The Enemy Above

I was reading Frank Herbert’s shockingly underrated The Dosadi Experiment on a flight the other day, and marked this passage for future reference. Herbert’s world-building is complex, but suffice to say that McKie, of the Bureau of Sabotage, is deposing Aritch, an elite Gowachin (the frog people), as his client under Gowachin Law. The Gowachin control an entire prison planet, Dosadi, populated by both human and Gowachin, test subjects all. “Demopol” means the manipulation of the demos by pollsters using “software probes”1:

“The DemoPol can serve many governmental forms,” McKie said. “What’s the basic form of their government?”

Aritch considered this, then: “The form varies. They’ve employed some eighty different governmental forms.”

Another nonresponsive answer…. A more interesting datum was surfacing: Dosadi had employed some eighty different governmental forms without rejecting the DemoPol. That implied frequent changes.

“How often have they changed their form of government?”

“You can divide the numbers as easily as I,” Aritch said. His tone was petulant. McKie nodded. One thing had become quite clear.

“Dosadi’s masses know about the DemoPol, but you won’t let them remove it!”

Aritch had not expected this insight. He responded with revealing sharpness which was amplified by his muscle pains.

“How did you learn that?”

“You told me.”

“I?”

“Quite plainly. Such frequent change is responsive to an irritant — the DemoPol. They change the forms of government, but leave the irritant. Obviously, they cannot remove the irritant.”

I marked that passage because it reminded me of this from Matt Stoller:

In the U.S., something very unusual has been happening for the last twenty years - change elections. In 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, and almost certainly 2026, voters threw out incumbents in one or both Congressional chambers, and/or the Presidency.

Exactly as on Dosadi, American voters are trying to remove an irritant, and are unable to do so. But what is the irritant?

Most answers would, at a high level, boil down to “the enemy within.” In its most florid form, “the enemy within” are actual traitors, card-carrying members of the ACLU, not real Americans for one reason or another, etc. In less florid but equally virulent form, the enemy within are “deplorables,” stupid, racist _{MR SUBLIMINAL But I treat Maria, who takes care of little Madison, “just like one of the family”}, and above all déclassé, incapable of politesse or good taste. (Bourdieu has the machinery for this analysis in Distinction.) For each side — and not the third body in our political system that has stepped away from the slugfest — the only happy outcome is the disempowerment of The Other. (I’m not framing the entire system of electoral politics and all its players in class terms, though I should, because that’s a hard problem and I don’t have the horses to do it, just at present. However, class will most definitely enter [drumroll] — now.)

Most of the thinking that boils down to “the enemy within” dissolves — or should dissolve — once you realize that these reciprocal enemies — let’s just go ahead and call them political parties — are both funded by the same class of people: “The enemy above.”

Why “above”? Because they own and control enormous, impossible-to-visualize quantities of capital of all kinds (mostly economic capital, but also social and symbolic capital), and use their capital to exercise enormous power over us dull normals, political and in all other ways, partly for fun, partly to accumulate yet more capital. In fact, they’ve taken (see Elon Musk, not to mention Donald Trump) to ruling directly, instead of working through proxies in government.

Why “enemy”? Because they do to us dull normals what enemies do: They get us into endless wars, make housing unaffordable, cause our lifespans to drop, and enshittify Google (not to mention anything else they can get their greedy hands on, greed being the operative principle of capital accumulation, along with fear). And if deadlock between the two reciprocal enemies keeps the war endless (ka-ching), makes housing reform impossible (ka-ching), renders the health care system psychotic (ka-ching), and makes regulating Silicon Valley monopolies impossible (ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching) then “Good. Great!” The great Arthur Silber once said: “It’s called the ruling class because it rules.” How’s that workin’ out for us? Sanders would call the enemy above “oligarchs” or billionaires. He’d be right. The enemy above is the “irritant” that we have been unable to remove.

I mentally coined and stashed the phrase “the enemy above” when, during this blog’s lengthy gestation period — probably June or July 2025 — I was listening to a YouTube from one of the dissident faction opposing our endless wars; not Mearsheimer, Freeman, or Mercouris, and probably MacGregor or Wilkerson. I paraphrase, since although I mailed myself a link to the YouTube, I lost the link in an email re-org, and so can’t provide a proper transcript:

[DISSIDENT:] Trump doesn’t listen to his cabinet; not to Rubio, not to Hegseth, not to any of them. He only listens to sixteen billionaires.

(My memory, for what that is worth, is quite clear on “sixteen”1). Though I can’t find the exact quote, here are some similar quotes. From MacGregor (YouTube):

[MACGREGOR:] I suspect that the same billionaires that are calling the shots in Washington in terms of policy towards the Middle East and towards Iran are also calling the shots in in Ukraine. And these billionaires have decided that they want Zelinsky there and they want to continue doing whatever they can to harm Russia. That’s their agenda. That’s not an American agenda. That’s what the billionaires want. And I think more and more people are coming around understanding the billionaires really are in charge. You know, they own the House. They own the Senate. They own the White House.

(I don’t think “own” is the precise word, but to be fair, I’m trying to propagate “the enemy above.”) From Wilkerson (YouTube):

[WILKERSON:] I am not at all sure that Trump understands this… I know his cabinet doesn’t, none of the principles do, but I’m not sure the billionaires behind him understand this other than in a very negative way.

And Wilkerson (YouTube):

[T]he empire [is] badly led by a three-ring circus with Trump in the center, and Hegseth on the left, and Rubio on the right, if you will, and the billionaires behind them is just absolutely ignorant of this fact. Other than the billionaires, the oligarchs being very concerned about the empire’s ability to continue to rape, pillage, and plunder the world in their behalf. I don’t say that loosely at all because that’s really what capitalism has become in the hands of states like Israel and like the United States, and to a certain extent one or two European countries, has become predatory in the sense that Marx for example, I think it was Marx3 said that give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves. There was a lot of truth to that. You go to monopoly, cheap products, very expensive products that are cheap in terms of the way they’re built. And that’s just a small microcosm of what predatory capitalism is all about. But that’s what we are today, a predatory capitalist state. That kind of state sees everyone as an opponent.

I was a little surprised to see former high officials in the national security establishment, grizzled veterans all, thinking and talking like this (and there are other examples that are too hard to find, YouTube search being what it is). But now this view seems to be percolating out into the Democrat mainstream (that is, beyond Sanders and this year’s crop of leftists). Here’s Paul Krugman just yesterday. The headline: “Learning from a Mentally Ill President.”4 And the deck: “We need to deal with the powers and system that put him in power and keep him there.”

Krugman’s headline and the deck contradict. The headline is “enemy within” thinking; if only we got rid of The Orange Man, all would be well! (One can only wonder if Krugman ever wrote a similar headline about Biden. After all, “Genocide Joe” showed that he had mislaid his mind on national TV, and it was clear that the entire upper strata of the Democrat Party colluded to conceal that fact from voters for months if not years. And if the recent DNC autopsy is any indication, they “learned” nothing whatever from it.) The deck, however, is “enemy above” thinking; after all, people who “put him in power” and “keep him there” are above the party system, by definition, yes? Anyhow, quoting Krugman:

Okay, this is not coming out of thin air. These people — I’m not talking about Trump but people who are empowering him — are not stupid. Some of them are weak but they are also acting because they think there’s something in it for them.

All of this at some level [above —lambert] is about money and power for people beyond Trump. And it’s made possible by the fact that there is so much money in the hands of a few people, many of whom turn out, not too surprisingly, to be terrible, insensitive, anti-democratic people themselves.

Obviously, we need to defang Trump as much as possible and make sure that neither he nor anybody who follows in his footsteps has power after the next two elections. But beyond that, we really need to do a thorough purging of the United States. We need a deMAGAfication. And I’m not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the denazification that we pursued successfully after World War II in Germany.

And it’s not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible.

This passage exhibits the same contradictions as Krugman’s headline and deck. On the one hand, we have “enemy within”-style thinking in deMAGAfication. But I am absolutely not willing to give the Democrats a free pass in “a thorough purging of the United States.” The United States became an abettor, indeed an enthusiastic participant in genocide when Biden was President. The United States lost a million people to Covid when Biden was President. The United States rationalized and consolidated Bush’s national security system of pervasive, warrantless surveillance, torture, and, yes, targeted assassination when [genuflects] Obama was President. The United States didn’t put the banksters who caused the Great Financial Crisis in jail, unlike Iceland. No, we rebooted the financial system when Obama was President. Please don’t tell me that all of these policies, implemented by Democrats, don’t also need to be “purged.”

But on the other hand, Krugman exhibits “enemy above”-style thinking in “the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth.” The system matters far more than the person. We know that from the targeted assassinations practiced by Israel: When one actor is whacked, another steps forward, ready to play the role. If Trump’s mental illness were such that Melania decided to throw a big net over him and call the DC cops, would that be anything more than a nine-days wonder? Of course not; J.D. Vance, not actually a blood bag for billionaire Peter Thiel, would take his place.

So there’s your story, everybody. The battles that flare along all the arcs of conflict, whether from Murmansk to Oman, or from Red States to Blue, are, one and all, froth; oftimes bloody froth, to be sure, but froth. They are all one “enemy within” against another. What matters is the class that sets those arcs of conflict in motion. The dissidents — and now Krugman — agree on that: the enemy above. Let’s remove the irritant!5

NOTES

1 I left the “Demopol” material in the excerpt not because I see Herbert’s views on democracy as especially interesting or useful (see any of his other novels), but because it sets the table for the “irritant” concept.

2 “Sixteen billionaires” (in my paraphrase), and definitely not “sixteen Zionist billionaires,” let alone “sixteen Jewish billionaires; I would have flashed on that. Pace Mearsheimer, the identities of the billionaire class are not relevant to this post, so please don’t go there. I will get to that at a future time.

3 I wanted to say Lenin, but I was wrong. Quote Investigator shows the attribution to Lenin is weak. Marx and Stalin are right out.

4 As readers know, I’m vehemently opposed to remote diagnosis performed with obvious political motivation, and have been since the days of Terry Schiavo (you can look it up). Readers will recall I held off with remote diagnosis for Biden as well (though he was clearly frail in the Iowa caucus, when a staffer had to guide him down a set of steps). When I hear Trump talk, he sounds exactly as he sounded when I saw him in person at The Cross Center at Bangor. Now, I grant the reality of Big Man Syndrome, where the sycophancy that surrounds great power can make The Big Man delusional. That said, Krugman’s lead is: “The President of the United States is mentally ill, but everybody knows that.” That “everybody” (who?) “knows” Trump is “mentally ill” doesn’t make Trump certifiable! Worse, focusing on Trump The Man is a distraction from focusing on Oligarchy The System.

5 Less passionately: What is to be done? I’m not sure. If I had to make a recommendation, which I am as qualified to do as any other dull normal, I would look to Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods, especially #179 (“Alternative social institutions”), #180 (“Alternative communication system”), and #198 (“Dual sovereignty and parallel government”). There’s nothing to prevent deliberative democracy taking place in the local Grange Hall, for example. Nor does anything prevent a vote afterwards (paper ballots, hand-counted in public). And nothing to prevent scaling that up and aggregating the results (well, nothing except everything). Perhaps, however, the answer isnothing, in which il faut cultiver notre jardin (which one probably should do anyhow). But let’s at least do so clear-eyed, aware of the issue and the stakes.