Kevin Barrett, Does the Presidential Election Matter?

Will the 2020 elections change history? If they do, it won’t be because one or the other candidate won, but because they accelerated the polarization that brought down the American empire.

Political partisans, including most of the mainstream media (MSM) are screaming from the rooftops that the fate of the known universe depends on the outcome of Trump v. Biden. The dominant anti-Trump MSM faction casts Trump as a new Hitler who has exterminated more than 200,000 Americans in a coronavirus holocaust. (Why not say six million and imprison anyone who disagrees?)

Critics say Trump is a malignant narcissist and egomaniac—which is true. They call him a mental midget, or as several of his senior military advisors have said, a “moron,” which is also true. They say Trump has wrecked the system of so-called alliances with occupied vassal states on which the US empire depends. That, unfortunately, is not entirely true, but give Trump another term and he might get there.

If Donald Trump did actually finish off the Anglo-Zionist Empire, the good news is that he would go down in history as a hero of world-historical stature. The bad news, for Trump’s ego anyway, is that he would be credited with destroying the evil empire through sheer incompetence. If such happens, insha’Allah, perhaps he will be immortalized by statues of him stumbling on a stairway, whiffing at a golf ball, or ingesting vast quantities of junk food and diet coke while staring hypnotized at a big screen tuned to Fox News. Future archeologists will decipher the lapidary legend: “My name is Donald J. Trump, king of kings; look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Such would be a fitting epitaph for our age, and for the obese imperial colossus that sat bestride it.

The liberal MSM pundits who envision Trump destroying the USA and its Empire imagine that a Biden presidency would, by contrast, save America, and perhaps the world. Biden, they say, would patch up US “alliances” and resurrect the moribund institutions by which the US has dominated the planet since World War II. According to the never-Trumpers, Biden will slay the coronavirus, stop Global Warming, rehabilitate America’s reputation and soft power, put Russia and China in their places, save Israel from its own hubris, and refrain from tweeting utterly insane things every 20 or 30 seconds.

Pro-Trump pundits offer a mirror-image vision of “why the world will end if our candidate loses.” They imagine that if Biden wins, George Soros and his legion of Antifa terrorists will take over America, burning and looting whatever is left in the stores after the next COVID lockdown. Law-abiding citizens’ guns will be confiscated. America’s borders will be flooded by (nonwhite) immigrants, crime will rage out of control, police will call in sick, the internet will be purged of conservative voices, and brain-dead Biden will quickly be replaced by a vicious prosecutor named Commissar Kamala who will become America’s first ethnically-ambiguous female dictator.

In contrast to the cartoonish visions of political partisans, history suggests that it matters less and less who gets elected president. Each succeeding election becomes the new “least consequential election in US history,” and the 2020 election appears to be no exception. Candidates are selected by an oligarchy of politically-active billionaires who set strict limits on policy agendas. No president ever has the political capital to pursue more than one or two major policy proposals, which generally get watered down anyway even if eventually approved.

No US president has imagined that he is really president since JFK was executed for that crime in 1963. And since the Trilateral Commission chose an obscure Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter to launch the neoliberal revolution in 1976—and then replaced him with the more radical Ronald Reagan in 1980—the oligarchs haven’t even bothered to go through the motions of pretending America is a democracy. The 2003 introduction of black box voting machines, better termed vote-fabricating machines, formalized the permanent state of emergency inaugurated by the 9/11/2001 National Security Special Event Day.

Donald Trump campaigned on a long list of extravagant promises: End all foreign wars and reveal “who really did 9/11,” bring the troops home, pull out of the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), ban all Muslims from entering the US, wall off the entire southern border at Mexico’s expense, end NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP and all trade treaties, bring manufacturing back to America, end NATO and all alliances (unless the vassals vastly increase their tribute payments, which they won’t), rebuild America’s infrastructure, demand and get vastly better trade terms from China, resurrect 1950s-style family values, and restore Americans’ pride in their history. These are, in essence, the specifics behind Trump’s promise to “make America great again.”

So how much of that agenda did Trump accomplish? Only the tiny fraction supported by oligarchs. A cabal of Zionist-extremist plutocrats wanted to pull out of the JCPOA and exert “maximum pressure” on Iran, so Trump was allowed, or directed, to pursue that insane and inhuman initiative. Other than that, Trump fulfilled none of his promises, because the oligarchs wouldn’t let him. Instead, following oligarchs’ orders, Trump lavished money on tax cuts for billionaires and record increases in the military budget. Aside from Iran policy, a Hillary Clinton presidency wouldn’t have been all that different; Clinton might have thrown slightly less money at the billionaires and the military-industrial complex, but not enough less for ordinary people to notice.

Trump is hardly unusual; recent presidents have increasingly accomplished less and less of whatever their ostensible policy agenda was supposed to be. Obama was elected to close Guantanamo, end torture, end the 9/11 wars, prosecute the war criminals, restore the Constitution and the rule of law both domestically and internationally, reduce economic inequality and racial disparities, and stop wasting money on foreign wars in favor of domestic spending while increasing average Americans’ standard of living. Needless to say he did not accomplish any of those things, as predicted by my 2008 book Questioning the War on Terror.

Previous presidents were almost equally ineffectual. George W. Bush (2000-2008) was elected on promises to end America’s role as world policeman—and, incidentally, stop kidnapping pro-Palestinian Muslims on fake terror charges. (The Muslim vote put Bush in office.) Instead, Bush was himself kidnapped on 9/11/2001 when his orders to fly from Florida to Washington, DC were disobeyed, and he was coerced into spending the rest of his presidency reading from the neocon-Zionist 9/11 coup perpetrators’ script.

Bill Clinton (1992-2000) like Trump and Obama came into office pushing significant policy initiatives: He charged his wife Hillary with shepherding a single-payer national health care plan through Congress, and he intended to force Israel to completely withdraw from 1967-occuppied territories in return for peace. But the insurance lobby demolished the former plan, while the Zionist lobby and its agent Monica Lewinsky devoured the latter. So all Clinton really accomplished was neoliberalizing the globe under billionaire orders (and learning who really runs the world).

So whether Trump wins a second term or Biden replaces him, the US empire will mostly likely continue to decline in more or less the same fashion. Hostility, sanctions, and the possibility of war will dominate relations with Russia and China. Biden might return to the JCPOA, easing overt tensions with Iran, but the covert Zionist-directed war on the Islamic Republic will continue no matter who is in office. Meanwhile ordinary Americans will continue to be plundered by the oligarchs, the military-industrial complex and its Zionist friends, and other powerful special interests. A private bankers’ cabal will keep creating the entire currency supply out of nothing by lending it into existence at compound interest. Debt will keep increasing and the petrodollar will keep slipping toward the precipice. Infrastructure will continue to crumble. There will be no national public health care because the oligarchs and insurance companies won’t allow it. Manners and morals will continue to decline. Oligarch-directed hoaxes and lies, along with bread and circuses, will distract the public. In short, nothing will really change.

This year more than ever, American voters have been whipped into a frenzy of sound of fury signifying nothing. When the hoodwinked sheeple yank the levers of their rigged voting machines, like suckers yanking levers of Sheldon Adelson’s rigged slot machines in Las Vegas, they may think they are participating in the making of history—when all they are really doing is demonstrating their own ignorance and gullibility.

The Real Issue: Polarization-Induced Civil Strife

But by working themselves up into a political lather, and yanking those voting machine levers so hard, the voters might actually be helping make history—but not in the way they intended. They may be setting themselves and their country up for a failure of epic proportions. (Whether that failure would be the deliberate result of a plan by the globalist elite to divide-and-conquer America in service to The Great Reset is beyond the scope of this article.)

The United States of America has experienced countless episodes of mass domestic violence, but only two all-out civil wars (in the 1770s and 1860s).[1] Today, many observers expect a post-election flare up of unrest that could conceivably erupt into another civil war—or even multiple civil wars.

The levels of polarization and fanaticism seen today have not been witnessed since 1860, when an unusually galvanizing election set the stage for what has been variously termed the American Civil War, the War Between the States, or (among Confederate sympathizers) the War of Northern Aggression. The parallels between the 1860 and 2020 elections are suggestive. In both cases, party realignment had destabilized the political system. In 1860, the Republican and Constitution Parties were new, while the dominant Democratic Party had split into two factions over the issue of slavery in the Western territories. Likewise, in 2020, voters will choose from political parties that have shifted positions: Trump’s newly populist Republican Party has attracted much of what used to be the Democrats’ working class base, while the Democrats have shamelessly embraced their new identity as the party of the “moderate” billionaire oligarchs[2]—exactly what the Republican Party used to be!

Like the 1860 election, the 2020 election will poll a starkly divided nation worked up into a frenzy over race-related issues, facing a stark choice about the future direction of the nation. In 1860, the key issue was whether new states in the Western territories should allow slavery. If slavery was banned in all new states, as Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln urged, the southern slave states would become an increasingly disempowered and untenable minority faction in the Union, eventually facing economic ruin as the tariff-loving industrial North grabbed an ever-greater share of the South’s wealth. When Lincoln won, southern leaders foresaw looming disaster, and felt compelled to secede from the Union in hopes of saving their economy and preserving their sovereignty.

In 2020, populist conservatives likewise feel existentially threatened—and might want to fight and/or secede if they lose. Just as the looming demolition of the slave system foretold an apocalyptic end to the antebellum South, today onrushing demographic change threatens white majority America. Alongside that demographic change, which promises to reduce whites to minority status by 2044, the destruction of working class jobs through global outsourcing and automation threatens to impoverish much of what was once the (mostly white) American middle class. Meanwhile religious and family values are eroding, in part due to an all-out ideological assault by a media and academy dominated by secular-progressive, disproportionately Jewish elites. Those increasingly radical elites embrace all varieties of victimization-based identity politics—starting with a pro-Zionist Jewish identity politics aimed at maintaining Jewish privilege—while casting whites as monolithic villains whose efforts to defend their own interests are relentlessly demonized.

Today white identity advocates like Kevin MacDonald and Jared Taylor, and their fellow travelers in the pro-Trump camp, feel about the same way southerners did in 1860: If the election swings the wrong way, they will witness the annihilation of their country and way of life. Better to go down fighting, many say, than accept such an inglorious fate. Like the secessionists of 1860, today’s rebels may react to a Biden win by picking up their guns in support of Trump’s efforts to contest the results. Out of the resulting chaos might emerge a series of armed confrontations between various rural (pro-Trump) and urban (pro-Biden) areas, as well as a larger clash between red states and blue states that could conceivably escalate into a Civil War Redux. How the US military (split between pro- and anti-Trump factions) and local and state police (mostly pro-Trump) would react remains to be seen.

But Trump supporters are not the only ones who might react violently to an election loss. If Trump wins, or claims victory, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa protests from last summer will likely flare up into a series of regional brushfires, if not a nationwide inferno. The dominant liberal faction of the mainstream media (MSM) will echo Biden’s June 11 statement that the military should “escort Trump from the White House with dispatch.” Militias and Trump sympathizers in the military might mount an armed resistance against Trump’s forceful ejection from the White House. The violence could easily spiral out of control.

Skeptics may say: Sure, there is plenty of chatter about post-election violence. But is there any actual evidence supporting the notion that this election is different from any other, and that people are more likely to violently contest the outcome? The answer is: Yes there is. A series of polls by YouGov shows that the number of Americans who believe violence is justified for their political party to achieve its goals has risen dramatically in just three years. In 2017, eight percent of Americans supported political violence on behalf of their party. In 2018 it was 12%, in 2019 over 15%, and by June 2020 it had doubled to 30%! The latest poll, taken in September 2020, found that 33% of Democrats and 36% of Republicans support partisan political violence.

Another factor driving potential post-election chaos is pent-up frustration over the COVID-19 lockdowns and the economic and social damage they have inflicted. Democrats have blamed Trump for all the COVID damage, with some success. Many Republicans, however, believe COVID was deliberately unleashed, and/or exaggerated, in order to overthrow Trump. (It is true that without COVID, Trump probably would have ridden the strong economy to an easy re-election; and it is also true that COVID is probably a deliberately-released biological weapon, though Trump was almost certainly not the main target.)

As Americans have had their lives upended and degraded by the pandemic and lockdowns, they have been divided into two camps, each scapegoating the other for the terrible situation. History has shown how such mass scapegoating can devolve into mass bloodshed.[3] The underlying factors driving America’s current trajectory toward civil war—including demographic change, the decline of religion, the rise of identity politics and the culture of narcissism, and economic inequality and the impoverishment of the working and middle classes—are growing stronger every year. Polarization around the grotesquely divisive figure of Donald Trump may serve as the catalyst that sets off a chain reaction of violence.

As conservative pastor Chuck Baldwin writes, “Trump’s vulgarities, blasphemies, duplicities, thefts, immoralities, racism, narcissism, covetousness, self-deification, misogyny, unconstitutional conduct and mass murders disqualify him from being elected dog catcher, much less President of the United States.” But Trump’s Republican supporters, like Democrats who supported serial rapist Bill Clinton and his rape-enabling wife Hillary, or war criminal Obama, or corrupt apparatchik and likely sex criminal Biden, follow President Roosevelt’s reasoning about the vicious dictator Somoza: “He may be a son of a b*tch, but he’s our son of a b*tch.”

An election driven by such unprecedented levels of mutual hatred, with both sides increasingly ready to pull triggers rather than voting machine levers, could turn out to be a national booby-trap. Whether it goes off in ten days, ten weeks, or ten years—or miraculously fails to go off at all—will (unlike the minor issue of who wins) determine the course of history.

An earlier version of this article was first published in Crescent International

Notes

[1] The American Revolution was in fact a civil war between colonists in British North America, and involved massive bloodletting between revolutionary and anti-revolutionary factions.

[2] The “moderate” Democrat oligarchs are funding “radical” causes like BLM and Antifa as a divide-and-conquer strategy against the working and middle classes. They are fomenting strife around identity politics, especially race, in order to lure leftists away from Bernie Sanders style proposals to redistribute wealth. Antifa and BLM extremism also serve to discredit “leftism” (and by extension Bernie Sanders’ agenda) in the eyes of the majority of working- and middle-class Americans.

[3] On the many holocausts and genocides of recent history, see Gideon Polya’s US-Imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide. For a deeper analysis of how an innate human tendency toward scapegoating and human sacrifice are the source of such atrocities, see René Girard.