It began with the political strategy of Karl Rove to polarize the bastions of White Liberalism from White Conservatism, city from country, San Francisco and Austin from Columbus and Miami, privileged middle class centrists from under-privleged working class rightists, secularists from theocrats, identity politics from patriotism, pro-choice from pro-life, education from politics, intelligence from celebrity, citizen rights from consumer rights, race from nationalism, gender from self, justice from power. And the list goes on.

Bourdieu once pointed out that the Left is several symbolic revolutions behind the Right.

Sentence - sumbolon moving through western currents- coins or bones broken in two parts along an unpredictable divide, the break the proof the holders of the halves are the partners of a contract - even if the holders are not the original partners -- i.e., Ronald Regan with Herbert Kohl laid a wreath at the the Bitburg SS Cemetery, and five months latter Nakasone paid tribute at the National Yasukuni Shrine where WWII war dead are commemorated, signing the registry with his official title. the contract: fascism.

China and Korea protested the later but no one protested the former. In the United States, fascism has long lain dormant. And now its is on the threshold of civil war, again.

The United States today is, once again, headed for civil war, and, once again, it cannot bear to face it. The political problems are both structural and immediate, the crisis both longstanding and accelerating. The American political system has become so overwhelmed by anger that even the most basic tasks of government are increasingly impossible.

The legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government at all levels is in freefall, or, like Congress, with approval ratings hovering around 20%, cannot fall any lower. Right now, elected sheriffs openly promote resistance to federal authority. Right now, militias train and arm themselves in preparation for the fall of the Republic. Right now, doctrines of a radical, unachievable, messianic freedom spread across the internet, on talk radio, on cable television, in the malls.

The consequences of the breakdown of the American system is only now beginning to be felt. January 6 wasn’t a wake-up call; it was a rallying cry. The Capitol police have seen threats against members of Congress increase by 107%. Fred Upton, Republican representative from Michigan, recently shared a message he had received: “I hope you die. I hope everybody in your family dies.” And it’s not just politicians but anyone involved in the running of the electoral system. Death threats have become a standard aspect of the work life of election supervisors and school board members. A third of poll workers, in the aftermath of 2020, said they felt unsafe.

The problem is not who is in power, but the structures of power.

Under such conditions, party politics have become mostly a distraction. The parties and the people in the parties no longer matter much, one way or the other. Blaming one side or the other offers a perverse species of hope. “If only more moderate Republicans were in office, if only bipartisanship could be restored to what it was.” Such hopes are not only reckless but irresponsible. The problem is not who is in power, but the structures of power.

Stephen Marche

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/next-us-civil-war-already-here-we-refuse-to-see-it

For ‘We Late Egyptians,’ protest is NOT enough: Science has been and IS the Cause of the downfall of humanity and the planet. Science is the great force of Nihilism that Nietzsche prophesized.

Today, there is NO effective protest method in the western world to combat what is nothing less than a slaughter of democracy. Not in the US, not in the UK, not in the EU.

Yet, the most effective ‘protests’ in all three of those territories, are led by their neoliberal, austerity ‘governments’. By ultra-right anti-democratic ideologues and fools, and the Robert’s court opposed to human rights, human justice, human equality, and human dignity.

And the greatest en masse supporters of these protesters are the UK and EU parliaments, along with the US congress, along with the national banks, the lobbyists, the global corporate elite, the IMF, the World Bank, the stock exchanges, and the national party organizations that support them.

The original leaders of this global revolution in support of the anti-democratic right, were Thatcher and Reagan.  Their revolutionary method was based on a series of strategies: eliminating taxation for corporations, the elimination of all social welfare, both strategies of which have meant the privatization of taxation and dumping trillions of dollars into the pockets of the already rich.

Thatcher and Reagan began the revolution against democracy, particularly against the post-World War Two democratic order established by FDR, and it’s been the combination of the digitization of the economy, and, the ramping up of social media, that has allowed globalization to occur and undermine the nation state and all the civic values and constitutions that pretend to uphold them.

The FACT is that democracy has been still born. It never existed. But now, even the possibility and poorly functioning version of it, and even the fantasy of it’s existence has been destroyed. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Or, might be a good thing if history reflects these developments in 50 or 100 or 200 years from now; so, future generations might learn what a fantasy the last 200 years have been.

The FACT is that the GLOBAL environment has been destroyed. The FACT is that it cannot and will not be saved. The FACT is that science has failed because the illusion is that science is neutral, while it has since its founding mechanicism and rationalism has worked in league with Capital to produce this state of catastrophe. Science has produced capitalism and allowed it to go rogue against everything it knows. And science repeatedly operates anti-humanistically. Science created the machine that has produced our cesspool world. Science created mechanized warfare, and continues to. Science is nothing more, today, than an notary that poorly attempts to explain how science has destroyed humanity. Science is the archivist and the documentarian of how it itself has ruined an entire world, Earth.

So much for the scientifically caused ‘Enlightenment’. Science is no different than mass media: it simply normalizes and mitigates, unscientifically, the utter catastrophe it itself has visited on perhaps the only unique planet in the cosmos that until now, has supported life. Science, that created the atomic bomb and normalized that by spreading it around the planet, now pretends to suggest that it itself, science, can get humanity out of the impossible hole it has created.

So, let’s put this in perspective: science has created global warming, climate change, capitalism, the ideology of progress, and yet, represents itself as the great savoir, against, itself. To put this in historical terms: modernity IS science; and modernity has destroy the very humanism it created, and a great percentage of the rest of the life on the planet. And it’s not that we were not forewarned. The anti-science philosophers and critics from the 16^th through the 19^th centuries were many, Nietzsche being the greatest of them.

What’s to be done? Probably, nothing, now. It’s too late.