"We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan. The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote paedophilia."
In Russia, the appeal to these old-fashioned values has concealed an old-fashioned looting of the economy, along with a beefing up of the military. That Trump has nominated so many titans of the corporate sector and the military-industrial complex suggests that his administration will closely follow the Russian blueprint, much as Viktor Orban has already done in Hungary.
As Donald Trump settles into the Oval Office this week, say goodbye to the one-worlders of the Obama-Clinton years and say hello to a new era of the one-percenters. America's oligarchs will profit handsomely from the administration's infrastructure program, its reconfigured trade deals, and its accelerated emphasis on resource extraction.
For the rest of us, much pain will accompany the birth of this new nationalist world order, this confederacy of oligarchs. The world urgently needs a new generation of democratic internationalists -- or there won't be much of a world left when Trump and his cronies get through with it.
John Feffer is the author of the new dystopian novel, Splinterlands (a Dispatch Books original with Haymarket Books), which Publishers Weekly hails as "a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning." He is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and a TomDispatch regular.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well as Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 John Feffer
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