President Trump's US :The Decline of the West and the New Caesarism

'A series of terrifying articles suggests that a company called Cambridge Analytica helped to swing both the US election and the EU referendum by mining data from Facebook and using it to predict people’s personalities, then tailoring advertising to their psychological profiles' -George Monbiot

The Rise of Conspiracism and Information Wars.

There is little hope for opposition to Trump when it is looking for conspiracy theories to explain away electoral verdicts they have a psychological problem in accepting. Brexit is one thing, Trump is another. Serious opposition to him should refrain from conspiracy theories of the sort Trumpists believe in.

In any case, Brexit and Trump's victory are not the consequence of some uniform global conspiracy by Rupert Murdoch and Breitbart news-or a shady cabal in hoc to Vladimir Putin. PM May did not even want Brexit and the referendum verdict was not 'caused' by sinister counter-elites or propaganda.

Certainly, the British media had a role. Yet the same media once was courted successfully by the very pro-European and Atlanticist PM Tony Blair. If anything the pathetic level of public debate that accompanied the British referendum on the EU was the consequence of a politics degraded by years of spin.

The Iraq War and the serial incompetence of 'liberal' elites in thinking that they both knew best and that 'the people' could be fobbed off only with what they really needed to know has led to a frenzied reaction against organisations such as Reuters and the BBC etc as merely amplifying 'liberal establishment propaganda'.

During the British referendum, every day the media just recycled Remain claims that voting for Brexit would lead to doomsday scenarios. Despite the lies and fraudulent claims of the Leave campaign, people decided they had two forms of manipulation to choose from and decided to stick it to the elites.

The problem was with the useless existing form of politics and the attempt to threaten the electorate with exaggerated claims that if the establishment did not get their way, then disaster would happen. It was seen just as another attempt to manipulate and cajole people to think one way,just as in the Iraq War over WMDs.

'Fake news' and its use comes from the fact fewer and fewer really know what to believe or see as true anymore. Instead, rather than patient scepticism there is wish-thinking and a belief that, even if things are not true, then essentially they are true irrespective of fact checking and reasoned interpretation.

Instead of carefully analysing information and consulting multiple and reliable sources over time, the speed at which information is coming out and is being released-or leaked-has led to 'information wars' : what power wants or demands is set to shape the news agenda in accordance with what people 'want to know'.

What people want to know can be determined by 'Googling' and by almost by directing themselves as sovereign consumers of information to websites that provide them with only such facts as they want to believe as true. Such is the disillusionment with the 'MSM' after the Iraq War, that it is just seen as necessary to resist manipulation.

By the time facts have been checked, the original kneejerk panic reaction to get information will have passed.Yet the online group or organisation-such, for example, as Breitbart which got its 'facts' and interpretations out first could well shape the agenda and way in which people remember in retrospect certain events.

The allegation made by President Trump that Obama wiretapped him simply might not have time to be investigated while he throws another unsubstantiated allegation out at the political opposition. But while the opposition keeps accusing him of being a Kremlin plant, Trump can claim that all politics is 'just dirty' and like that.

Throughout the 2000s conspiracist thinking flourished. Where once a figure such as David Icke was laughed at for his crazy predictions and being laughed at on the BBC's Terry Wogan show , he went on to become a global celebrity who started sell-out talks in London by those eager for an 'alternative news'.

Alex Jones with his InfoWars in the US represented the trend towards exploiting and amplifying paranoia and conspiracist thinking. Trump appeared on the Alex Jones show to make clear he knew there would be conspiracies to stop the outsider getting in to power. He will play with the idea the establishment are 'out to get him'.

From outlandish accusations that Obama wiretapped his office, Trump would no doubt have no problems with promoting the idea-or at least insinuating it-that there could well be a plot or conspiracy to 'take him out' of office through assassination, not least as the dangers he poses might actually have opponents wishing it.

The growing problem it is not just the Trumpists playing the conspiracy game. Supposed 'liberals are doing it too. The FBI is looking into the 'Russian connections' of 'Trump's Team'. Protesters wanting Trump removed are spouting 'as fact' that Trump is a Kremlin agent or even that Russia occupies the White House.

Trump benefits from the environment where nothing seems true or, in politics, where other politicians are mostly just lying. People, therefore, can have belief in the necessary strong man who will do what is needed to put things basically right again. This is why the Russian conspiracy theory is so dangerous for Trump's opponents to use.

It could be that Trump has business contacts or interests which clash with his role as President. He needs to be challenged on this. But trying to whine about the election result as one thrown or determined by the Kremlin just makes politics about whose conspiracy theories a person as news consumer wants to believe.

Clinton lost because she was a lame candidate to put up against Trump in the circumstances. Russia did not install Trump. The American people did. There is a new disturbing mood that facts are less important that creating a new reality based on a belief that things, even if not true, are essentially so if they can be believed.

Democrats and Anti-Trump Republicans are having to promote the Russian conspiracy theory to rationalise their case against Trump ( they can't say the people were foolish ). and because they are struggling to comprehend a frightening new reality. There is not much hope when politics becomes openly one of competing manipulations.

The real danger of this 'strategy' is that it plays into Trump's 'narrative' that because he wants to do what the people actually want, free from 'political correctness, from building that wall to bombing the shit out of ISIS, the sulking and evil sinister 'liberal establishment is out to get him and remove the people's choice.

How an Infantile Leftism Helped Cause President Trump and the Rise of the Alt-Right.

Opposing Trump is going to be tricky in an increasingly post-literate age based on TV, image and people with limited attention spans. People are less and less interested or capable of reading what is actually written in longer articles or bothering to check facts and alternative sources. Consumers want instant views as news.

The Internet has magnified this tendency. Instant news can be disinformation and people choose the news that suits them and claim those that do not 'have an agenda'. Anxiety levels are up and the left has too many shouty types who are more into dehumanising their enemies instead of countering opponents.

In fact, aspects of the leftist or liberal opposition are doing Trump's work for him with their crude slogans and arrogant self righteousness. Some are principled and focused but the Internet has spread intolerance and hatred and magnified it. The media has not helped this by giving too much space to identity politics and faux outrage.

The alt-right have now colonised identity politics for themselves and, with the idea of consumer choice, Trump's tactless and fact less emotive statements and accusations are identified with by those who feel they were neglected and constantly called bigots for expressing opinions that seem reasonable.

The Johnathan Pie satire on Trump's victory, claiming that it was a consequence of 'political correctness' and 'shouting people down' and saying 'you can't say that', really nailed the contribution identity politics made to Trump's victory. It's not enough to reason or argue: power is just the ability to impose oneself over other oppressors.

Consequently, polemical battles have become ones where the 'debate' is about 'framing the opponent- as-enemy' through manipulating language categories. If a person complains about 'political correctness', the offended one reinterprets 'political correctness' to really mean 'decency' and so the user is evil and 'racist'.

Part of the wider problem is the age of narcissism and 'being seen' with slogans that are resisted in so far as they try to force others to have their thinking done for them. 'Hope Not Hate' is one stupid example of an organisation that has as its name a slogan that implies if a person has no 'hope' in the way they demand, he must therefore 'hate'.

Once more there are then issues with 'Islamophobia'. It would seem Hope Not Hate has far more of a problem with white supremacists or those against the EU-such as UKIP-than with Islamist fanatics because the latter might not always be white and so the fear is of being 'racist' in focusing on them too much.

The problem with this approach, apart from its increasing obsolescence, is that Islamism causes far much more consternation to people in Britain than UKIP whose members at least do not threaten to murder and kill other British citizens because of who they are, that is, because of their very identity as 'enemies'.

The fringe-right has learnt. Every attempt to ban or remove comments from online paper commentary sections for being 'offensive' was a potential vote for Trump. Every attempt to shut people up for having an opinion on Islam created a meaner mood. Now too many have thought there is a conspiracy to destroy them.

Trump is the consequence. Where large numbers of people online can be dehumanised and smeared, rather than any attempt being made to reason or appeal to the better angels of human nature, the far- right and Bannon's Breitbart have proved able to spin this as part of an attempt to ensure silence and shame where there should be outrage.

Bizarrely, therefore, the idea that 'silence is complicity' and that there needs to be mass resistance against 'the establishment' has been taken from the radical left into a position increasingly dominated by the far-right. 'We the people' becomes a slogan to take back control and the right to be who we are from weak 'liberals' and sinister leftists.

One example of that can be found in the popular Youtube videos of former 'alternative comedian' Pat Condell who started off as a 'New Atheist' condemning religion in the 2000s to an increasingly strident opponent of Islam, Muslims and 'Multicultural Madness'. Political correctness can induce pathological reactions.

Whether such reactions as Condell's evolution from a trendy leftist comedian to a fervent UKIP supporter and Trumpist was just out of a desperate desire to reverse the rot and blast away the politically correct trying to shut down debate or whether he was 'always secretly far-right' is mostly pointless speculation.

What is clear, however, is that legions of anti-war activists in the 2000s are at fault too. They claimed Britain had a terrorist attack coming as a direct consequence of foreign policy 'imperialism' alone and that to see any connection with 'Islam' as 'racist Islamophobia' contributed this by conflating race with culture with religion.

This reaction only made it possible for a number of people who feared 'political religion' or 'radicalised Islam', whether they supported the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars or not, to claim the left, as represented by the StWC, Respect and radical Labour MPs such as Jeremy Corbyn, were both weak, apologetic and indulgent of terrorism.

The big problem as a consequence is that distinguishing between genuine hatred of Muslims because Muslims, as opposed to criticism of certain aspects of Islam as a religion or else opposition to intolerant Islamist ideologies, has become so muddied and mixed up that a universal atmosphere of paranoia based on confusion and fear welled up.

In Britain, cynical New Labour politicians after 2001 were prepared to conflate the 'war on terror' with evil everywhere in the Middle East that could threaten 'us' at home or-increasingly in the US to the homeland-and so aligned with President Bush as created the increasingly invasive surveillance and security state.

'The War on Terror' was one designed to manipulate fear and increase paranoia to justify 'intervention' abroad. At the same time doing nothing, in fact making worse, the very security situation in the Middle East that would lead to a growth and extension of zones of failed states where Islamist jihadis could flourish and train.

The fact that the media would fix upon 'Attacks on the West' and the role of Western-born Muslims as jihadists was bound to create fears about a new 'enemy within' prepared to flow across increasingly porous and continental wide open borders within the EU. The collapse of Syria and the migrant crisis of 2015 created alarm and panic.

The fact that nation-state hard borders started making a return was denounced by leftists as 'racism' at exactly the time where people in the West felt great anxiety about the Islamist threat and ISIS terror attacks. It was that mood which demagogues such Trump and Farage were able to exploit to push for electoral victory.

The idea that any attempt to enforce borders was 'racism' perfectly complemented Trump and the Far-Right's contention that there was a deliberate conspiracy to destroy the West by feeble-minded 'multi-culti leftist' elites who wanted to create something akin to the old dreams of global communism through global neoliberal capitalism.

The new term or populist meme for this was 'cultural-Marxism'. In turn this meant that 'racism' was just a scare term to delegitimise those who wanted to preserve nations from destruction and disintegration through proper controls on immigration. That this could in fact have any plausibility was partly the fault of liberal-leftists.

So in the US in 2017 there are significant numbers of Trump voters who no longer think that 'racism' as an accusation has much meaning left. That benefits real white race supremacists but it has also been accepted that 'racism' means hatred of whites by non-whites basing their policies on race baiting and race obsessions.

Stephen Bannon's Vision : The Clash of Civilisation Against Internal and External Forces for Barbarism.  

“A new chapter of American greatness is now beginning. A new national pride is sweeping across our nation. And a new surge of optimism is placing impossible dreams firmly within our grasp. What we are witnessing today is the renewal of the American spirit”-President Trump

Travel bans designed to 'stop Muslims' from entering the US and a wall to keep illegal Mexican migrants out could be defended because the only possible opponents to Homeland Security could come from whining 'politically correct' elites who put their own obsessions and neuroses before the first job of government-security.

In fact, one of the purposes of such innovations as the first Trump travel ban was to arguably to create a 'shock event' which would draw out more hysterical protesters and set the aggressive tone for the new Presidential era in which further security measures might be needed to defeat internal enemies 'effectively' aiding external ones.

There have already been moves in several Republican dominated states, such as Arizona, to ban protests, ones which could start to be extended towards those which are designed to disrupt executive actions such as deportation of illegal migrants. Outlawing protests would be a stage too far at present while protesters are so useful to Trump.

Eventually, however, it would appear a new age of authoritarian surveillance states based on tight border control, involving Israeli style huge concrete walls, watchtowers and checkpoints could be arising. Just as Israel has forged a new militarist democracy, increasingly akin to Sparta, so too might its main ally follow its model.

Bannon has taken an interest in Israel as a frontier-settler state beset with Islamic jihadi enemies and creeds of radical Islam that necessarily mean war. 'Radical Islam' has the convenient flexibility as a term that can mean any 'Islamic state' or place where terrorist threats exist so long as it does not mean those who back them in the rich Gulf States.

To that extent Trump's administration has reaffirmed unstinting support of Netanyahu's Likudist dominated Israel and unconditional defence of the interests of the Gulf States, most obviously Saudi Arabia, by gearing up for potential conflict with Iran. This would most certaintly lead to a revival of jihadi power in Syria and Iraq.

The travel bans could indeed be seen as a security measure if the idea is an apocalyptic one in which civilisational conflict between the West and Islamic states are to be welcomed as the pretext simply to secure oil supplies where necessary and confirm and deepen the enmity felt towards the USA anyway and so to shut out Muslim migrants.

Protecting the West from migratory flows of Muslims would become as much a question of militarising borders as of ruthlessly securing resource interests. This is the precise meaning of Trump's otherwise absurd assertions about 'taking the oil'. To help install dictators and client regimes and to eschew 'democracy promotion'.

The entire underlying thrust of the Trump Presidency is to 'Make America Great Again' by going back to the 1980s when the USA under Reagan was a more successful capitalist superpower on the cusp of defeating the Soviet Union and which had not ceded so much political and economic power away to other future rivals such as China.

Back then, the USA simply was not interested in trying to solve the internal problems of states in the Middle East but pursued a realpolitk strategy against the Soviet Union. The same should be done in 2017 against the Great Powers contending for rival control over strategic regions and oil resources: that means Iran and China.

Iran is on the travel ban list is ostensibly because it is a 'state sponsor or of terrorism'. The reality is that Saudi Arabia is far more so a funder of extreme Sunni jihadist militias in its proxy war. The aim really is to provoke a hardline reaction in Tehran and justify the general 'narrative' of a confrontation with the forces of 'radical Islam'.

The difference is that Trump has extensive business interests in Saudi Arabia and because its considered a major ally and market for lucrative arms deals. The Saudi bombardment of Yemen and killing of civilians is of no consequence : only operations to take out Al Qaida, which has been supported by Saudi Arabia, are.

Wars that kill, destabilise and cause refugees, as well as the consequences of global heating in causing famine and war are bound to create huge migratory flows from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Horn of Africa northwards. Trump is utterly indifferent and the only task is simply to create harder borders while using harder force.

In an apocalyptic worldview such as Bannon's, though officially climate change is a scam, any ruse or exaggeration is justified that acts as a pretext to defend Western Civilisation against inevitable migrant invasions and to marginalise and destroy the power of human rights advocacy in preparation for this new era of survival.

The US following and upholding the post-war architecture of the UN and human rights is considered a weakness that cannot be afforded any more so the 1951 Refugee Convention most likely will be under attack under Trump. A new time of crisis emerges, the winter of civilisation in which new authoritarian leaders are needed.

Bannon takes this from Oswald Spengler's bleak vision of a life-and-death struggle,where civilisation is held together at the end only through a new 'Caesarism'. Bannon has seen Trump as the practical vehicle through which a return to an Edenic vision of the US of the Pax Americana after World War Two and under briefly revived Reagan.

Spengler wrote in Germany in the catastrophic wake of the Great War. For the US, as Trump has emphasised, it has lost both the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars and been overtaken by China. As with Germany after the war, it appears the rightful primacy of the globe's most economically advanced nation has been betrayed by liberal elites.

In Decline of the West, Spengler predicted,

'...in this century blood and instinct will regain their rights against the power of money and intellect. The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy ,of humanitarianism and freedom is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men and will obey them'.

On the face of it, such bleak and gloomy Germanic prognostications in the 1920s would appear to have little in common with America's image of itself as having an open, optimistic and voluntaristic, as well as intensely individualistic culture. No US politician could ever claim that 'freedom is coming to an end'.

But, curiously, Trump rarely emphasised freedom in any of his speeches whereas Presidents Reagan and George Bush Senior and Junior has speeches peppered with the word. Trump's inauguration speech did not mention freedom so much as transferring 'power' to the 'people', ending the 'carnage' and fulfilling their 'dreams'.

Bannon's spin on Spengler's concepts applied in an American context have it that the successful materialism created by the Judeo-Christian West was forged by a spiritually superior culture that was victorious against the Nazi and Soviet atheist totalitarian challenges through victory in a 'great war' between 1941 and 1945.

This moralised capitalism compares to the debased form of  "crony capitalism" and vulgar material that developed as the consequence of two factors. Firstly, the rise of hippie baby boomers in the 1960s and 1970s as “the most spoiled, most self-centered, most narcissistic generation the country’s ever produced.”

Secondly, the new secular pluralist elites who at first embraced political radicalism, as witnessed in the cultural revolution and anti-Vietnam activism, later went on to promote the destruction of a culture rooted in Christianity and pride in Western values in favour of a rootless and rapacious neoliberal capitalism.

The 'Davos Set' and the neoliberal elites, as hideously represented by the Clintons from the 1990s, outsourced American jobs, enriched itself through globalisation and favoured the destruction of the cultural identity of Middle America, importing cheap labour to drive down wages while lauding progress and 'diversity'.

The abstract and spiritually empty 'rationalism of the Megalopolis', as Spengler put it, lies with these new makeshift trendy ideas that are aimed at destroying national religious traditions of Judeo-Christian folk traditions and identity in order to pursue a sickly vision of a globalist world that is destined to end in bloody failure.

The power of this creed lies in the fear and increased apartness of 'Middle America' from the multicultural fringes of the cities of the eastern and western seaboards of the USA. The 'outward' looking America is loathed by those in the deeper heart of America who feel left behind and yet who once 'won the West'.

Bannon's vision, in this sense, is only entrenched by the way infantile forms of leftist and activist types do seem to pose as the enemies of all borders and all 'older' American national culture in favour of a 'we are the world' posture that feeds into the conspiracist idea that radical protesters are 'paid agents of globalists'.

'Reclaiming the Future' for America from the 'Regressive Left', 'Globalists' and China. 

Bannon's creed, as espoused by Trump when he's told to read scripts out, is a secularised form of the old religious concept of The Fall, one away from a Golden Age that becomes all the more powerful in its uncritical hold over minds when smug progressive types try to pretend that nothing was actually better in the past than in 2017.

Increasingly, 'anti-racism' stances based on race, class and imperialism left over from the 1960s and which regard all criticism of Islam as 'racist' and part of a strategy of power and domination by 'hegemonic white males', preferably patriarchal ones, look more than ideologically intransigent: they look absurd, outdated and obsolete.

Moreover, the presumed dominance of these leftist attitudes-one much exaggerated-over the institutions of the US and Britain, is being used to justify the infiltration instead of a right wing, even far-right, counter-strikes on these institutions in order to remove their hegemony and to impose one more suitable in the interests of security.

Contested terms are being taken up and used in rhetorical wars. 'Regressive left'  is deployed to refer by Breitbart to those liberals and leftists who, through their naivety ,stupidity, self-hatred and perverted desire to prostrate themselves before the world for white guilt are prepared to let endless numbers of migrants in.

This is referred to by Trumpists and UKIP as 'cultural marxism'. The use of 'racist' to apply to those who criticise open borders and mass migration is now simply batted away as an ideological construct that represents their fanaticism and our moderation. Identity politics on both sides is becoming pathological and polarising.

'Regressive liberal' or 'left' in 'alt-right' terms can mean a 'reactionary' facilitator who not only is soft-headed but also a danger to national and public security by importing huge numbers of sentimentalised underdogs who are considered to have very often primitive and vicious attitudes towards women and may well extol jihad.

Connected to this idea of The Fall and forthcoming apocalypse is the idea Bannon has from the novel by Jean Raspail's 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints in which a huge migrant invasion destroys Western Civilisation. Bannon made a direct comparison to the migrant crisis of 2015 and this nightmare narrative now unfolding in real time..

The book is said to be racist in its depiction of global overpopulation and the decision of resentful Third Worlders to swarm 'like a river of sperm' into a placid and comfortable Europe ( France ) due to their fecundity and the idea that without wealth redistribution, the movement of Third Worlders north was a means of direct action.

The novel, as praised as by Bannon, is a favourite of Breitbart because it emphasises the paralysis and weakness of those Westerners too naive and paralysed by white guilt to do anything to defend their borders, wanting only to feel good about themselves, while growing number of migrants jump on the bandwagon to force their way in.

Raspail was a traveler and fascinated by how ancient civilisations become overcivilised and so incapable of ensuring their own physical survival against more vigorous, if less civilised, intruders . They consequently fell because lacking the necessary ruthlessness to defend themselves against growing incursions from outside.

The Camp of the Saints was said by Raspail to be a parable and it could be considered a sort of dark literary 'thought experiment'. It is clear for Bannon, however, that it is a prophecy of what is happening and will happen over time unless defenders of the West start developing the necessary brutality to block migration.

In Bannon's scheme of things, migration from poorer 'Third World' nations, especially the Muslim part is part of an invasion that will require the response to become more militarised. As in the Camp of the Saints, the West loses not so much because of the migrant hordes but because of the internal guilt ridden facilitators.

In particular, Raspail's novel shows the 'End of the West' is due to a failure to win a civil conflict with hippies and humanitarians, where not being brutal enough in suppressing those wanting to 'do the right thing' and so enabling a catastrophe that ends up in the leftists being marginalised and cast aside too by the invaders.

'We just want to help' and 'have empathy' would seem to be mortal weaknesses on the one hand: on the other, they are seized up by those cultural revolutionaries and embittered crypto-communists who could not get their way in the 1960s in getting global revolution and so believe mass migration is one way of fighting for social justice.

In the place of humanitarians, quaint relics who might 'mean well, Breitbart propaganda has created the figure of the 'SJW', the Social Justice Warrior, the one who wants to fight his own civilisation in order to throw open the benefits that should be for the successors of those who created it and not open to just anyone from anywhere.

SJWs could be rather like The Fish in the flawed but interesting dystopian film Children of Men who are active in wanting to 'Let Them In' and fight the deportations of 'illegals'. No longer are those wanting open borders and claiming 'No Human is Illegal' just sentimental idealists: they are terrorists that need to be destroyed.

The 'Regressive left' could well be intended as a term referring to those on the far-left who make excuses for 'reactionary Islamic' ideas in the name of 'anti-racism'. The term has been coopted by Breitbart to mean those who are performing a deliberate disintegrative role in society, weakening the West ready for a Chinese global takeover.

In Raspail's work, on the collapse of the West China immediately invades Russia. In the 1970s, China had the largest population growth and its population could well start to grow again one the government fears its 'greying' as a consequence of material prosperity and the one-child policy having their effects since the 1980s.

Bizarrely, despite Bannon regarding China as the existential enemy of Western Supremacy enabled by the sinister neoliberal globalisers which outsourced manufacturing jobs there, he could also think China has definite advantages over the USA precisely because its disregard for human rights makes it stronger and capable of survival.

China has no qualms in boosting its population by considering subsidies for native Chinese births or in settling frontier territories such as Tibet, taken at the time the PRC was founded in 1949, just as the USA did in the nineteenth century when it started on its path to become the strongest industrial state and so a great world power.

China also became the second largest economy. For Bannon, it's poised to surpass the USA by clamping down on domestic 'disharmony' and protesters wanting Western style 'freedoms' that would have created disorder and stymied the creation of a successful capitalist superpower, albeit one that remains a potentiallly hostile 'communist' state.

In this sense Bannon is, as he claims, 'Leninist'; the only way to revive the state and economy is to ramp up state power to destroy domestic traducers of the American Way, to seize state institutions, purge them ruthlessly of cultural marxists and regressive liberal-leftists. Then the nativist genius of real Americans shall flourish again.

In a perverse sense, freedom as conceived by Bannon is liberation from leftist dogmas and dominance, ones that have conspired to destroy the American spirit and hand over global power to China and a feckless degenerate elite that facilitated this transition and allowed US economy and society to be hollowed out.

Bannon's biological concepts imply that information wars, using Breitbart as a template, can generate the necessary new memes and change and shape consciousness away from the unhealthy ones that have poisoned America and led to the rise of aparasitic finance capitalism which makes nothing real and creates decadence and demoralisation.

The problem is that there is a degree of plausibility in Bannon's vision of a US that lacks real productive powers, that is in civic disintegration and full of deindustrialised wastelands in which unemployed Americans in the rust belts and the declining white middle class can all believe the system is stacked against them.

At such a time, the supposedly 'left wing' obsession with identity politics in the US and in the UK,  the 'race relation industry', the constant demonisation of whites and 'their privilege', not least when coming from middle class university students, is almost a gift to the 'alt-right': now the real victims are the excluded whites.

The perceived decline of the white males, harangued nevertheless as still all having disproportionate power because of who and what they are, has led to a nasty reaction from a section of them who have nothing to lose but by turning to the 'alt-right' and to feel liberated and good about themselves faced with the prospect of destroying enemies.

There is a groundswell of resentful pyschopathology that Trump and Bannon could now tap into directly and use to justify turning towards a war with radical Islam, the need for a trade war and even military confrontation with China and against the internal enemies that empowered those who clearly aim to ruin their lives and degrade them.

Fantasies of violence-smashing puny little placards with their soppy platitudes and aggressive banalities , punching activists in the face and shooting those who clog the smooth working of Trump's border patrol and deportation officers-could well be lived out as part of Trump's 'impossible dream' that is destined to be realised by ultra-hard power

A collective purging of humiliation through violence against what are considered termite level SJWs could well be on the cards. The US election of 2016 that led to Trump's victory was dominated by violent clashes, one Trump as commander of the auditorium and tough leader played on to show how he could expel troublemakers.

Keeping the folks safe and secure from unwanted intruders, agents of chaos and harm was a theme Trump's style of campaign played on. In short, there is a new hunger for the President of ruthless action who is cruel enough not to care about using brutality and violence to protect to crush and terrorise 'SJWs'.

The media-entertainment catchphrase from Trump's hit show reality TV show The Apprentice-"You're Fired"-could take on a sinister new aspect. Some Republicans have even called for violent protesters to be shot as were the students at Kent University in 1970. The USA could be heading towards becoming a violent authoritarian state.