At 4 AM this morning, I lied awake in bed, composing a post about Gary Wean, who is in my pantheon. Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky are also in it. Gary was about as right wing as it gets, while Ed and Noam epitomized the left in ways. Gary has been called an anti-Semite and he originated the “Israel did it” hypothesis of the JFK assassination, while Ed and Noam were/are Jews. I’ll take heroism where I find it.
Gary is not the only right winger in my pantheon, as Dennis Lee and my professor-partner also hailed from the right wing. As I reflected on that situation, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, I decided to make a post on the USA’s peculiar political environment. There has never been anything quite like it in world history.
What I found helpful in understanding this situation is the Epochal framework that I developed to view the human journey, which is based on humanity’s energy practices. The USA is history’s richest and most powerful nation primarily because Anglo-Americans invaded and stole a rich continent with prodigious energy resources. Originally they plundered the vast forests and intact soils of the Eastern Woodlands, but the invasion coincided with England’s rise to industrialization. The USA’s industrial ascent began with the watermill economy that dominated England, along with history’s most dramatic deforestation. As eastern temperate North America was shorn of its forests, then the USA quickly discovered, as England had long ago, huge coal deposits to exploit. Less than a century into that process, the extraction of the USA’s huge oil deposits began, and the USA quickly rode those energy sources into becoming history’s richest and most powerful nation. There really is nothing to compare it to in world history, and the rest of the world has been playing catchup.
The transition from agrarian (Third Epoch) to industrial (Fourth Epoch) economies is the most dramatic shift in the human journey, and the USA uniquely straddled that progression. On the eve of the USA’s Civil War, the North had a rapidly industrializing economy that had abolished slavery, which was an agrarian institution that did not make economic sense in industrial economies, while the South had an agrarian economy that relied on slave labor. The South never stood a chance. I do not know of a more dramatic contrast of the Epochs than that.
The USA was busily finishing its theft of a continent and industrializing in the last half of the 19th century, while Europe was divvying up the Eastern Hemisphere, as Europe rode industrialization to world conquest. Farmers have always been the ideal soldiers, because their hard lives suited them for the rigors of war campaigning. With a huge continent to fill with farmers, once the natives were eradicated, the USA had a tremendous pool of farmers to draw upon for its wars. To this day, rural America fields a disproportionate share of the USA’s soldiers. My father, Dennis, and my professor were all raised on farms and became soldiers. They all had a certain naïve farmer honesty about them, which was part of their virtue, and they all were harshly disabused of their naïveté. They were all right wingers in ways. Dennis’s migrant-farmworker roots were evident in everything that he did. My professor taught accounting, would be called a paleoconservative today, and was a believer in corporate America, at least until his life-ruining and life-shortening experiences in Ventura. My father’s father had a Quaker heritage. Quakers were among the West’s first “progressives,” as pacifist abolitionists. My grandfather was president of Seattle’s painters union, and my father became a right-wing Democrat, which brings to mind Gore Vidal’s observation that the USA has one political party with two right wings.
That Epochal framework makes clear that as humanity’s energy surplus rose over the Epochs, human societies became more humane, because they could afford to be. Violence and warfare has commensurately declined. But because the industrial Epoch is so young, and most of humanity still lives in predominantly agrarian societies, the transition to the industrial epoch is still happening, as agrarian religions are still prominent, the mistreatment of women is ongoing, and other vestiges of agrarian societies are evident. Radical feminists see the trans craze as a patriarchal rear-guard action on women, to eliminate women altogether, and I think that they are right.
The American political environment is a bizarre stew, as the empire totters. But perhaps the strangest part of all is that my journey taught me that the political system that we see, which I call the retail political system, is mostly for show. The people who really run the world are unaccountable elites that nobody has ever heard of. Americans who sit in their cubicles, work in factories, watch TV, read the newspapers, surf the Internet's mainstream sites, or engage the retail political system will never encounter the elites who really run the world. But if they are astronauts who put on UFO conferences, or businessmen who put the world’s best heating system on people’s homes for free, then pursue free energy, which would end the world as we know it, then the global elite intervene and the life expectancies of their targets are dramatically reduced. Brian O’Leary’s and my professor’s lives were shortened, as Dennis’s wife’s was, and Dennis should be dead dozens of times over. I survived my adventures because I was young when I had them. That is what playing on the high road is like, and that was too traumatic for me.
As I continue with these posts on the lives of the great, they all hailed from various points on the retail political spectrum, from far left to far right, to down-the-middle mainstream. I think that it is more useful to see the issue as whether people are being self-serving or other-serving. That is the divide that matters, which separates the saints from the criminals. The left is ideally more spiritually mature, as it leans toward other-serving activities, but some of the greatest humans that I ever knew hailed from the right. As astute observers have stated, our political spectrum is not really left and right, but our system operates in top-down fashion. Ed’s Propaganda Model was all about how the media serves elite interests at the expense of accurately informing the public, and Noam said that all intellectuals in capitalist societies do that, with few exceptions.
This post only scratches the surface of these issues, but it can help to keep them in mind when reading my work, which is not easy to categorize into our popular definitions.