Chapter 10: The Vanguard Party Is Not What You Think It Is: Part VII

Nevertheless, even if it was done on accident, Lincoln's experience here is instructive. He didn't let himself get bogged down by a wishlist of goodies that his base undoubtedly wanted; there was no mention of a Homestead Act, no mention of subsidies for a transcontinental railroad, and certainly no mention of abolishing slavery everywhere in America forever. Just this one thing about restricting the spread of slavery, as a national compromise to resolve the issue forever, because the issue had indeed come to a head and the rest of politics looked dim by comparison. And as he offered it to the Devil and looked reasonable, the Devil walked away from the pact and looked unreasonable.

As conservative parties have recognized ever since Lincoln, and as social democratic parties haven't, it's best to keep one's message as simple as possible. Jeremy Corbyn wrecked Theresa May's government in an election, but then ran on a socdem wishlist against Boris Johnson, whose entire message boiled down to "Get Brexit Done" to an electorate exhausted by the issue. Boris won, and he even won traditional Labour strongholds, because he offered the voters what they wanted in an easy, simple-to-grasp message. The average worker didn't have time to read, grasp, and compute every last action item in the Labour manifesto.

So this Radical Republican platform ought to have only one real plank, and it's already a popular plank within the GOP and will only become moreso over time. The Democrat Party also pretends to care about accomplishing this plank, but the fortunes of its bougie donors absolutely depend on it never coming to pass and so the Democrat Party will rise in counterrevolution if it ever does. I speak, of course, about the end of American imperialism.

American conservatives have come to regret our imperialism themselves. Yes, they were absolutely for it when their kids were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, because they were worried about their kids. But when they saw the body count, and thousands of them saw their kids' bodies come home draped in the flag, and they read that ISIS and the Taliban were going to win anyway and a fraction of a million civilians had died in both countries, all for nothing... they changed their mind. Almost no Republican even likes George W. Bush anymore; some even correctly call him a fascist. That's why he fled to Ellen's couch and the Democrat Party, where the suburbs will still line up to lick his impotent boots, as liberals do. It will not be a difficult matter to convince the voters whose kids he killed for nothing that the phenomenon he championed is a great evil that must be forever abolished.

The last dregs of the labor aristocracy in America have a name they're better known by: "everyday low prices." Lenin joked about coupon-clipping, but his jokes on that score would equally apply to Walmart or Tesco today. Those everyday low prices are secured by the absolute shit-tier wages paid to workers in the Third World. Those wages are so low because the comprador bourgeoisie (a fancy commie phrase for "collaborators") of those nations can get their own governments to forcibly break up any strike or revolutionary activity. Those governments will do so because they're installed by the CIA, protected by American military bases, and the goods exported are protected by the US Navy on their way to the rich nations of Earth.

Don't feel too bad about the origin of your shirt; you didn't personally create this system, you can't meaningfully boycott it, and it doesn't really benefit you anymore. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Everyday low prices benefitted the Boomers, especially as they grew up. But everyday low prices eventually undermined everyday high American wages, so now your shirts are cheap and made by wage slaves, but you are now a wage slave yourself.

The Americans most benefitting from everyday low prices at this point are the bougies and the petties. 1% of America, the bougies, is deriving fantastic wealth from paying their workers peanuts and selling the stuff they make to you for retail. 10-15% of America, the petties, is able to maintain their standard of living on the back of this stolen labor. The rest of us, the proles, are undercut by this stolen labor, in the same way that the Free Soil Party once worried that the westward expansion of slavery would cost them their ability to compete in the labor market.

But what if there were no American bases in the Third World anymore? What if an American President enacted their own version of Gorbachev's "Sinatra Doctrine" (letting the Soviet satellites go their own way) and the CIA was muzzled and investigated for its crimes? Revolution has not swept the Third World for a lack of communists there, but for a surplus of American imperialism. Remove American imperialism from the equation, and communist revolution will immediately break out all over Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Sure, Europe will attempt to stuff these revolutions back in the box, but the only imperialist nation besides America left with even the barest capabilities for force projection beyond its own borders is France and Britain. Britain voted down an invasion of Syria under Obama, and France is currently getting their asses kicked by nomadic Tuareg militia in Mali, so there's that. American military dominance let European imperialism grow soft and weak, and it will not be able to recover its claws overnight.

Without comprador bougies running the Third World under American imperialist protection, the likelihood of immediate seizure and nationalization of American corporate property in those countries would skyrocket. Trillions of dollars in investment, in trade, would all evaporate overnight. The temporary tightness of goods in the stores would kickstart homegrown American industry again, and tighten the labor markets. The impoverished bougies would be assailed at home and abroad, and much of the money and property they would've used for political class warfare would be gone, and they would be scarcely able to resist.

These bougies vote Democrat, and they can analyze this potential future as well as anyone else can. So upon the election of a dedicated anti-imperialist Republican President who campaigned on literally no other issue and thereby had a mandate to implement it, they would know their fortunes as a class were doomed without drastic action. They would counter-revolute, and then the Second American Civil War would be upon us.

Onwards to the final chapter!