Credit: National Archives of Norway
“Yay! I get to vote!” isn’t much consolation to somebody living in a tent.
The statements and actions of the President of the United States of America continue to dominate the news following his acquiescence to the ambitions of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Those who have proclaimed the uproar over hell freezing over in Helsinki as a turning point (the ‘last straw’ seems to be a popular euphemism) fail to acknowledge Trumps many enablers. There will be no miracle. The Trump train will continue to roll.
Columnist Paul Krugman pointed this out earlier this summer, writing…
…about the people who are enabling his betrayal of America: the inner circle of officials and media personalities who are willing to back him up whatever he says or does, and the wider set of politicians — basically the entire Republican delegation in Congress — who have the power and constitutional obligation to stop what he’s doing, but won’t lift a finger in America’s defense.
These people need to suffer the consequences of their actions. They need to be shunned socially and politically, sans the tactics and terror employed by the alt-Reich’s wannabe Brown Shirts.
The enablers of the Trump agenda need to be called out for what they are: Quislings. Let’s make that word popular again.
Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling was born on July 18, one hundred thirty-one years ago. His claim to infamy was the enabling of the German occupation of Norway during World War Two, acts of collaboration that led to his execution by firing squad on October 24, 1945.
His last name became synonymous with treason in Britain and beyond thanks to a 1940 editorial in the Times titled “Quislings everywhere.”
“To writers, the word Quisling is a gift from the gods. If they had been ordered to invent a new word for traitor… they could hardly have hit upon a more brilliant combination of letters. Aurally it contrives to suggest something at once slippery and tortuous.”
Let us hope that future historians are able to look back at the ascension of Trump the way they now do about Vidkun Quisling:
The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung described Quisling as a mini-Hitler with a CMT (chosenness-myth-trauma) complex, or alternatively, megalo-paranoia, more often diagnosed in modern times as narcissistic personality disorder. He was “well installed in his personality,” but unable to gain a following among his own people as the population did not provide a mirror for Quisling’s ideology. In short, he was “a dictator and a clown on the wrong stage with the wrong script.
***
The actions of this administration are not an aberration. Both the autocratic instincts of its leader and the wholesale destruction of institutions in progress are the result of a decades-long process.
Trump resigning, going to jail, or being impeached should be viewed as no more than [possibly] worthwhile steps along the way to building a better world. The man could defect to [insert name of dictatorship] tomorrow, and the wheels of reaction, racism, economic oppression, and misogyny would continue to grind on.
White racists in US have shown time & again they’d rather burn the republic to the ground than have racial equality in America.
This Trump-Putin situation is just a continuation of that dynamic. The commitment to white supremacy is stronger than commitment to western democracy
— Bree Newsome (@BreeNewsome) July 16, 2018
We should not be fooled by the false narratives flowing from the ways this wannabe New World Order is being characterized. The old imagery of Uncle Sam versus the Russian Bear being used to frame what is going on is simply false.
Defenders of Donald Trump are trying to diffuse the situation, citing what they’d like us to believe are truths about his handling of foreign relations, his sorry/no sorry/I misspoke statement, and… “hey how about that economy?”
Russian state TV’s coverage of the Putin-Trump Helsinki summit includes statements like “licking Putin’s boots” and “He really smells like he’s an agent of the Kremlin.”
Har, har, har. LOL, LOL, LOL.
Those who see the world through the lens of the twentieth-century are invoking the fear-inducing imagery of the communist hammer and sickle on the right, and the mythology of a benevolent/peace-loving Russian state on the left.
Conflating the oligarchy of the Russian Federation with Soviet socialism is just as wrong-headed as saying appeasement with Putin is some sort of remedy for the wrongs of US imperialism.
What we have here is chess, not checkers, and the only question to answer is whether or not our fearless leader is smart enough to understand this. Trump’s narcissism and his fundamental illiteracy, which make him seem feckless, need to be viewed against his longterm role as a laundryman for the tainted money of the Russian oligarchy. Whether he’s a willing accomplice or a useful idiot isn’t worth spending much time on; the bigger picture is what is important.
This “collusion” is really about an ultra-perverse post-industrial capitalism, or, as I like to call it, unfettered greed. There’s money to be made auctioning off the assets of the state and power players on both sides of the Atlantic want a piece of the action.
The race to destroy the old order–whether it be globalism or the New Deal–is on. Turning back the clock isn’t an option.
The path for progressives and people with good intentions worldwide is to see Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as two sides of the same coin. And to understand that a restoration of any of the trappings of traditional Western Democracy cannot occur with a fundamental reorganization of the economy.
“Yay! I get to vote!” isn’t much consolation to somebody living in a tent.
In the United States, this means working to slow the advances of the oligarchs while building a shared vision of what the future should be. Building that vision, one saying we’re all in this together is the strategy.
Beating the crap out of Republicans and their enablers at the ballot box is one immediate task in front of us. Protesting their ideology and actions at every opportunity is another.
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Doug Porter
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Nice to hear the real thing, Doug Porter. The slow-moving coup d’etat, or golpe d’estado — or, as we know it, the dictatorship — is well along on its path to destroy American institutions and has picked up some definition. Would you trust Trump with your child’s education, your hybrid car, the nation’s environment, your money, the laws that established equal opportunity and civil rights? High cabinet and White House officials in his administration have resigned at the rate of more than one a month. Government is not just being criticized by T-Rump and his moneyed friends, it’s being destroyed.
And don’t get me started on the keyboard warriors who think they can just call a general strike on Facebook and the administration will resign. It takes work. Slow, steady, every day. This ain’t the friggin’ movies.