By Paul Edwards
The American Empire, founded as empires must be, on cruelty and dominion, is at the apogee of its material power, so its ruling elite contend, though there is a quaver of trepidation now in their strident voices. That claim rests on its boasted military force, assertions that are mutually dependent which, again, is integral to empires. It says, simply, we’re the strongest, so we rule.
As with all known empires since Knossos, while founded on brute power, ours had to offer a justification in righteousness, if only for its central, driving elite. That is, the violence it required had to be sweetened as a promised good, its purposes shown benevolent.
Our American catechism concealed and camouflaged its brutality with a concise summation of enlightened thinking, construed as the most noble of human aspirations. Our founding geniuses—and they were political geniuses—created an ethical framework on which the body of the nation was to have been built. That this did not happen, and was done quite otherwise, was a reality never allowed to interfere with the cut and thrust of empire.
For two hundred fifty years the hypnotic magic of this prosody, so superbly crafted in our inspirational founding documents, held Americans mesmerized in a profound trance convinced, in the marrow of their bones, of its absolute truth. “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal.”
What was evident in prose was never present in practice, and the country, in which the whole animating drive was to extract profit from our astonishingly rich land, was driven at top speed by the engine of Capitalism to arrogate all its natural bounty to a minute ruling class at the expense of the great mass of working people.
We had a vision, but it was a fiction, false at its core, a cynical burlesque invented to enlist full support of the people it abused and fleeced, and it was astonishingly successful. It continued to be effective because—in addition to the innate need of people to believe in their own goodness and decency—Capitalism had been convicted, over time, for its monstrous cruelty due to the inevitable periodic failures caused by its boundless rapacity.
Those failures, inherent and certain, had, since electoral reform in Victorian England, but especially after the Great Depression, seen Capitalism angrily, grudgingly, forced to yield some small token benefits from its enormous excess profits to the working classes. This concession, forced by the real threat of societal chaos, was what Marx could not foresee that averted the threat of revolution.
In practical economic terms, it ended the era when labor was hardly distinguishable from slavery and, in adopting elements of Socialism—the right to organize, regulation of wages, and some basic social security—it gave workers a small stake in preserving a savage system that thrived by exploiting and denying them.
This brought about the curiously awkward stasis that has allowed the ravenous Capitalist cabal to continue to function in all its flagrant hypocrisy. It has kept feeding the founding bullshit to a public that is less inclined to eat it, while showing its contempt for it by electing the most vacuous, praise-lusting sleazebag in our history to oversee the accelerating disintegration of America.
Trump's obscene second inauguration gathered dozens of plutocrats, making it clear that the US is neither ruled by nor for the people, and never has been.
Trump’s election the second time is the evidence that the huge segment of citizenry which has felt dissed and betrayed by the soft-boiled, woke-worshiping, so-called ‘liberal’ cabal that has owned the government under both parties has broken its hoary hold on usurped power and that its cynical racket is dead.
In disillusion and rage, this small but sufficient plurality of Trump voters rejected the Grand Con of the Capitalist Coalition, not because it understands that our bogus credo is meaningless, but because it insists on reaffirming it. That’s the pathetic magic for the dingbats that buy the MAGA message: they laud and defend the fairy tale that screwed them and put them where they are.
Unwashed Trump backers are blind to the fact that MAGA’s real captains—the money—are billionaire Zionist Jews and cutthroat Libertarians who care nothing for them and their needs, and are happy to mouth the mantras of the outraged underclass so long as they are left free to butcher the nation and consume it.
When have you heard our dummy figureheads urge the nation to ethical achievement? When has one inspired us to higher aims in any terms? When has any said the elevation of our people in all respects must be our goal? When has an example been exalted outside of celebrity in the toxic sewers of money and war? What has been the content and substance of our leaders’ vision?
In a sense a nation, a culture, is like a receptive child: it absorbs what its dominant, parent-figures provide as rules of behavior. When a people is trained by its elite in the evil death cult dogma of Capitalism, it is internalized and results in the spiritual and moral death of that people. They exist physically, and do what conditions force them to do, but they are effectively dead.
The old ruling clique would have you believe the roiling disaster that is American politics and the furious social bear-baiting we live in is due to the ascent of Trump and his band of feral oddities and mangy predators. Not so. It is the hog wallow the Capitalist Parties built for you to suffer under over many previous decades.
In Trump, instead of a bold vision, we have the view of a spoiled, arrested juvenile defective, who in his garish fatuity wants to raise tacky, brummagem monuments to his destructive inadequacy.
This, it seems, is all an ethically dead public deserves.
