AMERICAN PARTY DUOPOLY

RORY FANNING—Armistice Day was established on November 11, 1919, to commemorate the end of hostilities in World War I. Armistice Day was sacred because it was intended to evoke memories of fear, pain, suffering, military incompetence, greed and destruction on the grandest scale for those who had participated in war, directly and indirectly. Veterans Day, instead of looking toward a future of peace, celebrates war “heroes” and encourages others to dream of playing the hero themselves, covering themselves in valor.

ERIC ZUESSE—It’s said that Trump is causing people outside the U.S. to despise the United States. But Obama was at least as bad, and he is internationally respected. Foreigners are no better than Americans. This really isn’t a national thing. It’s a reflection of the common global culture, which is sick everywhere. 

YASHA LEVINE—Since the dot-com bubble, Silicon Valley had been at the forefront of pushing for a new (American-led) global world order — a borderless society with global platforms, global supply chains, and global capitalism. But that’s over. The mood’s changing. Ever since Trump won in 2016, the industry has gotten more nihilistic and militaristic and much more patriotic. It’s part of this new liberal belief that America is an embattled society being attacked through the Internet by hostile foreign forces.

ERIC ZUESSE—In America, the Deep State ‘justifies’ itself in the ‘news’-media that it owns, and does so by falsely ‘defining’ what the “Deep State” is (which is actually the nation’s 607 billionaires, whose hired agents number in the millions). They mis-‘define’ it, as being, instead, the taxpayer-salaried career Government employees, known professionally as “the Civil Service.” (Although some Civil Servants — especially at the upper levels — are agents for America’s billionaires and retire to cushy board seats, most of them actually are not and do not. And the “revolving door” between “the public sector” and “the private sector” is where the Deep State operations become concentrated.

JEFFREY SACHS—If the Trump administration “succeeds” in dividing the world into separate technology camps, the risks of future conflicts will multiply. The US championed open trade after World War II not only to boost global efficiency and expand markets for American technology, but also to reverse the collapse of international trade in the 1930s. That collapse stemmed in part from protectionist tariffs imposed by the US under the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act, which amplified the Great Depression, in turn contributing to the rise of Hitler and, ultimately, the outbreak of World War II.