Political Observer on the Snyder’s programmatic chatter!

Opinion US politics & policy

Headline: The Republican blueprint for power contains the seeds of its own demise

Sub-headline: It is not too late to stop the descent of the American political order into tyranny, oligarchy or anarchy

https://www.ft.com/content/a7eea0af-bf9f-4635-812b-271c30620e72

Regular readers of Mr. Snyder can’t forget this propaganda intervention for the 2014 Ukrainian Coup :

(https://www.eurozine.com/UserFiles/docs/Kyiv_2014/Programme_Public_EN.pdf)

Editor:

The Ukrainian Coup was the work of may hands: Victoria Nuland, Jeffrey Pyatt, The E.U., in the deep background Barack Obama, George Soros, NATO. The reader need only check the participants, the bad faith actors of Western Imperialism circa 2014, in the link to the program: Timothy Snyder, Leon Wieseltier, Bernard-Henri Lévy and many others.

Editor: Under the rubric of ‘Particle Solidarity’ there is this:

This gathering was the initiative of Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic and Timothy Snyder of Yale University and was made possible by the willingness of colleagues to heed their call and agree to participate in great haste, and by the creativity and hard work of Tatiana Zhurzhenko and Oksana Forostyna. A number of partner institutions helped transform an idea into an event: the Batory Foundation, the Embassy of Canada, the Embassy of France, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Embassy of the Republic of Poland, the Embassy of the United States of America, the European Endowment for Democracy, the European Forum for Ukraine, the Network of European Cultural Journals Eurozine, the Goethe-Institut, the Institut Français d’Ukraine, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), the International Renaissance Foundation, the Ukrainian cultural journal Krytyka, the National University “Kyiv Mohyla Academy,” the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the National Endowment for Democracy, The New Republic, the Open Ukraine Foundation, the PinchukArtCentre, the Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies “Tkuma,” the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, and the Visual Culture Research Center.

Editor: for questions about Ukraine and its Political History rely on:

Ivan Katchanovski

University of Ottawa | Université d’Ottawa, School of Political Studies, Department Member

https://uottawa.academia.edu/IvanKatchanovski

Given the above, Mr. Snyder’s first three paragraphs sets the tone of his essay, wan polemic that metastasizes into hysteria mongering.

This week, Republicans reminded us of the alternatives to republics, hosting a convention that showed how the American one could be brought down. They summoned up three variants of collapse: tyranny, oligarchy and anarchy. 

A tyrant emerges through a system that he breaks. Long before the assassination attempt on him last weekend, Donald Trump had transformed the Republican party into a cult of personality. As a convicted criminal running for office, he undoes the expectation of any rule of law. He has challenged the principle of succession in the US by encouraging the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He claims to be winner of all elections, regardless of the vote, and that he should be allowed to remain president indefinitely. His vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, endorses his defiance of vote counts, past and present. Trump promises mass deportations, detention camps and military tribunals, actions that would change the American regime type.

Yet the tyrant might be less important than the oligarchs behind him. Whereas Trump can slip through the gaps of the legal system, his backers waltz through the cellophane barrier between money and politics. The right metric for predicting Trump’s vice-presidential pick was simple: what do these supporters want?

Editor: What escapes Mr. Snyder’s historical grasp is that the Tea Party utterly changed, in deed radicalized the Republican Party, from it’s base in the House of Representatives: this Tea Party clique primaried those thought to be insufficiently radical : The Proud Boys, Trump & January 6 were its issue, to be reductive. While the New Democrats, in the person of Hillary Clinton, called out ‘the deplorables’, demonstrating her contempt, for those who don’t share her highfalutin sense of self, and her position as political arbiter, mired in class bias.

Editor: Mr. Snyder names the Trump Fellow Travelers:

The most important is Vladimir Putin, whose propagandists adore Trump and celebrate Vance. David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor, included Russian propaganda tropes in his speech at the convention. Like Elon Musk, whose changes to X, his social media platform, have helped the Russian cause, Sacks supported Vance. In the background is Peter Thiel, without whom Vance would not have become a wealthy politician.

Editor: Snyder names the very people who read The Financial Times, that usually acts as apologists for the predations of Capital. The Reader has to wonder at Snyder and The Financial Time’s lack of – while The New Democrats can’t quite bring themselves to jettison Joe Biden: The Trump/Vance ticket is of such toxic magnitude as presented by Snyder … Name this trading on Political Chaos! Reader there are only 625 words left in this diatribe, I will engage in some self-serving pruning!

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These oligarchs’ own platform is anarchy.

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The war in Ukraine, an atrocity in itself, is also a test case for the aspiring global anarchists.

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Ukraine also defends the international order in a broader, geopolitical sense, demonstrating that major offensive operations are difficult

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By defying a nuclear power, Ukraine is also making nuclear proliferation and thus nuclear war much less likely.

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If it becomes weak enough, it can, like Russia, become an oligarchy in which a few rich men can openly call the shots. A failing state will not regulate social media, which will make it easier for the digital oligarchs to profit by anarchising our daily lives.

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The anarchy can seem fun, at least for a while. With some luck, chaos can bring political fruit.

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 The strongman act of Trump and Vance distracts from their blatant dependence on the wealthy. Their threat to deport migrants shrouds the reality that none of the relevant oligarchs was born in the US, that Trump married two migrants and that Vance married the daughter of migrants.

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As the billionaires claim power ever more openly (oligarchy), they put pressure on the aspiring authoritarians who are supposed to be the strongmen (tyranny). The people who want a strongman don’t want him to be a puppet. Signs of strain were certainly evident at the convention.

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Political Observer