The number one news story in the world today is not the Russian special military operation, or the collapse of the Western economy as an aside, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade constitutional guarantee of the right to terminate a pregnancy. Now the issue of abortion has been moved back to the states. And immediately the U.S. Attorney General of Missouri, Eric Schmitt, announced the decision to ban abortion. The decision blew up the U.S., and the whole globalist wing of that nation, having received such a blow, rushed out into the streets, howling and roaring, with an uncontrollable appetite for burning cars and looting stores. In my view, this is very serious.
The fact is that, until recently, the only branch of government in the United States that had not yet discredited itself was the courts. Their authority was indisputable for all political actors. It was believed that corruption and ideological lobbies had failed to fully seize control of the judicial system. And now the judges appointed under Trump have made their move. All of this requires the most serious reflection.
The fact is that there is not one United States, but two countries, and two nations with that name. And this is becoming increasingly obvious. It is not even about Republicans and Democrats, the conflict between whom is becoming increasingly acrimonious. It is the fact that there is a deeper division in American society.
Half of the U.S. population are supporters of pragmatism. This means that for them there is only one criterion for evaluation—things work or they don’t work. That’s it. And no dogma about the subject or the object. Everyone can think of himself as anything, including Elvis Presley or Santa Claus, and if it works, no one dares object. It’s the same with the outside world—there are no inviolable laws; do whatever you want with the outside world; but if it responds harshly, that’s your problem. There are no entities, only interaction. This is the basis of the core American identity. It is how Americans themselves have traditionally understood liberalism: as the freedom to think whatever you want, believe whatever you want, and behave however you want. Of course, if this leads to conflict, the freedom of one is limited by the freedom of the other; but without trying it, you won’t know where the fine line lies. Try it. Maybe it will work.
This is how American society was up to a certain point. And here banning abortion, allowing abortion, sex reassignment, punishing sex reassignment, gay pride parades or neo-Nazi marches were all possible, nothing was rejected from the get-go, whatever the outcome. And the courts, based on a host of unpredictable criteria, precedent, and considerations, were the last resort in problematic cases to decide if it worked or didn’t work. This is the mysterious side of Americans, completely unintelligible to Europeans, and also the key to their success—they have no boundaries at all, which means they go do wherever they want until someone stops them. And that is exactly what works.
But among the American elite, which is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds, at some point a critically large number of the wrong kind of people, the non-Americans, have been congregating. They are predominantly from Europe; often from Russia. Many are ethnically Jewish, but steeped in European or Russian-Soviet principles and cultural codes. They brought a different culture, a different philosophy to the United States. They did not understand or accept American pragmatism at all, seeing it only as a background for their own advancement. That is, they took advantage of American opportunities, but were not about to adopt a libertarian logic, alien to any hint of totalitarianism. In fact, it was these foreign elites who hijacked the old American democracy. It was they who rose to the head of the globalist structures and gradually seized power in the US.
These elites, most often left-liberal, sometimes outright Trotskyist, brought with them a position deeply alien to the American spirit—the belief in linear progress. Progress and pragmatism are incompatible. If progress works—great. If not, it must be abandoned. Here is the law of pragmatism—it works/it doesn’t work. You want forward, go ahead. You want backwards, no problem. That’s what freedom is in the American way. In the Old American way.
But the Old World emigrants carried with them very different attitudes. For them, progress was dogma. All history was seen as one continuous improvement, as a continuous process of emancipation, improvement, development, and the accumulation of knowledge. Progress was a philosophy and a religion. Anything was possible and necessary in the name of progress, which included a steady increase in individual freedoms, technical development, and the abolition of traditions and taboos. And it no longer mattered whether it worked or not. What mattered was progress.
But this represented an entirely new interpretation of liberalism in the American tradition. The old liberalism asserted—no one can ever impose anything on me. The new liberalism countered with—the culture of abolition, of shaming, of the total elimination of old habits, of sex change, of the freedom to dispose of the human fetus (pro-choice), of equal rights for women and races—which was not just a possibility, it was a necessity. The old liberalism said—be whatever you want, as long as it works. The new one countered—you have no right not to be a liberal. If you are not a progressive, you are a Nazi and must be destroyed. In the name of freedom, LGBT+, transgender and Artificial Intelligence, everything must be sacrificed.
The conflict between the two societies—the old libertarian, pragmatist society and the new neoliberal, progressivist society—has been steadily increasing over the past decades, culminating in the Trump presidency. Trump embodied one America, and his Democratic globalist opponents the other. The civil war of philosophies has now come to a critical juncture. And it is precisely a matter of interpretation of freedom. The old America sees individual freedom as something that excludes any external prescription, any requirement to use it only this way and not that way, only for that, and for nothing else. For example, only for abortion and gay pride, and never for the prohibition of abortion or the ravings of perverts. New America, by contrast, insists that freedom requires violence against those who do not understand it properly enough. This means that freedom must have a normative interpretation, and it is up to neoliberals to determine how to use it and how to interpret it, and by whom. The old liberalism is libertarian. The new liberalism is openly totalitarian.
And it is in this context that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision on abortion should be considered. It is in favor of the old liberalism and pragmatism. Note, it does not prohibit abortion, but only states that there is no clear solution at the federal level. The states can solve the problem however they want. But it means, no more, no less, that time is reversible. That it is possible to move in one direction, progressive; or it is possible to move in the opposite direction. As long as it works. So, it’s not about abortion at all. It’s about understanding the nature of time. It’s about the deepest divisions in American society. The point is that one America is, more and more blatantly, at war with the other.
The whole totalitarian dictatorial strategy of the globalist neo-liberal elite is being undermined by the Supreme Court, which is acting—somewhat like the Russian Bolsheviks—in the name of the future. Progress justifies everything. Until then, all decisions were only in one direction—in favor of individualism, egocentrism and hedonism. And suddenly the Supreme Court takes a sharp step backwards. Why was it allowed to do that? And once desperate old Americans, pragmatists and libertarians rejoice—the freedom to do what you want, not what progressives and technocrats say—to go in any direction, not just where the globalists force you to go, has triumphed again. And the brave Missouri attorney general has already shown what can be made of it. Bravo! This is a pragmatic revolution—an American-style conservative revolution.
And naturally, the whole globalist progressive rabble is about to be knocked flat on their asses. Something as important as Trump’s election has happened. The old America has counter-attacked the new America.
“Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand” (Matthew 12: 25). It’s coming soon…
Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitica.
Featured: “Builders of Ships – The Rope,” George Bellows; painted August 1916.