There is a feeling in dissident circles that “the worse things are, the better,” when it comes to the crumbling might of the American Empire. I don’t really buy this, sorry. The country may be crumbling and people may be getting poorer and more desperate, but that doesn’t mean that the budget of the secret police will be slashed anytime soon. Quite the opposite, in fact. So long as the secret police gets funded, the criminals will stay in power and the shakier their hold gets, the more they’ll need to rely on the secret police. Things will get worse for dissidents when the situation gets more critical, not better.
In terms of talking about contacts with the secret police, the National Security Letter is designed precisely to prevent this. Even to admit to having seen one is to court jail. They don't always use this, obviously, but it's impossible to know how often they are used by the very nature of it.
One effective resistance tactic, historically, is obscurantism. We're already doing this, e.g. esoteric meme culture. The Poles did something very similar in the 80s. Their underground punk scene, which served as a propaganda arm for the Solidarity movement, adopted a lyrical style that was deliberately opaque to those not in the know. When the archives were opened up after communism fell, it turned out that this had been very effective: agents sent out to infiltrate had been left utterly baffled by what they were hearing.
The secret police is definitely being expanded in the US. The IRS is being made much larger in order to squeeze the taxpayer, and I think we can all guess which taxpayers they'll be sicced on. The IRS is also going to be armed, now. So we'll be able to add economic repression to the list of tactics the regime uses to suppress domestic dissent.
I am confused about the intelligence services, at least in the French context. I have met a few students whose goal was to join them. When I occasionally meet one, I ask them about what they do now and some have answered that they work for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which means that they have probably joined domestic intelligence. They are all patriotic or nationalistic and heavily conservative. I have also met people who have retired from the intelligence services and they are patriotic and conservative too; one is even reactionary and royalist. These people also have an uncanny ability about never uttering any useful info about their former jobs. So I could not figure out whether most people there were patriotic or conservative or whether they are outliers. I have never met anyone in active positions in the intelligence services, however their personnel is supposed to remain dissimulated under innocuous job descriptions. Thus there are patriots in the secret police but I cannot fathom their actual numbers and power.
That said there are signs that the intelligence services work first and foremost for themselves and co-operate with their peers for their own good standing. They have official secret budget allocations from parliament but they also seem to run dark budgets. The CIA has been shown to be involved in drug trafficking in the past. In France during the celebrations of the first world war, the delegation from Kosovo was treated with great consideration whereas the Serbian delegation was treated with despise; the mere presence of a delegation from Kosovo made no sense. Furthermore a novelist portrayed as having contacts in the intelligence services has described several Western intelligence services running cigarettes, drugs, and arms traffics through Kosovo. Kosovo has also been described by many papers as a state run the local mafia. This has lead me to conclude that the French intelligence services, the CIA and others run all sorts of lucrative trafics and have dark budgets. They also have access to arsonists and assassins from the mafias they work with.
So the intelligence services work first for themselves and in association with their peers. Loyalty to the government or to the top civil servants comes second in my opinion. Some old episodes in France show this. In 1980 or so the French services received the betrayal of a top official in the KGB. They chose not to tell the president because there was an election in 1981 and waited for the new president to be elected. They did tell the CIA about him though ! Then they told about him to the new president and asked him whether they should tell the Americans. The French intelligence and the CIA used this to test the loyalty of the president to NATO and the USA ! Authentic treason. I could recount other episodes that display a similar state. They are all gleaned from papers or books published by inquisitive journalists and they have caused small scandals when they were revealed.
I do not know how to assess on the role of the intelligence services in the repression of conservatives, reactionaries, right-wing dissidents. In the USA and Europe it is more the universities, the media, the civil service and the corporations that have been on the attack. The intelligence may give a hand but I believe that this comes at the request of the politicians, the top civil servants, or the Mossad; and they might not be zealous about it. As for the infiltration of reactionary groups, it might be done by employees of NGOs, like the Open Society, rather than the secret police. The secret police might train them though. Plenty of sabotage and personal harm might be inflicted by purely private means.
«Moving on, the next step would be to engage in actual politicking. That means reaching out to different voter blocs and forming a coalition with them to gain votes.»
And here there is a rather important detail, that mostly politics is about interests, not ideas, not values, not dreams. Currently a large block of voters in the USA, UK and other countries have only one interest: stock and real estate prices and rents/dividends.
The profits that 20-40% of voters make from stocks and real estate, 100% redistributed from the lower classes, have been so huge for 40 years that they have written a blank check to the neoliberal (reaganista, thatcherite) parties that have delivered them.
The problem with the "tory" nationalist "paleocon" politics is that most of the potential right-wing "tory" supporters are also stock and real estate owners, and their profits are far more important to them than "tory" nationalist paleocon ideas and values. Consider this excellent interview with Republican strategist G. Norquist:
«Pat Buchanan came into this coalition and said, “You know what? I have polled everybody in the room and 70 percent think there are too many immigrants; 70 percent are sceptics on free trade with China. I will run for President as a Republican; I will get 70 percent of the vote.”
He didn't ask the second question … do you vote on that subject?»
Eventually enough people voted on that subject to elect Trump, but there have two problems with that:
* Many of those people were left-wing social-democrats abandoned by the DNC, so their vote is "invalid" from a right-wing perspective.
* D. Trump was then subjected to a bipartisan (read: "corporate") campaign of propaganda plus a bipartisan campaign of stalling or undermining his policies.
An alternative to the "whig" globalist neocons will only arise when their corporate "sponsors" will become too weak to fund and support them, in a "end of the USSR" situation, a large economic crisis. But the USA is still quite far away from that, even if the UK and some other vassals might be closer to it. It will not be necessarily a "tory" nationalist paleocon alternative, it could be social-democratic or socialist one.
It´s weird how on many angles I can agree with you. The Black Panthers were infiltrated by the FBI, resulting in the murder and imprisonment of some of its members. Around 1990 people who I knew were EarthFirsters fighting to protect the redwoods in N. Ca. had a bomb placed in their VW bug which blew up and severly injured the 2 main activists who were in the car and then they were accused of carrying a bomb. After 10 years of litigation, they proved that it was the FBI that had planted the bomb and they were awarded 1 million dollars. This was not publicized.
The "secret police", the CIA, the FBI, have infinite funding, mostly secret. Running a new political party is virtually impossible in the US as history has shown. Besides, once they would be elected, they would be intimidated immediately and either conform to the demands or be murdered (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oilxI6Dgoy8).
Also, another real problem is breaking thru the propaganda machine. How? I was thinking this morning of pirate radio, which we did to some extent in the past. But it never was significant enough and the police could triangulate where we were.
* The current neoliberal regime is supported by all those real estate owners who have been making huge capital gains for 40 years as real estate prices have been doubling in many areas every 7-10 years. That is so huge for the living standards of that 20-40% of voters that they will support anything as long as they keep getting those massive capital gains, and that big block of voters have decided most elections.
* For those who oppose neoliberalism the pushback is not done so much by the secret police, but by blacklisting (from both platforms and business and jobs) against the smaller "deviants" and by massive media and dirty tricks attack campaigns against the bigger "deviants" (from Sanders to Trump).
In general things change when there is a fight and turnover among ruling class factions, revolutions from below are fairly rare. In the UK there is a genuine split among the ruling class between right-wing libertarian globalists and right-wing traditionalist nationalists, and this resulted in a change of regime flavour with brexit, but the libertarian globalists have been pushing back, and in any case there is no significant party that represents non-right-wing politics, or even right-wing politics outside the libertarian/traditionalist factions.
Remember this: The Secret Police force is made up of individuals - people who are your next door neighbors, who live in your communities. Out them, ostracize them and the cast them out. This is how we stop this.
The analysis you present is one reason Steve Bannon won for Trump. Trump is old line CIA.
Since murdering JFK the police state has though metastasis grown to be the entire Federal government. . By the time the Cold War ended, the West was already riddled with a culture in a profound state of decay, coupled with a spiritual malaise that would, in another generation, lead to a situation wherein each side of the dominant “left-right” political cleavage would come to contain significant amounts of irrationality and moral bankruptcy. Surely the utter collapse of the Christian West in the matter of a generation requires a more compelling explanation than what is generally given. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/12/14/atheism-the-core-of-modern-western-culture-in-the-thought-of-augusto-del-noce/
If you look into civil conflicts in general, people who talk to or come into the custody of the enemy are often tortured (or at least interviewed on scopolamine or something) before being let back in, as a security measure. You cannot have a successful movement if the core group is riddled with compromised people (which is not the same as infiltration).
Agreed that Rolo's exercise on how to build a populist takeover is of largely academic value, given the power the deep state has accumulated and exerted via what he calls the secret police. I see several additional obstacles to successful populist revolt in the US.
First is the climate of fear that already immobilizes much of the public. When my health care provider refuses to prescribe Ivermectin, presumably out of fear, how can one imagine a revolt that requires much more risk and courage?
Second, US citizens are too spoiled and weak, unlike populations in the global south, so oppressed and impoverished for generations that they are more easily persuaded to pick up the gun and join the guerillas.
Third, the inevitable demise of industrial economies starting in the West, driven among other things by underlying energy and other finite resource depletion, will is beginning to progressively weaken all centralized power structures, making a takeover of central government a useless endeavor.
Still, Rolo's thought experiment suggests creative revolt options open to proles or peasants. One is Tom Osher's horizontal government, called variously, social anarchism, decentralism, or simply relocalization. I tend to favor this option as the best chance for a civilized society as central power crumbles and people are thrown back on reliance on local resources. It may be a long shot, considering that historically in collapses of civilizations, local strong men tend to take over, instituting a feudal system that may be more or less oppressive depending the values of the autocrat and the ability of the peasants to organize themselves.
I've been thinking exactly the same thing a government in exile would be key to taking down the decadent dismal corrupt cretin bearing regime. Could be in Russia but the shill media would say we're Putin's puppet. The raid on Trump's home is a clear sign the opposition is get very worried. We can still triumph but we must get organized focus and stop being afraid of the "rootless cosmopolitans".
I've been thinking exactly the same thing a government in exile would be key to taking down the decadent dismal corrupt cretin bearing regime. Could be in Russia but the shill media would say we're Putin's puppet. The raid on Trump's home is a clear sign the opposition is get very worried. We can still triumph but we must get organized focus and stop being afraid of the "rootless cosmopolitans".
Not a substantive critique, but an aesthetic one. Only one faction of the German anti-communist crusade was Prussian. They were drab, trad and boring visually. But the Nat Socs, the SS, were anything but. They set the standard for right-wing military aesthetics. OK, they were posthumously sullied by you know who. The swastika is banned even today, just like everything else associated w/ them.
«But the secret police stops this process at step one. It is difficult to organize politically outside of the approved parties»
You talk a lot about the "secret police", but the USA and similar states use the that kind of stuff relatively rarely. It is mostly that dissidents are put on various blacklists so they become unemployable and also are subjected to media campaigns. See J. Corbyn and D. Trump (and even B. Johnson's more recent case is quite similar) for two different people subjected to "cancellation".
«who have an understanding with the Deep State to play by the rules.»
The various sides of "le pouvoir" are not entirely the same, but the corporate "sponsors" control both the official parties and the deep state.
«where the DNC has more power over domestic and foreign policy than the professionals running these organizations and the GOP is largely just controlled opposition»
There is little difference between the DNC and the GOP, they are both fronts for slightly different factions of their corporate "sponsors".
What is remarkable is how narrow is the difference between both right-wing parties, both of which are mostly "whig" globalist neocons. There are some "tory" nationalist paleocons in the GOP, but they are marginalized, like Senator Borah was between WW1 and WW2 (he was also accused of being a russian puppet).
In the UK the "tory" nationalist paleocons were allowed into power with Brexit and B. Johnson, because the "tory" faction is much stronger than in the USA, but the "whigs" have been pushing back hard and managed to get rid of Johnson, even if he looks to be replaced by another "tory" nationalist paleocon (the "whig" globalist neocon is R. Sunak).
Gore Vidal, from the insider Gore political dynasty, wrote:
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party [...] and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently [...] and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
George Mikes, an english-hungarian who wrote in the 1954 a humorous yet accurate description of the USA ("How to scrape skies"):
“In England you know for instance that the Labour Party is for the nationalization of various industries and the Conservatives are against it. In America such ideological clashes hardly ever occur. A practical issue may be whether the U.S. should give a large loan to Britain or not. In Siloam Springs (Ala) the loyal Democratic leader, with an eye on the Jewish inhabitants, may take up an anti-British attitude because of Palestine. In the next village, however, the bank manager's daughter may have an English fiancé, a former R.A.F. pilot, who is personally very popular and the Democratic Party leader will be inclined to say: 'Let the poor boy have the dough.' All this may seem very confusing but, in fact, it is quite simple. The difference between the two main American parties is very sharp and well defined; it is more marked than the difference between Communists and right-wing Democrats in any European coalition government:
(a) one party is in, the other is out;
(b) one party wants to stay in and the other tries to get it out.”
BTW it is no longer the case that “the Labour Party is for the nationalization of various industries and the Conservatives are against it”, both parties are neoliberal, as “in the urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labour markets, we are all thatcherites now”.
Couple thoughts.
In terms of talking about contacts with the secret police, the National Security Letter is designed precisely to prevent this. Even to admit to having seen one is to court jail. They don't always use this, obviously, but it's impossible to know how often they are used by the very nature of it.
One effective resistance tactic, historically, is obscurantism. We're already doing this, e.g. esoteric meme culture. The Poles did something very similar in the 80s. Their underground punk scene, which served as a propaganda arm for the Solidarity movement, adopted a lyrical style that was deliberately opaque to those not in the know. When the archives were opened up after communism fell, it turned out that this had been very effective: agents sent out to infiltrate had been left utterly baffled by what they were hearing.
The secret police is definitely being expanded in the US. The IRS is being made much larger in order to squeeze the taxpayer, and I think we can all guess which taxpayers they'll be sicced on. The IRS is also going to be armed, now. So we'll be able to add economic repression to the list of tactics the regime uses to suppress domestic dissent.
I am confused about the intelligence services, at least in the French context. I have met a few students whose goal was to join them. When I occasionally meet one, I ask them about what they do now and some have answered that they work for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which means that they have probably joined domestic intelligence. They are all patriotic or nationalistic and heavily conservative. I have also met people who have retired from the intelligence services and they are patriotic and conservative too; one is even reactionary and royalist. These people also have an uncanny ability about never uttering any useful info about their former jobs. So I could not figure out whether most people there were patriotic or conservative or whether they are outliers. I have never met anyone in active positions in the intelligence services, however their personnel is supposed to remain dissimulated under innocuous job descriptions. Thus there are patriots in the secret police but I cannot fathom their actual numbers and power.
That said there are signs that the intelligence services work first and foremost for themselves and co-operate with their peers for their own good standing. They have official secret budget allocations from parliament but they also seem to run dark budgets. The CIA has been shown to be involved in drug trafficking in the past. In France during the celebrations of the first world war, the delegation from Kosovo was treated with great consideration whereas the Serbian delegation was treated with despise; the mere presence of a delegation from Kosovo made no sense. Furthermore a novelist portrayed as having contacts in the intelligence services has described several Western intelligence services running cigarettes, drugs, and arms traffics through Kosovo. Kosovo has also been described by many papers as a state run the local mafia. This has lead me to conclude that the French intelligence services, the CIA and others run all sorts of lucrative trafics and have dark budgets. They also have access to arsonists and assassins from the mafias they work with.
So the intelligence services work first for themselves and in association with their peers. Loyalty to the government or to the top civil servants comes second in my opinion. Some old episodes in France show this. In 1980 or so the French services received the betrayal of a top official in the KGB. They chose not to tell the president because there was an election in 1981 and waited for the new president to be elected. They did tell the CIA about him though ! Then they told about him to the new president and asked him whether they should tell the Americans. The French intelligence and the CIA used this to test the loyalty of the president to NATO and the USA ! Authentic treason. I could recount other episodes that display a similar state. They are all gleaned from papers or books published by inquisitive journalists and they have caused small scandals when they were revealed.
I do not know how to assess on the role of the intelligence services in the repression of conservatives, reactionaries, right-wing dissidents. In the USA and Europe it is more the universities, the media, the civil service and the corporations that have been on the attack. The intelligence may give a hand but I believe that this comes at the request of the politicians, the top civil servants, or the Mossad; and they might not be zealous about it. As for the infiltration of reactionary groups, it might be done by employees of NGOs, like the Open Society, rather than the secret police. The secret police might train them though. Plenty of sabotage and personal harm might be inflicted by purely private means.
«Moving on, the next step would be to engage in actual politicking. That means reaching out to different voter blocs and forming a coalition with them to gain votes.»
And here there is a rather important detail, that mostly politics is about interests, not ideas, not values, not dreams. Currently a large block of voters in the USA, UK and other countries have only one interest: stock and real estate prices and rents/dividends.
The profits that 20-40% of voters make from stocks and real estate, 100% redistributed from the lower classes, have been so huge for 40 years that they have written a blank check to the neoliberal (reaganista, thatcherite) parties that have delivered them.
The problem with the "tory" nationalist "paleocon" politics is that most of the potential right-wing "tory" supporters are also stock and real estate owners, and their profits are far more important to them than "tory" nationalist paleocon ideas and values. Consider this excellent interview with Republican strategist G. Norquist:
http://www.prospect.org/article/world-according-grover
«Pat Buchanan came into this coalition and said, “You know what? I have polled everybody in the room and 70 percent think there are too many immigrants; 70 percent are sceptics on free trade with China. I will run for President as a Republican; I will get 70 percent of the vote.”
He didn't ask the second question … do you vote on that subject?»
Eventually enough people voted on that subject to elect Trump, but there have two problems with that:
* Many of those people were left-wing social-democrats abandoned by the DNC, so their vote is "invalid" from a right-wing perspective.
* D. Trump was then subjected to a bipartisan (read: "corporate") campaign of propaganda plus a bipartisan campaign of stalling or undermining his policies.
An alternative to the "whig" globalist neocons will only arise when their corporate "sponsors" will become too weak to fund and support them, in a "end of the USSR" situation, a large economic crisis. But the USA is still quite far away from that, even if the UK and some other vassals might be closer to it. It will not be necessarily a "tory" nationalist paleocon alternative, it could be social-democratic or socialist one.
It´s weird how on many angles I can agree with you. The Black Panthers were infiltrated by the FBI, resulting in the murder and imprisonment of some of its members. Around 1990 people who I knew were EarthFirsters fighting to protect the redwoods in N. Ca. had a bomb placed in their VW bug which blew up and severly injured the 2 main activists who were in the car and then they were accused of carrying a bomb. After 10 years of litigation, they proved that it was the FBI that had planted the bomb and they were awarded 1 million dollars. This was not publicized.
The "secret police", the CIA, the FBI, have infinite funding, mostly secret. Running a new political party is virtually impossible in the US as history has shown. Besides, once they would be elected, they would be intimidated immediately and either conform to the demands or be murdered (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oilxI6Dgoy8).
This is why I am suggesting a possible solution is horizontal governing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wywMhg604W8). To get this idea in the heads of the public.
Also, another real problem is breaking thru the propaganda machine. How? I was thinking this morning of pirate radio, which we did to some extent in the past. But it never was significant enough and the police could triangulate where we were.
To summarize some of my previous arguments:
* The current neoliberal regime is supported by all those real estate owners who have been making huge capital gains for 40 years as real estate prices have been doubling in many areas every 7-10 years. That is so huge for the living standards of that 20-40% of voters that they will support anything as long as they keep getting those massive capital gains, and that big block of voters have decided most elections.
* For those who oppose neoliberalism the pushback is not done so much by the secret police, but by blacklisting (from both platforms and business and jobs) against the smaller "deviants" and by massive media and dirty tricks attack campaigns against the bigger "deviants" (from Sanders to Trump).
In general things change when there is a fight and turnover among ruling class factions, revolutions from below are fairly rare. In the UK there is a genuine split among the ruling class between right-wing libertarian globalists and right-wing traditionalist nationalists, and this resulted in a change of regime flavour with brexit, but the libertarian globalists have been pushing back, and in any case there is no significant party that represents non-right-wing politics, or even right-wing politics outside the libertarian/traditionalist factions.
Remember this: The Secret Police force is made up of individuals - people who are your next door neighbors, who live in your communities. Out them, ostracize them and the cast them out. This is how we stop this.
you say, "I have brought up all of these topics on the blog before at one point or another, but now I’m trying to bring it all together."
you're doing a good job of it. thank you!
The analysis you present is one reason Steve Bannon won for Trump. Trump is old line CIA.
Since murdering JFK the police state has though metastasis grown to be the entire Federal government. . By the time the Cold War ended, the West was already riddled with a culture in a profound state of decay, coupled with a spiritual malaise that would, in another generation, lead to a situation wherein each side of the dominant “left-right” political cleavage would come to contain significant amounts of irrationality and moral bankruptcy. Surely the utter collapse of the Christian West in the matter of a generation requires a more compelling explanation than what is generally given. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/12/14/atheism-the-core-of-modern-western-culture-in-the-thought-of-augusto-del-noce/
https://www.hegaion.com/2012/11/facts-from-life-of-vaclav-havel-and-his.html
we need to resurrect the Secret Policeman's Ball
If you look into civil conflicts in general, people who talk to or come into the custody of the enemy are often tortured (or at least interviewed on scopolamine or something) before being let back in, as a security measure. You cannot have a successful movement if the core group is riddled with compromised people (which is not the same as infiltration).
Agreed that Rolo's exercise on how to build a populist takeover is of largely academic value, given the power the deep state has accumulated and exerted via what he calls the secret police. I see several additional obstacles to successful populist revolt in the US.
First is the climate of fear that already immobilizes much of the public. When my health care provider refuses to prescribe Ivermectin, presumably out of fear, how can one imagine a revolt that requires much more risk and courage?
Second, US citizens are too spoiled and weak, unlike populations in the global south, so oppressed and impoverished for generations that they are more easily persuaded to pick up the gun and join the guerillas.
Third, the inevitable demise of industrial economies starting in the West, driven among other things by underlying energy and other finite resource depletion, will is beginning to progressively weaken all centralized power structures, making a takeover of central government a useless endeavor.
Still, Rolo's thought experiment suggests creative revolt options open to proles or peasants. One is Tom Osher's horizontal government, called variously, social anarchism, decentralism, or simply relocalization. I tend to favor this option as the best chance for a civilized society as central power crumbles and people are thrown back on reliance on local resources. It may be a long shot, considering that historically in collapses of civilizations, local strong men tend to take over, instituting a feudal system that may be more or less oppressive depending the values of the autocrat and the ability of the peasants to organize themselves.
I've been thinking exactly the same thing a government in exile would be key to taking down the decadent dismal corrupt cretin bearing regime. Could be in Russia but the shill media would say we're Putin's puppet. The raid on Trump's home is a clear sign the opposition is get very worried. We can still triumph but we must get organized focus and stop being afraid of the "rootless cosmopolitans".
I've been thinking exactly the same thing a government in exile would be key to taking down the decadent dismal corrupt cretin bearing regime. Could be in Russia but the shill media would say we're Putin's puppet. The raid on Trump's home is a clear sign the opposition is get very worried. We can still triumph but we must get organized focus and stop being afraid of the "rootless cosmopolitans".
Not a substantive critique, but an aesthetic one. Only one faction of the German anti-communist crusade was Prussian. They were drab, trad and boring visually. But the Nat Socs, the SS, were anything but. They set the standard for right-wing military aesthetics. OK, they were posthumously sullied by you know who. The swastika is banned even today, just like everything else associated w/ them.
«But the secret police stops this process at step one. It is difficult to organize politically outside of the approved parties»
You talk a lot about the "secret police", but the USA and similar states use the that kind of stuff relatively rarely. It is mostly that dissidents are put on various blacklists so they become unemployable and also are subjected to media campaigns. See J. Corbyn and D. Trump (and even B. Johnson's more recent case is quite similar) for two different people subjected to "cancellation".
«who have an understanding with the Deep State to play by the rules.»
The various sides of "le pouvoir" are not entirely the same, but the corporate "sponsors" control both the official parties and the deep state.
«where the DNC has more power over domestic and foreign policy than the professionals running these organizations and the GOP is largely just controlled opposition»
There is little difference between the DNC and the GOP, they are both fronts for slightly different factions of their corporate "sponsors".
What is remarkable is how narrow is the difference between both right-wing parties, both of which are mostly "whig" globalist neocons. There are some "tory" nationalist paleocons in the GOP, but they are marginalized, like Senator Borah was between WW1 and WW2 (he was also accused of being a russian puppet).
In the UK the "tory" nationalist paleocons were allowed into power with Brexit and B. Johnson, because the "tory" faction is much stronger than in the USA, but the "whigs" have been pushing back hard and managed to get rid of Johnson, even if he looks to be replaced by another "tory" nationalist paleocon (the "whig" globalist neocon is R. Sunak).
Gore Vidal, from the insider Gore political dynasty, wrote:
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party [...] and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently [...] and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
George Mikes, an english-hungarian who wrote in the 1954 a humorous yet accurate description of the USA ("How to scrape skies"):
“In England you know for instance that the Labour Party is for the nationalization of various industries and the Conservatives are against it. In America such ideological clashes hardly ever occur. A practical issue may be whether the U.S. should give a large loan to Britain or not. In Siloam Springs (Ala) the loyal Democratic leader, with an eye on the Jewish inhabitants, may take up an anti-British attitude because of Palestine. In the next village, however, the bank manager's daughter may have an English fiancé, a former R.A.F. pilot, who is personally very popular and the Democratic Party leader will be inclined to say: 'Let the poor boy have the dough.' All this may seem very confusing but, in fact, it is quite simple. The difference between the two main American parties is very sharp and well defined; it is more marked than the difference between Communists and right-wing Democrats in any European coalition government:
(a) one party is in, the other is out;
(b) one party wants to stay in and the other tries to get it out.”
BTW it is no longer the case that “the Labour Party is for the nationalization of various industries and the Conservatives are against it”, both parties are neoliberal, as “in the urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labour markets, we are all thatcherites now”.