Very interesting. This article puts into words what I've been thinking and
feeling since Trump's infamous escalator ride. It isn't his buffoonery, or
even his racism and elitism that is the real problem. It's his contempt for
democratic institutions and his willingness to dismantle them. Things like
trust in our institutions and reliable information about the issues of the
day are part of the commons, If they can be manipulated by the press, by
bots on Facebook, by censorship, well, I understand why amazon sells so many
copies of 1984. It really got to me when Donald trump told the people of
Utah that no longer would two bureaucrats in Washington control their land.
Therefore he was giving Bears' Ears national park back to them (so
petrochemical companies can exploit it).
Abby
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2018 2:39 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] The Useful Idiocy of Donald Trump
The Useful Idiocy of Donald Trump
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The problem with Donald Trump is not that he is imbecilic and inept-it is
that he has surrendered total power to the oligarchic and military elites.
They get what they want. They do what they want. Although the president is a
one-man wrecking crew aimed at democratic norms and institutions, although
he has turned the United States into a laughingstock around the globe, our
national crisis is embodied not in Trump but the corporate state's now
unfettered pillage.
Trump, who has no inclination or ability to govern, has handed the machinery
of government over to the bankers, corporate executives, right-wing think
tanks, intelligence chiefs and generals. They are eradicating the few
regulations and laws that inhibited a naked kleptocracy. They are dynamiting
the institutions, including the State Department, that served interests
other than corporate profit and are stacking the courts with right-wing,
corporate-controlled ideologues. Trump provides the daily entertainment; the
elites handle the business of looting, exploiting and destroying.
Once democratic institutions are hollowed out, a process begun before the
election of Trump, despotism is inevitable. The press is shackled.
Corruption and theft take place on a massive scale. The rights and needs of
citizens are irrelevant. Dissent is criminalized. Militarized police
monitor, seize and detain Americans without probable cause. The rituals of
democracy become farce. This is the road we are traveling. It is a road that
leads to internal collapse and tyranny, and we are very far down it.
The elites' moral and intellectual vacuum produced Trump. They too are con
artists. They are slicker than he at selling the lies and more adept at
disguising their greed through absurd ideologies such as neoliberalism and
globalization, but they belong to the same criminal class and share many of
the pathologies that characterize Trump. The grotesque visage of Trump is
the true face of politicians such as George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama. The Clintons and Obama, unlike Bush and Trump, are
self-aware and therefore cynical, but all lack a moral compass. As Michael
Wolff writes in "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," the president
has "no scruples." He lives "outside the rules" and is "contemptuous of
them." And this makes him identical to those he has replaced, not different.
"A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them
eerily similar-except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did
not," Wolff writes.
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Trump, backed by the most retrograde elements of corporate capitalism,
including Robert and Rebekah Mercer, Sheldon Adelson and Carl Icahn, is the
fool who prances at the front of our death march. As natural resources
become scarce and the wealth of the empire evaporates, a shackled population
will be forced to work harder for less. State revenues will be squandered in
grandiose projects and futile wars in an attempt to return the empire to a
mythical golden age. The decision to slash corporate tax rates for the rich
while increasing an already bloated military budget by $54 billion is
typical of decayed civilizations. Empires expand beyond their capacity to
sustain themselves and then go bankrupt. The Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek,
Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires all imploded in a
similar fashion. The lessons of history are clear. But the illiterate
charlatans who seize power in the dying days of empire know nothing of
history. They are driven by a primal and inchoate lust for wealth, one that
is never satisfied no matter how many billions they possess.
The elites in dying cultures turn everything into a commodity. Human beings
are commodities. The natural world is a commodity. Government and democratic
institutions are commodities. All are mined and wrecked for profit. Nothing
has an intrinsic value. Nothing is sacred. The relentless and suicidal drive
to accumulate greater and greater wealth by destroying the systems that
sustain life is idolatry. It ignores the biblical injunction that idols
always begin by demanding human sacrifice and end by demanding
self-sacrifice. The elites are not only building our funeral pyre, they are
building their own.
The elites, lacking a vision beyond satiating their own greed, revel in the
intoxicating power to destroy. They confuse destruction with creation. They
are agents of what Sigmund Freud calls the death instinct. They find in acts
of national self-immolation a godlike power. They denigrate empathy,
intellectual curiosity, artistic expression and the common good, virtues
that sustain life. They celebrate a hyper-individualism embodied in
celebrity, wealth, hedonism, manipulation and the ability to dominate
others. They know nothing of the past. They do not think about the future.
Those around them are temporarily useful to their aims and must be flattered
and rewarded but in the end are ruthlessly cast aside. There is no human
connection. This emotional numbness lies at the core of Trump's personality.
"[Stephen] Bannon described Trump as a simple machine," Wolff writes. "The
On switch was full of flattery, the Off switch full of calumny. The flattery
was dripping, slavish, cast in ultimate superlatives, and entirely
disconnected from reality: so-and-so was the best, the most incredible, the
ne plus ultra, the eternal. The calumny was angry, bitter, resentful, ever a
casting out and closing of the iron door."
The elites in a dying culture confuse what the economist Karl Polanyi calls
"real" and "fictitious" commodities. A commodity is a product manufactured
for sale. The ecosystem, labor and money, therefore, are not commodities.
Once these fictitious commodities are treated as real ones for exploitation
and manipulation, Polanyi writes, human society devours itself. Workers
become dehumanized cogs. Currency and trade are manipulated by speculators,
wreaking havoc with the economy and leading to financial collapse. The
natural world is turned into a toxic wasteland. The elites, as the society
breaks down, retreat into protected enclaves where they have access to
security and services denied to the wider population. They last longer than
those outside their gates, but the tsunami of destruction they orchestrate
does not spare them.
As long as Trump serves the interests of the elites he will remain
president. If, for some reason, he is unable to serve these interests he
will disappear. Wolff notes in the book that after his election there was "a
surprising and sudden business and Wall Street affinity for Trump." He went
on: "An antiregulatory White House and the promise of tax reform outweighed
the prospect of disruptive tweeting and other forms of Trump chaos; besides,
the market had not stopped climbing since November 9, the day after the
election."
The Russia investigation-launched when Robert Mueller became special counsel
in May and which appears to be focused on money laundering, fraud and shady
business practices, things that have always characterized Trump's financial
empire-is unlikely to unseat the president. He will not be impeached for
mental incompetence, over the emoluments clause or for obstruction of
justice, although he is guilty on all these counts. He is useful to those
who hold real power in the corporate state, however much they would like to
domesticate him.
Trump's bizarre ramblings and behavior also serve a useful purpose. They are
a colorful diversion from the razing of democratic institutions. As cable
news networks feed us stories of his trysts with a porn actress and
outlandish tweets, the real work of the elites is being carried out largely
away from public view. The courts are stacked with Federalist Society
judges, the fossil fuel industry is plundering public lands and the
coastlines and ripping up regulations that protected us from its poisons,
and the Pentagon, given carte blanche, is engaged in an orgy of militarism
with a trillion-dollar-a-year budget and about 800 military bases in scores
of countries around the world.
Trump, as Wolff describes him in the book, is clueless about what he has
unleashed. He is uninterested in and bored by the complexities of governance
and policy. The faster Trump finds a member of the oligarchy or the military
to take a job off his hands the happier he becomes. This suits his desires.
It suits the desires of those who manage the corporate state. For the
president there is only one real concern, the tumultuous Trump White House
reality show and how it plays out on television. He is a creature solely
concerned with image, or more exactly his image. Nothing else matters.
"For each of his enemies-and, actually, for each of his friends-the issue
for him came down, in many ways, to their personal press plan," Wolff writes
of the president. "Trump assumed everybody wanted his or her fifteen minutes
and that everybody had a press strategy for when they got them. If you
couldn't get press directly for yourself, you became a leaker. There was no
happenstance news, in Trump's view. All news was manipulated and designed,
planned and planted. All news was to some extent fake-he understood that
very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This
was why he had so naturally cottoned to the 'fake news' label. 'I've made
stuff up forever, and they always print it,' he bragged."
Yes, the elites wish Trump would act more presidential. It would help the
brand. But all attempts by the elites to make Trump conform to the outward
norms embraced by most public officials have failed. Trump will not be
reformed by criticism from the establishment. Republican Sens. Jeff Flake of
Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, who denounced Trump, saw their approval
ratings plummet and have decided not to run for re-election. Trump may have
public approval of only 39 percent overall, but among Republicans the figure
is 78 percent. And I don't think those numbers will decrease.
The inability of the political establishment and the press to moderate or
reform Trump's egregious behavior is rooted in their loss of credibility.
The press, along with political and intellectual elites, spent decades
championing economic and political policies that solidified corporate power
and betrayed and impoverished American workers. The hypocrisy and mendacity
of the elites left them despised and distrusted by the victims of
deindustrialization and austerity programs. The attempt to restore civility
to public discourse and competency to political office is, therefore,
fruitless. Liberal and establishment institutions, including the leadership
of the two main political parties, academia and the press, squandered their
moral authority. And the dogged refusal by the elites to address the engine
of discontent-social inequality-ensures that they will remain ineffectual.
They lay down the asphalt for the buffoonery of Trump and the coming
tyranny.
