The Great Bustout Has Done its Job
The US is not a democracy. As the constant nitpick goes, its a republic. But in real life, its no longer that either. It is an oligarchy run by libertarian billionaires. You saw them on stage at Trump's inaugural, flaunting their political power in public for the first time.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only
IBM and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. (Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, and Netflix) Those are the nations of the world today. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale.– Arthur Jensen – Network (this quote is found at the two-minute mark of the link)
Its not news that corporatism has been striving towards this goal for decades. So I want to focus on the proximate cause of Trump's victory - what I call the Great Bustout on the Democratic Party.
A bust-out is a type of credit card fraud where an individual applies for a credit card, builds up a normal payment history, and then maxes it out with no intention of paying the bill.
A bust-out consists of a first phase where an individual develops a good relationship with a card issuer by building a strong credit profile so that they can open numerous accounts and increase their limits.
The second phase of a bust-out consists of maxing out the new cards and higher limits with no intention of paying the card balances back.
Fraudsters typically use their credit cards for four months to two years before "busting out."
- Investopedia, Bustout Fraud
The Great Bustout was the hijacking of the economic and civil rights agenda of the Democratic Party in order to ruin it and to usher in the most reactionary government this country has ever seen. A century's worth of political capital - New Deal regulations and unionization laws, civil rights laws, and freedom of speech - was burned to the ground by a pile of bought and paid for political mercenaries.Once the Clintons sold out the party to Wall St. and big business, its destruction was pre-ordained.
If you want to see just how badly burned the party is and you don't mind ZH, read to see the state of play.
the party...has elected a lily-white, heterosexual man to its top position. Hitherto unheard-of Minnesota Democratic Party chair Ken Martin will be the new national "chairperson,"...If Democrats were seeking to infuse a trace of genuine masculinity into the party's brand, it couldn't have chosen a worse duo than Martin and Hogg. For starters, the married-with-two-kids, mild-mannered Martin comes from the same is-that-guy-really-straight mold as Tim Walz, the Dems' exceedingly cringy 2024 veep candidate
Maxing out the "liberal" credit card, with excuses
It all seems to have been scripted. Trump didn't win as much as the Dems seems to commit suicide over an eight year period. But, it only looked like suicide; it was a bustout. Every decent impulse of the left was amplified until it was a monstrous caricature, fulfilling every boogeyman story ever told by the political right, going back to the John Birch Society.
First, the Democrats set fire to common standards of our communities, using Civil rights as an excuse. Biden invited in massive numbers of illegal aliens, Soros-funded DAs refused to prosecute their crimes, and sanctuary city governments actually gave them free housing, food, and credit. BLM riots were condoned, and they were declared exempt to masking and lockdown rules. You could't find hypocrisy in a more compelling package.
Next, using tolerance as an excuse, the Dems pushed the divisive, delusional woke nonsense non-stop. They appointed totally inappropriate people to high office, e.g., "Rachel"Levine to run HHS. They let predators and exhibitionists define their own gender, walk into women's bathrooms and locker rooms, demand and get the right to be put in women's prisons; and they called any pushback to this sexism. They forced formerly exotic sexual practices on children as young as five. They forced so-called transexuals (a minority at the level of an orphan disease prior to the woke agitprop) into the list of "persecuted" minorities despite the historical non-existence of such persecution. Parents were told they had no right to know how their own children were being groomed for mutilation. Short of using their children for ritual sacrifices (oh, wait, the "vax"), the Dems couldn't have done more to alienate any self-aware (opposite of "woke") American. Granted there are few of those around these days.
Using the fight against racism as an excuse, they pushed reverse racism by race grifters like the BLM leadership, and ideologues ludicrously demanding reparations - as if anyone could parse out what was owed to whom after six generations had gone by and anyone could "identify" as whatever they pleased. On the sexism front, due process was abolished as people were fired without being allowed to defend themselves on the basis of twenty year old, unsubstantiated and ofter minor, accusations.
Using climate change as an excuse, ridiculous bans on gas stoves, water heaters, diesel trucks, nitrogen fertilizers were thrown in as further gratuitous sources of populist aggravation.
The Dems were totally on board with the massive lockdowns, censorship, identity cards, and all the other police state paraphenalia associated with the bogus "vaccine".
The icing on the cake was four years of media and politicians insisting that Dementia Joe was really in charge. When that mirage blew away (conveniently after DJ was the nominee), they shoved Kamala Harris down everyone's throat without a single primary vote. Just a fait accompli. She blew through a billion dollars in four months and lost in a landslide, bequething $20 million dollars of debt to the party.
In short, you could not find a more odious platform or candidates for a political party. Its hard to believe that this wasn't the plan all along - a plan to make Trump look good in comparison.
All this damage was added to the political ledger of the "left". Not the old-fashioned, pro-labor, pro-civil rights, pro-environment left. No. It was attributed to "cultural marxism", a bit of right wing nonsense as specious as the woke nonsense from the bustout left.
There is no such thing as cultural Marxism. Marxism without economics is like a burger without the beef.
- paraphrase of Roger Boyd
The "Get Trump" Interregnum
Post Obama, the last eight years have been one long piece of performance art. They rigged the 2016 election for Hillary. They thought that Trump was so awful, such an illiterate buffoon, that Hillary would win easily. But Hillary was her own trainwreck. First she destroyed the party's credibility with the populist wing of the Democratic Party via her sandbagging of Bernie Sanders (and the DNC's court-supported assertion that they had no obligation to respect the outcome of elections). Then she poked the rightwing populists in their eyes with her "deplorables" crack. She looked unwell. Her rallies were tiny, a joke compared to Sanders or Trump. She blew it.
What followed the loss of Ms. "Its My Turn" was a four year witch hunt against anything Trump tried to do. The DOJ/FBI entrapped and arrested his advisors. His attempts to improve relations with Russia and North Korea were sabotaged. He was only supported when he obeyed: cancelling Iran treaties, bombing Syria, attacking Venezuela.
After he was out of office, they started the Jan 6 witch hunt and the incessant lawfare by prosecutors of color. Then there were the assassination attempts, whose details have about as much chance of seeing the light of day as Lee Oswald's handler's debriefing notes.
The current political theatre (not a genuine political debate) is so warped you get dizzy. Its like listening to Stephen Colbert in his Daily Show heyday - a leftwing comedian pretending to be a right wing caricature bashing the left, when he is really bashing the right. It was so confusing that Colbert actually had a rightwing following, whom he mercilessly trolled, but who were oblivious to the joke.
So, after setting up the "cultural marxism" strawman, a genuine, small-d democratic case could be made that Trump would legitimately win in 2024.
The New Trump
Too bad nobody bothered to mention that Trump was now the creature of the Silicon Valley Libertarian Mafia (SVLM). Musk donated a quarter of a billion dollars to his campaign. His Veep, Vance, was given a job in SV by SVLM's don, Peter Thiel, who also bankrolled Vance's Senate run. Thiel has say over many of Trump's appointments. Musk has say over others. Long term civil servants are being ousted en masse and being replaced with Trump loyalists - you know, the way party purges are run in ideological dictatorships.
Instead of a bumbling outsider sabotaged at every step. The New Trump had his appointments picked and in front of the Senate on day one. None of them have been harraassed by the outgoing DOJ/FBI. He has playbooks from various reactionary think tanks. He is issuing executive orders at a fast pace. He started bullying tiny countries with outrageous demands immediately.
Different Boss, Same War on Government
Its tricky to distinguish between SV libertarian goals and neoliberal goals. Both want to destroy the government and replace it with the market. The SVLM seem to want the markets to be national markets, while the neolibs want the markets to be international, ruled over by unelected interntional organziations whose members have been put forward by the global corporatocracy (e.g., the WEF) Both agree that non-military government expenditures need to die.
Unfortunately, due to the Great Bustout, rightwing populists are cheering on this overkill. The genuine left has long since left the building, and the Bustout Left are going to run off to their well-earned sinecures, leaving no one to defend the legitimate functions of government from the coming techno-feudalism. Survivalism is looking more attractive all the time.