The American choice, if you can even use such an optimistic word for it, is in a sorry state. I agree with that. But wading through articles, commentators, and speeches, I have not heard the lead boots of truth that I am looking for. Here they are as I see them.
Trump is the direct result of a neoliberal reality. If Obama was the ideal, the embodiment of what neoliberalism promises and tempts us with, Trump is the reality, or what neoliberalism inevitably results in, the maw of the anglerfish. I hesitate to even use words like ‘neoliberal’ and ‘fascist’ because these words have become munitions, have become like the bright blotting lights of oncoming traffic. Yet I think they are still the closest available terms for explaining my position. We risk the freeway, so to speak. This is what I have come to believe, that fascism is the inevitable result of neoliberal ideals.
I do not want to delve too deeply into the theory because there exist enough theoretical armaments to entrench the world, (and they have). Know that it is a known idea, an idea whose ancestry can be traced back to at least Plato’s Republic. His suggestion is that what he called democracy could result in what he called tyranny. There is a natural inertia to a state’s maturation. If you can accept that then from there you can begin to speculate about which forms of government lead to which. My suggestion is that what I call neoliberalism will always result in what I call fascism.
My argument is not much more than a simple observation that men like Trump could not exist without a century of cooperative ideas, ideas that became the policies of today. The accumulation of wealth in a man like this is a statistical certainty in an economic structure such as America’s. And further, the veneration and popular support of a man like this, this looking glass which cannot be divorced from his identity, also stems from the same. You can say he is a threat to the system, but for a bald second ignore that, and recognize that he is also a direct consequence of that system.
You cannot have privatization, deregulation, austerity, and put economic growth on a pedestal without giving rise to a creature like this. You said to the peasants that you should respect wealth above all else, and now they have. And that is essentially what these policies say. They will ignore your words and absorb your rules whenever there be a mismatch betwixt. America signaled that individual wealth and freedom is the highest virtue. This is the hammer, and Reaganomics the forge, by which we wrought this sorry guillotine.
Today Biden looked me in the camera and had the audacity to say that Democracy is on the ballot, Freedom is on the ballot. I see neither. I see generations of Americans squeezed to the bone. The rural poor have no prospects. The urban poor don’t even have homes. And yes, I measure from the bottom. This is not a democracy. People are not free. Money is free, and people experience what freedoms they do only by association with it. After all this time we are still pretending we are something we are not. America is a failed economic experiment. America created Trump, and it always would have, and it will again.
I have no confidence the Democratic party has any intention of reversing the past century of neoliberal policy. I see a vote for the military industrial complex. I see a vote for the prison industrial complex, for education as a business, for healthcare as a business. I see immortality for the rich and bandaids for the poor. I see oil on the ballot. I see many known evils. Many atrocities overseas are just like Trump: they are the flawed byproducts of a broken system. They are a result of American leadership, American hegemony, the American machine. I am not proud to be American. I am horrified and ashamed.
If you can accept the present then I think it does make sense to avoid at all costs some incomprehensible future. So I do not resent those with such a view. If it is working for you in particular, then okay. You are behaving as a rational economic actor, which for the establishment is the highest possible aspiration. For those of us who find the status quo absurd, I think the threat of fascism is an important bargaining chip, the second half of a vise. Neoliberals, you will lose either way. If you want my vote you’ll have to earn it, and my numbers are growing. Even if you avoid Trump this time, someone like him will emerge again because America was and is a Trump incubator. Inevitable fascism or “radical” reform. Your choice.
saltednotion 