I cringe every time I hear some talking head refer to the gang of thieves engaged in an autocratic attempt to overthrow a democracy, however flawed, as “the administration.” Why? Because my first thought is, what exactly are they administering? An administration administrates; it does not plunder. Well, occasionally some do in relatively minor ways. On the other hand, a regime is just a regime, a group of intellectual misfits who use ideological sleight of hand to plunder the wealth of a nation in service to their insatiable greed.
So, when we listen to a rambling stream of lies called “The State of the Nation” speech, we are likely to hear, in addition to claims of past election fraud—the claims to which had been adjudicated and disproven in over sixty courts of law—we may sigh in frustration with a man who cannot stop beating a dead horse. We are expected to live in his world of appearances, despite what our eyes and price-tags tell us.
A lot of self-congratulatory claims of making the nation “great again” are heard, bragging of how many federal jobs he and his megalomaniacal tech-bro destroyed almost randomly with no policy goal whatsoever, other than eliminating anyone who might resist his cutting the costs of administering the nation’s business in order to retain funds to contribute to their massive tax cut for billionaire and corporate donors to their grift. Greatness is apparently defined as the extent to which one can make others suffer from their plundering the common wealth of the nation. It’s not just the job losses, it is explicitly taking from the poor to give to the rich. Shrink as many government programs as possible to increase the capacity to reward rich donors and fill one’s own pockets.
What is a Regime?
While technically the word regime refers to any particular form of government that defines the relationship between the government and the governed, it is more often used to indicate a more hierarchical relationship between the rulers and the ruled in a negative way. That may seem a subtle distinction, but it can make a huge difference.
In common usage, it often does has a negative connotation, as in the implication that a regime is either a dictatorship or an authoritarian form of government, that is, anti-democratic. That is why I find myself annoyed when I hear some talking head refer to an autocratic regime as “the administration.” Administrations execute laws passed by legislative action, they don’t run roughshod over laws passed by (more or less) democratically elected legislators. The societal mandate of any administration is not to operate in the interests of its personal and political power alone, without reference to any policy within legal parameters, other than re-shaping government to increase its power without reference to the wellbeing of the nation or its people.
A regime tries to construct a world of appearances to operate a government system for its own purposes, suppressing any source of dissent.
The Aims of Life and the Aims of ‘The System’
My recent reading of Vaclav Havel’s 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” was a fascinating refresher on the oppressive regimes of the Eastern Bloc countries that were dominated by the Soviet Union until its demise. It was written in response to what Havel called the “post-totalitarian” regime in Czechoslovakia before the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989. Havel contrasted the “aims of life” with “the aims of the system,” referring to the “post-totalitarian” regime as forcing the population social-psychologically to accept its “world of appearances” by “living within the lie.”
Unlike classic dictatorships, which enforced their power with violence, the regime Havel opposed, controlled the population by forcing them to “live in the lie,” in service to the system, which maintained its power through its cultural enforcement of rituals of legitimation as its primary instrument of control—systematic propaganda enforced as an unstable foundation built on lies. For the people, loyalty was an external front to display, not an internal state of commitment and belief. This ‘world of appearances” permeated Czechoslovakian society as the foundation of the system’s power over the people.
One of Havel’s key points was that the Czech regime operated strictly to serve “the aims of the system,” not “the aims of life.” While one might argue that many modern governments have become detached from the needs and lives of their people, since many of their systemic operational goals may not serve the aims of life as such, and may even conflict with them, they may ideologically rationalize system-goals as serving the people. Well, of course, that is a matter of degree.
But for Havel, that would constitute “living within the lie.” The analogy to our modern industrial-consumer political economy and its world of appearances of ‘democracy and progress’ through focus on consumption, operating as thin veils over the real world of excessive profits, capital accumulation, and exclusion of the population from the spoils of capitalism, is striking.
Such rationalizations run rampant among modern governments, but not to the extent that they become Havel’s “post-totalitarian” regimes, completely living within the lie. That is not to say that none are moving in that direction. Let us consider what the would-be dictator has to say in relation to these trends. Every situation is different in some ways. The emerging autocrat and his henchmen consistently act with a mix the elements of classic dictatorship—marauding masked thugs in unmarked vehicles ‘disappearing’ people off the streets in the manner of the former Argentine dictatorship under Pinochet—and ideological demands that everyone conform to an imaginary ‘world of appearances,’ which directly opposes the people’s efforts to ‘live within the truth.’
The Regime of Authoritarian Revolt Against Democracy
How can I not invoke the Epstein files, and the broader implications of emerging information on the “Epstein Elite”? After all, as Representative Ro Khanna so accurately labeled it, the “Epstein Class” is a global network of the most perverse and powerful members of the global super-rich, powerful, and professionally accomplished elites, who believe themselves to be above the law. As Anand Giridharadas and Ezra Kline elaborated in their conversation on Kline’s podcast, it is not as if their perversity were limited to sexual abuse of children, as if that were not enough.
The human trafficking was part of an even deeper indifference to human life. Even when elite members were not involved in the child sex trafficking, but knew about it, it did not matter to them in terms of their relation to Epstein. Among the global elite power-seekers, what mattered more than anything was position and status within the network. It would seem that for them, status and position in the network is everything.
To the Epstein class, and to the class of grifters who seek direct control of government, the people—those ‘below’ them in the hierarchy of society—do not matter at all, other than potential pawns in their games of power. Sexual abuse of children seems the ultimate expression of that depravity.
Now, we find gradually with the trickle of information gleaned from the millions of Epstein file pages, that there is a considerable overlap (of uncertain extent until more Epstein data becomes available) between the two. But one thing is clear, they all have a studied indifference and disdain for the people of the nations they struggle to control more than ever. The “state of the nation” is a concept that is closely related to the performance of an administration that attempts to execute its own vision of how that state might be improved. However, the purveyors of oppression, who measure success by domination alone, do not constitute an administration; they are merely an emerging autocratic regime. Their ‘world of appearances’ is only a twisted characterization of the state of the nation, and only reflects the level of their depravity.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 