Former CIA Director John Brennan’s brief for dismantling democracy
18 August 2018
Following Trump’s decision Wednesday to revoke John Brennan’s security clearance, the former CIA chief has emerged as the chief spokesman of the anti-Trump faction of the ruling class. It is an altogether fitting position. Brennan embodies the criminality and authoritarian disposition of the military-intelligence apparatus, which is the driving force behind the opposition within the state to the Trump administration.
While Trump is seeking to develop a framework for authoritarian rule—including the cultivation of far-right and fascistic forces based on anti-immigrant chauvinism—there is not an ounce of democratic content in the campaign of his critics within the state and political establishment. In the name of opposing Trump—and the supposed Russian plot that sustains him—they are developing their own arguments for dictatorship.
This is the significance of Brennan’s column, “President Trump’s claims of no collusion are hogwash,” published in the print edition of the New York Times on Friday. The pages of the Times were turned over to Brennan by James Bennet, the newspaper’s highly-connected editorial page editor, brother of right-wing Democratic Senator Michael Bennet and son of Douglas Bennet, a former top State Department official with CIA connections.
In his column, Brennan presents a massive conspiracy theory according to which the Russian government has been able to manipulate and exploit US political institutions to advance its agenda. “Before, during and after its now infamous meddling in our last presidential election,” Brennan writes, “Russia practiced the art of shaping political events abroad through its well-honed active measures program, which employs…