A Repeat Of The Tea Party Isn't Enough-We Need A Revolution To Counter The Trump Regime

Like most every other disaster throughout history, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The Democratic elite had just committed perhaps the worst affront to democracy this country has ever seen by stealing the presidency from Bernie Sanders, and the Sanders supporters, who'd grown more than numerous enough to decide the election, were largely convinced that if Clinton could do this and get away with it, she could no longer claim the title of the lesser evil. Indeed, the rigging of the 2016 Democratic primaries, and the disturbing McCarthyite tactics that establishment Democrats launched after this rigging was revealed, have made it so that I personally find Hillary and Friends just as frightening as the Trump regime.

A big mistake many of my fellow anti-Clintonist progressives made, though, was becoming so eager to get rid of Clinton that they'd taken to talking down the threat of the alternative. "As bad as Trump is," wrote the otherwise always spot-on leftist blogger Michael E Sparks in his breakup letter to the Democratic Party, "he would just spin his wheels for four years. Both Republicans and Democrats would vote down everything he tried to do. The insiders hate him. He has no government experience. He can’t navigate it. He would just be a four-year Jon Stewart punchline." Those exact sentiments were expressed by a great deal of other former Sanders supporters, me included; how bad could Trump really be, we reasoned, given the facts mentioned above?

I'll get to exactly why this view of Trump is not accurate in a second, but the reason I think so many on the anti-Clinton left dismissed the notion that Trump posed much of a threat had to do with something I call the Tea Party Fantasy. When Trump got in, a lot of progressives believed, the left would do in 2017 what the right did in 2009 and easily overwhelm the new regime, along with the establishment of one of the major parties, with a years-long festival of grassroots political action. And so far things have for the most part lived up those expectations, with the fierce progressive backlash having likely ruined the GOP's hopes of repealing or even reforming Obamacare while the power structure of the neoliberal Democrats gets chipped away at more and more every month. At this rate, you'd think, by the time the Tea Party of the left is finished, Trump and Friends will be pretty much irrelevant as president-elect Bernie Sanders prepares to take office as the leader of the now corporatism-free Democratic Party.

The hard truth, though, is that our task is far bigger than staging an inverse repeat of the Tea Party. Because this is not 2009, and Donald Trump is not Barack Obama.

Consider these words, as written by the staunch anti-Clinton leftist Chris Hedges shortly after the election:

We await the crisis. It could be economic. It could be a terrorist attack within the United States. It could be widespread devastation caused by global warming. It could be nationwide unrest as the death spiral of the American empire intensifies. It could be another defeat in our endless and futile wars. The crisis is coming. And when it arrives it will be seized upon by the corporate state, nominally led by a clueless real estate developer, to impose martial law and formalize the end of American democracy.

When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist?

The specter he anticipates is one that anyone can objectively see coming, but that many of my fellow left-wing opponents of the Democratic establishment still refuse to acknowledge can happen because of their attachment to the Tea Party Fantasy: during Trump's term, perhaps sometime very soon, there will inevitably be a major crisis, most likely, I think, in the form of a terrorist attack. And as we saw almost sixteen years ago with the case of the dystopia portrayed in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, such an event can easily lead to extremely violent and authoritarian behavior on the part of the government. Especially when that government is headed by the likes of the Bush or Trump administrations.

And seeing as the Bush team looks warm and fuzzy compared to the current regime, this time the aftermath of the attack will no doubt be horrifying on a level that Americans have never been forced to confront. Trump himself may not be competent enough to create an autocracy, and he and his administration may be for now reviled by the vast majority of Americans including most in Congress, the Senate, the media, and the Deep State, but terrorist attacks have ways of shaking things up. Immediately after this event, Trump's approval ratings will no doubt go way, way up merely because of his position as the commander of a nation in crisis, and frazzled as he'll be, his far smarter and ideologically committed top aides will see to it that he wastes no time in taking some very big actions. As most of the House, the Senate, the press, and the public becomes compliant towards the president, his egoistic and domineering personality will partner with the terrifying cunning of behind-the-throne rulers like Mike Pence and Steve Bannon to bring about an exponential expansion of executive power and the irrelevance of laws saying that power can be challenged. And by the time the following period of wild military ventures, mass arrests of any perceived dissenters, and expanded corporate power makes most people again turn against the regime, it will be too late. As Chris Hedges says, the pretense of democracy will be ended, and fighting back will be virtually impossible.

No, Trump is not 2017's equivalent of 2009 Obama. The latter, like the Democratic Party, was prone to tepid liberal moderation and capitulation towards his political opponents, something Trump and Friends are the antithesis of. And the supporters of this president are driven not by the reassuring fuzziness of "hope and change" but by bitterly paranoid hatred and fear. Even before the coming 9/11 event, these facts have been chillingly demonstrated on multiple occasions, such as that of the victory salute a prominent group of neo-Nazis gave for Trump in November which provoked a disturbingly tepid response from the Trump team, and the Trump rally last month that a witness describes as having included a "horrifying" amount of zeal, nationalism, and "demonic activity."

Trump's administration may look like the politically fragile product of a "straw man" candidacy whose power is severely limited by the government's checks and balances, but as will soon be made apparent to all, it's a fascist time bomb that will go off as soon as the next big attack happens. It has a powerful enough movement behind it, it has a path to greatly increased influence, and all it has to do is wait. Michael Sparks himself seems to suspect it, having lately taken to comparing Trump with Hitler. And more than ever, he has some good reasons to justify doing so, what with the Trump administration having recently signed an executive order that in many ways dismantles various aspects of government, including the state, educational, and justice departments, so as to consolidate authority to the executive branch.

So what do we do? The bad news is that in many ways, the opportunity to avoid the course towards this insane future ended when Bernie Sanders was cheated out of the nomination. The good news is that to soften the fascist blow awaiting us, all we have to do is ramp up what we're already doing: getting involved in the political process.

We must firmly draw the line between the Sanders coalition's movement and the so-called resistance movement of the Democratic establishment, the latter of which, in addition to serving as a public relations tool for corporate Democrats, is run by people whose political brand makes them inherently unable to truly resist a fascist. We must talk to all of our generally non-political friends, relatives and neighbors about the gravity of the situation so as to make the percentage of Americans who have become more politically involved in the face of Trump go from its current 25% to more than twice that. We must redouble our commitment to donating to anti/Trump and/or anti-neoliberal Democrat organizations, participating in and/or organizing protests and strikes, signing petitions, contacting political leaders, and simply spreading information that increases awareness of the threat at hand. A good opportunity to do so is the "Berniecrats' Day of Action" that I'm organizing, which takes place on March 25, the one-year anniversary of the moment a bird so upliftingly visited Bernie Sanders at one of his rallies.

"Now is the time not to cooperate," writes Chris Hedges in his blueprint for revolt. "Now is the time to shut down the systems of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The fanatics are moving with lightning speed. So should we." To do so will take more than following in the footsteps of the Tea Partiers; this will require the creation of a movement whose success has no parallel.

Trump Is Right About The Major Media Being Fake News. There, I Said It.

As a strong believer in the Trump administration's ability to do great harm to our democracy, I was naturally left with an ominous feeling when, during a press conference three days ago, the president demonized the media for more than a little often portraying him negatively. When I witnessed the reactions that this incident typically received from the representatives of the media establishment itself, though, I started to get a similarly uneasy feeling.

The narrative that the major media and its fans have consistently and slyly tried to promote following Trump's remarks is one which has left little room for nuance. Outlets like CNN and The New York Times, we've been told in ways subtle and not almost every time we've been exposed to talk of Trump's comments, are obviously very reliable sources if Trump attacks them. How dare he call organizations like these fake news, the aghast TV pundits have said, earnestly frowning at this egregious offense while conversing on split screens (I'm talking about something I actually saw, by the way). Perhaps to protest the injustice of it, they'll organize a "National Freedom of the Press Day" where everyone tries to constantly read and watch the information that they provide.

If you're someone from my target audience, you no doubt know why I'm refusing to defend the major media. And if not, you can read Caitlin Johnstone's brilliant and righteous explanation for why she isn't defending these organizations either. But whether or not you insofar agree with me, I think we ought to revisit some of the things the major media outlets have done to lose the respect of me and more than two-thirds of the rest of the American public.

Again, I'd like to make it clear that not all of what these media outlets produce can't be trusted, or that the way Trump attacked them isn't petty and hyperbolic. But the fact remains that in spite of all the hand-wringing about the freedom of the press being endangered, we already have a mainstream media that's been manipulated towards being a tool for narrow, power-serving interests. By this I of course mean that virtually all of the major American news organizations are controlled by powerful corporations.

It hasn't always been like this. Before corporations and the super rich pulled off their coup within the U.S. government around forty years ago, more than 50 companies controlled the majority of American media sources. But by the time Bill Clinton signed the infamous Telecommunications Act, that number had been cut into a fifth of what it had once been, with Clinton's 1996 deregulation law acting only as an extra push to the rolling snowball of media consolidation that had been happening for decades. So it was no surprise that by the early 2000's (when 5 corporations controlled the majority of the media), these news organizations famously showed a staggering amount of bias towards the interests of the corporate state, with the major media having made no effort to question the Bush administration's WMD claims prior to the Iraq War, purposely taken down the campaign of Howard Dean, and generally acted as propaganda outlets for the White House and its agenda.

Since then, the concentration of media ownership has gotten even worse if that's possible, with 5 companies controlling 90% of U.S. media outlets. This has naturally made it so that the mainstream media's behavior during this last election cycle, which I'll mainly be focusing on in this article, has been stunningly power-serving.

I'll of course start with big media's coverage of the early months of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Sanders himself has found it worthwhile to review the way he was treated by the corporate media in his book Our Revolution, wherein he rightfully complained about the media blackout which surrounded him during that time. Just as the major media goes out of its way to cover things like sports and celebrity gossip rather than things like climate change and economic injustice, wrote Sanders, it predictably went out of its way to cover things like Donald Trump and trivial political gossip rather than Sanders and the issues he was trying to bring to the table. He recounted his experiences with the major news networks wherein the interviewers, reporters or debate moderators tried to steer clear of focusing on Sanders' message and instead asked him questions like "Do you think it’s fair that Hillary’s hair gets a lot more scrutiny than yours does?" (he was really asked that, by the way). He cited the incredible statistics about just how much effort the major media put into avoiding giving him exposure, such as the fact that as of December 2015, Jeb Bush had received 56 minutes of combined network news coverage compared to Sanders' 10 minutes.

The media blackout of the Sanders campaign was undeniably prevalent, and it greatly tipped the scales against him. However, what I find the most notable about the media's treatment of Sanders is not the instances where it ignored him and his ideas, but the instances where it directly attacked his anti-corporate agenda. As Thomas Frank assessed in his essay Swat Team about how the people who run outlets like the Washington Post viewed Sanders' goals, "As we shall see, for the sort of people who write and edit the opinion pages of the Post, there was something deeply threatening about Sanders and his political views. He seems to have represented something horrifying, something that could not be spoken of directly but that clearly needed to be suppressed."

And so in a great deal of cases, the corporate media decided to skip the step of simply pretending like Sanders' ideas weren't relevant to the political scene and go straight to attacking them. This may have first been apparent in December 2015, when The New Yorker published an article titled What Hillary Clinton Gets (and Bernie Sanders doesn't) About Wall Street. The piece's author, who revealingly says that they work in the financial sector, attempts to distract from the fact that a new financial crisis is now inevitable because the economy has been largely turned over to a handful of mega-banks whose business model is based on debt accumulation and fraud by discussing the relative decline of profits on Wall Street in recent years, while not addressing the now greater-than-ever financialization of the economy. "So why is Sanders so obsessed with Glass-Steagall and the big banks?" they wrote after making this evasive counter-argument. "It seems to be a matter of personal style and historical tradition: as a socialist, Sanders is echoing political ancestors who railed against Big Banks, Big Oil, Big Everything. He also appears to be fighting the last war, of the 2008 financial crisis, out of a conviction that the 'too big to fail' banks still pose a systemic risk to the economy."

And as the campaign went on, the efforts from the Big Media (does my use of that term make me a "socialist" too?) to paint Sanders' agenda as something absurd continued. Also in December of 2015, recounts Frank in Swat Team, the New York Times published an article that criticized Sanders' focus on the hollowing out of the middle class by declaring that "Americans are more anxious about terrorism than income inequality." You can stop with the class rhetoric now, Senator, most of the 7 in 10 Americans who have less than $1000 in savings just don't have money on their minds anymore. This condescending presumption about the beliefs of Americans, along with the slander that Sanders is a socialist, were both echoed, as Swat Team said, with a January Post article titled Nominating Sanders Would Be Insane which stated that Sanders couldn't win because "socialists don’t win national elections in the United States." Indeed, socialists probably don't. But non-socialists whose views are shared by the vast majority of Americans most certainly do.

And on and on went the barrage of neoliberal propaganda. Stop Reviling TARP, Frank recounts one Post editorial read regarding Sanders' opposition to the disastrous Wall Street bailouts before giving a simplistic and inaccurate history of the cause and aftermath of the financial crisis. Level With Us, Mr. Sanders, Frank says a headline piece in the Post blared indignantly before denouncing Sanders with the familiar charge of his ideas not being practical. And in some cases, as Frank wrote, the Post's attacks on Sanders got so nakedly pro-corporate that they were one step away from a literal endorsement of an oligarchic model for society:

The paper’s piling-up of the senator’s faults grew increasingly long and complicated. Soon after Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, the editorial board denounced him and Trump both as “unacceptable leaders” who proposed “simple-sounding” solutions. Sanders used the plutocracy as a “convenient scapegoat.” He was hostile to nuclear power. He didn’t have a specific recipe for breaking up the big banks. He attacked trade deals with “bogus numbers that defy the overwhelming consensus among economists.” This last charge was a particular favorite of Post pundits: David Ignatius and Charles Lane both scolded the candidate for putting prosperity at risk by threatening our trade deals. Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer grew so despondent over the meager 2016 options that he actually pined for the lost days of the Bill Clinton presidency, when America was tough on crime, when welfare was being reformed, and when free trade was accorded its proper respect.

Hostility towards real Wall Street reform and a defense of the bailouts. The assertion that economic inequality isn't much of a problem. The lie that anyone who doesn't subscribe to the corporate ideology is on the political fringe. The implication that there isn't a plutocracy right now in America. The endorsement of neoliberal trade deals, mass incarceration, and neglecting the needs of the poor. When you pay close attention to the nature of the corporate media's attacks on Sanders throughout the campaign, it becomes clear that the oligarchs who control outlets like the Times and the Post aren't shy to use them as tools to promote their self-serving views.

And the media's offensive towards the Sandersist political brand has continued beyond the day that the media itself helped get Sanders out of race by declaring Clinton had clinched the nomination right before the California primary. To make extra sure that a non-corporate candidate wouldn't win in 2016, the corporate media started a smear campaign against the Green Party's Jill Stein after the convention, prompting Counterpunch's Peter Lavenia to write regarding the motivations behind this decision: "Marx once opined that 'the ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,' and in an era of (potential) mass political upheaval, the media plays an active role in silencing dissent to those ideas. Indeed, they are linked to the continued profits generated by the political order." To assure themselves that a non-corporate candidate couldn't have won in 2016 in any case, neoliberal columnists have been writing op-eds saying Sanders wouldn't have beaten Trump. And to make sure a non-corporate candidate doesn't win the next time around, the Washington Post has lately been slandering Tulsi Gabbard.

"Keep in mind," writes Caitlin Johnstone in another piece telling the corporate media to get over being called fake news, "this is the mainstream media crying victim right now. These people wear suits that cost more than I make in a year, and right now, they’re mopping up their crocodile tears with a sleeve that would feed both our families for a month. Somewhere along the line they’ve taken up the Taylor Swift challenge of loudly playing the victim card while quietly stealing the spoils, which is pretty much the whitest thing a person can do. Remember that these people were responsible for relentlessly broadcasting the WMD story, a fake news invention that sent the world in a war-driven death spiral from which we have not recovered. They’ve published so many pernicious lies as truth over the years that those reporting a great deal of trust in the mainstream media is now below ten percent. They invented the pejorative specifically to destroy alternative media, but now they’re all Scarlett O’Hara 'Hand me the smelling salts!' about it being used anywhere in their vicinity? Yeah, I’m not buying it."

When you see Trump and these news organizations dramatically clashing, you are witnessing a side show designed to keep you unaware that both of them depend on the other to keep their respective charades going. Trump needs the Democratic Party establishment that the corporate media represents to keep up his easy job of having a weak political opposition, and even Trump is smart enough to know it seeing as he preferred to be running against Hillary Clinton rather than Bernie Sanders. And the establishment Democrats need Trump's utter awfulness to keep up their role in the public eye as the "not exactly perfect" but necessary lesser evil.

It's time for the American people to stop buying into the kinds of manipulative, power-serving political theatrics that we're seeing with this outrage over the corporate media being accurately called fake news. And to include yet another article from Johnstone, that's exactly what they're doing.

It's As If Trump And Friends Are Itching For A Terrorist Attack To Actually Happen

You've probably heard sometime recently about a book, published in 1935 by one Sinclair Lewis, titled It Can't Happen Here. It's a piece of political science fiction which tells of how Berzelius Windrip, a self-styled populist who turned out to be a corporatist dictator, won the 1936 Republican presidential nomination and defeated the incumbent Franklin Roosevelt on a wave of nationalism and contempt for the establishment. Thankfully, no one resembling Windrip appeared in the 1936 election, and Roosevelt would probably still have defeated them if they had because of how grateful the vast majority of Americans were for the New Deal. But especially after taking a good look at the events of this past month, it becomes clear that Lewis' prediction wasn't wrong; it was just eighty years off.

The first thirty days of the Trump administration, aside from some menacing statements from the president and his aides about the press being their enemy and a series of overreaching executive actions, have not quite been qualifiably fascist. But throughout these last few weeks, the president and/or his top aides have made some remarks which seem to very strongly imply they have an intention to take things much, much further. At one of his strange campaign-esque rallies today, Trump invoked the politically self-beneficial specter of a terrorist attack regardless of whether he was talking about a real event, having vaguely referred to a terrorist incident that happened "last night in Sweden."

Okay, you'd think. He said another ridiculous thing. Why make it into a provocative headline? Well, it's established a trend that Trump and Friends have developed of fabricating terrorism incidents for their own political leverage. Last month, as you know, the Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway referred multiple times to a nonexistent "massacre" in Bowling Green, Kentucky that was perpetrated by foreign Muslims to use as an argument for the thankfully now independent court-blocked Muslim ban. Days later, Trump himself cited a wide series of unsubstantiated terror incidents that he said the media was covering up. And now we've seen a remarkably similar piece of rhetoric coming from the highest office.

One explanation for this bizarre pattern is that Conway's the kind of counselor that tells her patients to listen to rather than ignore the voices in their heads. Another is that Trump and his inner circle have privately decided that focusing on terror attacks, real or not, is a way to create political capital for themselves out of thin air.

To be clear, I'm not going to pander to any "false flag" suspicions in this piece. I don't believe the Trump administration is plotting a terrorist attack any more than I believe Bush was behind 9/11. But I do have some solid reasons to suspect the Trump administration would welcome, and is even preparing for, the enormous position of power they'll be given in the event of a major terror attack during their term.

A Trump supporter gives his interesting take on this situation.

We've all seen the ghastly political shock waves that terrorism tends to have. 9/11 brought about one of the darkest periods in American history for our country's constitutional and democratic values, allowing the Bush administration to create a surveillance state, violate human rights, and tear apart the middle east for profit all while the vast majority of Americans backed the president out of "national unity." Most recently, the 2015 ISIS bombings in Paris that killed 130 people let the French government declare a prolonged state of emergency which threatened the country's pretense of democracy. And in the Trump era, as Phil Torres writes today after referring to the president's Islamophobic rhetoric, attacks on the judiciary, and demonization of the media, we are in greater danger than ever of losing our democracy because of terrorism:

So the dominos are in place for a major, sudden constitutional crisis. What’s frightening about this unstable equilibrium is that another terrorist attack will almost certainly happen within the next four years, if not the next year or coming months. It’s not so much a matter of if but when this takes place, as terrorism scholars unanimously agree. And once this does happen, those who still believe in American democracy will need to be vigilant and proactive in defending the only branch of government [the independent courts] that currently stands between democracy and autocracy.

And so when I see Trump and his top aides regularly fabricating terrorism incidents to strengthen their case for the persecution of Muslims, the dangers of a free press, and the expansion of the executive branch's powers, I get the impression that they're scratching an itch they have, consciously or not, for the things a real terrorist attack would let them do. Indeed, many in Trump's cabinet are anticipating, with an unsettling amount of conviction, the event of a terror attack and/or civilizational war between America and the Muslims of the world. Michael Anton, Trump's senior director of strategic communications, apparently expects Islamic terrorists to attack the U.S. with a nuclear weapon "any day now." And Steve Bannon insists that in accordance with a dubious, cycle-based view of history wherein world conflict is scheduled to peak around every eighty years, an epic global war is sure to come very soon.

The irony of this is that as has been the case with the Islamic fundamentalists who believe they're on the verge of winning a coming apocalyptic war between good and evil, Trump, Bannon and the rest are beginning to realize their visions of turmoil and the end times regardless of whether these expectations are based purely on myth. And both of these forces are helping the others' similar aspirations be brought about, with the middle east power vacuum that Obama's unnecessary military involvement created now showing hints of being filled as members of the Islamic State hail the things they're gaining from Trump's anti-Muslim actions. And the Trump administration, obviously, is using the Muslim extremists to further its own ends of gaining partisan advantage, consolidating economic and political power, and the allegiance of the American people.

I almost can't blame Bannon for believing in the eighty-year cyclical view of history, because so many disasters that developed in the 1930's are repeating themselves now. But in this case, things are in many ways far worse than they were eight decades ago. Instead of just the Dust Bowl, there's a global and irreversible environmental catastrophe. The economic inequities and corporate control over society now surpass in magnitude the similarly plutocratic conditions of the early 21st century. In addition to a new Great Depression that's expected to hit this year, we now have an unprecedented coming era of natural resource scarcity to deal with. And as wasn't the case eighty years ago, the new rise of fascism has occurred in not just Europe but in the United States.

And as long as we're talking about parallels, here's one of the songs in praise of Windrip's regime from It Can't Happen Here, which I suspect will soon be a very accurate description of the state of the country:

Bring out the old-time musket,

Rouse up the old-time fire!

See, all the world is crumbling,

Dreadful and dark and dire.

America! Rise and conquer

The world to our heart's desire!

Toeing The Line Between Revolt Against Trump And Revolt Against The Democratic Establishment

I've got some bad news: the 2016 election is still going on, and it will probably keep going on for a while. All that's changed since November 8 is that the contest now takes place in the general political realm instead of presidential politics. Trump and his team of proto-fascists continue to throw out absurd and dangerous disinformation so as to bend the fabric of publicly accepted reality to their liking. Sleazy corporatist "liberals" continue to use shaming, scapegoating, and failing all else outright lying so as to hold onto the little public support they still have. And as was also the case in 2016, the majority of Americans who aren't buying into the self-serving political brands of either of these two forces are in agony while trying to navigate the tedious and grotesque game that they've been forced into.

Like it or not, the fascists and the sleazebags are in almost full control of the political establishment right now, and before they're hopefully replaced in the following elections, all we can do is work to tie them down best we can. What complicates our hopes for doing so is that instead of being in one piece and thus easy to oppose, these two groups are in competition. This gets in the way of our ability to oppose them because in this situation, attacking them has become a double-edged sword.

Caitlin Johnstone explains this problem in a recent piece:

Every time I write an article suggesting that progressive rebels should focus on attacking the Dem establishment instead of Trump, I get a deluge of comments and messages saying “We can fight both! We can walk and chew gum at the same time!” No you can’t. You cannot do that. You will fail. You will fail because this is a media war, a war of perception, a war of narrative. It is impossible, in our current political climate, to feed into the “Trump is a monster” narrative without simultaneously feeding into the “any Democrat would be better” narrative, because the establishment Democrats are doing everything they can to use anti-Trump narratives to elevate themselves so that they can take back control of the government without espousing a real progressive agenda. 

The national narrative determines how people vote, and they will vote with the Democratic establishment if we support the Democratic establishment narrative by collaborating with their desire for us to focus on Trump.

Going by that, it would seem that the solution is to simply focus on bringing down the corrupt Democratic cabal instead of feeding into its slyly self-elevating narrative about the monstrosity of Trump. But while I'm otherwise an enormous fan of the messages that Johnstone works seemingly every day to spread, I see some big flaws in the approach she's advocating. Namely that putting aside the Democrats' fear campaign, Trump absolutely should be feared.

Johnstone argues in her case for the counter-productiveness of revolting against Trump that while he and his cabinet are certainly very scary and power-hungry people, there's no danger they'll be able to circumvent the larger systems within our government's structure. "The Deep State goes very deep," she writes, "and the power structures entrenched therein are very old. The POTUS faces a long, hard, uphill slugfest of a battle in his attempts to restructure America’s power systems, and the majority in both parties openly or secretly hate him and his stated agendas."

She's partly right. What with said Deep State already being in full-on battle mode against Trump, I don't expect him to take very much control over it, even if he pounds away at its power structure every day for the next eight years. But that Deep State is mainly located within America's military and intelligence agencies, which can only contain Trump to an extent. Many other political facets exist which aren't so impervious to the influence of the president, and they alone may well be what enables his continued rise to power. While this will sound hard to believe, what I'm talking about is the Congress, the Senate, the governorships, the state legislatures, and the American public in general. Yes, the White House does have a way to expand its influence into these areas, and it runs through the last event that brought about an era of president-worship and grotesque nationalism in America: a major terrorist attack.

If and when the U.S. is attacked during Trump's term, the tables are going to be turned in his relationship with America's power structures. As the president, by default he'll become the main figure people will want to be loyal to amid a moment of great uncertainty and grief, and this will give him unparalleled power. With the newfound backing of the majority of the public, he'll easily be able to make the members of lesser elected offices, whether or not they hate him, go along with his agenda out of "national unity." It's then that Steve Bannon and the other terrifying Trump puppeteers will move in for the kill, suppressing dissent, going on reckless military ventures, and generally laying waste to the constitution and our democratic institutions. If you think I was led to believe this by the eager-to-fearmonger establishment Democrats at the Vox or The Washington Post, just look at what the avid Democratic Party critic Chris Hedges thinks about what will happen under this administration.

In short, Johnstone may be right for the moment in assessing that revolting against Trump is an act which feeds into the narrative of the larger threats at work, but that very likely won't be the case a year from now after circumstances allow him to take far more control. So returning to this article's main point, what's to be done about all this? Every time we attack Trump, we're inadvertently helping the Democrats. And every time we attack the Democrats, we're inadvertently helping Trump. The paradox that people like me find ourselves in when faced with this dynamic is maddening, and it's no doubt provoking a lot of us into hopelessness and apathy.

Rest assured, though, there is a solution. And it's as uplifting as it is simple: rather than spending all our effort on attacking our opponents, which, in spite of its partial importance, is ultimately an act which feeds into the revolution-strangling dynamic of the two-party system, we mainly try to build up alternatives. The hidden weakness in the system of mutually controlled opposition that the Trumpists and Clintonists have created is that ultimately, in spite of their over-emphasized differences, they serve the same interests. Which is to say the interests of the corporations and oligarchs that prop up both of them. If we can take away, for just one example, the ability of Goldman Sachs to lobby and donate to political candidates, Trump and the neoliberal Democrats, who are both deeply influenced by the bank in different ways, will lose massive amounts of money to run their campaigns and organizations. Then they'll be forced to rely on individual contributions from their ordinary supporters, who largely have far more positive desires than those of Goldman Sachs, or else be politically flattened by the dynamic small-dollar funding operations of the Berniecrats.

In this and many other respects, fighting the system of predatory capitalism is a highly effective way to kill these two big, ugly birds with one stone. Another is to advance leaders, organizations and ideas which represent our agenda. This approach may have proved ineffective when the 2016 election was in presidential campaign mode because of the deep institutional obstacles faced by Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, but in this new political landscape, we have a lot more options. We can run candidates in state and local level races, where it's a lot harder for the neoliberal order to rig the game against us than was the case with the presidential election. We can build organizations and movements from outside of electoral politics, putting us in an excellent position to enact change where it matters: in the bottom-up. And we can force the political establishment to work in our interests by making clear to it, with strikes and boycotts and calls to political offices, that an uprising is coming if they don't start working for the people.

None of this is to say attacking the Trump administration and the Democratic establishment directly won't often be necessary. But if we can refrain from making it a central priority, and focus on ending the neoliberal status quo in general, their card house of controlled opposition will fall down.

The Oligarchy Inches Towards Implosion

The New York Stock Exchange After Trump's executive order to partially bar Muslims from entering the U.S. caused markets to dip.

Following the death last year of the infamous noliberal trade deal the Trans-Pacific Partnership, its creators are now trying to bring it back in a new and even more dangerous form. The Trade in Services Agreement, in addition to including the TPP's aspects of allowing corporations to sue governments over lost profits and making it so that still more American jobs would be shipped out, expands on the TPP's unreasonably extended copyright laws in that it calls for the elimination of internet neutrality. In other words TiSA is the Christmas list of an oligarchy that didn't get what it wanted last year. And the worst part of this is that Donald Trump, the supposed champion of a fairer American trade model, may well be the one who passes it.

Trump, in addition to having rather suspiciously still not revealed his stance on TiSA, seems likely to pass it because he's deeply tied to one of the interests that would benefit from him doing so, by which I mean (you guessed it) Goldman Sachs. While Trump didn't take any money from the bank throughout his campaign, he's just as beholden to it as Hillary Clinton was, with much of his cabinet being made up of former Goldman executives. Telling from this, one could speculate, Goldman Sachs has pulled off a cruel bait and switch on the Rust Belt voters who decided the 2016 election. They've presented to these economically insecure whites a candidate that seemed far more likely than his opponent to prevent more U.S. jobs from being shipped out, and then made it so that he would sign a trade deal that posed even more of a threat to the livelihood of (for now) working people.

Assuming all of that is the case, the benefactors of the neoliberal order have stooped to a new low in their forty years-running quest for more. They've presented the victims of their plunder, tauntingly it seems, with a completely false way out of the vicious cycle of economic inequality. And their next power grab will be even more extensive and vicious.

As quickly and shrewdly as possible, the Trump administration is working towards full control over society for both the alt-right and the corporate state. Already, Trump and his far more sinister and intelligent puppeteers have begun to dismantle some of the fundamental facets of our democracy, having worked to dis-empower dissenting forces within the government as many of their lower-ranking allies have attempted to take away the public's right to peacefully protest.

And this is just a hint of what's coming. Throughout the following months, the Trump government, with the help of a terrorist attack for which they'll be inadvertently responsible, will conduct a staggering coup within the U.S. government. Opposition to the state and its ideology will be silenced. Mass incarceration and the authority of police will be expanded indefinitely. The glorification of nationalism, war, and violations of human rights that we experienced after 9/11 will repeat itself, this time to a far greater significance. The increased consolidation of economic and political power that's occurred for the past half-century will become turbocharged, along with the effort to suppress dissent from the public.

That is, if the public doesn't disable the state's authority do so so beforehand.

The resistance-by which I mean the resistance against not just the Trump regime but the neoliberal order in general-has gotten off to a more than respectable start. Around a third of the days since Trump's election have seen protests against him, organizations like Justice Democrats and the ACLU have experienced a massive surge in donations, and the various strikes and boycotts planned for Trump's term are gaining great momentum. But despite the massive energy we've seen building in opposition to the coming autocracy, I fear not enough is being done to avoid the fate mentioned above.

Too often do I see my fellow progressives dismissing the notion that Trump poses a threat to the republic as fearmongering spread by neoliberal Democrats. Too many Americans continue to regard Trump and his agenda as fairly nonthreatening, with just 46% opposing Trump's partial ban of Muslims, only 53% trusting a federal judge more than the president to decide the fate of a law, and a far too low 49% (citing a poll from last May) viewing Trump as a fascist. And most discouragingly, just 25% of Americans, and that's including just 40% of Democratic women, intend to become more politically involved.

And without a vast majority of Americans being firmly behind the resistance, its cause stands a good chance of failing. "We don’t have much time," one of this movement's leaders Kali Akuno is quoted as saying last week when talking to Chris Hedges. "We are talking two to three months before this whole [reactionary] initiative is firmly consolidated. And that’s with massive resistance."

The irony of all this, though, is that all the time, with every appalling action Trump and Friends take, they move themselves closer to a political black hole. And they may draw themselves into it within the time frame that Akuno mentions.

For the last eight years-or perhaps far longer-the world economy has been heading towards a crash that may be the 21sy century Great Depression. This lurch towards collapse has been due to a wide series of problems with how our economy is structured, most ominously among them the wind down of oil production that's been happening for the last several decades and will continue to happen, to disastrous effect, throughout the several decades to come. But in the shorter term, this depletion of resources has mainly been causing trouble in how we've chosen to order our economy.

Following the 1970's recession largely brought on by 1972's all-time peak in oil production, the advocates of a more elite-oriented economic system were provided with an opening for pushing their agenda. The political establishment, persuaded by the pitch that money needed to be saved amid the economic downturn, abandoned the model of restrained capitalism introduced by FDR and took on an economic worldview of free market fundamentalism. As a result, the economy has grown highly unstable since then, with a refusal on the government's part to provide a level economic playing field having increased poverty and stunted growth while lack of sufficient taxation on the wealthy has driven up the national debt. This unsustainable dynamic of a top-heavy economy, which has been present for the last forty years in not just the U.S. but in most other major countries, is setting us up for a repeat of the crash of 1929 (which, predictably, was also caused by extreme economic inequality). And this Judgement Day for neoliberalism is approaching very quickly.

As was also the case with the Great Depression, the next financial crisis will be set off by an American banking system that's come to be based on fraud. For the past twenty years, our economy has become more and more controlled by more and more corrupt financial institutions, starting with Clinton's Wall Street deregulations. After the crash that resulted from those policies, the government, incredibly, took an even more destructive course of action, having allowed the big banks to become further consolidated and powerful. Now the economy is in a better position than ever for failure, being highly financialized in addition to the two other problems I mentioned. And Donald Trump, with his tendency to disrupt markets and economically destabilizing ultra-neoliberal policies, is sure to speed up the arrival of the new financial crisis, which is expected to come sometime this year regardless.

When Trump and the neoliberal order push the economy off a cliff, though, it's possible they'll go right down with it. A great deal of those who for now remain politically apathetic, along with many current supporters of Trump and the status quo he represents, will no longer be willing to stand by when the consequences of the establishment's self-serving actions culminate in a sudden hollowing out of the middle class. Amid the staggering disappearance of wealth, a political vacuum will form in the ruins of Trump's coalition. And it will be filled by a movement to take the country back from moneyed interests that's strengthened by the newfound support of millions of the regime's former supporters.

From the start, the oligarchy has been gradually setting things up for its own demise. And it's reasonable to expect that very soon, the conditions will become right for a transition towards a sustainable and just society.

If We Want The Resistance To Succeed, We Won't Let It Be Hijacked By The Neoliberals

The words on the sign above are of course fake. But the message it articulates is very real. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the other corporatist members of the DNC, in addition to having engaged in the infamous tactics to undermine Bernie Sanders' campaign that we learned about from Wikileaks, naturally did nothing to stop the numerous incidents of voter suppression and electoral fraud which were perpetrated throughout the primaries by lower-ranking Democratic officials.

This subtle coup against the Democratic candidate who was supported by the majority of their party's electorate, along with the terrible strategies used by the Clinton campaign to win over that majority, is one of the many actions establishment Democrats have taken which played a major part in Donald Trump's election. While you'll never see them admit it, the vast majority of the American people do not share the corporatist, morally relativistic worldviews of establishment Democrats, and this made them the worst ones possible to be in charge of stopping Trump from winning.

So after the election, these Democrats took the only wise course of action: try to fashion themselves as the leaders of the resistance movement to Trump.

While the fiasco of the Democrats' 2016 defeat has convinced some of those who supported Clinton in the primaries that they've been pursuing a dead-end political brand, most of them still aren't willing to acknowledge the deep problems with the current Democratic Party, as evidenced by how all the corporate Democrats who might run in 2020 have the combined support of 45% of the Democratic electorate. And once again, the minority within a minority of the "liberal" oligarchs who fund and organize the charade of the Democratic Party establishment are trying to make claim to the role of opposing Trump and the GOP so as to further their ulterior motive of maintaining the economic and political status quo.

Their attempts to hijack the anti-Trump movement are predictable and occasionally amusing. One of the neoliberal Democrats' media gofers Keith Olbermann has dramatically photographed himself with a concerned expression while draped in an American flag, with the sleek logo of "the resistance" featured in front of him; the neoliberal Democratic mega-donor George Soros has had disturbingly significant involvement with the organization of the Womens' Marches; and establishment Democrats have generally been shamelessly eager to use policies like Trump's Muslim ban to point the finger at progressives who didn't back Hillary Clinton-and that's including those who didn't support her in the primaries.

And once again, the neoliberal Democrats' campaign to make their left-wing opponents compliant by branding themselves as noble allies in the fight against the greater evil is endangering our chances to actually defeat the greater evil. As I've illustrated in depth by pointing to the public opinion polls which show the vast majority of Americans support Sandersism's supposedly radical goals and the inscrutably populist nature of Trump's victory over Clinton in the Rust Belt states, appealing to the left, not the "mainstream" center, is in most cases the best way to win elections these days. And the old guard Democrats' refusal to acknowledge this is already hurting the Democrats' hopes for fighting Trumpism on the electoral level.

"We may very well have one chance to save our party and begin winning elections again," assessed the decidedly Berniecratic Santa Rosa Democratic leader Sarah Coutu in a letter to The Progressive Army regarding the tactics that pro-establishment Florida Democratic officials used last month to shut out reformers in their state. "Florida plays a huge roll in nationwide elections. The Florida Democratic Party had this one chance to recover from the huge losses on November 8th and prove that they were serious about change. I personally feel they have instead sealed our fate to another 8 years of losing elections. Today feels like the beginning of what others are calling 'Trump’s World'. Before today [when the neoliberals took ill-earned victory in the race for the Florida Democratic Party's next leader], there was hope we could start winning elections in 2018 and thereafter, bringing the party back to the people, uniting our forces across the entire party to stand strong against the republicans. I’m afraid we have just opened the door for Trump to do catastrophic damage to our country, with no force to stand against anything he wishes to do."

These so-called resistance leaders aren't putting up much of a real fight to Trump and Friends on the civic level, either. Far too many Senate Democrats have voted to confirm Trump's cabinet nominees, something that I think will prove to be just the beginning of a saga of over-compromises that corporate Democrats, in their eagerness to be "pragmatic" and generally not rock the boat, will make towards the Trump administration. After all, these types of Democrats have no real incentive to block Trump's agenda of increasing racial inequality, perpetuating unnecessary military conflict, escalating the class war on the bottom 99.9%, ending civil liberties, and further making the American pretense of democracy irrelevant, as they themselves for the most part represent all of these goals.

This folly on their part, I expect, will soon become a danger not just to progressive values but to our very republic, as Trump is sure to take on a truly fascist bent when the next major terrorist attack inevitably occurs.

Those who don't represent these things, thankfully, are doing everything they can not to let this movement whose prospects for success are our only hope of saving the planet from ecological meltdown be co-opted and neutered by such narrow and self-serving interests. The Berniecrats have already made great gains in wresting the California Democratic Party from the neoliberals, as well as in many smaller facets of the Democratic Party throughout the country. And while the old guard has managed to occasionally strike back as mentioned three paragraphs above, their only line of defense is evidently an ability to rig the process in their favor which seems to only reach so far. They may be able to set some political booby traps for the progressive insurgency, but stealing every election is all but impossible for them to do. And so the Sandersists, with their unparalleled nationwide network of grassroots activists, are by far in a better position than the establishment is to win elections both within and outside of the Democratic ticket, as well as to influence the actions of those in power generally.

In November, James Howard Kunstler wrote regarding the 2016 election: "Daddy’s in the house and he busted straight into the nursery and now the little ones are squalling in horror. Mommy was discovered to be a grifting old jade who ran the household into a slum and she’s been turned out to solemnly await the judgment of the courts, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The kids on campus have gone temporarily insane over this domestic situation and some wonder if they’ll ever get over it." Well, since then the kids have for the most part managed to regain sanity and start directing their panicked energy towards getting mommy out of the house, who's refused to obey her eviction notice. And when they finally get her out of the picture, they can focus on getting daddy, who's not as strong as he looks, tied down to the nursery floor. Then it's playtime.

I Hope He Fails

 

Many of my fellow Americans will probably not appreciate the title of this article. It would seem that I'm stooping to the level Rush Limbaugh did eight years ago right before Barack Obama took office when, on his radio show, he famously used those same words to describe his view of the next president. I've seen a lot of people, whether or not they supported Donald Trump, urging me to "give Trump a chance" and "get behind our president," with those of them on the liberal end of the political spectrum saying we mustn't treat Trump the way Republicans treated Obama because "we're better than that."

To these people, as Limbaugh also said to those conservatives who felt an obligation to get behind Obama, I'll have to say I disagree fervently. Because unlike was the case with Obama, I believe Trump is quite seriously the greatest existential threat the United States has faced since the Confederacy.

Before I begin my case for this, I'd like to clarify that I don't view Trump and his party as the soul problem with who's running our government. I'm well aware of the enormous corruption, neoliberalism, and hypocrisy of the modern Democratic Party, and indeed I've voiced dissent to it and its leaders just as much as I've done with Trump. Nonetheless, I feel the need to iterate just how much danger we'll be putting ourselves in if we don't do absolutely everything we can to resist him.

I say this because while criticizing Trump is obviously a right of passage for the 37% of Americans who disapprove of him, I believe in the very near future, it will be very difficult to do so.

Let me go through a scenario which, while I've illustrated before, is something I believe must be repeated many times: it's months into Trump's term, and he's so far been little more than an embarrassment to the republic he's infiltrated. His opponents on both the left and the right are putting up a formidable fight, and with the help of his abysmal and dropping approval ratings, they're for the most part winning. That is, until something happens which ruins everything: a major terrorist attack. 

Such an event, which seems inevitable given the ever-increasing threat of terrorist attacks and Trump's dangerous ineptitude at protecting our country, will no doubt bring a profound change to how the president will try to govern and how much power he'll have to get his agenda passed through Congress the Senate. His poll numbers will spike, along with his willingness to take extreme and authoritarian actions, and things will get very scary very quickly.

Just imagine it: the world is in the wake of catastrophe, and Trump and the members of his cabinet are at the forefront of the damage control effort. What kinds of things do you suppose Trump's National Security advisor Michael Flynn, who has written that Muslims are "dead set on killing us and drinking our blood," will do to religious liberties in a situation like this? What do you suspect Steve Bannon, Trump's White House Chief Strategist, who has said that white supremacists are "a much smarter group of people" than others, will do to civil rights? What do you think Trump himself, who's publicly fantasized about assaulting his opponents, arranged for transparently Nazi-esque salutes to be held at his rallies, lied about seeing Muslims cheer on 9/11, bragged about having "called" last year's Orlando attack, and used "Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don't know what to do. Love!" as his New Year's Eve address will do?

The answer, as Chris Hedges assesses in his own essay on this very real possibility, could be something we'd prefer not to know beforehand:

The last constraints will be removed by a crisis. The crisis will be used to create a climate of fear. The pretense of democracy will end.

“A fascism of the future—an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis—need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols,” Robert Paxton writes in “The Anatomy of Fascism.” “Some future movement that would ‘give up free institutions’ in order to perform the same functions of mass mobilization for the reunification, purification, and regeneration of some troubled group would undoubtedly call itself something else and draw on fresh symbols. That would not make it any less dangerous.”

Our ruling mafia will use the crisis much as the Nazis did in 1933 when the Reichstag was burned. It will publish its own version of the “Order of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State.” The U.S. Constitution will be in effect suspended. Personal freedom, including freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to organize and freedom of assembly, will be abolished. Privacy will be formally eradicated. Search warrants will be unnecessary. America’s emergency decrees will cement into place what largely exists now.

In short, America as we've known it for the last fifty years, and perhaps even for the last two hundred years, will stand a good chance of coming to an end when a major crisis meets an inherently authoritarian and bigoted Trump administration.

Due to factors that have emerged in recent decades such as extreme economic inequality, the corrosion of the democratic process, and loss of public faith in established institutions, in the last several years our country has entered into a phase so many other societies have throughout history: the rise of fascism. As was the case with those past societies, this path of ours has started with an increased public desire to get back at the political establishment which has abandoned their interests and a campaign on the part of demagogues to hijack this anger towards their own maniacal ends. And its next phase will be that of a transition to all-out tyranny.

When we approach our final destination on this road to fascism, though, we'll still have the potential to change course at the last minute. And in order to do this, we'll need to prepare to resist the personality which this toxic cultural energy has congealed around in full force. Despite the doubts some have that Trump poses a threat, I think it's important at this point in time for me and others to flatly say, "I hope he fails."

Don't Count On Establishment Democrats To Stand Up To Trump

As 2017 gears up to quite possibly become the new 1933, the two thirds or so of Americans who oppose you-know-who are spending this bleak political winter doing their best to prepare for taking part in the massive resistance effort which is certain to bloom in the spring. But as history has shown us, a significant portion of that two thirds might not stay committed to the fight.

Before I continue, I'd like to make it clear that this piece is not intended as a means to divide Trump's opposition between the moderate and far left. While I hold no allegiance to the Democratic Party until fundamental changes are made to it, and I will under no circumstances embrace the neoliberal agenda that it currently represents, I know that in the context of resisting Trump, it's important to know that the enemy of your enemy is always (to an extent) your friend. The main way in which I'm about to attack the moderate left has do to with how it can't be relied upon to remain part of said resistance.

Enter the instance of what happened after 9/11. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Bush administration used the circumstances to go on a rampage, infringing on many constitutional liberties in the name of security and doing you-know-what in the middle east. What enabled the U.S. government's reign of terror, though, was not just the compliance of Republicans, which was to be expected, but the compliance of many liberals, namely the ones of the centrist persuasion.

Mainly among these "liberal" enablers of the administration were the ones in the House, the Senate, and much of the major media. Throughout the years following the attacks, far too often did most House and Senate Democrats vote in favor of Bush's proposals, such as when all but one Democratic Senator approved the Patriot Act and when enough of said Democrats supported the Iraq War for it to be able to pass. Others in this effort to unite the left and the right at whatever cost included those in charge of "liberal" publications like The New York Times and the "liberal" UK prime minister Tony Blair.

"I hold Blair more responsible for the Iraq War than I do George W. Bush," Michael Moore has said in a brutally honest assessment of the role that Blair and others like him played in this shameful affair. "Because I expected that of George W. Bush. That wasn't a surprise, all right. But Bush only got away with it because he had the cover of Tony Blair, because he had the cover of liberals, the liberal New York Times, the liberal New Yorker magazine, the 'liberal' Tony Blair."

Now enter the situation we're going to be in when Donald Trump is president. While I, like too many others, used to view the claims that Trump is a threat to the republic as alarmist, I've lately come to believe that image many have gotten of "Fuhrer Trump" has a lot of merit. While I have every reason to believe he'll govern in a relatively center-right, congress-restrained fashion at first, at a certain point I expect things to indeed get very scary. Namely, when a terrorist attack similar to that of 9/11 inevitably occurs, the only way one can realistically imagine the Trump administration reacting is with an amount of authoritarianism and reckless military action which may be unprecedented in the history of America's government.

Right after the crisis hits, Trump and his party will no doubt get an enormous boost in popularity, giving them a powerful political aura throughout the next several years which allows them to get away with a lot more corrupt and/or dangerous deeds than usual. Just how useful this aura turns out to be for them, however, depends on what his opponents do. And from everything we can tell, those in the moderate, corporatist wing of the Democratic Party will abandon their initial (supposed) effort to resist Trump right when the attacks occur.

Again, I make this prediction not because I want to provoke division within Trump's opposition due to the ideological differences I have with establishment Democrats, but because I have good reason to doubt said Democrats, who are unfortunately the main people in charge of the resistance movement, will share any parts of my cause after a certain point. If my prediction seems implausible now, just look at what these Democratic leaders did during the post-9/11 period of the Bush administration.

Take the case of Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader who voted for and outspokenly supported the Patriot Act, the Bush tax cuts, and the Iraq War. She's also on record for stating that "We stand shoulder to shoulder with the president" when asked about how she viewed Bush's efforts to violate civil liberties. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, can be trusted even less than Pelosi to continue opposing Trump, having both supported the Bush policies mentioned above and having been named by the president-elect as more likable than the Republican leadership because of his articulated willingness to compromise. And given how the agenda of the rest of the Democratic Party's leadership generally matches up with the corporatist, militaristic views of these two, I suspect most other House and Senate Democrats will act similarly compliant to the wishes of the GOP.

In short, after these "liberals" have inadvertently helped Trump win with their embrace of the politically impotent Clintonist ideology, they're no doubt going to aide him in the second phase of his rise to power by capitulating to his agenda after the next 9/11 occurs. If progressives and anti-Trump conservatives want to weather the coming fascist storm, they'll rally around leaders who can't just be considered "liberals," but genuine advocates for systemic change.

2016: The Year Inverted Totalitarianism Went Belly-Up

The final weeks of Barack Obama's term have sadly been defined by some of the worst crackdowns on civil liberties the United States has (so far) seen this decade. Last month, his administration introduced a law called H.R. 6393, which, if passed, would allow the government to counter-act websites that the state deems to be fake news outlets. And on Christmas Day, Obama signed the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which establishes a government agency with the purpose of suppressing such sites.

These measures are just the tail end of the saga of unjust actions that the U.S. government has taken throughout the last several decades, and indeed for the last several centuries. Genocide, slavery, economic exploitation, perpetual war, environmental destruction, the creation of a surveillance state, and countless other unjustifiable policies have been justified by the country's leaders to the public through fear, disinformation, and scapegoating, with the government's effort during the last few months to justify the laws mentioned above with a good old-fashioned Red baiting campaign being no exception.

The good news, though, is that I'm convinced this will be the last time the state can succeed with such propaganda efforts for quite a while.

The tactics I've mentioned all fall under one category of effort on the part of the state to gain public support for its oppressive actions: inverted totalitarianism. The methods that this term signifies, as Chris Hedges assesses, is applied to American society as follows: "Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent."

What's recently disrupted this order, though, is something somewhat counterintuitive: the (minority-decided) election of a leader whose political brand is invertedly totalitarian to the extreme. The means Donald Trump has used to gain support fits every part of the definition of inverted totalitarianism; by almost consistently misrepresenting the truth while making public statements, seeking to portray himself as a victim of biased media and governmental institutions, and inciting anger towards groups and individuals that he chooses to scapegoat, he has effectively created a cult of personality wherein his supporters (literally) pledge allegiance to him despite the encyclopedia of evidence that he is not someone worth following.

What's backfired about this approach, though, is that aside from his loyalists, it's caused the country to turn against him. According to some surveys, 70% of Americans view him unfavorably, and while just 54% view him as honest and trustworthy, a minuscule 29% said in September that they would be excited to see him as president, and 24% said they would be proud. Especially considering how this may be one of the higher points of his popularity since the favorability ratings of presidents tend to peak early in their terms, it's clear that the next president will not be welcomed by the vast majority of the population.

The result of this, I believe, will be an effort on the part of all save the members of Trump's ever-diminishing personality cult to overthrow him and the oppressive system he represents. I believe this will be the case because when this revolution inevitably materializes, it will in a lot of ways be led by those on both the liberal and conservative sides of the political spectrum. In a piece from earlier this month, I predicted Trump's presidency would provoke the rise of a possibly unprecedented progressive backlash against the new president and his agenda. It turns out, though, that a great deal of those on the right could join this effort, because liberals and conservatives in fact share many goals.

A survey from 2014 shows that the majority of Republicans, like most other Americans, want an end to the failed Drug War and do not think someone should be arrested for marijuana possession. The views of Republicans on taxes have radically shifted in recent years, with 53% of them supporting the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy. The same is the case for their beliefs about the environment, with 54% of Republicans acknowledging the existence of climate change. The government's mass surveillance programs are generally opposed by conservatives as well, with about as many Republicans as Democrats being opposed to the Patriot Act in its original form and 56% of them disapproving of the NSA's electronic communication surveillance. Most Republicans favor raising the minimum wage (though unfortunately only a quarter of them want it raised to $15). And 80% of them want Citizens United, and by extension the role of money in politics, ended.

In short, most Americans support policies which advance social, environmental, and economic justice, with conservatives in many ways being no exception. And with Donald Trump being viewed as hard to like by half of Republicans, I expect the anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party will join the rest of the country in resisting the efforts on the part of Trump and leaders like him to ignore climate change, drive up the wealth gap, and expand mass incarceration and with the surveillance state. And especially given how the current income disparity has made it so that the conditions are now very hospitable for such a movement, I also believe this revolt's success is most certainly assured.

The irony of this situation is that inverted totalitarianism's death was caused by inverted totalitarianism itself. Trump won because he played on the anger that so many are feeling towards traditional institutions and leaders, and now that he's president-elect, he, along with the political and economic establishment that he pretends to oppose, are about to lose their power.