Who’s going to come to the rescue?
Anne Applebaum, in reporting on the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria, describes the repressive tactics that Assad used, abetted by the armed involvement of Putin’s Russia. Those tactics were brutal, merciless, and indiscriminate in who they targeted. And that was deliberate. She draws a parallel to Putin’s use of the same tactics in Ukraine to make the argument more convincing. Two well documented examples.
But the sadism of both autocrats’ regimes is not the objective she says. What Assad and Putin did and do to their populations involved more than just wielding a hammer. They did use that hammer initially to punish existing dissent. But to maintain obedience and control, they created a lasting visceral reaction to the carnage, something that will sit in their subjects’ consciousness to stifle future opposition. “There is nothing worse than hopelessness, nothing more soul-destroying than pessimism, grief, and despair,” Applebaum writes.
Despair always co-occurs with inaction, so any exit strategy out of the brutality imposed by oppression requires losing the sense of despair first, unharnessing the oppressor’s means of control.
We know now, since Trump has assumed the reins of American power, what forms of control he envisions for his administration. They won’t involve Assad style bombing of our own population, blue state by blue state, but we’ve been forewarned, even threatened, that they will be punitive.
They’ll involve personal actions against purported enemies — firings, judicial harassment, deportations, fines, imprisonments. But just as likely will be actions directed against particular populations to restrict their rights and freedoms. We can almost guarantee that trans people and immigrants will be in the crosshairs. And of course, there will also be pervasive economic pain directed at the groups identified as non-productive, including the disabled, the old, the sick, and the poor. These groups will be hit with cut-backs on the institutions managing the social safety network — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP and WIC programs, even Veterans Health programs.
The intent is to generate a sense in the population that the social safety net set up during the New Deal years 75 years ago and added to since by both Democratic and Republican administrations is “not working for you and we can do better.” His promises for doing better are only meagerly backed up with actual counter proposals. But the problem of coming up with viable proposals he has relegated to the heads and hearts of people lacking the initiative and experience to formulate them. Those who could contribute he has relegated to the “deep state” and he will force them out. The replacements will consist almost exclusively of those who share his contempt for progressive solutions. Getting rid of DEI government and university programs will assure that opportunities for marginalized groups will evaporate.
It’s not too far-fetched to think that the underlying purpose of this cruelty goes beyond purported reason to get the budget back in balance and to put the government on a diet. The real reason is to put more money into the private sector, another way of feeding the rich. It will not likely create new rich, necessarily, but it will certainly grow the existing billionaire class.
The major exponents of this class, the three richest Americans, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, collectively worth about a trillion dollars, were all prominently present on the dais with the president at his inauguration. A highly symbolic visual of the implied promise of them all making each other richer. We have other evidence of Trump’s reliance on the condescendingly rich in the composition of his cabinet. Their accumulated wealth while certainly not as vast as the MBZ trio tops out somewhere between 14 and 20 billion dollars. This means as the poorer billionaires in the government that they’ll have to do some actual work to bleed the country. It will be they who come up with the good ideas to “make American great again” through their continued widening of the income gap between them and us.
To still any attempt to crawl out from under the heavy heel on its neck, the billionaires will rely on the autocrat’s play book and push the population into depression, both mental and financial, rendering them too emotionally disabled to retaliate.
Whew, a scenario straight of a Mad Max dystopia!
But I actually don’t think this bleak script will fully come to pass. We have a lot of Dudley Do-Rights in this country, who know their way around the railroads and can undo the worst knots tying Tess to the tracks. The work will necessarily be exhausting, though it’s not likely Trump himself will come out exhausted. His arsenal doesn’t involve much more than a pen to write an executive order. It will be his deliberately selected sycophants who do the dirty work. Trump himself is likely to spend as much, if not more, time on the golf course as he did in his first administration. One estimate put it at a full year of his time in the White House riding his golf cart around the greens; that is, 25 percent of his waking time.
So given that we’ll have a group of inexperienced and weakly motivated people subservient to a president who they’ll have to catch up with somewhere between the 8th and 9th holes, and who himself will only answer calls from his billionaire cabal complaining about why the money isn’t rolling in faster, our Dudley will have the opportunity to make the rescues. He’s never failed Tess and he won’t fail us.
By the way, Dudley is a Democrat, if I’ve been too subtle in making that apparent. He’s smarter than he looks.
The Syrian Regime Collapsed Gradually-And Then Suddenly
Assad’s fall offers the possibility of change.www.theatlantic.com
What Is the Net Worth of Trump’s New Cabinet?
Break out the caviar because the White House is about to become a second home for even more billionaires. Here’s what…nymag.com
The world’s richest people attended Trump’s inauguration. Here are their net worths
Some of the wealthiest people in the world attended Trump’s inauguration ceremony. Here are their net worths.www.usatoday.com