Q: Why is the Era of the Establishment now over, just because Donald Trump won the election?
Good question. After all, this is just one election, and Donald Trump is only one man. So far, moreover, he has appointed multiple people to his cabinet who come straight out of the old Establishment. He seems to want to make peace with them to some degree. Looking down the road into his administration, at least in the short run, maybe his policies won't differ that much from a mainstream politician of either party.
So what has changed, really, of such monumental significance? Why can we say that the Great Wheel of the Ages has Turned?
A: Things have changed permanently and irrevocably because according to the rules of the Establishment, Donald Trump as a major party nominee, let alone as President of the United States, could never be allowed to happen.
The Establishment (c. 1947-2016) as a system of politics and a structure of power, depended utterly on being seamlessly coherent, pervasive and uninterrupted in scope. It was, in the true sense of the word as discussed by Carroll Quigley and others, an imperium, in that it successfully became a cosmopolitan encompassing whole which embraced and infiltrated the totality of society.
A key phrase about the Establishment that comes to mind is the one that was employed during the Second Gulf War by Dick Cheney and others: full spectrum dominance. In the way that Cheney meant, it implied that the United States has complete mastery of all phases of the war, including on the battlefield and off the battlefield. This included, among other things, complete domination of the world media, so that American propaganda was taken as the objective historical truth by default.
The Second Gulf War was arguably the apotheosis of the Establishment, during its latter New World Order phase. But the concept of full spectrum dominance has long been one of the cornerstones of the Establishment from its very beginning. The Establishment rose to power and thrived within America, and eventually the world, because it held utter mastery over the entire message and the process, throughout the all the channels of society that mattered.
The world "spectrum" hear may be taken literally to refer to the electromagnetic spectrum of the radio and television airwaves. In the Establishment system of power, all voices within the spectrum were ideally to be those endorsed by the Establishment. Just as the radio band was confined to a narrow range of possible frequencies, so the range of acceptable voices were to be confined with a band of Right-to-Left politics, all of which buttressed the Establishment from various angles, while seemingly offering choice to the public at large.
Just as frequencies outside the narrow AM/FM band were not receivable by standard radio equipment in the U.S., all voices outside this acceptable Right-to-Left spectrum range were to be deemed "extremist" by the Establishment. The standard weapon of the Establishment in this regard has been to conflate any unacceptable opinions with, say, Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan (in the case of the right wing), and to Communists (in the case of the left wing).
In the last few decades, however, as the Left has completely capitulated to the Establishment, leaving only the Right as the dissident faction, the charge of "Communist" has lost nearly all its power as a shaming tool and has been embraced as a cuddly and benign label by many Leftists without consequence within the Establishment system.
This, by the way, is why the ultimate challenger to the Establishment had to come from the Right (as Donald Trump did), instead of the Left. Bernie Sanders proved this fact by his surrender at the end of the primaries, sheepdogging his followers into the Clinton campaign (many refused to follow, of course).
This means the Left has a lot of work to do, to built up a true post-Establishment movement to challenge Trump and his followers, who have an enormous head start. For the time being, many Leftists who have anti-Establishment sympathies are nevertheless still enamored of such things as "global governance," which is in fact the very cornerstone of the Establishment structure of power. The mention of such things as "climate change" are enough to send many Leftists running straight back to the Establishment as the savoir of mankind.
The shattered pieces of the Establishment remain potent within the politics of the world and America, but they are no longer form a seamlessly coherent and unchallengeable structure. They cannot be reassembled as such, for the illusion of inevitable mastery has been destroyed completely. There is no "forgetting what has happened." This is what Donald Trump's election has accomplished above all else.
Among other things, we know that the media no longer has the final say over political candidates. We know that candidates no longer have to bend their knee to the great organs of Establishment power, in order to avoid being shamed out of the public arena.
Above all, we now recognize that there is such a things as the Establishment, and that it can be beaten. This is by far the most significance change of this year.
It took a self-financing billionaire with contempt for the mainstream media in order to bring this about, but it some ways it was inevitable at point, given that the Establishment was in advanced state of decay after many decades of interrupted dominance and success.
For the time being, the Left hates this situation, because it has brought to power the very "right-wing extremists" that they have been trained to hate with Pavlovian instinct by the Establishment. But in time new factions will find its own true anti-Establishment voice. There is plenty to oppose Trump about, and still be very anti-Establishment. Moreover, the entire Right-to-Left concept of politics will soon be seen to be a relic of the Establishment itself.
No matter what happens going forward in the Trump administration, it will be a golden era for new, vibrant political movements. Donald Trump will have given all of us that gift. Most people just don't know it yet.
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