Tapescript: The Palinthanatos of the American Empire (2018)

This is the text of Colin Liddell's Shortpod (#19) podcast on 23rd of March, 2018. 

Hello, this is Colin Liddell, the chief editor of Alternative Right and this is the Shortpod, a short, five-to-ten-minute-long podcast to save you wasting hours and hours of your life listening to some long, drawn-out "blood sports" debate on YouTube by a couple of idiots who don't know what they're talking about.

And today is March the 23rd.

Now, the big news today is the new "omnibus spending bill" that will fund the American government for the rest of the year, and will lead up to the 2018 midterm elections, where the GOP will come up against a resurgent Democratic Party with a demoralized voter base that didn't get what they voted when they voted for Donald Trump. Essentially, there'll be no wall, there'll be no border security, there'll be no pushback against sanctuary cities and mass immigration, and a lot of the people that were energized and enthused by Trump, they will simply stay at home. So, what we're starting to see here is the presidency of Donald Trump sliding off into lame-duck territory, and, under those conditions, it's quite hard to see why he will be re-elected in 2020. So, it looks like 2016 Trump-o-mania, the meme wars, etc. etc., it seems like all that was really a waste of energy and time, and people would have more-or-less got the same results by voting for Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton.

2016, it seems, will be remembered in history much more for what happened in the UK, where people actually voted for Brexit, and it seems that they are more-or-less going to get Brexit.

Now, this is, of course, very important and significant for the Alt-Right, because a large part the Alt-Right has been LARPing as the "ascendant political class" of America, and the events of recent days just remind us how limited Trump is, how hemmed in he is, how impotent and powerless he really is.

The Alt-Right, alas, is not going to have a "Palingenetic" effect on the American political system. That is the main conclusion, and, from that, a lot else flows. So, the Alt-Right has got to back away from American mainstream politics, and we have to see ourselves as an oppositional revolutionary force to an establishment that is essentially corrupt, decadent, hollowed-out, debt-ridden, and heading for collapse, and this collapse could actually happen sooner than people expect.

One possibility is that, because Trump has become, in a sense, emasculated in terms of domestic policy, he might pivot strongly -- and too strongly -- towards foreign policy. Now, one of the reasons that Trump got elected was because he wasn't going to be George Bush, he wasn't going to be a Neocon, and he was going to focus on his domestic agenda. Now, that domestic agenda has essentially been taken away from him, and in November 2018 his ability to influence the domestic agenda will be even more circumscribed, so, because of his psychological characteristics, his urge to be the alpha male, to be all-important, it looks very likely that Trump will become much more proactive on the international stage.

Now, just the other day, we saw John Bolton making a comeback as Trump's third National Security Adviser, and in the recent "omnibus spending bill," which coughed up a little money for a few minor improvements on the existing border fences, Trump also ensured that American military spending would be bloated to ever higher levels. So, Trump is poorly equipped to carry out his domestic agenda, but, of course, an American president faces a lot less Congressional oversight and judicial interference overseas.

Overseas, Trump will feel much more empowered, whereas at home he will feel emasculated, so I think it's a safe bet to say that Trump will seek to define his presidency by foreign policy and by projecting American power. And, given the state of the Middle East, it's highly likely that this will lead to some kind of war. Trump, obviously he is very much on board with the Neocon agenda in Syria and in Iran, and so I think there is now a heightened chance of America getting involved in a very ill-defined and messy war.

Now, from an Alternative Right point of view that could actually be a positive, because the worst thing for a movement like ours, for an oppositional revolutionary movement, is for the status quo, the status quo of gradual decadence and decline, to remain stable. So, Trump can still be useful to us by pushing this system into much more turbulent waters. where the various military and geopolitical stresses placed on the system help to tear it apart.

Now, earlier, I mentioned the term "palingenesis." This is a Greek word that literally means a rebirth, from "palin" (again) and genesis (a birth), and so back in 2016 a lot of people had hopes that Trump would have this effect on American society. Now I think the hopes of the Alt-Right have to move away from this idea of palingenesis to its opposite.

Trump can be this figure who can push the American Empire to the point where it literally starts to break, rather like a kind of Gorbachev figure. And so, if Trump could get involved in the right kind of messy foreign war, that would help to bankrupt the American system even more than it is, and it would cause the the major schisms and stresses that already exist in the system to open up. So, instead of Palingenesis we have to move towards the concept of Palinthanatos, let's say. And, as America was created out of the death of the British Empire, so something new and potentially greater can be created out of the death of the American Empire.