Sunday, September 29, 2019

How Much Damage Can Trump Still Inflict? Ask Chris Hedges.


Chris Hedges, quite predictably, looks at the impeachment drama underway in Washington with a "pox on both their houses" attitude. When it comes to corruption he considers Democrats and Republicans of a piece. That sentiment, however, isn't the interesting part of his latest essay. The intriguing bit is Hedges' assessment of the chaos Trump could trigger on his way out.

Trump ...will not go quietly into this good night. He will attempt to bring the whole rotten edifice down with him. And he may succeed. 
“The Democrats thrive on silencing and intimidating his supporters, like YOU, Friend,” reads a fundraising appeal for Trump that was sent out immediately after the impeachment inquiry was announced this week. “They want to take YOUR VOTE away. President Trump wants to know who stood with him when it mattered most.”
...Trump’s rhetoric, as the pressure mounts, will become ever more incendiary. He will, as he has in the past, openly incite violence against the Democratic leadership and a press he brands as “the enemy of the people.” 
There is no shortage of working-class Americans who feel, with justification, deeply betrayed and manipulated by ruling elites. Their ability to make a sustainable income has been destroyed. They are trapped in decaying and dead-end communities. They see no future for themselves or their children. They view the ruling elites who sold them out with deep hostility.
Trump, however incompetent, at least expresses this rage. And he does so with a vulgarity that delights his base. I suspect they are not blind to his narcissism or even his corruption and incompetence. But he is the middle finger they flip up at all those oily politicians like the Clintons who lied to them in far more damaging ways than Trump.  
...“People no longer voted for candidates they liked or were excited by,” Matt Taibbi writes in “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus.” “They voted against the candidates they hated. At protests and marches, the ruling emotions were disgust and rage. The lack of idealism, and especially the lack of any sense of brotherhood or common purpose with the other side (i.e., liberals and conservatives unable to imagine a productive future with each other, or even to see themselves as citizens of the same country), was striking.” 
Impeaching Trump would be seen by his supporters as an effort to take away this primal, if ineffectual, form of defiance. It is yet another message to the disenfranchised, especially those in the white working class, that their lives, their concerns, their hopes and their voices do not matter. This huge segment of the population, as Trump is aware, is heavily armed. There are more than 300 million firearms in the hands of U.S. civilians, including 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles and 86 million shotguns.
...Trump, fighting for his political life, will use rhetorical gasoline to set it alight. He will demonize his opponents as the embodiment of evil. He will seek to widen the divisions and antagonisms, especially around race. He will brand his political opponents as irredeemable enemies and traitors. He will demand omnipotence, the power of a dictator. Many of those for whom he is a cult leader will seek to give it to him. For when the magical aura of Trump’s power is attacked, those in the Trump cult feel attacked. He is an extension of them. Trump embodies the yearning by millions of Americans, especially those in the Christian right, for a cult leader.
Hedges' culprit, as ever, the forces of corporatism.
Our social, cultural, economic and political crisis created a demagogue like Trump. These forces will grow more virulent if Trump is impeached. The longer we fail to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for the misery of over half the U.S. population and our broken democracy, the more the disease of cultism will spread. It was the seizure of power by corporations that vomited up Trump.

If we do not succeed in overthrowing corporate power, the explosive devices mailed to Trump critics and leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, along with George Soros, James Clapper and CNN, allegedly by Cesar Sayoc Jr., an ex-stripper and fanatic Trump supporter who was living out of his van, will become an acceptable form of political expression. Such assassination attempts will, if left unchecked, eventually succeed. Anarchic lawlessness and tit-for-tat forms of political murder will swiftly turn the United States into a failed and terrifying state.


6 comments:

  1. I find myself succumbing to the appeal of the Hedges cult once again.

    ReplyDelete
  2. .. I aint in Mr Hedges league.. not even close.. but
    I have been suggesting the USA is headed to social and civic disaster.. call it 'uncivil war' .. and if we Canadians to the North think it won't be a problem.. think it over. We know already there's a substantial number of Canadians who will choose sides.. certainly as far as opinion.. perhaps even more to the events Hedges suggests. But what will tip our apple cart will be the American political and violence refugees flooding our borders, blowing our fragile social systems, blowing out all our shstems. What ? We think they'll head south.. hoho.. to Missouri? Georgia ? People need to watch Deliverance or Winter's Bone.. or The Hunger Games.

    Its an ugly ugly scenario.. confused conflict from many many fronts many direction, many factions.. as much as its a disaster scenario inside and at the fringes of urban areas.. it will explode into rural and agriculture realms.. everybody with guns and ammo & really know how to identify friend from foe..

    ReplyDelete
  3. tRump "at least expresses this rage" or rather he channels it very effectively.

    Biden is the new Hillary. (hint, no rage, just a 'status quo' figurehead.)

    A lot of tRump voters would vote for raging Bernie if they got the chance. (not likely).

    Sorry folks, no violent coup or revolution down south anytime soon.
    Just 4 more years of violent rhetoric from your favourite buffoon in the new normal.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This morning NPR had a piece on an ad Trump is running in which he claims Joe Biden offered a billion dollars to Ukraine to quash an investigation into his son.

    Now he's accusing Schiff of 'treason' for investigating his presidency.

    Like most I find Hedges' worst case scenarios a bit much. That said, Trump has left no doubt that he's a man without conscience or principle.

    And who can tell how such events can play out in a 'pathocracy'?

    https://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.com/2019/09/depression-for-masses-everybody-gets.html

    ReplyDelete
  5. More to this than we know.
    This morning NPR had a piece on an ad Trump is running in which he claims Joe Biden offered a billion dollars to Ukraine to quash an investigation into his son.

    https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/09/heroes-villains-and-establishment-hypocrisy/

    The system is friggin corrupt.
    At the moment we have no saviours.

    TB

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hedges is so full of shit, it runs out of his ears.

    ReplyDelete