The USA’s political reorientation: how liberals embraced cold war madness, & conservatives came far closer to anti-imperialism

In only two decades, political ideologies in the United States have undergone a shift that’s made them only cosmetically resemble what they used to be. Whereas liberals and the “left” have become the primary drivers of cold war foreign policy, as well as the main allies of big pharma and big tech, conservatives and libertarians have become the primary opponents of these things. 

Among the latter camp, there are plenty of actors who’ve proven themselves to not be revolution-compatible by reaffirming their support for “Israel,” even as they’ve opposed aid to Ukraine. These types are mainly found among the right-wing political elite, though. There are also tens of millions of people who’ve come to be revolution-compatible due to the country’s political reorientation, and this is shown by how most in the MAGA base both oppose aid to Ukraine and support a ceasefire in Gaza. This is the true reason why the liberals, along with the liberal-adjacent “leftists,” view MAGA as the most important thing to be combating. What we call the “left” has entered into a tacit alliance with monopoly finance capital, which means it’s following the Democratic Party’s example in vilifying every illiberal element of society. 

How did we get to such a point? How did liberals adopt the same obsessive hatred towards Russia that the right had fifty years ago? And how did conservatives transition from their rigidly jingoistic “love America or leave it” mindset, to their newly predominant mindset of opposing the intelligence agencies, questioning the war machine, and hating the pharma monopolies? This is a timeline of the key events within the transition from the Bush era—which was of the same nature as the late Cold War’s U.S. political divide—to the present era. The era where one’s relationship to the question of imperialism is no longer so defined by the left-right binary. 

2008

September 24: After over a year of growing trouble for the housing market, Bush is forced to give a statement on the financial crisis. From this point on, living standards in the U.S. wouldn’t truly return to the level they had been prior to this development, greatly reducing the amount of people who fit the image of the comfortable middle-class Bush voter. 

November 4: Barack Obama is elected with the help of many who would vote for Trump in 2016. It would be found that in the 2012 election, 8.4 million voters who picked Obama that year would pick Trump four years later. And in the 2008 election itself, 17 percent of Obama voters had voted for Bush in 2004. This indicates that many of those newly dispossessed Bush conservatives have been looking for a new political orientation throughout the last fifteen years or so, with them now largely being part of MAGA.

2010

February 18: WikiLeaks starts to publish the Manning leaks, the pieces of journalism that would expose U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan. The persecution that this would bring for Manning, as well as for Assange, started off a trend where more on the right came to hate the intelligence agencies. At first it was mainly the ones who were already libertarians, but since then conservative hostility towards the “deep state” has become far more widespread.

2011

March 15: in Syria, protests start that the Obama administration uses as an opportunity to mobilize its jihadist proxy forces, and instigate a conflict. This conflict would turn into the issue that compelled principled people on the left to break from their anti-Assad counterparts, and principled people on the right to do the same in defiance of the neocons.

September 17: the Occupy Wall Street protests start, creating an opportunity for the Democratic Party, its NGOs, and its aligned left organizations to divert post-2008 mass movements away from revolutionary politics. The demonstrations came to be managed by organizing leaders who the liberal political machine approved of, and who therefore prevented this spontaneous upsurge from reaching its full potential.

November 16: Obama begins his “pivot to Asia” by declaring to the Australian parliament that the U.S. is “here to stay” in the eastern hemisphere. This was a continuation of the geopolitical maneuvering that Washington had already started by creating AFRICOM in 2007, and by starting the Syrian war. As these things, like essentially every other part of modern U.S. foreign policy, were done to counter China.

2012

October 2022: the final day that late Cold War politics defined the country’s discourse. Obama said to Romney: “the 1980’s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back — because the Cold War has been over for 20 years. But Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980’s, just like the social policy of the 1950’s, and the economic policies of the 1920’s.” As Obama escalated the war against China, he would soon find that bringing back an anti-Russian foreign policy was in U.S. imperialism’s best interests, as Russia is a crucial strategic partner of China’s.

2013

June 5: Edward Snowden publishes the first of his leaks about the NSA, exposing the full extent of how Bush and Obama had violated the people’s privacy rights. Snowden would get support from the libertarian right, with Rand Paul calling him a “civil disobedient.”

July 13: a group of activists who had become connected to each other through NGO networks forms Black Lives Matter, an organization that would act to solidify monopoly capital’s domination over the organized left. BLM’s role has been to divert spontaneous mass anti-police police outrage towards civic activism that aids the Democratic Party and its NGOs. This has helped make Black working class people unable to find any outlet within the established “left” which can advance their anti-imperialist interests.

August 21: the empire adopts a strategy for Syria that ultimately leads many more people, including on the libertarian right, to question the war machine: carrying out false flags. The inconsistencies in the official story about the “Ghouta incident” were taken note of by the supporters of WikiLeaks, who would come to represent a major threat towards Washington’s plans for a new cold war. And this rise of a dissident left/right element would become more pronounced with every new Syria false flag that happened over the next decade.

2014

February 20: snipers—later found to be participants in a false flag—massacre Euromaidan protesters in Ukraine, ensuring that the old government loses credibility and gets replaced. This would let the Obama White House install a government that’s aligned with the ideology of the Banderites, Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators who assisted the Third Reich in committing genocide. When the Russian speakers of the country’s eastern Donbass region responded to this by constitutionally voting to break from fascist rule, Kiev would begin a years-long bombing campaign against the Donbass, leading to mass graves.

March 17: Ron Paul goes against the neocon view on Ukraine that’s shared by his son Rand Paul. Wrote Ron Paul about the referendum by Crimeans to become part of Russia: “Opponents of the Crimea vote like to point to the illegality of the referendum. But self-determination is a centerpiece of international law. Article I of the United Nations Charter points out clearly that the purpose of the U.N. is to ‘develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples’…Critics point to the Russian ‘occupation’ of Crimea as evidence that no fair vote could have taken place. Where were these people when an election held in an Iraq occupied by U.S. troops was called a ‘triumph of democracy’?”

2015

December 15: Trump, who was and continues to be the most popular candidate among the conservative base by far, makes a statement that effectively condemns the uncritically pro-war ideology which dominated the right during the Bush era: “We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East — we've done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away — and for what? It's not like we had victory. It's a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the 4 trillion dollars or 5 trillion dollars. I wish it were spent right here in the United States on schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart!” 

As president, Trump would continue and intensify Obama’s imperialist wars, dropping bombs in record numbers. That saying he opposes imperialist wars solidified his support, though, showed the conservative base had become vastly less pro-war during the last ten years.

2016

July 12: after bringing a generation of young people into the workers movement, Bernie Sanders endorses Hillary Clinton. He did this amid overwhelming evidence that the Democratic presidential primaries had involved so much election fraud and voter suppression, he would have won a fair primary. This strengthened the argument that Sanders had betrayed his supporters. A divide emerged between the leftists who would continue to follow Sanders and his “vote blue no matter who” instructions, and the leftists who would follow a path of revolutionary politics.

July 22: WikiLeaks releases Democratic National Committee emails that detail the DNC’s efforts to rig the primary against Bernie Sanders, leading millions of working-class voters to realize the Democratic Party can’t be changed to represent their interests. There were already widespread suspicions that this was true, but the DNC leak confirmed it in the minds of many.

July 26: echoing its past coverage on Iraq, the New York Times uncritically reports: “Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked The D.N.C.” This is the tactic that the national security state and Democratic Party have kept using since then: try to direct attention away from facts by saying it was the Russians who exposed those facts. The leftists who continued to follow Sanders would repeat these accusations, while the ones who’d broken from Sanders would join the dissident right in combating the security state’s propaganda. Enough of these renegade former Sanders supporters would vote Trump for them to be a major factor in the election.

July 28: Chuck Schumer says that “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” This would mean the Democrats consciously driving away their traditional working-class base. Their goal was to become a new home for the remaining conservatives who were still economically comfortable enough to prefer Bush/Romney neocon politics over Trump’s populism. 

November 8: Trump’s election demonstrates that too much of the population had become alienated from the old-money, eastern establishment for it to be possible to return to the late Cold War politics. The right wing of the eastern establishment, with its reliably anti-Russian politics, couldn’t come to dominate the GOP again. And though the eastern establishment’s liberal wing wasn’t going to lose control of the Democratic Party, Trump’s victory had proven that this new, fully neocon version of the party wouldn’t be able to maintain dominance over the wider culture. It would have its loyal base of pro-imperialist supporters in the wealthy suburbs, but it would remain besieged by an ever-growing anti-imperialist force on both the left and the right.

2017

January 6: the FBI publishes a report designed to discredit socialist and anti-imperialist ideas by portraying their continued presence within U.S. discourse as a product of Russian propaganda.

January 10: UK intelligence agent Christopher Steele puts forth a fabricated dossier, designed to reinforce the rumors that Trump conspired with Russia to sway the election. The dossier’s sensationalist nature made it able to become the biggest thing in the discourse at the moment, forcing everyone on the left to make a choice: go along with the “Russiagate” narrative that the eastern establishment was promoting, or resist this narrative. Those who resisted it would be labeled as Russian bots or agents, and subjected to unprecedented levels of online censorship.

April 6: following the latest false flag in Syria, Trump carries out an airstrike against the country. This would prove to only one be among the numerous other parts of Trump’s foreign policy which made him an even more aggressively anti-Russian president than Obama had been. That these policies occurred showed the extent of the eastern establishment’s ability to influence potentially rogue presidents towards complying with the new cold war agenda. As each of these policies helped Trump build a case that he wasn’t Russia’s puppet, meaning they were at least partly a product of the pressures which Russiagate exerted upon his administration.

2018

April 9: when another Syria false flag is followed by another U.S. airstrike, Tucker Carlson points out the absurdity of the official story on the “Douma incident”—something he wasn’t yet willing to do only a year prior with the last big false flag. Said Carlson: “How would it benefit Assad using chlorine gas last weekend? Well, it wouldn’t. Assad’s forces have been winning the war in Syria. The [Trump] administration just announced to pull American troops out of Syria, having vanquished ISIS [Daesh]. That’s good news for Assad. And the only thing he could do to reverse it and hurt himself would be to use the poison gas against children.” This statement showed that conservatives and libertarians had become less compatible with imperialist wars than ever.

At the same time, both liberals and “leftists” had become even more pro-imperialist. As the liberal media and the Democratic Party had been intensifying their anti-Russian demagoguery, and facilitating ever-more big tech censorship against antiwar voices, the country’s largest ostensibly socialist organization was assisting in the cold war propaganda campaign. The Democratic Socialists of America, the Sanders-aligned group whose membership had multiplied many times over during the last couple years, was tacitly supporting the reactionary aspects of Trump’s foreign policy by attacking pro-Assad leftists. This decision would further place the DSA’s camp on the side of the security state. Because the following year, when WikiLeaks published evidence of a coverup on forensic research that contradicted the official Douma account, the only way to reject this evidence would be by reinforcing the lies about WikiLeaks and Assange.

2019

January 9: a survey shows that the majority of support for keeping troops in Syria now comes from Democrats, whereas an even higher percentage of MAGA conservatives support withdrawing from Syria. That Trump’s aggression towards Syria was so visible proved these MAGA people were taking this stance despite being aware that it went against their own partisan team. Iraq—and in certain ways the 2008 crisis—had had such a great effect on the right-wing base that this base was now overwhelmingly willing to oppose wars, even when this blatantly broke the old rules of red vs. blue politics. 

There was another factor that had contributed to this reorientation, if indirectly: the switch wherein the right came to be the main opponent of the intelligence agencies, while the “left” came to be the intelligence community’s biggest defender. The new cold war—which Syria has been related to in a highly noticeable way—is a project of these agencies. It’s these agencies that have been manufacturing the narratives used to justify wars against Syria and Russia, and that have been working to censor the opponents of these wars. Because of this, the left-liberal camp that supports the intelligence community is aligned with the war efforts against these countries, while the illiberal camp that’s opposed to the feds is aligned against these war efforts.

March 7: the Mueller report on the investigation into Russia’s alleged interference is published, and it finds no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. This represents a loss for the narrative managers, who had spent the last two or so years continuously saturating the discourse with the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

April 11: after having taken refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy in 2012, then staying confined there the entire time, Assange is arrested upon being forced out. This provokes global outrage, furthering mass opposition towards the security state and U.S. imperial hegemony. Even after the dozens of fabricated scandal stories the hegemon’s media had been spreading about Assange, continuing the effort to persecute him would narratively backfire.

Summer of that year: needing to make a narrative pivot amid this development, and amid the Mueller report’s discrediting of Russiagate, the empire’s propagandists shift towards China as their new main target. The CIA-backed Hong Kong protests would let the imperialist media further its proliferation of the “Uyghur genocide” hoax, which the right would fully embrace. The most mainstream parts of the “left,” such as Sanders, would promote this great anti-communist lie as well. Which reaffirmed their rejection of revolutionary ideas, growing the vacuum in our politics that only a genuine dissident movement could fill.

June 30: Trump makes history by becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. His decision to form this relationship with the DPRK, which outraged the eastern establishment, was made with the intent of inspiring positive feelings among the MAGA base. And that the MAGA base responded as such showed more Americans are open towards friendship with the DPRK than one might assume.

2020

March 15: states begin enforcing Covid-19 lockdowns, an event that triggers a vast reaction from the country’s illiberal elements and thereby accelerates our political reorientation. This was the moment when the libertarian-minded Americans, who’d already been growing angry at the war machine, the security state, and the neocon-aligned media, challenged the big pharma monopolies during a crucial moment in the narrative war. It was also the moment when the organized left engaged in an unprecedented level of collaboration with monopoly capital. 

By supporting the lockdowns and big pharma against MAGA, these left elements further ensured that they wouldn’t be able to define the future of the working-class movement. As Christian Parenti has written in response to this shameful decision by so many leftists:

The public health response to Covid and the left’s inability to offer a critique of it have been catastrophic. Left refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the populist critique of mandates, passports, lockdowns, and censorship is alienating large swathes of the working class. Vaccination rates are not the same as approval rates for mandates. Many people get the shots only because their jobs and thus physical wellbeing are threatened. 

The Lockdown Left, being mostly members of the Professional Managerial Class generally has no idea about such things. Its members enjoyed the lockdown – telecommuting from their second homes, spending more time with the kids, getting into homemade meals. One friend praised lockdown’s new “life-work balance” and described convivial socially-distanced outdoor cocktail hours with neighbors on their sundrenched side street in Berkeley. Lost in its own foggy war against the deplorables, Lockdown Leftists are confused. They think that because they trust Fauci, most everyone else does too.

October 19: Politico, which had been one of the major participants in the Democratic establishment’s media campaign to attack Sanders supporters, tries to shield Biden by publishing the headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” This counter-narrative was not effective. When the intelligence agencies got big tech to suppress the story, and the major outlets carried out a media blackout on it, this exposed the reality of the USA’s political police. It was now obvious that an unelected national security clique had come to hold unprecedented control over our major institutions, creating the (correct) perception that the intelligence agencies are who’s truly interfering in our elections.

2021

January 6: the FBI stays passive amid the overwhelming evidence that the Capitol Hill riot was being planned, and lets Ray Epps—someone who the feds would go on to protect—lead the effort to storm the Capitol. As big tech used this event to intensify censorship against Palestinians, and the incoming Biden administration used this to attack civil liberties, the MAGA camp would look to Epps as evidence that January 6 was a false flag. 

There were confused theories about Antifa (which typical MAGA rhetoric mistakenly conflates with communists) having stormed the Capitol. But more thoughtful observers came to the conclusion that the culprit behind the riot’s suspicious underhanded activities wasn’t the communists; it was the feds. Revolver, a publication that’s sympathetic to MAGA, wrote upon looking at evidence of the FBI infiltrating both MAGA and leftist groups: “What if the provocateurs, infiltrators and escalators of illegal activities weren’t coming from Antifa or BLM? What if they were coming straight from the FBI?”

2022

February 24: the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the prime force within the ostensibly Marxist wing of the organized left, says that “we do not support the Russian invasion,” and that “The menace of war can only be defeated by international solidarity among the peoples of the world and a resolute struggle against U.S. imperialism.” There was a contradiction between this statement of supposed solidarity with the world’s peoples; and the practical reality that the Donbass people would have been massacred on a vast scale if Russia hadn’t taken action against the invading Banderites. This would contribute to PSL ultimately losing its pro-Russian allies, such as the Party of Communists USA.

May 18: the “Disinformation Governance Board” that the Biden administration tried to establish is canceled. This is due to how much backlash the project got, showing that though the Ukraine psyop had so far been successful, the majority of the people had potential to turn against the policies of the imperial state. 

May 28: the Libertarian Party is taken over by the Mises Caucus, a group with a dual nature: it’s further to the right than the old Libertarian Party on domestic issues, yet fully opposed to the eastern establishment and its geostrategic agenda. This would lead to the Caucus acting as a progressive domestic force in one sense: because it’s an enemy of U.S. hegemony, it’s also an enemy of monopoly capital. The Caucus’ opposition to neocon foreign policy would lead to big right-wing donors no longer funding the Libertarian Party, showing it to now be a rogue political actor which the highest-level elites feel threatened by.

July 29: the African People’s Socialist Party, one of the pro-Russian orgs, is raided by the FBI for supposedly assisting Russia in “election interference.” This would get the APSP support from the dissident right, as it was the security state that had targeted the party.

October 13: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is shouted at by Tulsi Gabbard supporters for voting in favor of giving weapons to Ukraine. This moment exposed the anger that left-wing people with anti-imperialist principles had come to feel towards AOC, and showed the urgent need for an authentic socialist movement that’s broken from the established “left.” 

2023

February 19: the Libertarian Party, the PCUSA, the Center for Political Innovation, and other organizations from different elements of illiberalism come together for the Rage Against the War Machine rally in DC. The event would unite such illiberals in its favor, while uniting liberals in opposition to it. And there were many actors within socialist spaces which revealed themselves to be willing to join with the liberals in attacking RAWM. At this point, among the most notable of these actors included the Black Agenda Report, the Trotskyist World Socialist Website, and the Trotskyist organization Socialist Action.

March: in response to RAWM, the PSL plans an anti-NATO demonstration of its own in the San Francisco Bay Area, then uses the event’s social media as a platform for attacking RAWM. The PCUSA assisted PSL in this project, but when PSL’s leadership facilitated this act of sectarian provocation, the partnership between the two orgs would end. Up until that point, PCUSA’s polemicist members had been refraining from publicly criticizing PSL for its opposition to Russia’s humanitarian action in Ukraine. Because at that stage, such open inter-organizational arguments would have been inappropriate. But now PSL had initiated a split, giving PCUSA’s members permission to start naming PSL in their denunciations of the compatible left.

April 20: following that month’s indictment of three APSP members by the Department of Justice, and the introduction of a bill (RESTRICT) that would codify the legal logic behind these indictments, Tucker Carlson platforms APSP. Carlson pointed out the alarming nature of the situation, saying these indictments were “not partisan” but a simple act of political repression. Glenn Greenwald then described how the indictment was an example of the U.S. government using the same methods from the “War on Terror” on its own people. This gave Fox News viewers the idea that an agenda which aligns with Bush-era neoconservatism is an agenda that’s opposed to liberty.

August 10: as surveys have come to show that the majority of Americans now oppose further aid to Ukraine, making it harder for the White House to get such aid packages passed, Biden blackmails his own people. Biden would put Ukraine aid into the relief bill for the Maui fires, effectively coercing the people into letting him continue this war.

September 24: as part of its pro-Ukraine efforts, the Canadian parliament honors a World War II Nazi fighter, which backfires massively. The pro-Ukraine side was confronted with too much backlash to be able to ignore, and was forced to either apologize or invent ineffectual counter-narratives.

October 7: when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hypocritically condemns Hamas for its supposed terrorist attack, even though “Israel” is the terrorist state that provoked Hamas into taking action, the Libertarian Party decries his pro-imperialist stance on Palestine. Wrote the party: “We are the only ones who are actually anti-war in every context. Not just when it's convenient. All of the disenfranchised anti-war supporters of @RobertKennedyJr are welcome in the Libertarian Party.”

October 11: China’s CGTN comments about Tucker Carlson’s statement of opposition towards backing Israel’s war on Gaza: “Within the American political circle, irrational voices like ‘bombing Iran’ regarding the recent Israel-Palestine conflict spread wide. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson hit the point: There's no such thing as ‘a war to end all wars.’ Wars will only beget more war.”

October 17: the APSP denounces the decision by PSL to hold a Palestine rally at the same time and place as APSP’s solidarity rally for its indicted members. APSP’s statements would describe this decision as not only an attack against the Black liberation movement, but also an attempt to exploit the Palestinian cause. They would decry PSL’s leaders for their “willingness to isolate the Palestinian people and struggle by separating it from other anti-colonial struggles, including Africans in the United States.”

October 19: a survey shows that the majority of Americans, including most Republicans, support a ceasefire in Gaza.

November 27: the Rage Against the War Machine organizing coalition announces that on February 17 of this year, it’s going to hold a 2.0 rally, called Defeat the Deep State.

Do the developments I’ve listed mean that MAGA is going to be the vanguard of the revolution, or that communists should start looking to MAGA as a source of leadership? I don’t believe so. But I’ve declined to identify with the “MAGA Communism” brand for a different reason than the liberal-aligned PSL types have. Whereas PSL’s camp views MAGA and anything associated with it as being necessarily “fascist,” I simply see evidence that MAGA and libertarians aren’t the only elements with significant revolutionary potential. There are plenty of working-class people who’ve been coming to anti-imperialism from the left end of the ideological spectrum, such as the Black workers who’ve joined APSP. 

The revolution will exclusively come from neither the left nor the right, but rather from everyone who proves themselves to be compatible with the anti-monopoly cause. And where pro-imperialist habits still exist, like with how conservatives continue to be highly susceptible to anti-China psyops, it’s our job to complete the anti-imperialist education of everyone who’s willing to receive it. Becoming pro-China and pro-Iran is the next logical step of becoming pro-Russia and pro-Syria, as these same conservatives have recently done. (They’ve also been becoming pro-DPRK in a sense, due to Trump’s diplomatic steps with Kim Jong-Un.) All the examples I’ve described of anti-imperialist thought breaking out among these Americans represent openings in the cognitive war. We have the potential to bring millions of our neighbors towards unlearning the lies which keep them divided from so much of humanity.

The recent escalations in our geopolitical and class conflicts have prompted the opportunists, both on the left and the right, to reveal their loyalty towards monopoly finance capital. Our goal needs to be to bring in everyone who still has potential to join with the resistance towards this greatest of enemies. We must promote Defeat the Deep State, and the future events that the RAWM coalition puts on. We must continue to combat the imperial hegemon in the information war, while building the organizational infrastructure needed to keep our movement going as the state intensifies its crackdown. We must train our cadres to defend against the “left” and lumpen counter-gangs, which the feds are preparing to use as violent weapons against anti-imperialists. If we stay on the anti-opportunist path that these events have put us on, we’ll outmaneuver our enemies, and bring the people to victory.

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