
Image by Jon Tyson.
One can look back into the catacombs of history and find a multitude of precedents that almost but not quite fit. Caligula and Nero. Mussolini and Hitler. Nixon and George Wallace. Despots on the big stage and despots on the smaller stages. Foreigners, especially non-white ones, as the scapegoat. Greed defined as a virtue and a god made of gold. Skies darkened by industrial smoke and fossil fuel burn off. Lakes and rivers running with effluents. Everything listed above and then some dedicated to making America great again. It’s a giant step into the dark past all in the name of a future made by and for fascism.
The opposition in the legislature melts away; the combination of fear and the obsessive love of money more than enough to get almost everyone in that body called Congress to make the leap into the trumpist swamp. Trump appointees in federal departments halt all funding so they can review contracts and policies. They are looking for so-called DEI clauses and other culture war nonsense; in truth I think the contracts will be held back until the trumpists can make sure they will make the money from them. Corporate USA is already bending to the trumpist will, deleting DEI clauses and kissing trumpist ass. One wonders what exactly they think the allegiance or even the contracts will get them.
They seem more like an acknowledgement that trumpists will try and go after anyone Trump doesn’t like and who made it a point to challenge his BS. The problem wasn’t that there wasn’t anything to charge Trump with, it’s that the Biden administration chickened out after charges were made. In other words, they folded. That’s why they failed in derailing Trump, not because he didn’t commit a lot of crimes. Ultimately, it’s all ruling class games and I wouldn’t care except their games affect the rest of us, usually in a negative way.
Recently, the government of Colombia refused to accept a planeload of migrants being deported from the US. The reasons were numerous, but the one cited the most in the press had to do with the fact the passengers on the military plane were cuffed and shackled and treated as less than human. Trump responded angrily, placing sanctions on Colombian officials and taking other retaliatory measures of questionable legality. Colombia responded and a compromise was reached which unshackled the passengers Trump celebrated by releasing one of his rants which basically claimed his government would do whatever it took (or something to that effect) to defend US sovereignty. Maybe a day or two prior to this, that same government demanded the Saudi regime invest a trillion dollars in US AI projects. For those who don’t see the contradiction, massive investments by foreign entities are a much bigger threat to a nation’s sovereignty than illegal immigration. Indeed, this is a big reason why those who think Trump is a Russian asset think that: his use of Russian banks and his role in laundering Russian monies makes him liable to manipulation by Moscow.
Reading the mainstream news, it appears that many if not most US residents are at least a little surprised at the scope and quickness of trumpist vengeance since inauguration day. While many of Trump’s supporters are likely celebrating this expression of their prejudices and hatred, many liberal opponents of Trump are aghast. An easy response to their surprise would be to ask them whether they were paying attention at all during the past several years. The thing is, most of them were. It is their belief that the political system they accept would not allow the current situation to exist. In other words, even if a dictator did get elected, the courts and legislators would check that dictator’s grab for complete power. While this might still happen, there are several indications it won’t. The primary indicator is that Trump is back in power, despite his multiple felony convictions, two impeachments and numerous charges now being dropped by a compromised justice department, a justice department becoming a tool of the fascists serving in Trump’s administration.
Many hope that the vicious nature of the early attacks on the public by Trump will backfire, as if the political system will reject them like a human body rejects excessive consumption of alcohol. This is not going to happen. The political system is too compromised. The decades long actions of the US right wing, the abject surrender of the liberals, and the disintegration of the popular left have made this so. Monopoly capital has never had such power. The political right proselytizes for libertarian free market nonsense – a process that almost guarantees an ever greater concentration of wealth. The liberals champion the war machine and cash their dividends from the same. Their opposition to the reactionary social and cultural agenda of the religious and fascist right becomes meaningless when considered together with their support for neoliberalism; an economic program which exacerbates inequalities of all kinds beginning with income.
I’ve been pretending otherwise, but it becomes clearer with each executive order sent from the trumpist White House that the change that is needed will not come from the system that exists. The future will be either a continuing dystopian breakdown or a revolution against capitalism and those who rule because of capitalism.