by Gordon M. Hahn
- This is the final part working paper, For Part 1, see https://gordonhahn.com/2021/11/04/working-paper-comparing-the-russian-and-american-revolutions-from-above-part-1/. For Part 2, see https://gordonhahn.com/2021/11/20/working-paper-comparing-the-russian-and-american-revolutions-from-above-part-2/.
The American RFA’s Phase Four: In Power, Removing the Mask
With Biden’s inauguration a new phase in America’s RFA began. No longer was the DP and its state bureaucratic network willing to submit to the constitution, the rule of law, the ‘whims’ of the American citizen, especially the white ‘supremacist’ heterosexual male, or uncertainty in elections and governance. The DP state’s framing of 1/6 and the propaganda campaign it designed in order to convince Americans that it was Trump and his supporters who have been attempted a coup against constitutional republican government have been used to accelerate the RFA. This acceleration has been facilitated by Biden’s entry into th Oval Office and the DP’s House and Senate majorities; all won in the flawed and unfair 2020 elections and allowing the DP to discard the mask of ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy’ and move full speed to establish a single-party dominant authoritarian political system and socialist economic system subordinated to the interests of global oligarchs such as George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, and Klaus Schwab.
Institutional Takeover and Transformation in the RFA
The reform, destruction and/or creation of new institutions for waging the revolutionary political battle evident in the Soviet/Russian RFA and discussed above are present in the developing U.S. RFA. Thus, the Biden administration has moved to radically transform the American population and political system to ensure its permanent hold on the U.S. presidency, Congress, and Supreme Court. Biden’s first order of business upon entering the Oval Office was to submit HR 1 to the Congress for approval. The “For the People Act of 2019,” or H.R. 1 would have federalized all elections. Specifically, it stipulated:
—that all states implement universal, automatic voter registration based on information generated from state databases, such as the notoriously out-of-date voter rolls and other sources bound to contain the names of large numbers of ineligible voters, including illegal aliens.
—that all states allow felons to vote.
—that all states extend periods of early voting.
—that all states allow same-day voter registration, ending states the ability to check information submitted by those registering.
—limiting the ability of states to cooperate and prevent registeration of individuals in multiple states.
—forbidding election observers from working with election officials to challenge suspicious voter registrations.
—disallowing states from adopting their own mail-in voting laws.
—no-fault absentee ballot requirements; the tool easiest and most frequently used by those attempting to steal elections and cast illegal votes.
—requiring that voters without an ID be allowed to vote if they sign a statement attesting that they are who they say they are.
In other words, HR 1 would have legalized all of the unconstitutionally adopted, illegal and improper 2020 election rules: no ID requirement, no signature verification, universal mail-in voting. The Democrats failed to get this bill through the House, forestalling the RFA and establishment of one pillar of the DP’s envisioned single-party dominant regime.[1] With this defeat, the DP moved to the local level to achieve one of the main golas of HR 1: to allow non-citizens, including illegal aliens to vote in America’s elections.[2] The DP’s attempts to legalize 15-20 million illegal aliens through amnesty and make minority-dominated Washington DC and Puerto Rico states are of the same stock as HR 1. These efforts aim to bring into the polls large populations who will tend to vote for the DP’s candidates.
Another way the DP is a moving to dominate a new authoritarian order is an attempt to pack the Supreme Court by adding during the Biden administration additional justices to the court’s traditional nine justices since 1869. Such a move would guarantee the adoption of almost all of the DP’s policy preferences and the Party’s ability to block any moves challenging the constitutionality of the legislation, election practices, and law enforcement practices. Biden set up a commission to study the issue, and it has decided that packing the court would not violate the constitution. So far the body’s only qualms about allowing one administration to shift the high court’s majority in the favor of his own party for decades to come is that it might undermine the court’s authority and legitimacy.[3]
The attempt to alter the conduct of elections and transfer jurisdiction over it from the states’ legislative organs to the federal government and the move to pack the Supreme Court are just a few examples. Another is the recent expansion of the Capitol Police’s (CP) purview and functions by opening field offices outside DC, with the first to be set up in California and Florida, lending it intelligence-gathering functions, and partnering with local prosecutors. In addition, the House passed a new CP budget of $1.9 billion, meaning each congressperson’s security is backed by $3.5 million.[4] It is important to note that this comes in the wake of more than two years of often DP-supported calls for another institutional change to undermine the public order for revolutionary ends: ‘defund the police.’ Together with the Biden administration’s and FBI’s recent claims that the main terrorist threat facing the nation comes from white supremacist groups, everything suggests whom this new secret police organ will be targeting. This development’s authoritarianizing implications are even more obvious when one considers the number of U.S. intelligence and police organs and the special status of secrecy that the CP enjoys. Being an organ of Congress, it is the only police-intel body not open to the scrutiny of FISA disclosures.[5]
The U.S. Congress ‘Select Committee’ on 1/6 is another example of unconstitutionally refashioning institutions for the purpose of political battle, the seizure of power, and regime change. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that the Congress cannot exercise any law enforcement or investigative function, yet the Select Committee has set out its task to be precisely that. Moreover, the Select Committee is issuing subpoenas to gather information on people who did not participate in the storm of the Capitol in any way while at the same time requesting communications companies to provide the Committee with data that receives the greatest of constitutional protection, according to the Court, and that the Committee has no right to access. All of this has been evidenced in excruciating and irrefutable detail by leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald, who is determined to uphold the constitution, rule of law, and Bill of Rights.[6] In sum, the DP is unconstitutionally using Congress, giving it new unconstitutional functions, in order to carry out illegal search and seizures—all clear indications of a RFA aiming to establish authoritarian rule.
If the DP and its state network of revolutionary bureaucrats eventually can get the above measures passed, it will mark to onset of single-party rule and soft authoritarianism in the U.S. With this change of system, the U.S. will be transformed from what is today an increasingly weak republican multiparty system to a de facto (potentially de jure in future) single-party system soft authoritarian system. Although there is a still a long way to go before this is accomplished, the first steps have been taken.
Not surprisingly, as during the perestroika era, elements opposed to the RFA could very well counter with their won institutional reforms, creations, and dissloutions, sparking the institutional instability. One such case could become conservative Republican governor of Florida Ron DeSantis’s proposal to create a special police force to combat election fraud.[7]
Regime Change and the Transformation of Economic Institutions: From Market-State Capitalism or State Socialism
For a long time, the U.S. economy has been becoming a mixed market-based and state-run economy. The managerial revolution in the early 20th century under President Woodrow Wilson, the semi-socialization of the economy under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the creation of an enormous welfare state beginning with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was capped off by Obama’s semi-nationalization of the health care and insurance sectors, constituting 16 percent of the U.S. economy. The Biden administration is now pushing to further statize the economy by adopting environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) first pioneered across the U.S. economy first implemented in communist China. This system will introduce mandatory requirements in terms of ‘equal opportunity’, ‘affirmative action (reverse discrimination) hiring, ecological ‘footprints’, and other state-determined criteria. Those who fail to comply will become ineligible for business and house loans, just as thise who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 are now beginning to be refused medical care and even life-saving organ translants. The administration has introduced a bill to Congress stipulating that the financial institutions report all transactions exceeding $600 to the IRS.
Most disturbingly, the Biden administration has nominated as Comptroller of the Currency, a Marxist professor from Cornell University, Saule Omarova, who not simply grew up in the Soviet Union but was a Komsomol member, a Moscow State University student majoring in Marxism-Leninism, and became an American only because the USSR collapsed wjile she was in the U.S. studying. She has produced transferring all private bank accounts to the Federal Reserve Bank, so that American citizens’ accounts could be tapped for funds in economic emergencies. She has also proposed a ‘golden share’ system (SGS) to be controlled by a new body, the National Investment Authority (NIA). “(T)he creation of a special ‘golden share’ (‘SGS’) regime,” according to Omarova, “would grant direct but strictly conditional corporate governance rights to a designated government representative on the board of each systemically important banking organization.”[8] Once inside the door of the board room this state interference in the financial order can be expanded further into the economy’s other state-defined ‘systematically important’ organizations.
Culture and Ideology in the Soviet/Russian and American RFA
One of the weakness of Russia’s RFA and its goal of establishing a constitutional republican market system was the lack of knowledge of, and commitment to the principles, norms, and values requisite for such a system. The overwhelming majority of Yeltsin’s supporters and fellow officials making the RFA were long-time Party-state apparatchiks steeped in Marxism-Leninism not market economics or Jeffersonian, Madisonian, and Masonian constitutional republicanism. Moreover, almost all of the old Party-state system’s institutions were incorporated into the ‘new’ Russian state apparatus. These apparatchiks and the institutions they still dominated were used to looking to the Party for guidance and a strong state, unaccustomed to compromising, adopting, and implementing policy through a pluralistic legislative process, and increasingly corrupt due to the breakdown of discipline during the perestroika era. This was one of the key breaking mechanisms confounding republican consolidation in post-Soviet Russia and elsewhere in the post-communist world.
This may not be a problem for America’s RFA. First, the ongoing regime transformation is coming out of a pluralist system with freedom of thought, speech, expression, media and so on. Thus, Americam elites have had access to all brand of ideologies and ideas. Indeed, over the last half century principles, norms, values, ideas, and even ideologies very antithetical to capitialist republicanism have come to dominate many American social institutions, setting the stage for the RFA at the grassroots and elite levels. Authoritarianized and radicalized institutions of the new cultural Marxist or communo-fascist bent include: most media, entertainment, and educational institutions. These have produced over a period of nearly half a century with gowing power and ubiquity a nascent official ideological alternative to the traditional capitalist republican one. The DP state’s new cultural Marxist or communo-fascist ideology consists of post-truth nihilism, gender and transgender identitarianism, reverse (anti-white) racism or ‘critical race theory’, socialism (Shwab’s ‘stakeholder capitalism’), and globalism. The DP’s allied teacher unions and the National Association of School Boards along with local DP politicians have been working for years and are continuing work hard to install these ‘isms’ into school curricula after there long insidious degradation of university education in America, where censorship and the ‘cancel culture’ now rule the roost.
The ubiquity of this authoritarian ideology among young people, the intelligentsia, and ethnic and gender minorities suggests that the ideological commitment and unity of the new movement is sufficient enough to support the new and reformed institutions being envisioned. Cultural Marxist propaganda program that insists all whites are genetically racist and thus American institutions are racist has infected the medical professions. It has infiltrated all American institutions now.[9] This can be seen in the mechanistic legalism and legal nihilism prevailing in the legal professions and support for ends over legal means among key actors such as George Soros, the DP, BLM, Antifa, and their allied media. Court decisions routinely flaunt the law and the U.S. constituton, reflecting a radicalization of the the courts, lawyers, and law schools and the dissolution of the traditional American legal culture based on the rule of law.
As mentioned, the ‘insurrection’ has been used by the Biden administration to pursue conservative groups as white supremacist and push through ‘critical race theory’ and transgenderism in America’s schools at an accelerated pace.[10] The U.S. President himself propagandizing this racist ideology.[11] The Biden administration has appointed openy reverse racist intellectuals to top government positions.[12] This is the kind of ideology that would lend itself to supporting not just a single-party dominant regime but one-party authoritarian or even totalitarian state is indispensable and a powerful tool for a clear regime transformation from republicanism to non-democratic rule.
Limited Popular Mobilization in America’s RFA
Finally, there is the issue of limited popular mobilization in our two RFAs. The Russian case briefly discussed above, we can turn to the American. If by mobilization we are speaking of street protests, marches and demonstrations, which occurred and were supported by the revolutionaries above in the Russian case, the point is that for an RFA to be an RFA and not a revolution from below (RFB), the overthrow of the regime must occur by documents – decrees, laws, orders, resolutions – issued by the state organs taken over by the revolutionaries above, as occurred in the Soviet/Russian case. If it occurs through mass disorder and/or violence, the stroming and seizure of government buildings, and capture of the ancien regime’s officials, then we have a case of RFB not RFA. There might very well be popular demonstrations and revolutionaries from above might well mobilize them, but revolutionaries from above will tend to ‘call off the dogs’ and maintain control over the destruction of the old order for themselves. Therefore, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa violent and destructive riots of summer 2020 can be seen as actions supported by the DP and state apparat revolutionaries from above because they could then be framed as critical of Trump and the RP and their ‘institutional racism’ and white supremacists. The mantra of ‘Trump is a fascist’ and so on served the DP state’s election needs for November. Since Biden has taken office, BLM and Antifa have gone almost completely silent. This is precisely because the center of action is inside state bodies now. With the executive branch again under DP control and DP majorities in the House and Senate, the revolution does not need to be ‘televised.’ It can be accomplished in the increasingly dark corridors of the White House and Capitol, hidden away from the American public by the ubiquity of pro-DP media.
Conclusion
The United States is in the midst of a developing RFA. The American republican system’s destruction is still some way from a fait accompli, as the defeat of HR 1 testified. As I noted in Russia’s Revolution from Above, regime transformations are highly contingent. However, revolutionary outcomes become more likely than imposed or ‘pacted’ transitions once a revolutionary situation has been established. A revolutionary situation is defined as the establishment of a credible alternative claim to sovereignty and rule over a particular population and territory. A claim to sovereignty of rule is credible when an alternative ruling or opposition group or front of such allied groups possesses substantial human, financial, informational, intellectual, even perhaps military resources comparable to those possessed by the ruling group or groups that represent and hope to preserve the old order. With the DP’s seizure of power in Washington and its willingness to run roughshod over the constitution and those who would preserve it, one can conclude that a revolutionary situation has been established from above in the United States. But as I also wrote, revolutionary situations are highly contingent and can evolve into RFB’s or one or another form of transition. Indeed, if not for the extent of unconstitutionality and illegality in the actions and policies of the DP and its state apparat network, there would be much in common here with an imposed regime transformation to authoritarianism. Given the strength and commitment of those who hope to preserve the American constitutional republic, there will be no negotiations with the RFA. The options appear to be the success of the RFA, a countering RFB, civil war, or restoration of the old order on the basis of some reformed model. Such a restored market-oriented republic might include, for example, term limits for members of the House and the Senate, a scaled back federal government in social and economic affairs, a strict separation between government and business, and new guarantees of freedom of speech, thought, and media in the new disinformation age – so that such takeovers as the one achieved by the DP and its state network in 2016-2021 can not occur again.
Although the Soviet/Russian RFA and the nascent American RFA each had a different trajectory, they may bring the two countries to very similar places. The former moved Russia from a decaying and reforming one-party totalitarian system to a weak, indeed very fragile constitutional republic and finally through a ‘thermidor’ bringing Putin’s soft, now more mid-range authoritarian single-party dominant system. The American RFA if it succeeds in destroying constitutional republicanism and market capitalism will bring the U.S. to a soft (at least initially) single-party dominant authoritarian regime. It is a great irony that in attempting to destroy American republican political system and market economic system the DP-FBI-led nascent American RFA has used as its propaganda instrument the very same Russia that underwent a pro-democratic, pro-market RFA. Something very strange happened on the way to Andrei Sakharov’s ‘convergence.’
History is full of ironies. Britain’s powerful and global monarchy gave birth to the most powerful revolutionary republican experiment the world had ever known. The powerful Russian autocracy spawned an international communist revolutionary movement—the most powerful global movement the world had ever seen. The respective offsprings of these two monarchies varied in the extreme. The former represented mankind’s foremost endeavor to establish ‘government by, of, and for the people’ under a democratic-republican constitution that saw man’s rights as coming from God or at least being inherent in his very being rather than a temporary loan from the powers that be. The latter wrought hyper-centralized regimes that came closer than any form of rule to establishing total control over every sphere of human life, promised power and rights to one class endowed with the authority to rule by History, and aspired to Man and Machine’s ascension over God-less nature. These two antithetical systems, standing in complete opposition to each other – the communist born in dedication to destroy the capitalist republican – were forced to come together in order to defeat a second totalitarian order in World War II. The task accomplished, the wartime allies broke with each other and split the world apart in the ‘twilight struggle’ of the Cold War. The capitalist republican West prevailed over the communism of the East, but at the height of its triumph abroad the republican metropole, the United States of America and its European allies, were already being hollowed out by a worldview very similar to the one it had defeated. At the moment, we see that it remains a question whether the republican constitutional experiment will enter a new phase or be terminated in favor of a new authoritarian or totalitarian one—this one likely to be more global and more destructive of humanity than the previous strains. There is no external force capable of developing a vaccine against utopian deceptions and virtualities disguising totalitarian power schemes that are now on offer globally. Humankind – Americans first perhaps – must develop immunity rooted in a renewed covenant of natural and equal human, civil, political, and individual rights and liberty for all.
[1] See http://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1.
[2] See https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/democrats-press-forward-non-citizen-voting-vermont-emerges-newest.
[3] See http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/bidens-own-supreme-court-commission-undercuts-court-packing-ambitions.
[4] See https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-capitol-police-armed-with-2-billion and https://news.yahoo.com/capitol-police-expansion-california-florida-014000738.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall and www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/us/politics/capitol-police.html.
[5] See www.rollcall.com/2020/06/15/capitol-police-a-department-shrouded-in-secrecy/.
[6] See one of Greewald’s numerous important investigations in https://greenwald.substack.com/p/civil-liberties-are-being-trampled.
[7] See https://parler.com/feed/186b1ffe-129f-44ff-8d5f-3ea595c4d0b9.
[8] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3715735; https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr2=piv-web&p=Omarova&type=sbc_dial%2FD211US714G0&hspart=att&hsimp=yhs-att_001#id=10&vid=f1e6999673af4e193f32c48f1d1f9015&action=view; https://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=AwrC5padIKFh0H8AAH0snIlQ;_ylu=c2VjA3NyBHNsawN2aWQEdnRpZAMEZ3BvcwM4?p=Omarova&vid=0d9c82f506e8dbad7b2eb3a4b4e6c91a&turl=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOVF.azUfAVGY%252b3T2dX92Z90udw%26pid%3DApi%26h%3D360%26w%3D480%26c%3D7%26rs%3D1&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D6IlYp-PC8rM&tit=%26%2339%3BYou+Used+To+Be+A+Member+Of+The+Young+Commies%3F%26%2339%3B+Kennedy+Grills+Comptroller+Nominee&c=7&h=360&w=480&l=344&sigr=tE94ljrXMSFa&sigt=lmV6s8rj2Dd8&sigi=ttcqBYC3jG51&age=1637252974&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Av&hsimp=yhs-att_001&hspart=att&type=sbc_dial%2FD211US714G0&tt=b; https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-want-them-to-go-bankrupt-saule-omarova-comptroller-biden-nominee-11636668294; https://www.foxnews.com/politics/police-report-reveals-striking-details-biden-nom-saule-omarova-retail-theft-arrest; and https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/saule-omarova-stole-hundreds-of-dollars-of-merchandise-from-a-t-j-maxx/. On golden shares, see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2947208 and https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/05/26/bank-governance-and-systemic-stability-the-golden-share-approach/.
[9] See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00030651211008507?journalCode=apaa&; www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/nyregion/yale-psychiatrist-aruna-khilanani.html?fbclid=IwAR2Zarxwa3K8owSFskvnaQJ4g-4oH0o2RLslr7n7vWyKCBRy7yMcTwpSWx4; http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-kristen-clarke-doj-civil-rights-division; https://issuu.com/wcapsnet/docs/final_statement_on_the_violent_attacks_at_capitol_; http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/15/understand-trumps-support-we-must-think-terms-multiracial-whiteness/?fbclid=IwAR0HlMvJbqufrYHNX6mTl2gHMd91SrVJtrhye9YBl_XzLw5EH_BfesZ4uLs; https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/10/29/we-got-to-take-these-motherfckers-out-rutgers-u-prof-praises-low-white-birth-rates/?fbclid=IwAR3PLuBlBn-xyj4zNHTOwFbuv-Kas9dVuI-H6vKRyPeb2AUvf7xn__QvK5A; and https://twitter.com/RepCori/status/1455310739988783106 and http://www.theblaze.com/news/anti-black-anti-child-anti-woman-and-anti-immigrant-cori-bush-decries-joe-manchin-s-opposition-to-the-build-back-better-act.
[10] See, for example, www.cde.ca.gov/nr/ne/yr21/yr211rel21.asp; www.city-journal.org/calif-ethnic-studies-curriculum-accuses-christianity-of-theocide; www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/california-curriculum-accuses-christians-of-theocide-encourages-chanting-to-pagan-gods/.
[11] See http://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/02/16/biden-former-military-police-fueling-growth-of-white-supremacy-groups/.
[12] See https://gordonhahn.com/2021/03/01/ebony-ivory-postmodernism-and-the-new-american-communo-fascists/ and http://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-un-ambassador-says-white-supremacy-weaved-into-americas-founding-documents).
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About the Author – Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, www.cetisresearch.org. Dr. Hahn is the author of The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, forthcoming in 2021), Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018), The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn also has taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and the Hoover Institution.