One More Time About My Homeland: America’s Revolution from Above, Cold Civil War, and Looming Constitutional Crisis

 [In honor of my father, Gordon M. Hahn Sr., who passed away six years ago and whose birthday is today]

Introduction

         The longest living republic, the United States of America, is on the brink of an existential crisis. It is the consequence of social and political degradation and the eroding effect of ‘democratic imperialism’ or global hegemony to which it rose in the 20^th century. As in a Greek tragedy, at its greatest height the American republic is collapsing before our eyes as a result of its astounding success. International chaos and the republican project’s attractiveness drew America to the dangerous temptations of ‘foreign entanglements’ and ultimately global power that the republic’s founders warned against. Unlimited power abroad generated passion for the same at home. One of the republic’s Achilles’ heels – the legacy of slavery and racism in the South – has been manipulated and extended to numerous real and imagined identity groups in order to sew hatred and distrust in service of those now seeking unlimited power in the republic. Their revolution from above against free market republicanism has sparked a cold civil war that threatens to become hot in the not too distant future. The upcoming federal elections could be the spark that ignites a tinderbox of rising tensions, perversions, hatreds, and horrors to conflagration.

The Rise of Socialist Indentitarianism in America and the World

Great powers risk their republican government if they have one. The need for a powerful military-security apparatus and fears about enemy forces and agents weakening the great power lead to a dissolution of natural law principles and ultimately most if not all civil, political, and human rights. The United States’ lone superpower status at the Cold War’s end led to the great empowerment of the military-security state apparati. A conditioning factor in the development of such a state, which might have been a more gradual evolution otherwise, was the U.S. rise to co-superpower status with the USSR after World War II. The struggle to win the Cold War prompted to the first wave of de-republicanization, security state empowerment, and violations of natural law principles.

The end of the Cold War offered an opportunity to return to the founding fathers’ original principles of distance from European conflicts and large military and security apparati, but 9/11 intervened and invigorated the military-security state to new heights. The Patriot Act, among other things, allowed police agents to write their own, open-ended search warrants, a violation of American revolution’s principle of specific search warrants signed off on by a court, not a secret court and a security agent’s brief. The CIA, NSA, and FBI began spying on Americans, stripping them of their right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” under the Fourth Amendment. Since then the American state’s violations of Americans’ natural law rights have expanded and intensified further.

New energy in the military-security state’s war against American rights was injected by Barack Obama. The Obama administration was not motivated by the impulse for state security and American hegemony. Instead, it was motivated by cultural Marxism or commune-fascism, a worldview that mixed class, racial, and gender hatred of the ‘rich white male.’ The focus of the military-security state began to be shifted to the tasks of ‘equalling the playing field’ (discrimination) and exacting revenge against the white supremacist capitalism in the name of socialism, non-whites, women, gays, and transgenderists – socialist identitarianism. This socialist identitarianism is a soft version of fascism (national socialism) with communist face—communo-fascism. It involves political economic fascism in its alliance of large capital with the military-security state, the reverse racism and identitarianism of ‘cultural Marxism’, and a primarily anti-Christian secularism. The power of the military-security state began to be deployed abroad in the service of the globalization of this presently soft communo-fascism or socialist identitarianism. Obama’s socialist identitarianism attacked American republicanism immediately when the Affordable Care Act and response to the 2008 financial collapse were rammed down the throat of Congress in the form of two 1-000-2,000-page bills adopted in days, precluding a full reading of the legislation not to mention a thorough discussion in Congress by the people’s representatives. Obama then moved to rapidly issue of executive decrees in what liberal constitutional expert Jonathan Turley called Obama’s ‘imperial presidency.’ While Obama’s administration was destroying republican government at home, abroad it was backing coups in Egypt and Ukraine and violent color revolutions in Libya and Syria as part of ‘democracy-promotion’. This new form of American revolutionism – one substituting socialist identitarianism for actual ‘democracy’ – would soon come home to roost.

America’s Revolution from Above

Russiagate, the impeachments of President Donald Trump, the fraudulent 2020 presidential election, the largely false flag 1/6 operation and subsequent prosecutions, and now an unprecedented five criminal cases brought against leading presidential candidate Trump are just some of the elements of an ongoing revolution from above led by the Obama and Biden (Obama third term) administrations against the American republic. Revolutions from above in contrast to revolutions from below are carried out by state actors – officials, institutions – rather than by opposition organizations in society in order to overthrow the existing political, economic, and social order. The American revolution from above began at the latest with the Obama administration-Clinton campaign’s conspiracy against the campaign of Donald Trump be deploying the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other state institutions, along with allied media, to accuse Trump publicly of treason. The now exposed criminal activity of then Vice President Biden and his son Hunter as well as the Clinton campaign’s use of the FBI to slander Trump (and later impeach Trump) requires efforts to ensure that neither Trump nor any other Republican Party president or majority in Congress is elected that would be willing to investigate their anti-constitutional, criminal use of the justice system and FBI to slant the elections and conduct other illegal and anti-constitutional activity in order accomplish their partisan political tasks. Thus, this revolution now aims to create a single-party dominant, soft authoritarian system in order to complete and consolidate a new socialist-identitarian state. This is the purpose behind the five indictments of Trump handed down this year, for these indictments also incriminate the Republican Party and indeed all conservatives, as Trump is the most popular politician on the right and leads opinion polls on Republican presidential candidates by a large margin.* Perhaps like the Stalinist show trials successful prosecutions in the trumped up cases against ‘insurrectionists’ and a presidential candidate will open the raod to ever widening circles of repressions for incorrect political opinions.

America’s Cold Civil War

       The revolution from above’s early successes – the Trump impeachments, the Democrats’ acceptance of the Russiagate and 6/1 scenarios proffered by the Democrat-security state regime, Biden’s fraudulent election ‘victory’, and the recent Trump indictments – have sparked a conservative backlash, creating what is a cold American civil war. This war consists of two diametrically opposed ideologies, two antithetical interpretations of American history, two conflicting political allegiances, and two counteropposite moral orientations. Ideologically, the Democrat Party-state proselytizes a soft communo-fascist ideology – ‘a cultural Marxism’ or socialist identitarianism – based on charges that the US political and economic systems and Constitution were and are structured to institutionalize capitalist, racist, sexist, and genderist repression. The Republican Party and other conservative elements argue that the Constitution ensures equal opportunity and all manner of human freedoms, but it is no longer adhered to as a result of the radicalization and corruption of the Democrat Party and its allies in the state bureaucracy, including the judiciary – the Democrat Party-state.

The two sides have completely contradictory interpretations of American history. For the Democrat Party-state, putting aside its many purely cynical opportunists and careerists, American history is a horrific story of racial genocide, massive poverty created supposedly by the exhorbitant riches of a privileged white male ruling class, and by capitalist imperialism abroad victimizes non-white races and women through colonialism, wealth extraction, economic dependence, and support for authoritarian regimes. For the Republican/conservative camp, American civilization has been the brightest light of human history. American exceptionalism has eliminated to the extent humanly possible poverty, nationalism, and authoritarianism at home and abroad, creating a shining city on the hill that stands above the usual human pattern. In this view, American power has been used abroad only to defend and spread democracy, saving the world from fascist and communist totalitarianism in World War II and the Cold War, respectively. Although some conservative elties acknowledge the excesses of the use of American abroad, many and certainly the vast majority of everyday conservatives do not.

The two sides have conflicting political and economic allegiances and orientations. The ‘right’ stands for free markets (thought there is a divide between the oligarchic establishment and entrepreneurial middle-class everyday people), political pluralism, a limited state, natural law freedoms, especially freedom of speech. The left supports a strong state with a powerful autonomous managerial elite, allies with oligarchs, and seeks to limit market and natural law freedoms, especially freedom of speech. The two orientations’ moral foundations are directly counterposed. The right draws its moral principles from religious teachings, while the left rejects religion or applies it in limited, secularized forms, encouraging paganism, transgenderism, and transhumanism. In sum, living in two distinct political and economic cultural worlds, Americans no longer share a united worldview. They live in two separate countries of their imaginations, hopes, fears, and plans. This civilizational divide has sparked the new civil war. Each side sees the other as totalitarian in nature, constituting a ‘threat to democracy’. The Democrat Party-state is using the justice system, law enforcement, and intelligence bodies to repress Republicans’ rights and freedoms in ways never imaginable to them. In this way, its instigating role in the revolution from above and the resulting cold civil war is carried out with a false veneer of legality and the rule of law in the old American tradition. In response, conservatives are increasingly discussing the morality of civil disobedience, revolutionary activity, and secession. The next election cycle is likely to incite a watershed event of political violence that could escalated the cold civil war into a hot one.  

Looming Constitutional Crisis

There is a looming constitutional crisis hanging over the US political system and the American people. The confluence of multiple Trump indictments, the Republican controlled House’s likely impeachment of President Biden, and imminent presidential and general election campaigns are its drivers. What is the legal outcome if Trump wins the election but has already been found guilty of a felony? Does the Biden administration leave office? What replaces it? If it remains in power until a new election is held, what are the parameters of this mid-term presidential election? Who will determine them? Will the Biden administration find a pretext to cancel the elections, if both Joe and Hunter are at risk of being indicted or found guilty of the crimes they have committed or if an impeachment trial destroys any chance he can win re-election?

If you think this is far fetched, just read a recent New York Times “guest” opinion piece by a “contributing editor” “The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way” (www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/opinion/elections-democracy.html). You guessed it: the author recommends ending popular elections in the American republic. Recommeding the selection of US leaders by random, so-called sortition, he writes: “How do we make sure that citizens chosen randomly are capable of governing? In ancient Athens, people had a choice about whether to participate in the lottery. They also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties. In America, imagine that anyone who wants to enter the pool has to pass a civics test — the same standard as immigrants applying for citizenship. We might wind up with leaders who understand the Constitution.”  One wonders why sortition-selected leaders would need to understand the Constitution, since they would be selected in violation of it in its current edition. And given the woeful legality in our immigrations processes, using its “standard” of passing a citizenship test is suspicious, especially as one would like to know who decides who designs the test. In case the author has not noticed, Americans’ ability to organize and implement rules, procedures, and institutions that are free, balanced and representative of the people or even common sense is in steep decline. Recent criteria for employment, publication, and acceptance in much of American society involved declaring allegiance to wearing useless masks, being injected with virtually untested, often harmful drugs, and asserting that men and women are the same and that the elections in which ballots filled put by who knows who were dumped in unmonitored drop boxes positioned by groups that supported one of the parties were ‘the most honest elections in history.”  

But the ins and outs of sortition versus popular elections of people’s representatives is not the genesis of this article. The genesis is the complete degeneration of American political culture and a desire to send out a trial balloon for cancelling, not reforming American elections. Elections are an institution, and American politics are steadily abandoning its republican institutions, moving into the streets of revolution and civil war.

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* For more on America’s still incomplete revolution from above, see ; https://gordonhahn.com/2021/10/29/the-russian-and-american-revolutions-from-above-in-comparative-perspective-tentative-conclusions/; https://gordonhahn.com/2021/11/04/working-paper-comparing-the-russian-and-american-revolutions-from-above-part-1/; https://gordonhahn.com/2021/11/20/working-paper-comparing-the-russian-and-american-revolutions-from-above-part-2/; and https://gordonhahn.com/2022/01/06/working-paper-comparing-the-russian-and-american-revolutions-from-above-part-3-conclusion/. On revolution from above in Russia and in comparative perspective, see Gordon M. Hahn, Russia’s Revolution from Above: Reform, Transition, and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime (London: Routledge, 2014; New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002).

        

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About the Author –

Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 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 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 was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.