CJ Hopkins and Our Current Situation

 

CJ Hopkins and Our Current Situation

Peter Schultz

 

            CJ Hopkins argues that in the face of what he calls “Global Capitalism,” which is a “global-hegemonic system” with “no external enemies,” we are “experiencing throughout the West . . . a neo-nationalist insurrection against Globalism.” In response to this insurrection, GloboCap has employed “official propaganda … designed not to deceive the public… [but] to be absorbed and repeated no matter how implausible or preposterous it might be.” GloboCap has propagated “an official narrative” that creates “a defensive ideological boundary between ‘the truth’ as defined by the ruling class and any other ‘truth’ that contradicts their narrative.”

 

            Hopkins’s account of our current situation is attractive, even seductive insofar as it claims that parts of the public see through the claims of GloboCap, having “lost all faith in the electoral system,” and know they are “living in a sham republic controlled by global corporations and obscenely wealthy individuals….” But what if this insurrection that Hopkins sees and defends is a fabrication of the ruling classes that Hopkins despises? After all, Hopkins knows the global capitalists need enemies against which to wage war because GloboCap is “a hard sell” given its unconcern with the public. And, so, first there were the Communists and the Cold War; then there were the jihadists and the Global War on Terror; and now there are the “Putin-Nazis,” as represented by Donald Trump, et. al.

 

            What Hopkins misses, however, is that this global-hegemonic system is an edifice that not only tolerates dissent but encourages it, incorporates it as part of the edifice. It may even be said that GloboCap – as even Hopkins says at times – creates its enemies, fabricates forces that are said to be existential threats to globalism. For example, after 9/11, Bush claimed that bin Laden, et. al., wanted to destroy “the West” out of hatred, when what bin Laden wanted was for the US to leave the holy lands, for “the West” to leave Muslims to live in peace. Bin Laden would have accepted co-existence with the West, ala’ the situation that existed in Europe pre-1492. But without existential enemies, global capitalism is harder to defend and maintain.

 

            So, for example, Trump’s “insurrection,” what Hopkins calls the “neo-nationalist” insurrection, actually fortifies global capitalism, as do other “enemies” or “insurrectionists.” Why? Because globalism is not only totalitarian; it is also consensual. It’s despotic, but it is an illustration of Tocqueville’s “soft despotism,” a disguised despotism that for the most part sits easily on the public. As Hopkins puts it, “the majority of Putin-Nazis don’t see themselves as Putin-Nazis. They see themselves as just regular Americans;” that is, as Americans who don’t mind living in “a profoundly authoritarian society [because they] worship leaders, police, soldiers, and, basically, anyone wearing a uniform or a Giorgio Armani business suit.” And if those “suits” went to an Ivy League university, like Yale or Harvard, so much the better.

 

            So, there is not a real insurrection against globalism, just as there was no real insurrection on 1/6 in Washington, D.C. – which is one reason it was allowed to happen. Like other phenomena in the United States, e.g., the war on drugs, the war on crime, and the war on poverty, Hopkins’s alleged insurrection against GloboCap is all smoke and mirrors. In totalitarian or “profoundly authoritarian” societies, a politics of smoke and mirrors is essential to disguise or soften the despotism that exists. But although disguised or softened, it is still despotism.

 

[To see through the smoke and mirrors, to see “real reality,” it is helpful to spend some time with the likes Cormac McCarthy, who knows and can convey the emptiness of our modern world.]