The closure of the US development agency USAID has opened Pandora's box of a truth that is widely known: the falsely progressive neoliberal globalist agenda was a creation of the power groups of the American Deep State. In other words, without that being his objective, Trump has dealt a blow to one of the visible institutional faces of the so-called smart or soft power at a global level and caused the fall of those who had long been carrying out the work of cultural warfare. USAID's tasks have always included creating states of opinion in which not only the interests of the United States were defended, but also issues that were above the federal government and that concern families and corporate bodies. For this reason, in the case of agencies and NGOs, there has been talk for some time of a State within a State, which, like a community of faith, was only accountable to certain people and to very well-defined short, medium and long-term agendas.

But what Trump has done is cut off one of the arms of foreign policy not because it seemed too interventionist or harmful to international law, but because it was too much of a threat to the interests of the United States.

But what Trump has done is cut off one of the arms of foreign policy, not because it seemed too interventionist or harmful to international law, but because it escapes his control and is not aligned with his own conservative cultural agenda, which follows other paths and supports other alliances within American society. Trump uses more hard power, corporate and technological, whose essence is market protectionism, concentration of wealth and growth. For this reason, the globalists, with their domineering woke agenda and their social control commands, are alien to them. The Republican president understands that his power is exercised directly and without masks and that the world still has a center-periphery structure in which industrial countries dictate their fiscal, commercial and equilibrium policies. But the globalists, with their perception of politics from the postmodern, cultural and social perspective, are not interested in the globalist agenda. They know that to sustain the notion of empire, it must be diluted into a soft tool that penetrates person by person and creates the conditions for a new colonialism from the consciences beyond weapons and effective occupation.

When both sides of power are set on the scale, it must be taken into account that the cultural battle that exists in the West and in the United States reflects the domestic division of capital in a time of crisis. The mimicking of the social struggles of the left and the appropriation of progressive discourse by the liberal progressive agenda are phenomena that have to do with mechanisms of self-preservation of power that have been effective somehow. The demobilization, the confusion, the divisions allow capital to gain time and establish alternative commands so that the accumulation of wealth remains unchanged in the same hands as centuries ago. That’s what has kept the system in place and precisely this is what’s behind the current social engineering that is being carried out. What role does Trump play in such a debate? For the newly elected president, the cultural agenda becomes one of the events par excellence that would guarantee his coming to power and the establishment of a movement, the MAGA. That is, in the post-liberal political laboratory where Trumpist ideas are brewed, there’s a notion of empire and a procedure linked to its survival, but this is not linked to a progressive vision, nor to a mimicry of the left from a liberal perspective. Trump maintains that he is the heir of the Monroe Doctrine and that he is carrying out an anti-communist crusade in the style that was our daily bread in the decades of the Cold War. Polarization and hegemony around a real or imaginary enemy are the ingredients of a policy that cancels debate and has an authoritarian tone.

Perhaps for this reason, under the same illiberal logic, the president declared a state of emergency when he came to power and with that statute signed a large number of decrees, despite the fact that the spirit of the Constitution is to avoid such mechanisms that evade political balance. For the conservative agenda there’s no reason to justify the exercise of power, but rather its logic is based on the cynicism of declaring the use of force as legitimate, which exposes the essence of an entity in crisis like the United States. Post-liberalism is nothing other than that, the conquest of dominating objectives outside liberal structures that are no longer functional. And the fact is that concepts such as democracy and freedom have never been more unnecessary abstractions for the elite in its desperation to restore the old structure and not allow substantial changes to occur in what the world concerns.

In this context, USAID is seen as an agency that does not operate within the urgent geopolitics of the new command of power and the rising elite. It’s an organization that is more inscribed in the woke logic of domination and that operates by sediment and from the years and the creation of local tribes linked to interests. This kind of caciquism, sometimes even unconscious, is an activity that, when the crucial moment comes, is mobilized in the name of the causes of progress, but with the purpose of establishing goals dictated by USAID. In other words, in the globalist agenda, power is built from a culture of saturation and penetration that has to be assimilated from within. If Trump speaks openly about taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal, the globalist agenda would operate by assimilating the culture of the inhabitants of these places and from marches and citizen petitions that would make such annexation look “cool”, “progressive” and liberal. To this we must add the agitation and propaganda that have been carried out in more than one color revolution and that brought about the fall of governments. Ukraine is a piece that has fueled the board of geopolitical confrontation and its origin as an international conflict is the implementation of a color revolt in 2014.

USAID is part of a logic of power that conservatives are not willing to pursue, one that is not interested in the nation state, but in the postmodern vision of a delocalized global state in which power is exercised from cultural commands in the hands of progressive-liberal financiers. The division of societies between men and women, between homosexuals and heterosexuals and the creation of an enemy to whom all evil is blamed (the white patriarchy); these are social engineering whose base would be in the Democratic voters. But this agenda, which has shown its level of wear and tear and is linked to the logic of expansion of the elites, gave way to the establishment of a harsher and more direct power, one that speaks openly of racial superiority and hatred of other ethnicities. All in all one should not see one agenda separate from the other, but as part of the same global power organism of a Western and post-liberal nature. One side symbolically opposes the other and justifies the existence of a cultural war based on elections and the management of power factions. It’s a postmodern style of polarization that is mixed with the logic of lobbying and liberal pact-making.

Hence post-liberalism (or post-globalism) does not eliminate traditional mechanisms, but uses them only when convenient and denies them when they are part of an exercise of sovereignty not aligned with the elites. Thus, while globalism is carried out from the center of power of the North American Nation State, it advocates the elimination of the State in the subordinate countries through measures of cuts and the delivery of national resources and companies. But in all this struggle that is symbolic, there’s the same interest, which is to maintain the status quo of the post-Yalta world and the geopolitics that derives from the existence of a strong North American Nation State, which is capable of generating global responses to threats to its interests. This illiberal approach does not renounce the notion of monopoly and the imposition of mechanisms in which a logic of global class power is expressed, which has its origins in the division of wealth. But in the reconstruction of the scenario of domination, neither the symbolic nor the real use of force is spared if necessary. Trump embodies both one thing and the other, as did Biden.

The error would be to compare the narratives of the Western media, the very ones that now show that they all drink from the same source of subsidies. The fall of USAID perhaps expresses the opening of other mechanisms with a logic of cultural war that will be based more on the use of direct power. At the narrative level, conservatives are fascists, murderers of freedoms, dictators. And no one doubts that all of that is part of the ingredients of the political laboratories of power right now; but to buy into that completely is to assume that the globalist agenda is the center of progress, equality and shared goals. And nothing could be further from the truth, since through a complicated operation of ideological rebound, the mass of voters goes from one extreme to the other, without assuming entity, essence, or agenda of their own. The end of truly independent activism is expressed through dependence on payments from development agencies, which sink their geopolitical ideals into the use of physical and mental weapons based on the supply of the elites.

Beyond what we are told at a conversational level, the power agendas of the elites have a real expression in their factual articulation. Their true color is defined by what they are benefiting from in the medium and long term, as well as by the sources that give them funds. It’s not coincidence that the world that is emerging around leaders like Putin does not accept the notion of freedom that the West imposes from this conceptualization of diversity. And the fact is that, if we only understand things from the literality of the media and their agendas, we will not advance a policy that places us on the land of the real and the concrete. Buying into the cultural battle like Miley is also assuming the logic of power of Biden and the pseudo liberal left. And in that subtlety, those who only consume the message, without asking who made it, what were its conditions of elaboration and the purpose, get lost.

Politics is not a game of good and bad, although movies with their simplistic logic have already done social engineering for decades. It’s not the reds against the blues, but in the nuances and in the social classes, in the relationship of men and women with work and the appropriation of said transformative activity; there are the existential answers to the postmodern problem.

That’s why to understand today's world it’s not enough to consume news or to be on one of the supposed sides into which the cultural battle of the West is divided, but rather with understanding reality materially and factually.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff