Now that the rough beast is slouching past Mar-a-Lago toward the Isle of Reckoning, there’s no sign that the two political divides in America - Team Red and Team Blue - are going to wind down their culture wars any time soon.
By “Team Red,” I mean the hard-core electoral base of the Republican party as well as the media constellation associated with it: Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, right wing rage radio, and that Cthulhu of city news network ownership, the Sinclair Broadcast Group. This is about the manufacture of consent within the right. It represents the conservative option, with populism and nativism thrown in.
And by “Team Blue,” I mean the hard-core electoral base for the Democratic Party along with the media constellation associated with it: MSNBC, CNN, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the “alternative” yet centrist press, and so on. This is about the manufacture of consent within the so-called left. It represents the liberal option, with corporate virtue signalling (and the endorsement of token social justice activism) thrown in.
And this brings me to Russia. In the early years of the Cold War, the second “Red Scare” involved a campaign of fear mongering and political repression in the United States, attached to claims of Russian espionage and infiltration of American institutions. Communism was said to be infecting the administration of President Harry S. Truman, the State Department, the Voice of America, Hollywood, high school girls’ swim teams, you name it.
The man who diagnosed this fast-spreading cancer was a flinty, slit-eyed politician by the name of Joe McCarthy. From the late forties to mid-fifties the Republican senator from Wisconsin presided over political colonoscopies of US citizens as suspected communist subversives. Although McCarthyism failed to produce any giant red tumours of note, Joe’s mangled operations destroyed plenty of lives and careers. Eventually he undid himself after attempting to root out Bolsheviks in the US Army. (That’s one orifice you don’t stick your hand into.)
Meanwhile during the McCarthy years, US Air force officials and advisers were busy inflating estimates of Soviet military might into a planetary-scale threat: a “missile gap” resulting from America’s failure to match the Russia in the production of nukes. However, the missile gap turned out to be nowhere but in the heads of the analysts, as President John F. Kennedy discovered soon after taking office. (JFK’s efforts to stem a spiraling US-Soviet arms race after the Cuban Missile Crisis were cut short by a fatal limo ride in Dealy Plaza.)
So in the Cold War perception of Americans, Russia presented a double existential threat: nuclear weapons from without and Godless communism from within. Certainly Stalin’s record of killing off millions of his own people made the threat more believable. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev - pictured below - rejected Stalin’s legacy and attempted some rapprochement with the West, but that was presented as just rebranded commie deceit.
Cut to today. The old Soviet military/commie threat has bifurcated in the American imagination, with Team Red and Team Blue seizing on opposing angles.
For example, Team Blue has told us that Putin’s Russia messed with the 2016 US elections and now threatens cyberattack on the domestic electrical grid and Internet servers. In contrast Team Red warn us that America is under communist/socialist threat, but this time less from abroad than from broads. They’ve pegged Democratic congresswomen Alexander Octavio Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and the two other Congressional female members of the “squad” as pallbearers for US freedom, with funeral director Biden readying the casket.
Team Red interprets the rather tepid efforts of Team Blue to preserve any shred of the Post-Roosevelt welfare state as a Bolshevik menace. And here’s another irony: Team Red, which once regarded communist Russia as a threat, now regards state capitalist China as the real scourge (not entirely without reason).
Team Red also identifies the heavily ideological policing of language on university campuses as “cultural Marxism” even though class analysis, the signature of Marxist thinking, is almost entirely absent in these tenure-threatening squabbles over who should who call what. Team Blue hardly gets off easy here though. Many in their ranks endorse the restriction of “offensive” free speech and participate in social media-based “cancel culture,” even to the point where the cancelling turns inward on themselves. That takes balls. Um, I mean ovaries. Uh, wait…what I mean is that any sexual organs are acceptable in advocating for others! But no offence intended toward the Eunuch Community. Apologies in advance.
By default or design, the culture wars have functioned as a wonderfully effective mass psy-op: there are now two two immense information silos, inside which Team Red and Team Blue mistake their echoing voices for the music of the spheres while the true owners of the country hum along to Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”
You may say, “Oh Geoff, please don’t make a false equivalency between Team Red and Team Blue, one is far worse than the other!” I’ll just say this: if you lean Blue, your team has a lot to answer for. For the last three years of the Trump presidency the Blue media trafficked non-stop talking points about “bombshells,” with “the walls closing in” on Trump in “the beginning of the end,” sucking all the oxygen out of the newsrooms. These well-paid soothsayers assured news consumers that Russiagate spelled the end for Trump, like tomorrow.
By 2017 it was a Team Blue given that Putin’s magic elves stole the election for Trump through Facebook. Independent journalist Aaron Mate broke down the claim in a 2017 article on Russiagate for The Nation:
Then there is Facebook’s disclosure that fake accounts “likely operated out of Russia” paid $100,000 for 3,000 ads starting in June 2015. The New York Times editorial board described it as “further evidence of what amounted to unprecedented foreign invasion of American democracy.” A $100,000 Facebook ad buy seems unlikely to have had much impact in a $6.8 billion election. According to Facebook, “the vast majority of ads…didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate” but rather focused “on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum—touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.” Facebook also says the majority of ads, 56 percent, were seen “after the election.” The ads have not been released publicly. But by all indications, if they were used to try to elect Trump, their sponsors took a very curious route.
The data firm Cambridge Analytica, founded by uber-conservative Steve Bannon and billionaire investor Robert Mercer, was likely a much bigger player in cyber-manipulation for the Trump presidency. And then there is the problem of Facebook itself.
Blue pundits also insisted that Russians hacked emails from Democratic servers without a shred of evidence (in fact, the evidence leans toward a domestic hack, according to former intelligence analysts). This claim had the ancillary benefit of tying Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to Russia, an implausible connection that Blue media prosecuted with gleeful malice.
But facts be damned: there was a Russian asset in the Oval office to prosecute.
(This is not to say there never was a Russian connection. Trump’s business dealings with Russian financiers are well documented. And one former Russian spy claims efforts to manipulate the casino magnate for possible future gains date back to the eighties. If true, the Slavic flatterers may have been no different than their counterparts in Israel and other nations in recognizing the best way to the almond-sized heart of the world’s biggest narcissist was through his planetoid-sized head. In any case, Trump’s “friendliness” toward Putin can be put down more to concern over his investments than direct influence from the Kremlin.)
For direct, verifiable Russian collusion by Trump himself, the proof that there was no ‘there’ there came with the abject failure of the Mueller Commission to produce evidence strong enough for impeachment. The US Justice Department’s knight errant, who rode off to capture a flame-belching orange dragon, ended up waving his broadsword at smoke. The mumbling Mueller returned on his mule to address Congress with bupkis, which is Latin for fuck-all.
To spin out another metaphor, the notion of Trump being a flailing robot controlled by a Russian homunculus began to look as fantastic as a scene from Men in Black.
Not that the epic failures to indict Trump for Russian collusion have dissuaded Team Blue. In the winter of 2019, MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow suggested Russia might turn off Americans’ heat by going after the electrical grid. And in the latest twist, Team Blue media is warning of Kremlin-baked COVID vaccine disinfo. If you can believe that, I have a presidentially pissed-on mattress from a Moscow hotel room to sell you.
Ah, the good old days, when Team Blue and Team Red were united in fearing the Soviet Union’s threat to life, liberty and the American way! They may have differed on the details, but overall the teams linked hands in their duck-and-cover nightmares.
Though I’m no big fan of either team, I feel sorry for them in their contending delusions. So what common enemy could possibly bring the teams together in fear and loathing? Right now there isn’t a man, microbe or mass movement they can agree on. An alien invasion from outer space might do the trick, but that’s an outlier. And though it might seem even unlikelier, what about claiming that Russia has reverted to communism?
Genuine evidence for such a claim isn’t a problem. With some serious effort and enthusiastic stenographers in the media, I’m sure it could be manufactured, just like Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. (Team Red and Team Blue were in close agreement on that one.)
Think of it! Team Blue, who aren’t apostles for any sort of serious socialism, would get on board with hating Russian communism because... it’s Russia. And Team Red would get on board with hating Russia because… it’s communist. (Of course, Putin would deny his communist nature, but that’s exactly what a former KGB officer would say anyways, right?)
Russia itself wouldn’t have to do anything. No one there would have to read extracts from Das Kapital on the backs of cereal boxes, or return to manufacturing crappy automobiles, faulty nuclear reactors, and graphically excellent revolutionary posters.
It would be the good old days all over again! With a reminted global threat from a commie superpower, Team Red and Team Blue could get back to their grand bipartisan pastime of stomping all over the planet lavishing “freedom” on stubborn foreigners, including the Russkies.
Okay, let me walk that back a bit - no one likes the idea of nuclear winter. How about this proposal instead? The voting bases for Team Red and Team Blue wake up to the fact they have painted themselves into two colourful but confining corners. Each have separate pieces of the overall puzzle, which they can only assemble together on the floor between them. Warring online and off between election cycles does nothing but ensure the real owners of the country, the ones behind the duopoly, will continue to rule unelected and unopposed.
I think it's time to return the teams to their moms, close the stadium, fire the managers, and allow the audience to decide what needs to be done...all by themselves. Now that would be something different...
"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it" In this case it doesn't even rhyme. The present times are absurdist free form poetry.