Trump derangement syndrome

[pbrower2a]

I need to ask people familiar with dictatorship -- how do you deal with dictatorship? If you have some intellectual responsibilities, as in teaching or in clergy, how do you avoid sucking up to the propaganda that the regime (and it will be a regime) puts out? If you teach civics do you praise the "Trump Revolution"? If you teach science, do you deny global warming? If you are clergy, do you praise the Gospel of Greed that idolizes the crassest of acquisitiveness?

Donald Trump will surely betray American workers. Sure, there will be more jobs -- but the total pay will be less. People will work more hours under harsher conditions for less.

In private life -- I suppose it will be easy to retreat to video, music, books, and uncontroversial creative activities. Just avoid the present, even though we can only live in it no matter how deep into antiquity (whether Big Band music and 1940-era movies, or ancient Greek literature) you delve.

Any Cubans here? How did you deal with Castro? I expect to feel much the same with the arrogance of a tyrant, the numbing propaganda, and the fear.

It will be harder to leave America. There are fewer places to go. I do not want to live as an illegal alien. There will be many people who emigrate because Trump's America will be incompatible with their conscience. Sure, I have some talent as a writer -- but there will be a surfeit of critiques of American politics at the time.    

In my case -- I am in my early sixties. I have very little to lose. Should Medicare be repealed and Social Security be cut off, then death solves all my problems. I can no longer be a workhorse capable of the 80-hour workweek. Donald Trump may cause many Americans to contemplate the Ultimate Exit.  

[pbrower2a]

Donald Trump and the semi-fascist American Right will be taken down intellectually before it is taken down politically. If not intellectually, then by foreign powers following wars for profit that turn out badly. Governments that attempt to impose a New Feudalism tend to become as reckless in military policy as feudal-era societies.

There will be plenty to criticize about Donald Trump, and on a rational basis. To "Make America Great Again" as he understands it would be to return to the norms of the latter part of the Gilded Age, a time in which owners had all power and workers had none. Sure, there was full employment and a labor shortage so severe that working-class kids were dragooned into the work force because their parents were worn out by age 40 (if not already dead) by the 80-hour workweeks of the time.

Economic nostalgia makes bad social policy. Demagogues exploit it all the time: Mussolini and Hitler both made much of "Back to the Soil" movements to reconnect industrial workers to farming instead of to the distress of materialistic capitalism in the factory. Racist pigs of the Old South often made much of their attempts to keep the South 'pure' of the nefarious effects of industrialism upon a tradition-guided society. Marxism has nostalgia for the alleged ease of hunter-gatherer life (it was not so great as some anthropologists saw it) because there is no further need for the inequality that the divide between workers and owners necessitates.   The raw truth was that mechanization of farming made the need for farm toil less compelling.

But can America return to the "Good Old Days" of the 1920s, when anyone who wanted a job could get one? Maybe -- but we wouldn't like it. We are no longer made for it.

It is hard to imagine anything much crazier than a headlong rush to the economic norms of early capitalism, the brutal time in which workers were helpless wretches suffering for the greed and indulgence of rapacious plutocrats responsible only to themselves. Such is a pre-revolutionary situation, the sort that creates the kindling for a Marxist insurrection when the political order faces economic catastrophe or military calamity.

It is the American Right that is now mostly deranged -- but worse, utterly immoral. There are few moderate conservatives left in the American political order.