We are the Jungle

 

Robert Kagan, husband of Victoria Nuland, and long a leading neocon ideologist, has written an article calling the Iran war a total defeat and a disaster. Kagan’s latest book is called “The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World” (2018) in which the Western world is characterized as a “garden” of civilized values and institutions, is faced by a “jungle” of uncivilized nations and cultures threatening to grow back and overwhelm our Western civilization with its barbarism and superstition unless strong measures are taken to prevent it. Max Blumenthal makes the point that the rest of the world is the “garden” trying to protect itself from the jungle of Western barbarism.

Kagan never did support Trump. He endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, and for many reasons that were good ones in retrospect. Here are some quotes from 2016:

“The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic.”

“This is how fascism comes to America: Not with jackboots and salutes… but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac ‘tapping into’ popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party – out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear – falling into line behind him.”

“What he offers is an aura of crude strength and machismo as a substitute for substance… Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strong leader in whom the fate of the nation could be entrusted.”

“And is a man like Trump, with infinitely greater power in his hands, likely to become more humble, more judicious, more generous, less vengeful than he is today, than he has been his whole life? Does vast power un-corrupt?”

“Trump is the logical end result of an endless series of assaults on not just American liberalism, but on democratic institutions themselves, by the American right for many years. It is the long-term creep of radicalization of the right coming home to roost.”

Observing Trump after the first year of his second term here in 2026 makes Kagan look positively prescient. I should have known all this at the time, but I utterly detested neoliberal Hillary, who along with her husband Bill had corrupted every progressive value that once made the Democrats worth voting for. There was no third alternative, so I figured what the hell, let’s bring in Trump to break the ice. Kagan and other warmongers have no problem with neoliberal Democrats, it’s the progressive anti-war Democrats they don’t like. Perhaps young Democrats can find a way to take back their party from the sold-out and corrupt leadership of the Clintons and their cronies.