Clarity in Trump's Wake
This article offers astute observations and insights on the oligarchy's orchestrated attack on the Trump Presidency. It also discusses how some of Trump's failings played into the hands of the oligarchs. Originally published January 19, 2021.
In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic since the 18th century are things of the past. Americans’ movements and interactions are under strictures for which no one ever voted. Government disarticulated society by penalizing ordinary social intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom. Together with corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless, pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving directives. In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories....
Today’s rulers don’t try to convince. They demand obedience, and they punish....
In 2015, Americans could still believe they lived in a republic, in which life’s rules flow from the people through their representatives. In 2021, a class of rulers draws their right to rule from self-declared experts’ claims of infallibility that dwarf baroque kings’ pretensions.
In that self-referential sense, the United States of America is now a classic oligarchy.
The following explains how this change happened. The clarity that it has brought to our predicament is its only virtue....
Oligarchy had long been growing within America’s republican forms. The 2016 election posed the choice of whether its rise should consolidate, or not....
In the 21st century, the American people’s trust in government plummeted as they—on the political Left as well as on the Right—realized that those in power care little for them....
Americans on the Right were especially aggrieved because the oligarchy had become culturally united in disdain for Western civilization in general and for themselves in particular....
The principal consequence of the ruling class’ opposition to candidate Trump was to convince itself, and then its followers, that defeating him was so important that it legitimized, indeed dictated, setting aside all laws, and truth itself....
... the oligarchy that seized power in America between 2016 and 2020 is engaged in a never-ending seizure of ever more power and the infliction of ever more punishment—in a war against the people without imaginable end....
The COVID-19 virus is no plague. Though quite contagious, its infection/fatality rate (IFR), about 0.01 percent, is that of the average flu...
The oligarchy’s division of all activity into “essential”—meaning permitted—and “nonessential”—to be throttled at will—had less obvious but more destructive effects... The “social distancing” and mask mandates enforced in public buildings and stores, and often on the streets, made it well-nigh impossible for people to communicate casually....
The oligarchy, its powers notwithstanding, could not be sure how people would vote. That is why it acted to take the presidential election’s outcome out of the hands of those who would cast the votes and to place it as much as possible in the hands of its members who would count the votes....