Infection, Inflation, Insurrection, and Invasion: The Four Drivers of American Life Right Now

How the “4I” theory of domestic and global affairs helps us see what’s at stake in the upcoming 2022 national elections in the United States—which, if the GOP wins, may visit a fifth “I” upon America.

Apr 25, 2022

{Note: This essay was first posted as a series of comments on social media on April 24th, 2022. It’s been lightly edited and adapted to appear in its present form as a Substack essay at Proof.}

Introduction

Right now there’s no coherent right-wing intelligentsia; the contemporary American right is, after all, little more than a kleptocratic cult of internet trolls. But it’s scary to watch as Trumpism tries to squeeze out just a few intellectuals—or individuals who could pass for intellectuals if you squint. One such example (see this essay) is former software developer and current blogger Curtis Yarvin, who, like an alarmingly high percentage of the new far-right “intellectuals,” is a neo-monarchist trying to end U.S. democracy. (Another man we would put in this category, though more of a pragmatic villain than a sad ideologue, is former Donald Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon.)

Thinking through contemporary American political discourse via the lens of an anti-democratic neo-monarchist like Yarvin is useful because it can otherwise be hard for Americans to understand the almost unimaginably high stakes of the 2022 elections in the United States—which cannot in good conscience (and must not be, going forward) referred to as “midterms.” They are, rather, in both form and function, America’s 2022 national elections; that phrase underscores the depth and scope of their importance rather than emphasizing individual congressional “horse races”, as the administrative term “midterms” does. When American media discusses “midterm elections” rather than circumscribing in vivid terms what Americans are really doing every two years—shaping our nation’s and individual voters’ futures—they do our country a disservice.

So, this said, let’s discuss the implications of the 2022 national elections, and consider whether there may be a rubric we can use to discuss the “big picture” they will shape.

The Four “I” Words That Circumscribe Our World Today

January 6, 2021 saw a premeditated, coordinated, paramilitary attack on the America’s federal government that was aimed at obstructing the peaceful transfer of power long enough for a band of armed neo-monarchists fraudulently (we might even say perversely) calling themselves “patriots” to end our democracy. But the storming of the Capitol that happened that day wasn’t “the insurrection” in its entirety. Not by a long shot. It was, rather, merely a single event falling under the umbrella of a broader sea change—we might call it The Insurrection—that is one of four such sea changes defining life in America right now.

These persistent, long-term phenomena remain at the very core of American life even when and as they do not fit neatly into corporate media’s slavishly money-driven 24-hour news cycle. In fact, they almost never fit into such a short-form model. Which is another way of saying that U.S. media will have difficulty covering these phenomena because they are longer than Americans’ attention spans and more complex than our corporate media deems profitable to put on the market. And yet, if we want to track the possibility—a very real one—that America’s democratic experiment collapses in a catastrophic way over the next five to ten years, a way that destabilizes the Earth and changes forever our lives as we knew them, we must start tracking these phenomena:

Infection
Inflation
Insurrection
Invasion

Indeed, it can properly be said that you know far less about U.S. politics if you simply follow the horse races—individual electoral tilts—that pollsters and political analysts would like you to focus on than if you understand these four phenomena. I might go still farther and say, as a journalist and journalism professor, that every journalist in the United States (whether corporate or nonprofit, independent or institutional, full-time or part-time) needs to get right with their relationship with at least one of these terms—by which I mean figure out how the journalism you’re working on is aiding the American public in its long reckoning with what’s happening in these four arenas.

We may well be in the final decade of the United States as it has existed since the 18th century, so it’s in actuality the duty of many in public life now, not just our journalists, to get this right. In the following parts of this essay, I address each “4I” phenomenon in turn—not alphabetically, but in an order that underscores their interconnectedness.

I: The Insurrection

The Insurrection began before the 2020 presidential election, as public evidence now confirms. No less an insurrectionist leader than Donald Trump Jr. inadvertently confirmed via his recently revealed texts to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

In short, the Trump presidential campaign spent the months before the November 2020 presidential election ensuring that it had the pieces in play to win the election via administrative maneuverings if it could not do so by convincing American voters.

While January 6 was certainly a landmark day in the history of the Insurrection, it is important to understand that the Insurrection is ongoing. Moreover, its aims are clear; its leaders are known; its methods are public; and its implications are unmistakable.

Here are its foremost demands:

An end to free and fair elections in the United States;
the radical isolation of the United States from the rest of the world;
universal moral ambivalence—that is, a moral culture inside the United States in which whim is right and might makes right, and abiding principles will be not so much disfavored as eviscerated to the point of mawkish irrelevance; and
a unitary executive branch that is functionally the equivalent of a monarch.

Needless to say, all these aims are not just un-American but anti-American and even traitorous. Which is precisely why all of them are cloaked in coy patriotic slogans and terms: rallying cries like “1776!” obscure, even from some of those who advance their aims, that they do the work of individuals who hate America, American democracy, America’s unique institutions, and, most of all, Americans. Some of these people are hostile foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin, while others are self-loathing Americans like Bannon and Yarvin.

To understand the Insurrection, one must understand that it predated the election—whose results the insurrectionists had no intention, ever, of honoring—and that it is as active now (perhaps even more so) than it was on January 6, 2021. If you’re inclined to think of “January 6” and “the insurrection” as synonymous terms, you are—and I say this not unkindly—a fool. Meanwhile, if you’re a journalist and you believe this, let alone if you’re a journalist and have encapsulated this fallacy inside your journalism, you should lose your job in the profession. The Insurrection is a “movement” that lies beyond any esoteric debate over partisan policies. It is, simply, a plot to end America that is currently unfolding and may take a few years yet to be perfected by its authors.

Incredibly, the insurrectionists aren’t hiding what they’re doing. Their handful of so-called intellectuals—or as they preposterously style themselves, the “thinkers” of the Dark Enlightenment, a retrograde movement run by middle-aged white men with no ideas other than those of their predecessors from centuries past; some of them, like Yarvin, are men from other fields besides political philosophy (Yarvin is, as remarked on above, a former software developer) who pass themselves off as great minds—have been clear about the urgency with which they desire the end of America’s democratic experiment.

When you read the writing of these people, for instance the essay by Yarvin linked to atop this Proof essay, you understand why the American right—including evangelicals—supports Putin. It sees Putin as doing in Russia (in attempting to re-establish the old Russian Empire, with all the brutality, theocracy, and backwards thinking that premise requires) what it wants done here in America. Even more specifically, it sees what Putin is doing to Ukraine as what should be done to Americans who won’t toe the insurrectionists’ line.

II: The Invasion

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—or rather his third invasion of another country, following his invasion of Georgia in 2008 and his first invasion of Ukraine in 2014—is far more than a mere land grab, though in immediate terms it’s most certainly that. But it’s also emblematic of his belief that the Russian Empire was a divine whole that was forcibly divided (as he would, counter-historically, see it) by “leftists.” He’s open about wanting to extirpate Ukrainian nationalism—Ukraine as a nation-state—because he thinks it’s a laughable but also unholy fraud.

Indeed, while Putin’s persistently bizarre rhetoric about “de-Nazifying” Ukraine is in part intended to appeal to older Russians who remember with fear and loathing the Nazi invasion of Russia in World War II, as well as to those younger Russians who’ve read about the neo-Nazi inclinations of the former (now widely dispersed and largely irrelevant) Azov movement in the now-Jewish-president-led Ukraine, he’s in fact just as often referring to “national socialism” in a benighted, idiosyncratic, etymological sense: that is, he sees the men and women who want Ukraine to be a European-style democracy as “socialists” (in Europe the correct, quite different-meaning concept is actually social democracy) with “nationalist” impulses. (Putin deems these Ukrainians nationalists in the sense that they think Ukraine should be a self-governing nation-state in the European Union and NATO.) Putin has made the term national socialism into a Frankenstein’s Monster of his own design, diluting its history and its meaning.

But for all that, Putin’s usage is telling—and oddly transferable to American politics.

When American conservatives rail against Critical Race Theory, they’re attacking the idea that a nation can exist with discrete sub-communities that have different senses of the character of the nation, the nation’s history, and the present positioning of the nation on the world stage. These far-right radicals, obsessed with bandying about a term they don’t actually understand in any particular—freedom—are demanding that a unified narrative (theirs) become ascendant in the same brutalizing way that Putin’s notion of Russia is now ascendant and its author is demanding at the barrel of a gun that it remain that way.

The Insurrection will always support those violent nationalists trying to exterminate their internal subcommunities (literally or culturally) or to via an act of Invasion bring neighbors to heel (think here of Donald Trump’s militant and inhumane U.S.-Mexico border policy, or his past demands to invade Venezuela and purchase Greenland). So the American right, which is now more than 98% on board with the Insurrection, will always be obsessed not just with Putin but other strongmen like the neo-Nazi Viktor Orban in Hungary, the Insurrection-aiding Bolsonaros in Brazil, and even Narendra Modi, who seeks to brutally suppress certain religious and ethnic minorities in India.

So whatever your view of President Joe Biden, his diagnosis of geopolitics writ large is dead on: it’s defined by a tilt between democracy and autocracy, between diversity and ethno-nationalism, between freedom and authoritarianism. And it is a tilt that both the Insurrection (in North America) and the Invasion (in Europe) are key parts of.

III: Infection

All of the above unfolds against the backdrop of a global public health crisis that has killed millions and millions worldwide, and in America alone has left many millions with long-term health problems (namely “long Covid”, which affects one in three of those infected by COVID-19). Nor is Earth’s mass Infection problem going away soon; despite the rhetoric of those on the American right and even some in media who want to move on to other news, in fact the pandemic is an unavoidably long-term event.

Which presents not only a grave public health crisis, but a communications problem.

As Americans we are trained—partly by corporate media, which needs eyeballs on a daily basis or it dies—to focus on transient, real-time political debates rather than the “big picture,” even though it’s of course that very big picture that we’re shaping every time we go to the polls to vote and that big picture that defines our lives over the long haul.

Gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter ID laws, fake recounts, fake elector plots, even the revelation that almost all voter fraud occurs on the right—all these schemes arise from the goal of the Insurrection to end free and fair elections and to establish a unitary executive. And because right now nearly every elected Republican at the local, state, and federal levels has committed themselves to the Insurrection and its current but not forever leader, Donald Trump, the upshot is that every time America holds an election the Insurrection is what’s ultimately on the ballot, whatever partisan policy debates are then ongoing.

So what’s the point, anymore, in covering the horse race of an individual electoral tilt?

Either one is voting for a Republican candidate and the Insurrection—the coming end of American democracy—or one is voting for something (indeed anything) but that end.

By the same token, because the Insurrection categorically supports the premise of the Invasion Vladimir Putin has launched in Europe—if not necessarily every single war crime committed in its name (though there are certainly some insurrectionists who do), anyone voting for a GOP candidate is not only voting for the Insurrection but also for Putin successfully building a strategic “land bridge” into Crimea and Moldova.

The Invasion—like the Insurrection—is a long-term play. The Kremlin has sought to make Moldova a vassal state for decades, and currently has Russian troops deployed in the breakaway Transnitria region of that European country; as noted above, Putin has already invaded Georgia, seizing territory there in 2008 (which territory it has used as a staging ground for its current second invasion of Ukraine), and more recently began falsely claiming that Georgia has uniformed forces fighting in Ukraine, a possible prelude to (and pretext for) a second invasion of Georgia sometime in the near- to medium-term; Belarus is already a Russian vassal state that Putin could annex at any time he wishes; and the Kremlin’s influence over NATO member Hungary is so strong that a land bridge connecting Russia to the Crimean peninsula and Moldova would also be significant inasmuch as it would bring the Russian border that much closer to its closest European ally, requiring only the pursuit of a second, shorter land bridge—from northern Moldova to Hungary, along Ukraine’s border—to link the two nations.

In short, the primary reason that there can be no capitulation to Putin in Ukraine is not because anyone wants war, let alone a nuclear war, but because Ukraine isn’t the end of the Invasion. Just as Putin’s past invasion of Georgia and his creation of the nation of Belarus as a vassal state allowed these two spaces to become staging areas for his current war crimes in Ukraine, Ukraine could soon become a staging area for an invasion of Moldova and Moldova a staging area for the expansion of Russia even further along the doorstep of NATO. So when we see major-media stories indicating that Putin intends to make his most aggressive play ever to interfere in U.S. elections in 2022 and 2024, it’s in part because he wants—in fact needs—the Insurrection that is ongoing in America to become the political power in the United States long-term.

Only then can he be certain that America will do nothing to brook his vile ambitions.

And lest anyone be fooled by certain Republicans’ recent strong words against Putin—Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) even called for him to be assassinated—you must recall that Graham and other Republicans also had harsh words for Trump after January 6, only to recant when those words became politically inconvenient. By the same token, it is easy for a Republican to toss off strong language about the Kremlin when Trump is out of office; if, however, Trump returns to the White House—an end every Republican is working toward—U.S. foreign policy, and the GOP platform, will be whatever Trump declares it to be, and America already knows from Trump’s past words and deeds that that policy will be not just relentlessly but historically pro-Putin.

Indeed, Trump announced in Las Vegas in July of 2015—on camera—that Putin could take Ukrainian land without punishment, which is what Putin is trying to do now and why he wants Trump in the Oval Office. But the philosophy (such as it is) that Trump announced in 2015 would and does apply with equal force to other countries Trump does not care about, such as Moldova. In other words, in the view of the Insurrection, Putin can not only have Ukraine and Moldova but also Belarus (formally) and Georgia (via a second invasion). And for that matter, Putin can have all the other former Soviet republics—including some that are now in NATO, which is why Trump wants to end NATO.

Putin’s ethno-nationalism is in fact the American Dream as seen through the eyes of the Insurrection. In the terms now adopted by the Insurrection, Putin is just living his best life—which includes raping women en masse and murdering babies—and in so doing modeling in Russia what somebody (or so the Insurrection believes) should be doing in America.

So what does this have to do with the mass Infection the world is now experiencing?

For different reasons and in different ways, both the Insurrection and the Invasion spread the Infection. In the United States—and for that matter everywhere else that autocratic neo-monarchism is thriving, such as in Brazil—the Insurrection has made one of its key tenets the conspiracy theory that public health crises are just left-wing conspiracies to control right-of-center populations. In consequence, as we have seen over the two years of the pandemic, insurrectionists are exponentially more likely to weaponize public health policy for partisan political ends, even if doing so means that many more innocents will die and infections will continue to spread like wildfire. By the same token, Vladimir Putin choosing to launch a third world war in the midst of a pandemic that has destabilized the Earth’s human population is no accident; Putin is aware that the nations of the world are less able to counter him now than ever before due to the weakened global economy and the simple fact that many governments are distracted by the need to fight the spread of COVID-19. Moreover, Putin knows that the refugee crisis a world war invariably creates is only made catastrophically worse by the high odds that any refugee camps will soon be beset by localized COVID-19 outbreaks. Don’t doubt that the Invasion sees the Infection as one of its best allies—if a silent one.

Both in the United States and in Russia, the politicization of the pandemic was never principled. It was always “war by other means”: using the inevitable increase in deaths caused by anti-vaccine, anti-mask, anti-CDC, and anti-science rhetoric to advance the aims of the Insurrection in the United States and the chaos caused by the Invasion in Europe. Both Trump and Putin—not to mention their legions of followers around the world—are using the current public health crisis to crystallize their authoritarian visions; events in the public square that cause fear, anxiety, inconvenience, confusion, and death have ever been used in this way by madman, scoundrels, and sociopaths.

Which is why we now see one of the two leading Insurrection candidates for the U.S. presidential election of 2024—Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R)—not only using the COVID-19 pandemic to build up his political brand (pushing policies that have killed thousands in the process), but also working to advance the Insurrection’s theory of the “unitary executive” by nakedly using his executive powers to destroy a political enemy: Disney.

IV: Inflation

Of the four major forces shaping American life right now, inflation is the hardest to discuss both because it may be the most transient—and its influence oddly both the most evident (on our wallets) and the most obscure (on our collective thinking)—and because its likely impact on the 2022 national elections in the United States could be so profound as to almost escape ready reduction.

Look at it this way: can the Insurrection run in 2022 on destroying our democracy? No—that message, stated overtly, isn’t an electoral goldmine. Can the Insurrection run on its handling of the pandemic, past and present and future? Not really—as what the Insurrection really wants is either to ignore the pandemic altogether or to weaponize it in ways whose dangerousness will only become increasingly transparent the more they are discussed and their effects analyzed by scientists. Some on the far right might well be enamored with “the pandemic is a hoax” rhetoric, but it isn’t likely to reach many Americans who are independents, libertarians, or (if these exist) GOP moderates.

But inflation? It’s the perfect political foil for a Republican Party with no ideas of its own besides ones that plunge a dagger into the very heart of American democracy.

Though it’s the very high infection rates worldwide that the insurrectionists want to do nothing to combat that are causing global inflation, and the very invasion that the insurrectionist base in the United States supports that is ensuring that inflation stays high, American media doesn’t have the sophistication—or the Democratic Party the competent messaging apparatus—to effectively disseminate this fact. But that it’s a fact is beyond question, and only underlines the ties between all the “4I” phenomena.

So while inflation is the most squirrely of all the topics listed above to discuss—not least because so many things can cause inflation that are microeconomic rather than attributable to the “big picture”—if the Insurrection wins the 2022 national elections, it will be primarily because of inflation fears among Americans who haven’t consumed any media leading them to fear the consequences of the Insurrection and the Invasion and continued high levels of Infection across the globe.

Conclusion

The view advanced by this essay, and evident in many of the articles you see here at Proof, is that if the Insurrection wins the 2022 national election in the United States, it’s the start of America’s Last Years—and also (a) a victory for Putin that ensures his war in Europe will expand, (b) a long runway for the worsening of the ravages of COVID-19 worldwide, and (c) therefore a near-guarantee that inflation will increase.

Indeed, Republican control of the United States Congress beginning in January 2023 would almost certainly bring with it not only these travesties but yet another “I” that America can ill afford: a trumped-up Impeachment of Joe Biden over false, Kremlin-pushed conspiracy theories about alleged Biden family corruption and a withdrawal from Afghanistan that was made chaotic and shameful almost exclusively by the ticking time bombs inside U.S. foreign policy that Donald Trump left in his wake when he left the Oval Office on January 20, 2021. Trump’s errors of judgment and dirty deals with the Taliban left Biden with precisely the paltry menu of options in Afghanistan that a new Insurrectionist majority in Congress will start to blame him for in the coming year. A nation suffering under Insurrection, Invasion, Infection, and Inflation would, if Republicans retake Congress, have to suffer through, too, an Impeachment every bit as absurd as the one Republicans pushed past the House of Representatives in 1998.

And throughout it all, corporate media in the United States will continue to do what it knows to do to the exclusion of anything else: focus on polling and individual “horse races” rather than the larger stakes of it all, framing the 2022 national elections as merely a “midterm” for politicians rather than a defining moment in U.S. history. But make no mistake: the 2022 national election is even more urgent than the 2020 national election was, and the only two options on the table for American voters are to vote for America or for ruin.