Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
We might all profit, in an intellectual, or non-profit, fashion, from boiling down the machinations of the Dump administration to one core aim: privatizing the public wealth of the United States, and as much of that of the rest of the world as possible, for the enrichment of himself and his allies, each of whom represents some segment or other of the currently entrenched global corporate system. That seems to be his only policy goal, if he has one (that and salving his constantly bruised ego at every opportunity, only of importance for its entertainment value). The fascist ideology he serves as mascot for was just his way of getting votes and continues as a way to placate his most enthusiastic supporters, although we might find it has more direct advantages to him in his goal of stealing public wealth.
No one should have any difficulty accepting this umbrella explanation of the projectile fertilizer squirting out of the White House. Betsy DeVos, the undereducated Education Secretary, is peddling school vouchers, which will allow public money to subsidize private schooling for rich kids. The vouchers, of course, will be useless to poor people, because they won't be enough to help them pay for private school entirely, but will be just enough to give the already rich a little discount at the expense of public education.
Putting public lands up for sale is on the Dump wish list. Public funds are paying for members of the Dump clan to live in New York City, and for him to host ostensibly diplomatic business meetings at his resort. Dismantling the EPA is at the top of the EPA's suicidal agenda right now, with the goal of undoing pollution and safety regulations on corporations so they can make just that much more money – public health, public water, land and air, and nature itself be damned. The military buildup Dump keeps barking about can only benefit defense contractors, and a few foreign conflicts are always good for private military companies in the Blackwater and Halliburton mold, as well as your traditional arms manufacturers. The war on sustainable energy is only good for the fossil fuel industry, an industry in need of euthanizing if there ever was one. Even the money for that crown jewel of idiocy, the border wall, will mostly fill the pockets of executives of contracting firms with a bare minimum paid to actual workers, assuming work actually gets done, just as our FEMA dollars did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Steve Bannon, the Lady Macbeth of the White House drama, whose stylish slovenliness has been most accurately described by internet fashion critics as "Coroner of Margaritaville," is on record as desiring the Leninist/Nordquistian destruction of the government. I'm sure he'll leave intact anything dealers in vast amounts of money need to keep their operations running smoothly. Not because he's careless, regardless what his appearance suggests, but because he's a hypocrite.
Dump is, like most politicians, a self-serving engine. What's cruel about him is his disrespect for the feelings of others. And that's not a small thing. He has no skill at diplomacy. In politics, diplomacy is how things get accomplished without bloodshed.
Modern democracy was created in order to seduce the violent rabble to buy into the system, so they wouldn't be rolling out guillotines and chopping off heads every few decades. Dump does not understand the usefulness of getting people to buy into anything that isn't financial or brutal. Lacking this skill might be his undoing. And maybe ours, considering the mood of the moment. This to me is what is most dangerous about him. The specific sundry policies themselves are of course cruel and dangerous, as are the abruptness and severity with which he implements them, but all that is just a symptom of his poor leadership skills. His motive is not to hurt people, but if hurting people is the inevitable result of his policies, he doesn't mind.
We're experiencing an increase in bigoted incivility and hate crimes, mainly against people of color but also against anyone who displays any characteristics of foreignness. And I ask myself, regarding the generalization of Dump's motive I began with, how does practical bigotry play into the hands of the privatizers?
It's no accident that Dump's xenophobic populism has found the most leverage when relying on economic threats to workers as its fulcrum. As I've implied in another recent Moment of Truth, pitting one labor market against another allows capitalists to create an artificial shortage of jobs in societies that can afford to support decent wages and benefits, while they prey on the poor in other countries by threatening starvation and brutal oppression. This is wonderful for all transnational industries. Freedom of movement and freedom to organize are threats to the freedom of capitalists to use any means necessary to make more money.
We have two freedoms at war: the freedom of the masses and communities to act on their own behalf for their own welfare, and the freedom of the capitalist to thwart their freedom and exploit them for profit. These two interests have been at war for quite a long time, and the capitalist, with his dominance over mass discourse, has been able to co-opt a great number of those he oppresses and enlist them into fighting for capitalist freedom.
One truly marvelous manifestation of Dump's singular inability to disguise the ugliness of his project might be the disaffection of some of those capitalism has succeeded in indoctrinating against their own interests. It's a truism, even in the capitalist media, that Dump surfed to power on waves of anger propagated by feelings of economic helplessness. Bernie had no problem channeling that anger in the direction of the corporations and financial institutions who are the traditional enemies of the people according the lore of The Great Depression. Dump might just lose some support as the true nature of his program comes into focus, poorly disguised as it is, and those angry people, at liberty to find another heroic narrative to follow, could be persuaded to join with an anti-übercapitalist populism, even if most of them don't become militant socialists per se.
In other words, Dump might succeed where the left has failed: unmasking the inhumanity of the overweaning owning class. Capitalism has had no better human disguise than its cheerleaders, the Clintons and Obama. Dump is what it looks like when capitalism's human face is torn away. It looks a lot like fascism with its attendant racist and misogynist violence. Coincidence?
The USA loves its tycoons. Stories like that of Rockefeller handing out dimes when he made his first million go hand-in-hand with the liberal insistence that immigrants are worthy of civil rights because they're good for the economy – look at what's-his-brown- face, who founded that multi-million-dollar computer thing!
But a capitalist stomping around with his human face ripped off, how long can even Americans bear it? Might they see it as an affront to their mental model of a virtuous owning class? Perhaps if they can't be convinced to fight privatization and übercapitalism by common-sense arguments, they might come around once it's clear that Dump's repellent display of nastiness threatens to taint their myths of meritocracy.
Hey, as we've seen since we elected a black president with the middle name of Hussein, anything is possible in the USA.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!