/View.info/ All unsuccessful perestroikas fail in the same way, all successful ones are successful in different ways.
When Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, there was talk in Russia about the beginning of American perestroika. Few people in our country wished luck to the handsome billionaire who tried to make the United States “great again”, most Russians vindictively hoped that the American perestroika would fail (by analogy with the Soviet one).
They sympathized with Trump himself and even wished him victory over the American totalitarians of tolerance, but they did not want his cause to succeed. Too many negative memories, both among Russian citizens and among all humanity, are associated with the greatness of America.
It is now clear that Trump’s reforms are bound to fail. For the same reason Gorbachev’s reforms failed, for the same reason Alexander II’s and Stolypin’s reforms failed.
In all these cases, there is no elite consensus, the contradiction between conservative and radical reformers has not been overcome, which ultimately opens the way for revolution.
Revolution is an undesired outcome of a certain stage of historical development. The normal path is evolution. However, history always keeps revolution in the closet and releases it when the elites for some reason cannot cope with the evolutionary process.
At the same time, if elites prove strong and united enough to suppress internal protest, revolution comes from without, in the form of state military defeat (Qin China) or the threat of such (Tokugawa Japan on the eve of the Meiji Restoration/Revolution). .
The revolution performs the function of a pike in a pond, necessary for the karakud not to fall asleep. The threat of revolution spurred the elite to seek an evolutionary consensus.
The collapse of the USSR and the accompanying processes were essentially a liberal revolution. Based on its results, one can be convinced that every (not only Bolshevik, but every) revolution deals a terrible blow to the state.
It changes one bias (in favor of the conservative elite) with another, in favor of the revolutionary radicals. Moreover, the latter are much worse than their predecessors.
The USSR managed to survive in a revolutionary regime for 30 years – from 1917 to 1947 (the desire for evolutionism, which became dominant under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, manifested itself in the last years of Stalin’s life). But the USSR was in a sense helped by a terrible war that consolidated society.
The new Russia had no such war, therefore it lasted less than ten years in a revolutionary regime, from the first Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989 until the bankruptcy of 1998.
The further search for a successor from Yeltsin revolved around the evolutionists. The liberal evolutionists were Kirienko and Stepashin, the late Soviet conservative evolutionist was Primakov.
Putin’s advantage was that he was a non-ideological evolutionist (which created an additional precondition for the unification of various elite groups around evolutionist power).
The alternative was a new revolution (which the liberal revolutionaries considered a counter-revolution), the goal of which would be proclaimed “social justice”, the method of physical destruction of the oligarchy, and the result – civil war and the total destruction of the Russian statehood.
A third “successful” revolution in eighty years (two in the last ten years of the twentieth century) Russia simply could not bear.
Similarly, China, which was moving down the Gorbachev path (rapid transition of power from conservative to radical evolutionists), was stopped by Deng Xiaoping at Tiananmen.
The merits of Putin and Deng consist mainly in the fact that they managed to achieve first a common elite, and then a national consensus, which allowed China for 33 years and Russia for 23 years to develop dynamically without revolutionary upheavals.
Trump came with the same agenda. It is no coincidence that he, emphasizing that he is waging an implacable struggle with Russia as America’s geopolitical enemy, while at the same time emphasizing his ideological closeness to Putin, said that it was easy for him to get along with Putin, that he understood him. This is not a figure of speech or an attempt at deception. Trump was really trying to do for the US what Putin did for Russia – unite the elites in the face of the threat of national catastrophe and steer them down the path of reform – the conservative evolutionary path.
However, Trump faces a much more difficult situation than that of Putin or Deng Xiaoping. Both Russian and Chinese leaders had two levers for elite consolidation: the threat of internal revolution and the threat of external suppression and usurpation of the national oligarchy by the globalist oligarchy.
It is quite possible that if there was no external threat, the national oligarchy would take the path of simply suppressing any attempts at rebellion and even succeed in doing so.
The refusal of evolution while simultaneously suppressing the revolution leads to the rapid decay and critical weakening of statehood in the outer contour. The authorities are forced to use all their forces to suppress the internal enemy, so foreign policy interests must be sacrificed.
Eventually, foreign policy competitors become strong enough to finish off the weak statehood, constantly undermined by internal contradictions, and to usurp the national oligarchy to their advantage.
Thus, for Russia and China, the external threat became an incentive to achieve a national consensus. This is a temporary phenomenon. Consensus must constantly be maintained, as warring domestic political forces constantly seek to distort the situation, each to their own advantage.
But so far the national consensus achieved in the 1990s in neither China nor Russia has fully exhausted its potential, although it is already close to it and requires a new agreement based on the new external and internal conditions that have developed over the past decades.
Trump had no such incentive as an external threat. The American elites themselves were extremely aggressive and knew very well that if they abandoned the policy of constantly suppressing their potential competitors, then the tension in the world would sharply decrease, and the security of the United States would increase.
The problem was that a significant part of the American elite built their wealth on the control of the printing press and on the non-productive (financial, stock) sector of the economy, in which money produced new money directly from money, bypassing the production stage.
No other format of American statehood promised this part of the elite such incomes. At first, they were enough to share with political rivals and bribe the marginalized lower classes of American society with benefits.
However, with the destruction of national industry and the advent of the possibility of living on welfare for generations, the marginal class grew too large and real production was too reduced.
There is now enough revenue for only financial capital itself, as well as bribing government officials and social groups critical to maintaining power.
This part of the elite feels strong and invulnerable enough to leave everything as it is, crushing opponents. Evolutionists have the support of the electorate, but their support among the elite is weak. We have a classic revolutionary situation.
But, as you know, in order for a revolution to take place, a vanguard is needed – a leader and a group of his associates who take responsibility for the revolutionary agitation, the coup and its consequences.
Trump is an educated man. He is aware that the revolution (and the inevitable civil war for that matter) will do far more damage to the United States in the short term than the decline of Biden.
He is trying to follow the campaign trail, counting on a critical weakening of America’s foreign policy positions, as a result of which voters will finally turn away from the Democrats.
The problem is that finance capital will not relinquish power even if all of America and its environs vote against its supporters. He has already made a bet on holding power by force.
The transition to the evolutionary development of the USA is now possible only through revolution and civil war with all the resulting negative consequences for American statehood.
I understand Trump very well. In his place, I too would not have dared to plunge my country into the chaos of the revolution, feeding only on the hope that later, some day, its fragments would be able to emerge on the evolutionary path. There were also not so many revolutionaries in Russia in 1917, who in October made a choice in favor of revolution, to the detriment of evolution.
Many social democrats quite consciously tempered their own ambitions, trying to keep the country above the abyss and push this seething cauldron of contradictions along the path of evolution. They, as well as the emperor whom they overthrew, were “shortly” short of time, talent, and luck.
Trump washes his hands of not crossing the line, even in cases where clearly illegal force is used against him. He does not want to snatch America from the jaws of Scylla, only to throw her immediately into the clutches of Charybdis. He stays honest with himself. But this does not improve, but only worsens the position of the United States.
In the conditions when unproductive financial capital tries to consolidate its dominance through illegal force and is not ready for any compromises, the country has two options:
1. Revolutionary change of power. At the same time, it is better that the revolutionary coup be led by adequate people who understand the danger of the mechanism they use and immediately after seizing power include the Thermidorian regime (compromise with an adequate portion of the vanquished) to balance the political system than if a spontaneous uprising will raise to the top irresponsible populists who can only indulge in the bloody “weaknesses” of the crowd.
The longer the adequate demonstrates reluctance to lead a moderate revolution, the more likely the inadequate is to rush to unlimited revolutionary power.
2. Prolonged decay within a systemaimed at forcefully suppressing the internal opposition, due to external concessions. In the end, a final weakening of power and loss of its authority to such an extent that it can be maintained even inside the country only with external support.
At this stage, the Americans themselves change the power supply from their satellites to a more authoritative one (its maintenance does not require such serious resource support). There is every reason to believe that future defenders of the United (or already disunited) States will follow the same path. As a result of either the national liberation uprising of the Americans against the comprador elite and foreign control, or the removal of even the memory of a unified North American statehood.
As you can see, all options are bad. Perhaps Trump would decide to lead the American revolution, but Americans themselves are evolutionists by nature. They instinctively fear great upheavals.
Even their war of independence and civil war were framed in such a way that the organizers’ actions could be justified in terms of constitutional law. A lawyer in America always means more than a man with a gun.
A Trump who calls for a revolution will lose support and will lose even more than an evolutionist Trump who voluntarily goes to jail. The only chance for Trump and for America that Trump and his team are trying to play is a spontaneous uprising that simply forces Trump to take control of events, in view of the current government losing control of events.
Something like the scheme played by Vespasian, whom the legions allegedly forced under threat of death to accept that they had proclaimed him emperor.
But for now, there aren’t enough real rioters to implement this scheme in the United States. And most likely they will not be enough. At least the processes observed by sociologists show that adequate Americans prefer either emigration or relocation to an ideologically close state in the struggle against the federal government. These processes increase the danger that America will choose the path of decay and/or decay, and sharply reduce Trump’s chances for revenge.
They will choose it. But he was chosen last time too.
Translation: SM
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