The American Crisis, Part Eight: A Post-Election Obituary
Farewell to the Republic?
By not prosecuting Trump for treason, America paved the way for his dictatorship;
but we have not yet begun to fight!
by Kevin Annett
A nation without a sovereign, save the people themselves! Our bold American experiment in liberty has provoked the hatred and wicked design of tyrants and monarchs everywhere. Yet for all that, it is not a foreign enemy that will destroy our Republic, but only we ourselves. – Thomas Paine, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, Christmas 1777
Only one thing could have stopped us from coming to power: if our enemies had struck at us early on with the utmost severity. But they lacked the will and courage to do so and our victory was assured. – Adolf Hitler, 1934
If a people go down fighting against tyranny, they can rise again and recover their freedom. But a people who abjectly surrender and bow before that tyranny will never recover, and their freedom is lost forever. – Winston Churchill, June 28, 1940
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The American Republic has committed suicide. Two and a half centuries after its birth, the nation will once again be ruled by a deranged and unaccountable monarch.
It’s been said that our best teacher is a black eye. Or, as The Art of War warns, “You do not know your enemy until he has drawn your blood.”
With the November 5 ‘election’ of Donald Trump, corporate fascism in America has moved from a political abstraction to a bloody reality. Trump now controls all three branches of government: the Senate and Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidency. With the Democrats politically impotent, the Trump regime holds absolute power - not only as a one-man government, but effectively as a single party state.
Does anyone realistically expect him to ever relinquish such power?
Like Hitler, Trump is history’s dark judgement on a nation. It is pointless to speak of winners and losers. All are punished by the triumph of autocracy. And the punishment will only worsen.
This catastrophe is not simply because of the November 5 election that unlawfully put an impeached lunatic and criminal back into the Oval Office. It isn’t just the fault of the hordes of MAGA morons who want a king to rule over them. By not putting Trump on trial for treason after his attempted January 6 coup in the service of Russia, every public official in America betrayed their oath of office to defend the Constitution. Having lost the moral battle against a billionaire oligarch by placing him above the law and smoothing his way to power, the Democrats’ election loss was just the next domino to fall.
After all, how was America’s first criminally convicted president allowed to be on the November 5 ballot? Regardless of the Trump-dominated Supreme Court’s approval of such illegality, the Democrats could have countered that unconstitutional decision by getting state courts to remove Trump’s name from the ballot.
Equally incredulously, why was Trump treated like a legitimate candidate by the media and Kamala Harris, who on principle should have refused to debate or campaign against a proven traitor and violator of his Presidential oath of office?
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the alleged Russian spies, were electrocuted in 1953 for doing a lot less than what Trump has done in ‘giving aid and comfort’ to America’s enemies. (1) Yet even his proven collusion with Russia to subvert the 2016 presidential election has not stopped Trump from heading to the Oval Office rather than to an electric chair, or even a jail cell.
The Democrats handed Trump the election by making the classic mistake in warfare of underestimating and not knowing their enemy. None of the happy, over-confident Kamala Harris crowds understood the beast they faced and how much its rot has undermined America. MAGA violence has been a loaded gun thrust at the head of every Democratic voter and county commissioner.
Why did Kamala Harris lose every swing state where she was leading in the polls? Because of a Trump-orchestrated fear and terror campaign that threatened to violently “bring down America” if he didn’t win the election. The most ruthless thugs usually win.
As well, don’t forget that big money runs both the Democrats and the ‘Republicans’. The direct rule of the big bourgeoisie without the buffer of political parties is fast becoming the wave of the future. So, Americans’ choice of a dictator is not that unusual in the Age of Corporate Oligarchy.
Besides, even if the Democrats and the courts hadn’t enabled Trump’s victory, one-man rule has always been inherent in the American Presidency. Now it’s a functional requirement of the Corporatocracy.
Nobody should be surprised when King Donald the First resumes his use of the government and military as his personal playthings to feed his global business empire, even if it provokes war. It’s not like he hasn’t done it before. Besides, that’s the way of things now, in the age of mega-corporate rule.
It used to be that what was good for General Motors was good for America. Now, what’s good for the head CEO is what’s good for everyone, whether they like it or not.
After all, that’s what fascism is: the fusion of big money with government into a massive, totalitarian state, led by an absolute ruler whose word is law.
In such a regime, the masses are kept in line by being pitted against each other and pumped with a hateful, nationalistic hysteria whose offspring is war abroad and a police state at home. Trump’s ‘Enemies List’ is no joke, nor is his plan to deport eleven million Americans. For only the permanent fear and repression of ubiquitous “Others” can keep the dumbed-down populace distracted and the dictator on his throne.
Welcome to the Third Reich, American Style.
Geo-politically, America’s self-destruction suits Russia and China just fine because it’s been their game plan all along. As a Russian-sponsored Fifth Columnist, Trump will ensure that China’s hegemony continues to spread and absorb the North American economy and its resources. Trump will deliberately steer America into enormous indebtedness and economic ruination to profit his own global corporate Empire and his colleagues in Moscow and Beijing.
This arrangement is also for an even more insidious reason. A Republic like America that was founded on the principle of peoples’ self-governance is a threat to China, Russia, and the other oligarchies that operate as the medium for an expanding global Corporatocracy. Accordingly, Trump’s regime will dutifully ensure that America’s “bold experiment in liberty” will not survive much longer.
With the entire State now controlled by the ‘Republicans’, there is no means within the status quo by which to stop the Trump dictatorship. Something more is needed now: a grassroots, revolutionary movement to not only resist the new tyranny but overthrow it.
Americans who remain loyal to their Constitutional democracy have already slipped far down the slope to slavery by bending to Trump’s neo-fascism. Now is the time to halt that retreat and reclaim the Republic. But that effort will not come from ourselves as we are presently constituted, either individually or politically.
Most of us are too wedded to the false assurances and comforts of a rapidly vanishing life. To recover our liberty, we must go through a cleansing, Valley Forge-like catharsis and become free of our fears and false loyalties. Only then can we learn how to not only fight institutionalized tyranny but overthrow it and the system of dictatorial corporate rule that engendered it.