In comments the other day, we were laughing about John’s recent misinterpretation of a BREAKING NEWS ALERT during the Olympics and musing about the personal joy we will individually experience and the spontaneous street parties, etc., that will eventually occur When It Happens.
That sort of daydreaming is harmless enough. But as we all know, the rancid orange fart cloud is merely an avatar for a much larger constellation of problems, and those problems won’t dissipate when their current mascot joins the Choir Invisible.
Josh Marshall at TPM published a piece yesterday about the global authoritarian movement that Trump is arguably leading right now but that will persist when Piggy hoofs it to hell. It includes Gulf princelings like Jared Kushner’s bone saw pal, European revanchist governments, post-Soviet autocracies and U.S.-based far-right tech and media oligarchs who control major communication channels.
The whole thing is worth reading, so here’s a gift link. Below is an excerpt:
I’ve discussed this concept in the past. So I don’t want to belabor the point of its existence. I want to point out how its forces are arrayed against civic democracy in the U.S. — quite apart from Donald Trump. This wasn’t always the case. There didn’t use to be so many U.S. billionaires. And they characteristically had economic views which aimed to preserve their wealth. But they were not clearly on the right in the way they are now. They have moved an increasingly anti-civic democratic direction as the scale of their wealth and their identity as a class has exploded. They also weren’t so increasingly allied with primitive economy petro-states of the Gulf.
The point is that they will exist no matter what happens to Trump. They command vast economic resources; they run the governments in many countries where the government never changes; they have deep tentacles into the U.S. political system and many of its key players are from the U.S. Trump didn’t create this movement precisely. But his role in global politics over the last decade solidified it as a self-conscious group and congealed it together. Any movement of civic democratic revival in the U.S. will be menaced by its continued existence. Now is the time to think about how a revived and revitalized civic democratic movement in the U.S. could combat it and avoid being destroyed by it.
Emphasis mine.
Piggy is flailing politically and deteriorating physically. He’s grasping at a “legacy” by gilding White House surfaces, slapping his accursed name on edifices and overseeing the construction of a garish ballroom.
But his real legacy is a more consolidated global authoritarian movement that assembled under his banner. Marshall asks how a revitalized civic democratic movement might combat it, but I think the answer is implied in the bolded sentence above, which is to end its existence as a threat.
Figuring out how to do that is above my paygrade, but taxing billionaires out of existence seems like an essential component, along with reestablishing a global democratic movement, hopefully with less cynicism and a more sincere commitment to human rights. I have no idea if that’s possible, but defining the opponent and understanding their weak points is a good start.
Whether deliberately or not Trump strengthened that alliance, but it’s possible his buffoonish flailing might provide opportunities to undermine it. I think Senator Ossoff is onto something here:
Ossoff: We were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans. But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. It’s the wealthiest Cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class. They are the elites they pretend to hate.
What Ossoff says has the advantage of being true, but I have no idea if the message will break through. We’ll learn more as we live through these interesting times.
Open thread.
