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Watching the press briefing Trump gave... something in me finally broke.
I don't think it matters what you call Trumpism. I think that we've spent all of this time propping up a broken system with a broken man. I recoiled from the accelerationists who said they were using Trump to break the system because that just seems so destructive and vile, no better than the people who break Starbucks windows.
I thought: maybe he's a good man. Maybe we should give him a chance. And the Democrats are so vile in their baseless slander.
But the Dermocrats didn't make him give that speech on January 6th.
Hillary Clinton should have been jailed and she should still be in jail. There is nothing to be gained however from holding on to a tool that has run out of use.
I mean is there anyone out there who didn't understand why Democrats were in shrill hysterics about fascism? The man like to scare them, and I don't know if I believe that he had so much fun terrorizing the libs (it's so easy and someone has to do it) that he fell into it, or if... well, I just can't go down that road yet.
This criminal wasn't worth all of this divisiveness in our politics. Maybe the divisiveness was already there.
I regret my support for former president Trump and I want him to withdraw from public life. Nixon had the decency to step down when his time was up.
Meh. I've never been a Trump partisan, but this changes little for me. I still view Trump as the prole's middle finger, and his decline into persecuted irrelevance is part of the cyclical tragedy of class politics.
I called this right at the start. Trump is not Caesar, Trump is not Hitler. Trump is Tiberius Gracchus. He was, is, and will always be the failed aspirations of the working class projected onto an incredibly flawed cartoon of a human being.
We're not to revolution yet, but if and when we get there, the memory of how Trump revealed the depths of the deep state and baited the establishment into scrapping all their old norms will be strong.
The working class has been defeated, their champion will now be buried under every over-charging liberal prosecutor in every state and city where they have authority. The PMC cannot allow the threat that Trump poses to their hegemony to go without absolutely humiliating and destroying him (in their own minds, anyway).
So, when a competent successor appears, promises all the same things Trump did, and manages to get his hands on the military, he might well decide there's no point in comfortable retirement, because that won't be an option. If you want to lead the Populare faction, you must win or die in prison, poverty or both. The proles will not be allowed an equal voice in the operation of the country except by force.
The American Empire will have its emperor soon enough, and we will have Alvin Bragg to thank, in some small part. The senatorial thugs who killed the Gracchi rejoiced at their victory over the Populares. Sulla dug up the bones of Marius and threw them into the Tiber, and the senate rejoiced because they had reset the constitution to ensure the proles would never threaten again. And Julius Caesar watched it all, and when his turn came, he did not submit to the orders of the Senate. And yet he could not bring himself to kill them all, so they killed him.
Man has only two choices in government, autocracy or oligarchy. The people will support an emperor because the oligarchy is uncontrollable otherwise.
Does the working class actually prefer Trump, though? In 2020 Biden won among people who make under $100,000 / year. Of course that metric is not precisely correlated with any reasonable definition of "working class", but it is some indication that maybe the idea of Trump being the working class' chosen candidate is wrong.
Let's nuance the picture a bit. According to this article: "[I]n 2016 and 2020, CES data shows that the top two income quintiles (i.e., 80%–100% and 60%–80%) preferred the Democrat (i.e., Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden) over the Republican (i.e., Donald Trump) more than the twentieth through sixtieth percentiles did". Support for the Democratic Party by income is currently a U-shape where people in both the lowest and highest income quintiles are the strongest Democrat supporters - in fact, in 2016 and 2020 it seems that those in the highest income quintile have been a bit more pro-Democrat than those in the lowest. There's also the fact that in ZIP codes with a median household income of at least $100,000, Biden outpaced Trump in fund-raising, $486 million to only $167 million. In the rest of the country the two were knotted closely together.
The parties are switching bases, and I don't think this represents a shift in the beliefs of the upper class, rather I think this represents a shift in the parties and their policies. Over the years, the two parties have slowly converged when it comes to economic policy, and the ideological battleground has shifted to the social. Democrats have been adopting the brand of radical progressivism that has long had purchase with the upper class whereas their economic policy has slowly drifted moderate, and this serves the interests of their newly elite voter base.
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