Trump's Impeachment: Controlling the Narrative, Preventing Change

Trump’s Impeachment: Controlling the Narrative, Preventing Change

Peter Schultz

            In thinking about the current Democratic attempt to impeach and remove Trump from office, an attempt that is ultimately phony, it seems to me that this “show trial” has been created so the Democrats can try to control what is now called “the narrative” of American politics.

            As anyone who has offered the opinion that Trump’s actions vis-à-vis the Ukraine, for example, are politically insignificant when compared to, say, to Bush’s war against Iraq, a war based on lies and politically adjusted intelligence, has discovered, the response usually is something like this: “Well, that’s irrelevant.” And this means that whatever Bush did, no matter how monstrous, how deadly, how destructive, that doesn’t matter any longer. The only thing that matters is Trump and what he’s done.

            But such responses and such a myopic focus on Trump only serve to hide the perfectly legitimate argument that the American political order is thoroughly oligarchic, thoroughly imperialistic, and thoroughly militaristic, as illustrated by the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama administrations. It’s as if people are saying: “I don’t care if our political order is oligarchic, imperialistic, and militaristic. I care only about Trump and I want him out!”

            And if you point out that for the most part Trump’s critics are precisely those who brought us Bush’s wars, Bush torture regime, and Obama’s legitimation of Bush’s policies, the response often is: “Well, that may be true but I don’t care about that. I want Trump out because he should never have been president in the first place. And I am in favor of any decent pretense that accomplish this goal.”

            So the Democrats need not care whether Trump is impeached or, if impeached, removed from office. Their goal is to create “a narrative” by which their militaristic imperialism, for example, disappears from the drama or the discourse of American politics. Also, the oligarchic character of their politics will also disappear and these disappearances will be labeled “centrism” or “political moderation.” But by avoiding what they perceive to be “extremes,” the Democrats are ensuring – deliberately – that we the people will not see and they will not deal with the root causes of our political deficiencies. As I like to say: “Impeach and remove Trump if you care to. But don’t expect much to change afterwards.” Because this “impeachment” has been undertaken to prevent any real or significant change in America’s politics.

            And in this light, you might want to ask yourself: Why is it that the Communist system in the USSR had a greater capacity for change than the allegedly liberal and democratic United States? And don’t look now but the same phenomenon is taking place in Communist China. Americans just might want to look beyond Trump because “the times they are a changing.”