Republicans are the designated whipping boys for Reaction covering a wide swath of political culture, thought, and activity in America. The content is obvious, summarized as the militarization of advanced capitalism as it seeks to maintain its unilateral course of global supremacy, the effort breaking down in a world of decentralizing power relations, and thereby forcing America to ever greater extremes of action in order to keep its place. The strains are showing: an integral racism in the historical-national mindset quiescent for a time and now once more erupting; worldwide covert operations and meddling in others’ internal affairs, ongoing since the 1940s but now so regularized and done with impunity and urgency as to be hardly noticed; the use of trade as a battering ram for geopolitical/geostrategic purposes to shape the hegemonic balance-of-power with respect to China and Russia, while serving notice on US partners of forcible financial-commercial penetration, so that all alike are destructively affected; in sum, quick on-the-trigger hammering out of a stable ideological environment for America’s true spirit of ethnocentrism and xenophobia, consciously and unconsciously working on behalf of a corporatistic system of widening differentials in wealth, power, racial and ethnic superior-inferior rankings, a tightening of the screws on patriotic conformity, all of the foregoing wrapped tightly around the intensive concentration of business and banking power into amoral unrestrained monoliths based in or using America for protective cover.
