American Revolution

Trump is just the personification of, the manifestation of, and the logical conclusion of American capitalism.

If you’re old enough you might remember the time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the former Soviet Union fell apart.

In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev, aged 54 and the youngest member of the Politburo – became the General Secretary of the Communist Party. He launched a programme of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnot (openess) to move the country out of political and economic stagnation. Only four years later, in November 1989, popular revolutions swept away communist governments in East Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union made no attempt to intervene as its satellite regimes fell.

It may sound daft to mention Gorbachev in the same breath as Trump, its difficult to think of two more different people, forged in two more different cultures, but maybe there are some similar processes at play. For, despite the showmanship, the grotesque ego, the lack of humanity, and all of the talk of making America ‘great’ again, these are really the end days for the United States.

Trump’s assault on democratic institutions, ruthless playing of the culture wars, the pardoning of 1,500 people who took part in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, and allowing his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk to wreak havoc orchestrating a physical takeover of the United States Agency for International Development (USAid), locking out employees and vowing to shut it down, all display a commitment to violence and mayhem unprecedented in US presidential history.

All of Trump’s bizarre appointments have been ushered into post, flying through the pretense of congressional oversight. Opposition to characters like Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard and Peter Hegseth caused a lot of online froth, but little else.

Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “There had been some lingering optimism that at least some Republican senators would draw the line at some of the more absurd Maga appointees but that hasn’t happened. That also demoralises any potential opposition.”

He added: “What Elon Musk represents is basically a hostile takeover of the government and the complete indifference of the Republican Congress to the ways that it is being stripped of its core constitutional functions is demoralising. It is this mood that nothing can be done or will be done to stop them. You’re seeing that in the business community, in the political community, and it’s a fundamental loss of faith in the rule of law and in our system of checks and balances.”

What is becoming clear is that there are no real checks and balances in the system.

The danger here is – in the style of the boiling frog – normalisation.

Take Trump’s macabre press conference with his psychopathic friend by his side. The media, on both sides of the pond are reduced to a pathetic ‘both sides’ debate.

In one headline the BBC referred to Trump’s plans for ethnic cleansing as “real-estate instincts”. On Iain Dale’s sub The Day Today show he asked: 7pm “Trump’s plan for Gaza. Genius or mad?”

We are still using the language of “populism” to describe a coup, and still talking about mass forced deportations and the creation of camps as “getting tough on immigration”. As Michael Moore writes:

“He hopes to arrest upwards of 3,000 people per day to be sent to Guantanamo or to be deported to other nations. By the end of the year he will have removed 1-2 million people from the US. He will claim that another 3-4 million people will have “self-deported.”

There is unimaginable (or for some too easily imaginable) racism at the very heart of this, and the indelible fingerprints of apartheid (both its South African and Israeli variants) all over it.

But this is not new.

This is a repeat.

American voters could be forgiven (not really) for electing Trump the first time around unclear about what it would really be like. Not this time. In fact, many knew exactly what was happening the first time around. This is from 2020:

President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, has a message for people who are excusing President Trump’s racism:

“I had fully intended to ignore President Trump’s latest round of racially charged taunts against an African American elected official, and an African American activist, and an African American journalist and a whole city with a lot of African Americans in it. I had every intention of walking past Trump’s latest outrages and writing about the self-destructive squabbling of the Democratic presidential field, which has chosen to shame former Vice President Joe Biden for the sin of being an electable, moderate liberal.

But I made the mistake of pulling James Cone’s ‘The Cross and the Lynching Tree’ off my shelf — a book designed to shatter convenient complacency. Cone recounts the case of a white mob in Valdosta, Ga., in 1918 that lynched an innocent man named Haynes Turner. Turner’s enraged wife, Mary, promised justice for the killers. The sheriff responded by arresting her and then turning her over to the mob, which included women and children. According to one source, Mary was ‘stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.’

God help us. It is hard to write the words. This evil — the evil of white supremacy, resulting in dehumanization, inhumanity and murder — is the worst stain, the greatest crime, of U.S. history. It is the thing that nearly broke the nation. It is the thing that proved generations of Christians to be vicious hypocrites. It is the thing that turned normal people into moral monsters, capable of burning a grieving widow to death and killing her child.

When the president of the United States plays with that fire or takes that beast out for a walk, it is not just another political event, not just a normal day in the campaign 2020. It is a cause for shame.”

It is a cause for shame and – to be honest – US voters had no excuse now and no excuse then.

This is both rupture and continuity. It is America laid bare. It is unfiltered capitalism. Ironically, it is the system revealed without propaganda.

Continuity?

As Nesrine Malike writes: “Take Trump’s order to construct a migrant detention centre in Guantánamo Bay – a space that has for years operated outside international law despite outcries and appeals for closure. Hundreds of prisoners were kept there under military law, often following rendition, disappearance and torture at CIA black sites. Trump’s proposal to detain tens of thousands of migrants there is an outrageous move, but it is not an aberration. He is building, literally, on what came before him.”

Nor should any of us who have been alive to witness US imperialism invade and attack country after country after country throughout all of our lives and all of the lives of our parents be surprised at Trump’s casual talk of invading or plundering Greenland, Canada or Gaza.

This is, as I said, what, way back in January, just a new form of Manifest Destiny: “There was always an undercurrent to Trump’s MAGA movement that didn’t make sense. How was it possible that a brutal, lecherous convicted felon could attract such support from the religious community? How was it even conceivable that evangelicals could support such a grotesque figure? The answer lies in the thinness of religious conviction within American society and the convergence of ideology between colonialism and Anglo-American Protestant political thought, used previously to explain and justify the conquest and eradication of an indigenous people, and being evoked today to rationalise the latest stage of US imperialism.”

It’s in this sense that Trump’s second – but possibly not last – term is more continuity than rupture. It’s in this sense that Trump is just the personification of, the manifestation of, the logical conclusion of American capitalism.

His manifesto of imperial conquest, dehumanisation and colonisation isn’t some new variant form of American, it IS America.

The resistance to all of this is very weak.

The liberal left in the USA is completely disoriented. The far-right has been organising for decades. They have a sophisticated media ecosystem of propaganda in tv broadcast news, memes, podcasts and a hilarious amount of control of social media (as in owning it).

What was once a counterculture has been wholly subsumed into conspiracism and paranoia.

Large sections of the population have been conditioned to believe in the oligarchs, to have faith in the tech lords who curate our daily visual diet and provide us with (dis) information, and to venerate the super-wealthy and the ideal of endless accumulation. Many people think we’re going to Mars.

Timothy Synder, author of On Freedom and On Tyranny has written ‘Of course it’ s a coup’:

Imagine if it had gone like this.

Ten Tesla cybertrucks, painted in camouflage colors with a giant X on each roof, drive noisily through Washington DC. Tires screech. Out jump a couple of dozen young men, dressed in red and black Devil’s Champion armored costumes. After giving Nazi salutes, they grab guns and run to one government departmental after another, calling out slogans like “all power to Supreme Leader Skibidi Hitler.”

Historically, that is what coups looked like. The center of power was a physical place. Occupying it, and driving out the people who held office, was to claim control. So if a cohort of armed men with odd symbols had stormed government buildings, Americans would have recognized that as a coup attempt.

And that sort of coup attempt would have failed.

Now imagine that, instead, the scene goes like this.

A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments.

That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed.

He is of course right that a coup in more conventional terms would have provoked a more shocked reaction. But there is still a great naivete here. Synder writes: “In gaining data about us all, Musk has trampled on any notion of privacy and dignity…”

I mean, Zuckerberg et als were at the inauguration, in the front row. They were showing their fealty right there. I think the idea of ‘protecting our data’ or any ‘notion of privacy and dignity’ are long gone.

Cultism

Is this the bit at the end where the writer comes up with solutions?

Sorry but no.

The writer Sarah Kendzior talks of “the era of the No Information Voter.”

Last year she wrote about the Kamala-Harris campaign and Biden dropping out: “Initially the Harris campaign felt like opening a window inside a morgue.”

And she describes the feeling of watching American politics since – and before Obama:

“In 2008, I had a toddler and the economy was collapsing, both of which were novel. Now my children are teenagers, and everything has been collapsing for their entire lives. Nothing feels new, though it still somehow manages to feel unprecedented. All politics feel like a rerun, and so does the Kamala Harris campaign.”

She writes: “Political cults have dominated America since the rise of MAGA, structuring American life in a way distinct from past presidential cults built on true popularity, like those of Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama. Modern political cults are funded by billionaires and astroturfed by millions of bots and paid influencers who pose as organic supporters.

Today both the Democratic and Republican parties operate on cult logic, which means they sometimes have the same policies, but wrapped in different rhetoric — because cultists will abide by anything so long as their leader is the one pushing it. Policies they would protest if they were carried out by the other side are suddenly deemed acceptable when pushed by their own.

All of the mutually cheered policies have thus far been indefensible.”

Of all the responses to Trump 2.0 that I have seen – the almost constant refrain is about how to rebuild the Democratic Party. How a new leader, a new tactic, a new voice, or god help us, a new podcast is what is needed. Watching this from afar, and watching nearby echoes of B.H.L.C (bland hopeless liberal centrism) constantly feeding far-right politics and propelling the most awful people into power, the one thing I would urge the American people to do is not to rebuild the Democratic Party.

America is collapsing in on itself on a mountain of hubris and self-conceit, on centuries of violence and on decades of political failure. Perhaps it will collapse and dissolve as the Soviet Union did, and that would be no bad thing.