- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
US President Donald Trump has signed an order to strip back the federally-funded news organisation Voice of America, accusing it of being “anti-Trump” and “radical”.
A White House statement said the order would “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”, and included quotes from politicians and right-wing media railing against the “leftist”, “partisan” VOA.
This isn’t fundamentally changing anything. It’s about using different tools for the same goal.
America cannot dominate the world militarily, nor could that even serve the goals of its contemporary brand of neoimperialism.
Soft power i.e. culture, propaganda, and diplomatic/idealogical relationships, are the foundation upon which it’s built.
Yes, military hard power plays a critical role, but it cannot replace soft power.
This isn’t empire for the sake of raw nationalism, and nothing would accelerate the American collapse faster than dismantling the state’s soft power tools. The end result will be attempts to maintain power by spending its military resources on peer, or near peer conflicts.
In Trump’s brain, soft power isn’t properly deferential to him personally. That’s what it amounts to.
It all comes down to his raging narcissism; soft power is done with tact and diplomacy in whispers. For Trump, that’s weakness. It’s not true power unless people/countries/organizations proclaim his power with effusive thank-yous and obsequious shows of capitulation.
It’s not enough to lead the free world; the rest of the world needs to be properly thankful for it in a way that he himself finds acceptable. (namely by making a big show of bending the knee)
It’s not really about changing it for cold hard power, but changing how their soft power will be projected. I’ve seen some theories that the rethoric is going to change from being about freedom of expression and LGBT rights and similar to ideas about traditional family values or something, and I think it’s very plausible.
…and how will that be disseminated? That’s what organizations like VOA and USAID were for.
Trump has the capacity to destroy organizations, but I find it doubtful he could recreate them out of whole cloth.
That’s my point.
He can’t recreate them out of whole cloth, you’re right. But he’s got friends who could. They have the capital, they have the manpower, they have the brainpower, and could easily leverage all of that to creating privately owned alternatives, paving the way for Curtis Yarvin’s world to exist. America as we know it would be dead and replaced with hundreds, if not thousands, of small city-states owned and controlled by corporations, whose executive boards would have absolute free reign to control. If you’ve ever played BioShock, it would be akin to a bunch of Raptures, but on dry land.
Yarvin posits it as a collection of corporate city-states that would compete for citizens like corporations compete for customers. If you don’t like the oppression going on in your current city-state, you can simply move to another one and join it.(Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state could write policy forbidding you to leave, or placing conditions on your emigration, such as taking all your money.) There’s also some crypto nonsense about how borders wouldn’t exist because you can be a citizen of one of those “network states” without ever having visited simply by logging in and signing up like you could for a social network. (Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state might have beef with the oligarch of the state you wish to join and could restrict access to their network.)