Double Bind: Weaving Autocracy and Democracy
Destroying democracy to save democracy?
Recent events in the United States recall Lenin’s aphorism: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." A series of pivotal moments have shaken the country's electoral process. The media veil hiding President Biden’s cognitive difficulties was torn apart by an awkward debate performance. Then, former President Trump narrowly escaped assassination when a bullet grazed his ear, missing his skull by millimetres. A few weeks later, President Biden, under intense pressure from his party's autocratic elite, reluctantly withdrew from the 2024 presidential election. Party insiders then took an executive decision to select Vice President Harris, viewed by some as an empty political cipher, as the new candidate. Regime media began portraying Harris as a pop culture saviour, suggesting her sassiness alone could redeem the hopes of liberal partisans, who fearing so strongly an apocalypse for democracy from the right, have meekly acquiesced to the left’s tactical withdrawal from the imperfect democratic primary process.
At its most cynical, this figurehead switch appears to be the Democrats' Janus-faced approach to their Zionist dilemma. Like every other political entity in the U.S., the Democratic establishment fully supports the Israeli project. However, many younger voters do not share this view. Specifically, the post-white, post-Christian, post-boomer generations do not hold the same allegiance to the Jewish State as traditional Americans do. The split between Harris and Biden helps alleviate the tension this contradiction creates within the Democratic Party. With Biden stepping away from campaigning for a second term, Harris can appeal to critical anti-Zionist voters, particularly in Michigan. Biden's lame-duck status helps Harris duck blame for the party's unconditional support for Israel.
At the same time Biden is liberated from electoral constraints and can be proud and loud as he floods Israel with weaponry. Biden’s withdrawal from the race gifts Israel at least six months of carte blanche from the US in Gaza, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. And as much as Harris countersignals today, if she were to ever become President, she too would back Israel to the hilt.
A recent missile attack in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights has the region on the brink of war, and may damage this Democratic strategy on Israel. The missile struck a sports field at Majdal Shams in occupied-Syria, killing and injuring several children from the local Druze community. Hezbollah denies responsibility for the attack and claims the damage was the result of an errant Israeli air defense (AD) missile. Hezbollah often attacks the nearby Israeli military base on Mount Hermon and in the past Israeli Iron Dome AD missiles have indeed landed near Majdal Shams. Similar controversies arise in Ukraine monthly, and competing open source internet analysts will make their cases. As of this writing the damage seems more likely to be caused by an errant Hezbollah Falaq-1s—a primitive and unguided rocket.
Israel has been threatening to invade Lebanon for more than a month, and speculation arose that Bibi Netanyahu’s recent trip to the U.S. aimed to secure permission and assistance from the American government for this potential military action on Israel’s northern front. Any such attack would place Harris in a double bind. She would need to skillfully navigate a political tightrope: on one hand, she would have to present herself as a fresh new voice of moderation on Israel to appeal to younger voters, while on the other hand, she would need to follow the directives of the pro-Israeli oligarchic class funding her campaign.
True Believers in Hate
Although manufacturing hate is a universal aspect of politics, one particularly irritating feature of the recent American media landscape is the overwhelming tendency to engage in childish, black-and-white demonization of political opponents. The Democrats are especially skilled at this tactic, to the point where it becomes necessary to provide a right-wing example to demonstrate the absurdity:
The Republicans need to exercise some patience and take a page from the Democrats' playbook. The Democrats spend at least a couple of months laying the groundwork with preparatory propaganda against a hate enemy, before going full bore into the Hitler analogies. As a result, many Democratic partisans genuinely believe that Trump embodies the traits of both Stalin and Hitler—although in fairness perhaps not 200 times worse!
Eric Hoffer, in his popular psychological study of group dynamics, The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements, describes hate as the gravity that binds political constellations together:
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal [well-being] and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass.
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.
Despite Hoffer's recommendation of Hitler's strategy of focusing on a single, recognizable "monotheistic" devil, the current American national security establishment engages in cycles of demon inflation, creating a veritable pantheon of domestic and international devils. The precise satanic hierarchy remains unclear—questions arise, such as whether Putin holds more power than Trump or if Xi controls both.
It seems that, like the ideal deity, the ideal devil is one. We have it from Hitler—the foremost authority on devils—that the genius of a great leader consists in concentrating all hatred on a single foe, making “even adversaries far removed from one another seem to belong to a single category.”
The "evil trinity" of Putin, Xi, and Trump can be grouped together under the satanic category of authoritarians. Much like the Christian trinitarian concept of God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost, they are both distinct and united: in this case, as three versions of satanic authoritarianism.
And this is where the national security state faces a dilemma with Harris. Given the American media's tendency to personalize its enemies into cartoonish villains, does anyone really believe Harris is in the same power projection league as Putin, Xi, Kim, or Khamenei? It's clear that Harris' base of wealthy urban liberals, while eager to support most wars, will never volunteer to fight in one. Will the traditional backbone of American infantry—Appalachian country boys—respond to Harris' eventual call and start enlisting in the US military? This is especially doubtful after the recent massive devaluation campaign against rural whites launched by Harris' political allies.
Paradoxically, from a strictly anti-war perspective, Harris may be preferable to a Trump-Vance ticket. This is because it is conceivable that Trump and Vance could act as "white working-class whisperers," convincing their base to support foreign wars. While this scenario is unlikely, it remains possible; a universal rule of politics is that campaign promises are often broken. Politicians do not craft campaign rhetoric with the intent of solving future problems. Instead, narratives and images are offered by a campaign solely to maximize the number of votes a candidate may receive.
Of course the same rule can be applied to the other side. Who’s to say the Vice President will not morph into a second “Bomber” Harris if she were to ever reach the Oval Office?
From Hate to the Kill
The danger of stoking hate lies in the possibility that disturbed individuals might not distinguish between hate narratives used as unifying discourses and the actual act of killing a political figure. Killing Trump would have shattered the bonds of hate that unify the Democratic coalition. On the other hand, the "uniparty" often only pretends to engage in political combat. After Trump's demise, Harris and Nikki Haley could have made a great show of "coming together for the greater good of the nation."
Political assassinations are often motivated by the perception of a foreign policy betrayal. Charles de Gaulle survived several assassination attempts driven by outrage over France's "loss" of Algeria, a policy he championed. My preferred hypothesis for the motive behind the JFK assassination is that anti-Castro Cubans sought revenge against Kennedy for betraying the Free Cuban cause during the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion. Perhaps Trump’s would-be assassin was similarly motivated by the belief that Trump might betray Ukraine. However, no clear evidence of any motive has emerged yet.
One of my personal quirks when it comes to assassinations is to look for similar examples from ancient history. Generally speaking, until very recently, political assassinations were almost always recognized as conspiracies. One of the most remarkable cases from Ancient Greece was the assassination of the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus by a gay couple, Harmodius and Aristogeiton. They were celebrated as the saviors of democracy, even as recently as in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. A more cynical view suggests that the overthrow of the Athenian tyrants was actually orchestrated by Athens' eternal enemy, Sparta, and that the story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton was later fabricated by Athenian mythmakers.
In Athens, homosexuality was not seen as a fixed identity. One of the paradoxes of the Athenian practice of treating women like livestock was that it allowed situational homosexuality to flourish—based on the belief that romantic love was only possible between equals. An older, accomplished man would take a younger boy as a lover. Harmodius filled this passive role, but when the tyrant Hipparchus made advances towards him, the older Aristogeiton became enraged. The myth claims the two lovers then decided to kill the tyrant, hoping to be remembered eternally as heroes of democracy.
There has been very little information released about Trump’s presumed attacker, Thomas Matthew Crooks. He does on the surface project “incel” vibes. It’s pure speculation, but did Crooks meet a love interest—male or female—on the internet who inspired him to sacrifice his life to save democracy by slaying the evil tyrant Trump? If so was this “love interest” working for a foreign intelligence service that has an interest in seeing Trump dead?
In any case, the timing of the Trump assassination attempt was particularly propitious for the US National Security establishment. Biden’s string of senior moments during the June debate left Trump as an apparent shoo-in to win the 2024 presidential election. If a Republican were the win the upcoming election, powerful elements within the US establishment prefer it would be a butch neoconservative war hawk like Haley, who was Trump’s runner-up in the Republican primary process.
Haley represents a media-constructed alternative to Harris: a post-white, post-Christian and post-boomer America that still actually worships Israel. The media is very talented at gaslighting Americans. For the past year regime media endlessly insisted that Biden was as “sharp as a tack.” In a similar gaslighting campaign, two years ago the media launched an intense campaign that Ukraine would defeat Russia and reclaim their 1991 borders.
Trump’s fateful rally took place on the weekend before the Republican National Convention, which marked the last moment that Haley could be promoted to the top spot. For the first time during this election season, the major TV networks decided to broadcast a Trump rally live.
Had Trump’s assassin been a slightly more competent shot, the Orange Man’s death could have been blamed on Iran and a grand united front of uniparty Democrats and Republicans could have granted Bibi Netanyahu his fondest wishes by at the very least severely attacking Iran. Remember that one of the myriad reasons given by George Bush II for invading Iraq was the supposed plot by Saddam Hussein to kill his father, George Bush I.
Two months before the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. His stated desire was to visit Cuba and make contact with the Soviet embassy there. It must be remembered that in 1959 Oswald defected to the Soviet Union while serving in the Marine Corps Reserves, eventually returning to the US in June of 1962. There is much speculation that he was a false defector. Oswald’s visit to the Cuban embassy was meant to implicate Castro in the upcoming assassination, therefore in theory justifying a retaliatory invasion and regime change in Cuba.
There is the usual chatter about a deep state assassin firing several shots at Trump in addition to any shots taken by the 20-year-old incel patsy. However, is it really believable that a trained assassin could choke so badly on such an easy kill shot? From 140 meters it doesn’t matter if Trump turned his head or even performed somersaults on stage, an experienced sniper would have ended his life.
Following the Republican convention, it is Trump’s Vice Presidential choice, and bête noire of the deep state, Appalachian country boy / Yale Law School graduate J.D. Vance, who in case of any untimely demise, would replace Trump. Vance could be seen as a sort of assassination insurance since he at least feigns being even more anti-war than Trump.
But just a few days after the convention, perhaps displaying some serious cognitive decline of his own, Trump basically begged Mossad and the deep state to kill him in a false flag assassination to launch a scorched earth campaign in Persia.
Democracy in a Double Bind
Following the disastrous debate, with Trump on his way to a “victory over democracy” at the ballot boxes in November, the Democratic Party’s autocracy fell into a double bind. If they trusted the democratic choice of their voters, they would lose democratic elections, and—according to their paranoid inner voices—lose what little remained of the democratic tradition of America. Biden had earlier warned that only supernatural intervention would convince him to leave the race:
If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race,” he said. “The Lord Almighty’s not coming down
According to Politico, behind the scenes, the autocratic elites of the Democratic Party that despite their stern warnings to the populace to the contrary, the dumb masses were on the verge of granting a second democratic mandate to Trump:
In addition to presenting new concerns from lawmakers and updates on a fundraising operation that had slowed considerably, they carried the campaign’s own polls, which came back this week and showed his path to victory in November was gone, according to five people familiar with the matter, who, like others interviewed for this article, were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. Biden asked several questions during the exchange.
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When the campaign commissioned new battleground polling over the last week, it was the first time they had done surveys in some key states in more than two months, according to two people familiar with the surveys. And the numbers were grim, showing Biden not just trailing in all six critical swing states but collapsing in places like Virginia and New Mexico where Democrats had not planned on needing to spend massive resources to win.
And so the Lord Almighty herself came down from the lofty perch within her Pacific Heights mansion in San Francisco and commanded Joe to get out of the race:
Senior Biden aides were bracing for former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who’d worked behind the scenes to encourage others in the party toward the kind of collective action that might finally push the president to end his campaign, to go public this week and possibly even disclose Democratic polling clarifying Biden’s dire political straits.
“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” said one Democrat familiar with private conversations who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”
According to Seymour Hersh, Pelosi assigned former President Obama to deliver the final warning to Biden:
The compromise offered to Biden was that he could finish his term in exchange for not running in the 2024 campaign. One cannot fault the Democratic elite for making this decision—they arguably should have done so a year ago. In fact, a more logical choice might have been to push Biden out entirely and allow Harris to assume the role of the 47th President. However, this would have saddled her with the responsibility for the geopolitical crises the U.S. is facing in Ukraine and Israel. The real criticism of the Democratic leadership lies in their failure to even feign a democratic process in choosing Biden’s successor for the 2024 ticket.
The Double Bind
Psychologist Gregory Bateson claims that "you cannot count the bats in an inkblot because there are none. And yet, a person—if they are 'batminded'—may 'see' several." Similarly, can an autocratic figure like Nancy Pelosi override the results of a seemingly democratic primary process while also insisting on being recognized as the matron saint of democracy? How are "democracy-minded" partisans able to look into Nancy Pelosi’s cold eyes and perceive them as glittering with democratic fervour?
One explanation involves a defense mechanism against what Bateson terms the "double bind." In Bateson's original concept, a child is experientially groomed into schizophrenia by a dysfunctional mother who is incapable of expressing love while simultaneously forcing the child to see her as a perfectly loving figure. As she withdraws in disgust from the child, she compels him to be grateful for her supposed affection. The child's only defense against living under the impossible paradox of a double bind is to flee reality through the "escape valve" of metaphor. The fortunate victims grow up to become semi-damaged poets or comedians; the less fortunate may descend into the pathology of schizophrenia.
A double bind metaphor can be applied to the broader society, especially in the political realm. For example, a group of activists can be rallied by their political "primal mother" around the idea of saving democracy from a perceived "orange demonic menace." At the same time, they are compelled to disavow any democratic process in selecting a candidate, who ends up being merely a cipher for shadowy autocratic rule. In an adaptive yet pathological move to escape this double bind, the political partisan shifts her perception and misidentifies the empty political cipher as a champion of the very democratic values that the political "mother" rejects. This psychotic improvisation resolves little. As election campaigns follow one another, the dual process of withholding democracy while insisting that it be championed either rewires the partisan’s mind into a form of political schizophrenia or leads the partisan to extricate themselves entirely from the spectacle.
Bateson’s concept of metacommunication refers to communication beyond simple linguistic content. It includes intonation, body language, facial gestures and other contextual clues to the actual meaning of words spoken. Humour, sarcasm, parody and teasing are notoriously difficult for even neurotypical people to communicate over text or internet communication.
As a result the child must systematically distort his perception of metacommunicative signals. For example, if mother begins to feel hostile (or affectionate) toward her child and also feels compelled to withdraw from him, she might say, "Go to bed, you're very tired and I want you to get your sleep." This overtly loving statement is intended to deny a feeling which could be verbalized as "Get out of my sight because I'm sick of you." If the child correctly discriminates her metacommunicative signals, he would have to face the fact that she both doesn't want him and is deceiving him by her loving behavior. He would be "punished" for learning to discriminate orders of messages accurately. He therefore would tend to accept the idea that he is tired rather than recognize his mother's deception. This means that he must deceive himself about his own internal state in order to support mother in her deception. To survive with her he must
One aspect of schizophrenia is an inability to interpret metacommunication. This difficulty arises after years of grooming, during which the pre-schizophrenic individual learns to distrust their internal tools for deciphering metacommunication. When faced with the need to make a metacommunicative judgment, the mature schizophrenic may become overwhelmed with fear, leading them to retreat into paranoia, delusion, or even catatonia.
Playfighting is a powerful example of both metacommunication and the double bind. We are both fighting and not fighting. What appears to be combat is something else.
An obviously pathological condition arises if for example a teenaged boy and his father are playfighting but suddenly the father strikes a true blow and then laughs about never letting your guard down. The way out of the double bind is for the victim to call out the failure of metacommunication. “But Dad we where playfighting, I could have pummelled you if I knew we were fighting for real.”
Partisans from both sides in the political divide often call out their uniparty sides for political playfighting. In the past, many supposed political battles were more Kabuki Theatre than gladiatorial combat. There are vast areas of agreement for all politicians who have climbed their way through the ideological and financial filters in place to curate a docile political class.
The Harlem Globetrotters and Washington Generals engage in a form of athletic playfighting to showcase the Globetrotters' displays of skill, which are highly entertaining but irrelevant to actually winning. Perhaps one reason Donald Trump is so hated by the political elite is that when he entered the 2016 race, he broke the unwritten rules of political playfighting and engaged in actual, brutal political combat. If this is true, it is ironic, given Trump's involvement in professional wrestling, which is notorious for its flamboyant playfighting.
A Choice Between 1984 and A Brave New World
In 1985, media critic Neil Postman wrote his seminal work, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, often regarded as the anti-television bible. In his preface, he analysed two classic mid-20th-century novels that attempted to depict future dystopias, both of which predicted the dreaded decline of democracy:
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us
The 2024 U.S. campaign features opposing projections of 1984 versus Brave New World. This dichotomy places voters in a double bind between concepts of selflessness and selfishness on the individual and group levels. The “selfless" Democrats argue that a victory for the "selfish" Trump will lead to a 1984-style totalitarian dystopia, where citizens must become entirely selfless for the collective, autocratic good. The only way to maintain individual selfishness is to reject group selfishness (nationalism) by voting Democratic.
Conversely, Trump portrays himself as a selfless oligarch, taking bullets for the common man to supposedly spark a collective rejuvenation of America. To achieve this collectively selfish goal, the individually flamboyant Trump must somehow persuade everyday Americans to reject their own individual selfishness and embrace the austerity, work ethic and common sacrifice that fuelled U.S. prosperity in the post-WWII era.