Americans Who Support Status Quo Politics Are American Supremacists

By Caitlin Johnstone

"Information Clearing House"

Trump is a bad president. He’s coddled oligarchs both in America and around the world, he made a mess of the pandemic response and lied about it, he’s incited violence and inflamed hate, he’s done nothing for ordinary Americans, he’s facilitated ecocide, any good decisions he’s made on foreign policy have been far outweighed by the bad, and his recent refusal to guarantee a peaceful transition of power if defeated in November is concerning.

That said, Trump is not a uniquely bad president. The only way to see him that way is to believe that American lives are far, far more important than those of the millions of mostly brown-skinned human beings who have been murdered by the US war machine under the leadership of both Trump and his predecessors.

Just since 9/11 several million people have been killed and tens of millions displaced by American military violence to shore up control of key geostrategic regions with the goal of total global domination. Trump has not been any worse in the facilitation of this butchery than his predecessors. Where he differs significantly is in the amount of stress that his presidency has been causing Americans.

I don’t mean to make light of the stress, disruption and anxiety that Americans have experienced during the Trump administration, but to suggest that it comes anywhere remotely close to the unbroken streak of blood staining presidencies long preceding this one is absurd. Millions of people brutally murdered for imperialist resource control agendas and war plutocrat profit margins is vastly more significant than the emotional discomfort of Americans. It just is. If you disagree with what I just said, you are wrong.

I am not saying who Americans should or should not vote for. What I am saying is that the belief that this election is uniquely important because this president is uniquely bad is the product of a worldview which sees American lives as much more important than non-American lives. It is the worldview of American supremacism.

American supremacism is like any other supremacist ideology which holds an empowered group as innately superior to disempowered groups, except since its consequences are exported overseas its adherents don’t have to look at those consequences. For this reason, most American supremacists are not aware that that’s what they are. Their politics don’t hold all people as equal, but they are able to compartmentalize away from that fact since its consequences are out of sight and out of mind.

If they were executing immigrants in American streets by the millions, there’d be a very conscious divide between those who support this and those who do not, because everyone would be constantly confronted with the fact that it’s happening and forced to come down on one side or the other on the issue. But since it’s an atrocity Americans don’t have to look at, and since their oligarchic news media are all too happy to passively conceal it from them, they wind up unconsciously selecting American supremacism as their default position by supporting the status quo which promotes it.

Americans who support status quo politics, whether by the oligarchic warmongering Democratic Party or the oligarchic warmongering Republican Party, are American supremacists. They might not know it, but they are. They support a political paradigm in which people in other parts of the world are violently butchered to protect a US-centralized power structure which exists solely for the benefit of the powerful. Their American supremacist worldview allows them to see their own emotional discomfort as more significant than human bodies getting ripped apart by explosives every day around the world in support of the status quo their mainstream political faction promotes.

And it’s just taken as a given that it has to be this way. It’s taken as a given by both of America’s mainstream political factions that endless military expansionism, bombings, starvation sanctions and cold war escalations are going to continue, and the only things up for debate are the specific details of exactly how it’s going to continue and whether or not saying “black lives matter” makes you a communist.

And of course it doesn’t have to be this way. America could just function as a normal country, minding its own affairs inside its own borders without murdering anyone for happening to live near fossil fuels. There’s no legitimate reason why it could not. The endless slaughter benefits no ordinary people in any way.

It would be one thing if Americans actually benefited from all the bloodshed; that would just be garden variety human predation. But it’s not even that; the American supremacist worldview serves nobody but a few elite sociopaths who’ve enmeshed themselves with the world’s most powerful government. Ordinary Americans consent to the interminable churning of the US war machine at their own expense and to their own detriment because they are kept ignorant, poor and propagandized so they don’t get any grand ideas about intervening in the empire-building of the manipulators.

Regardless of what happens in November, this is madness and it must not continue. Don’t let the sideshow of electoral politics distract from this vastly more important fact. Vote for whoever you want, but have no illusions about that vote addressing what is by far the most crucial issue with the US government.

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