The following must be understood to grasp what is going on and what the trajectory is for the future.
Within global Jewry, there is a divide that can be coarsely spoken of as two groups: Western or Liberal Jewry and Eastern or Orthodox Jewry. As the terms imply, Western Jews are based in the West (primarily USA), while Eastern Jews are based in the East (primarily Russia).
While conventionally the Soviet Union has always rhetorically been referred to as a product of Jewry and much is said about the role of Jews in the establishment of Bolshevism in Russia, the reality is that Stalin’s Great Purge led to the significant removal of Jews from the party and government. Stalin also placed significant restrictions on the political and personal freedom of Soviet Jews.
While de-Stalinisation lifted some of these restrictions, some restrictions such as emigration bans remained up until the 70s, and Soviet Jews continued to be politically disadvantaged. Stalin’s purge and alienation of Soviet Jewry from the Soviet apparatus was achieved, and so Jewish political participation in the Soviet Union after Stalin was negligible.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and its industries underwent privatisation, the opportunity came for Jewry in the East to rebuild their powerbase and once again hold influence. The vast majority of Russia’s oligarchs are Orthodox Jews, and as they emerged as a wealthy class, they became interested in furthering their interests as Jews abroad. Part of this was their entry into Israeli politics.
Jewish emigration out of Russia was massive after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even today, Jewish population in Russia continues to decline despite their significant influence as many Jews move to Israel or the United States. But with them they bring their orthodox Hasidic beliefs, a Judaism quite divergent from the more liberal Judaism observed by Jews in the West.
Religiously and culturally, Western Jews and Eastern Jews were dissimilar to one another, and it quickly became clear they often had clashing political desires. Liberal control of Israel was the first casualty of this tension. The influx of Jewish emigres from Eastern Europe, the organised nature of these new orthodox communities in Israel, and the financial support of the new Russian oligarchs rapidly made these new immigrants a powerful force in Israeli politics.
Today, Israel is a hotbed of political struggle. Western Jews have been in a constant effort to clawback power in Israel, but thus far they have failed to regain power from Netanyahu, whom for the most part is aligned with Eastern Jewry. Back in Russia, the co-dependent relationship Russian oligarchs have with the Russian state leads them to desire Russia’s success on the world stage.
It should be understood that Russia as an entity is the cooperative union of the Russian oligarchs and the Russian government. Though these two pillars have in the past been at odds and contested one another, these differences have increasingly been reconciled and their global interests converged to a degree they are broadly indistinguishable.
It is a given that any global struggle for influence must entail seizing influence from the US, the effective global hegemon, and from Western Jewry. The cultural and religious rift between Western and Eastern Jewry meant that a struggle for power between them was inevitable, and so Eastern Jewry sought to undermine Western Jewry however they could.
Dugin’s geopolitical theories on how Russia could combat the West from its disadvantaged position and re-arrange the world into a multipolar geopolitical landscape away from a unipolar hegemony centred in the US consequently rose to prominence. Broadly speaking, Russia and Eastern Jewry have diligently seen to the actualisation of Dugin’s strategies with varying rates of success.
The rise of Eurosceptic populism in Europe, for example, was largely driven by Russia’s intent to weaken and, in the long-term, dismantle the European Union. Brexit was a major success of this strategy, and it is evident in the rhetoric of the various populist parties across Europe that a local “Frexit” or “Italexit” and so on was desired. However, hard Euroscepticism never saw as much popularity on the continent as it did in the UK, and so the populist parties in Europe pivoted towards a soft approach of remaining within the union but being disruptive of integration efforts.
The true “crowning jewel” of this strategy was the successful election of Donald Trump in 2016. This success was an immense victory for the Eastern faction. It meant coronating a president aligned with them and their intent to dismantle the liberal hegemony directly onto the hegemon’s throne itself.
The significance may seem exaggerated, especially considering Trump’s first term was marred by his failures to deliver on promises he made in the election and was characterised by a succession of scandals with many of his staff picks turning disloyal. Doubtlessly, if we focus on the peripheral outcomes of his administration, it appears to have been a largely inconsequential term and definitely not as significant as suggested.
However, that Trump does indeed represent a serious threat to the liberal establishment is made evident not so much in what he says or does (as the truth of what is going on or what is said can often be obscured), but rather in the severity with which the liberal establishment has campaigned against him and the lengths to which they have leveraged their power to prevent him success in anything.
Because Trump is truly a ‘foreign agent’ in the sense that he is not a sanctioned occupier of the White House, it is only natural that the whole established government would come against him. The modern US government is, after all, the creation of the liberals, and so it is at its core loyal to liberalism. Trump is foreign matter arousing the whole immune system to fight him. This obstruction of his governance meant success was always going to be limited in his first term.
But now we near the beginning of his second term, and the Eastern faction is prepared for the total reassembling of the US federal government. In this election cycle, Trump and his allies have regularly spoken of revamping the federal government and dislodging entrenched bureaucrats. The outcome will be ‘de-liberalising’ the bureaucracy and establishing a loyal public service.
As the United States is the core of the liberal hegemony, Trump’s plans of uprooting the liberal “deep state” and reorienting the entire administration promises the beginning of liberalism’s decline. In alignment with Dugin’s “multipolarity,” the US under Trump will begin to transition away from American imperialism and move towards a more “inward facing” United States.
Cultural and economic victories on the domestic front will be prioritised over foreign policy. Expect to see discourse shift towards nationalistic rhetoric favouring American culture and the strengthening of Christianity. Trump will be America’s “restorer of the world;” the so-called “Culture Wars” will be decisively won and “wokeness” destroyed. Progressive-Left ideas concerning inclusivity, diversity, sexuality, religion, and race will completely fall from public discourse. Evangelical conservatism will triumph and have increasing presence in public spaces and media.
What does Western Jewry do from here? Likely assimilate. We have seen already the assimilation of the Republican Party. Its established members were at first declaring themselves so-called “Never Trumpers,” but now they have either faded into irrelevance or, in most cases, have been assimilated into the Trump camp and are now invariably pro-Trump. For the American Left, they will likely reform into something more palpable, eventually “assimilating” into what will become the new standard for “acceptable American politics,” but doubtlessly grievously wounded after what will soon come.
But what about that ‘other’ signature facet of Western Jewry, “high finance?”
Let us establish context. The trend in global finance for particularly the past decade has been the acceleration of its decoupling from nations. The prevailing trend is the decline of global finance’s dependence upon government to provide its security and global impetus.
New technologies promise to provide this to financial institutions, whereby they will be a power unto themselves and no longer rely upon governments to be essentially the “middle-man enforcer” of contracts between themselves and the general public. As a consequence, the need for monopolising power has begun to wane, and so maintaining America’s unipolarity has become less essential to the survival of global finance. It is this trend that explains how an opportunity even came to exist for the East to achieve what it has in the US against liberalism.
The goal of “high finance” has always been independence from political authority. Its incentive to do so is obvious; while money can reliably control everything within the market, it cannot reliably control the government. But as mentioned prior, finance has a dependency upon government as an enforcer of legal contracts. Finance relies upon this enforcement because without it nothing can oblige, for example, a debtor to pay their debts, or a merchant to deliver their goods, or for any commercial agreement to be properly fulfilled.
Historic examples of finance trying to contain their dependency upon political government exist most obviously in the British East India Company and Dutch East India Company. In both cases, the companies were permitted by their royal charters to wield the powers of enforcement themselves. This meant that rather than being limited to solely the contracts the political government was willing to enforce, finance could regulate its own contracts and have the guarantee it could enforce counter-party compliance with their contracts should they need to.
Without further digressing by elaborating further the many ways they have since worked to attain the same, it can be said of today that the means for global finance to become truly “nation-agnostic” is imminently within reach. Developments in financial technology promise to truly divorce finance from localities entirely and will largely dispense with the need for government to guarantee commercial security. Technology will replace them by creating a global, interconnected system that will self-regulate and self-enforce commercial activities without the need for government guarantee.
What this means is that, for the most part, politics in general will soon have little to no bearing on financial institutions. This will liberate finance from its hitherto need to meticulously manage and control political outcomes to secure itself. If the politics of one nation becomes hostile to their financial order, its transcendence will make it impossible for that nation to challenge it alone- even domestically.
Unless a nation were to commit to total isolationism, an approach that would be greatly damaging for any nation, there will be no meaningful way to actually implement national regulation that could control or contradict the standards of the global financial order. This already exists to some degree today, but such is achieved through mechanisms of soft pressure and politics. Soon it will become truly impossible once all financial infrastructure is made transcendent.
Accounting for this trajectory, we can come to understand why the liberal order is collapsing. Finance used the liberal order, embodied within the United States as the master and hegemon over it, to fulfil the role of global regulator and enforcer. This provided the guarantee and security required for finance to rapidly grow and globalise the world’s economies. But having achieved financial globalisation and with the means to self-regulate and self-enforce now within reach, the liberal order is coming into redundancy.
Thus, those commonly identified as “the Establishment,” “the Deep State,” “the Swamp,” etc. that “political outsiders” such as Donald Trump are said to be warring against are actually the political remnants of the globalisation project. They were essential when finance needed them to drive globalisation and enforce compliance, but they have become outmoded, and so finance has become indifferent to their fate.
The “political establishment” of Western Jewry then is what we speak of when we speak of a defeated class. The coming end of the liberal order is less its death and more its expiration. The old class have been desperately trying to conserve it and have deployed every power they possess to do so, but they are failing. Trump’s victory in the US, the homeland of global liberalism, is a defeat they’re highly unlikely to recover from.
So, what’s to come in the future? Multipolarity, decentralisation, nationalism. ‘Conveniently,’ it would seem interests indirectly converge between what’s considered Eastern or Russian interests and the long-term interests of the new financial order, though why they are desired are for ostensibly different reasons.
For finance, distribution of geopolitical power is preferred over its centralisation, as centralised power can conceivably be leveraged against finance, and if that power is too great, then finance could be compelled to comply. For Russia, its interests likewise are against centralising geopolitical power, with its attested concern being unipolarity enables global coercion and diplomatic imperialism. It theorises that only in a multipolar world order could there be sufficient counterbalance between powers that such power to coerce could be prevented.
An example of a threat to both of these things would be the European Union. Due to the sheer regulatory power of the European Parliament, owed to its legal effect over nearly the whole of Europe, transcendental finance still could be compelled to submit to its demands despite being free of infrastructural dependence. Likewise, if the EU were to pursue federalist ambitions and consolidate into a polity, its unity would directly threaten the balance of power due to the significance of its potential to outpace any rivals.
The US federal government is likewise an immensely powerful regulatory institution, exercising legal power over the entire US domestic economy. Reducing federal power is already part of Trump’s rhetoric, and we can expect him to fulfil that and for it to continue as efforts are made to unwind federal primacy in favour of the states. The devolution of federal powers would greatly diminish the government’s ability to leverage the country’s wealth and population, thus rendering it far less capable on the global stage.
Further speculations could and should be made, but this suffices for now. This new era is going to be one of immense flux and change. Ideas will be shattered, and new ideas will be birthed. This moment of transition within politics is the moment for critical and radical change. It is the opportunity the world has been awaiting ever since the post-war establishment of the seemingly all-powerful liberal order.
There can be no passivity in this time, no meekness, no resignation- there can be nothing but the exercise of certainty that one can and will employ their sovereign will. Many passive souls will acquiesce to the designs of the incoming order, having learned their passivity in the face of an entrenched order that routinely exhausted every effort to have it changed. This must not prevent us. You will seize the moment.
Apotheism 