multiply the privileges of the state and to circumscribe the rights of private persons ... often sacrificed without regret and almost always violated without remorse ... men become less and less attached to private rights just when it is most necessary to retain and defend what little remains of them."
“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.
“The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
This is where we are, and there will be no turning back. To whatever extent it ever truly was, America will never be made great again. Something great may eventually rise from its ashes … but the ashes will come first.