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Biden isn’t the imperial rot, just like Trump wasn’t the imperial rot. They are merely symptoms. The very system of bureaucracy, policy making, and enforcement is the imperial rot. You could take out Biden and put in AOC and it wouldn’t matter. It likely wouldn’t have mattered, other than to the careers of a bunch of campaigning insiders, if Bernie got in. The gears and logic of empire run irrespective of the spectacle of the presidency, and that is what the left should be pointing out, not who happens to be strapped to the wheel this year and how much they are drooling.
Again, no. Individual capitalists and Republican politicians didn’t want Trump in, but capital, by and large, didn’t care. You are mistaking capital for individual people, capital for capitalists. Capital gutted the regulatory apparatuses regardless. And it didn’t affect the gears and logic of empire in the slightest, Trump still did the drone strikes, sanctions, and black ops that all presidents do. Hell, they even prevented him from actually pulling out of Afghanistan, which is something he very nearly did, but again, it didn’t and doesn’t matter because Afghanistan in the big picture of empire and capital expansion doesn’t matter, especially with the mess we left there.
What matters to capital is competing against China, which is arguably a war that we have already lost, and the flailing of the elites is them attempting to continue military hegemony even as our economic hegemony begins it’s decline. And yes, the gears occasionally shake, but by my count the U.S. still controls the majority of the globe militarily, we are still the ones sending weapons to Ukraine and patrolling the South China seas. It is only when war comes to the U.S. that I will say that the gears of empire have shuddered to a halt, otherwise everything else is shock doctrine and even blowback is in our favor.
