U.S. Midterm Elections and the Collapse of the “Unipolar Order”

The midterm election campaigns in the United States heavily featured loose talk about the “end of democracy”. For the Republicans (GOP), this referred to the pervasive censorship of opposition to the policies of the Democratic Party, and allegations of widespread vote fraud conducted by urban Democratic party election machines. For the Democrats, it was the belief that the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, which reflected the undemocratic, even fascistic sentiments characterizing Trump supporters in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.

Such talk, according to our American colleagues, was not simply overblown rhetoric, but partisan poison injected into the electoral process. Digging deeper, one finds something much more problematic affecting the outcome of U.S. elections. This is the long-term effect of a mental complacency among voters, which when combined with ignorance of history and real economics, compounded by sophisticated “hybrid or information warfare”, have made Americans incapable of addressing the real issue confronting the nation.

And that issue is the collapse of the unipolar order, based on the idea that America is the “sole superpower” in the world. That the unipolar order is collapsing, and the majority of nations are moving toward a new strategic and financial architecture, were not addressed by any of the major campaigns, which focused primarily on issues of “identity politics”, and portrayed opponents according to profiles shaped by narrow partisan interests. This is a kind of local form of “geopolitics”, of divide-and-conquer, of reducing voters to increasingly smaller constituency concerns, while demonizing all others as a “threat to our way of life”.

But what really threatens the way of life — the danger of a nuclear war between the U.S./NATO and Russia, soaring inflation and shortages of energy and food — were hardly mentioned during the campaign, with the exception of the two LaRouche Independent campaigns of Diane Sare for U.S. Senate in New York, and Joel Dejean for a House seat in Texas. Despite polls showing that 78% of the electorate were “dissatisfied with how the government is functioning”, and a 58% disapproval rating of President Biden, the much hyped “red wave”, predicting a Republican sweep of Congress, did not materialize. With votes not yet fully counted, the GOP is expected to have taken the House of Representatives by a small margin, while the Democrats have retained control of the Senate — but neither party has a plan for the nation. Thus, a major opportunity to bring American voters into the real world, to address the transformation underway with the rejection of the U.S./NATO enforced rules-based order, was lost.

Some of the blame for this is being directed at Donald Trump, including from many Republicans. His insistence on focusing the campaign on his person and his future prevented many GOP candidates from addressing Biden’s war policy against Russia and his dangerously foolish “green agenda”. That may be true, but the ignorance of American voters of the information warfare waged against them, and of what is happening in the world, certainly predated Donald Trump.