Internal Geopolitics of the US
Geopolitics is the study of international power. It looks at how power is distributed across space and how nation-states leverage power to their own ends. It also looks at international social movements, unrest within countries, resource distribution, coalitions, international markets and international governance institutions like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. Importantly, it does not judge the ethicality of nation states, but merely looks at positioning and power. As a thought experiment, what if we applied a geopolitics lens to the internal politics of the United States.
The United States is a large nation that is divided between densely populated urban areas and sparsely-populated rural areas. This division has existed from the founding of the country as the electoral college was designed to protect the power of slave-owning rural aristocrats against free-labor urban robber barons. The Framers foresaw the differences in power between urban and rural areas, which has been a factor in every single political conflict in the US including the Civil War. Presently, Democratic urban areas represent the core of the empire, while Red rural areas are mostly places of cheap labor, resource extraction, and tourism which feed and serve the core. This is not all that different than how it has always been except that the core has usually been able to manage provinicial administrators who at this point in history have become restless. They have mostly managed provincial administrators by allowing them to have their peculiar institutions and culture (read overt white supremacy). This is not to say that Blue is any less white supremacist, but their white supremacy is aimed extranationally through the maintenance of empire through Black and Brown client states and military action/sanctions for those who refuse client status. Internally, provincial administrators are mostly white, while externally, colonial clients are mostly Black and Brown. Much of this management externally and internally is breaking down.
I don’t want to act like I’m unconcerned with which color, Blue or Red, is more ethical. I do care, but this is an examination of power, not ethics and the projection of ethicality is often in service of power and not a representation of any real ethics.
What I am interested in is the fracturing of internal and external management of the empire from the imperial core. The dramatic failure in the Middle East and Trumpism are not separate phenomena. They are driven by the loss of legitimacy of the American state internally and the rise of China and decline of American power externally. Trumpism seeks a return to that power, but represents grievances of an increasingly powerless rural America. The driver of this really, ultimately is internal migration. The US reached majority urban status in the 1910s and currently is 81% urban. As capital has advanced, rural livelihoods have been decimated and driven migration to urban centers, where rural people encountered different types of people with different cultures, practices, and values. This has strengthened the power of the core over rural areas, but those crazies who persist in rural areas are on the verge of outright revolt.
It may be run through the lens of race because that’s the only popular social explanation available to Americans, but it’s really about power, and when it’s looked at from the standpoint of power, rural Americans are not that different from Mexicans or Philipinos or Bolivians or Iranians, the people we think are our enemies.
Why?
Because of white supremacy - the most effective system of global control ever invented.