U.S.-Americans don’t want to hear it
The article Will Trump’s Working-Class Base Turn on Him? by Yanis Varoufakis (Project Syndicate) writes,
“I, too, hope and pray that Trump’s working-class base will rebel against a president who so readily betrayed them. But I suspect they might not.”
I know they won’t. I just spent almost four weeks among a good sampling of them. They are heavily propagandized and well-trained to ignore anything and everything that they might accidentally hear that might cause an otherwise principled person to at least consider reconsidering their opinion of the magnificence of every single proclamation made from on high by their great golden leader.
“Today, Trump is also peddling two interlocking dreams. One is the dream of crypto riches, reflecting a novel assault on the common good – a campaign to privatize the dollar – that previous Republican presidents lacked the technology even to imagine. Coupled with the AI frenzy, this has triggered not only a bonanza for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, but also fresh optimism among Trump’s working-class base. A significant segment of his MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement, blind to the enormous risks of this new variant of the something-for-nothing mentality that led to the subprime mortgage debacle, dreams of future non-wage sources of income. Trump may be robbing them of food stamps and Medicaid, but he is the conjuror of magical forms of wealth with an “anti-system” aura.”
This is spectacular-sounding analysis and I’m sure Yanis is proud of it. I want to agree wholeheartedly but nagging at me is that I don’t think that either Trump or his flock understand any of what was written above in anything approaching concrete, rational, recognizably logical, or comprehensible terms.
Instead, I fear that they’re mostly just acting on instinct, snuffling for personal wealth. Their completely broken bullshit meters allow them to believe nearly any vague and wholly unsubstantiated—if not outright impossible and reality-bending—rumor. They combine this with an extraordinary resistance to admitting that they might have ever been wrong about anything, even when doubling down is clearly detrimental to not only themselves but everything they know.
In order to get angry or critical, you’ve got to first admit that you’ve been hoodwinked into something you didn’t want and that you’re going to have a hard time getting out of. People are not willing to do that.
For example, I have exactly one friend who could be honest about being fleeced, who freely admitted that Amazon was ripping him off because Prime Video used to be included in a Prime membership. Soon after, it became $4 per month, and now it’s up to $16 per month and there are 2-3 commercial breaks per movie.
Dr. Evil, his plastic wife, and his Freudian rocketOther people I talked to just talked about how expensive the licensing must be for Amazon while they admitted to coughing up an extra few bucks per month to turn off the advertisements. For now. They’re just cucks, really, making apologies for Jeff Bezos while he’s sending his wife into orbit for fun, using their prime-subscription money.
The article MAGA 2.0: Making China Great Again by Dean Baker (CounterPunch) writes that,
“[…] we also need to come to grips with a world where the United States is still a very important actor, but no longer the world’s dominant economic power.”
That’s going to be a giant tantrum that will shake the world and ruin untold lives. We can only hope that there’s anything left once the U.S. is finished throwing its toys out of the pram.
“There is no inherent problem with a country other than the United States having the dominant world economy. After all, the rest of the world dealt with it for the last 100 years, and most countries did just fine. However, the United States would be much better positioned to deal with China as the pre-eminent economic power if we had leaders who lived in the real world. We don’t at present, and it is not clear at what point in the future this could change.”
We haven’t had leaders like that for any time during this transitional period (i.e. during the decline of empire): Obama could not shut up about how exceptional America is, neither can Trump and neither could Biden. The U.S. is not capable of accepting multilaterality, culturally, philosophically, and socially. It is a machine that has been built to do one thing: plunder. It cannot do this from a non-dominant position. It will not deal with this well, as is apparent from the histrionics and tantrums of the Trump administration.