You can look at the national civic scene in the United States and shake your head in disbelief and disgust. American politics is so full of shit. It is easy to point the finger at the people and berate them for their childishness in believing so many lies. However, they have been lied to from the very beginning of their republic. The fear mongering by vested interests is legion. This whole anti-communist thing is such a load of garbage. I mean there has never been any iota of danger in America becoming a communist nation. It has been a complete beat up from its invention some hundred plus years ago.
The BS Inherent Within US Politics
Despite this, the main political parties have hung this threat over the American people like some sword of Damocles. Any sniff of wealth distribution for African Americans, women, and any other disenfranchised minority group is evidence of communism. How convenient for those white men in power who don’t want to share the wealth of the nation. The Republican party are the most recent and prolonged user of this fear mongering in their campaigning. They have created this mythical ideal American who hovers above the populace like an image from a drive-in movie. The tough white cowboy who takes no help from the government and walks tall at all times. This western frontiersman has shot savages and kept his womenfolk safe. He believes in God and takes no shit.
Cowboys, Reagan, & Americans Getting Shafted
Obviously, this hero doesn’t exist and never really did. Ronald Reagan resurrected the cowboy archetype for his campaign for the presidency back in the 1980s’. Reagan stripped back the New Deal economic policies, which had done so much over decades to make the US a much fairer place. The wealth index was more evenly shared among the population during FDR’s New Deal, and which Eisenhower continued on in the spirit of liberal consensus. Reagan began the great divergence between the wealthy and the poor via his regressive taxation policies and stripping spending on welfare programmes for the underprivileged. To effect these harsh economic policies upon the poor Reagan promoted the idealised American ‘cowboy’ narrative. The self-made man who shunned welfare and made it on his own terms. This Ayn Rand character BS ignored the fact that white men were already the privileged dominant cohort in America. Making it on your own terms is easier when you have already had a leg up thanks to your ethnicity and race. Poorly educated people are easily manipulated into believing that ‘anybody can make it in America’. White folk who did not finish secondary school do not learn about the things learned at college. Most of these folk don’t have the training to think outside of their own perspective on life. Therefore, they have no understanding of what life for many African Americans has been like. Generations of poverty, poor schools, apartheid living, and institutional racial discrimination are not features of a level playing field.
It is easier to eat up white supremacist propaganda about undeserving blacks incapable of getting ahead. American politics is so full of shit.
Fascists & Hating ‘The Other’ in Politics
Conservatives and right wing fascists always have an ‘other’ up their sleeve for the voters to hate. Communism was the new evil of the day. It was Godless, which condemned it in the eyes of the evangelical Christian right. Any sign by Democrats of helping African Americans, women, or Latin Americans was a clear indication of communist intent. It was weakness, as Americans should help themselves and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Meanwhile, the rich became superrich, the birth of the billionaire class happened on the Republican watch. Whilst average Joes’ were busy conforming to an American ideal, corporate America was shovelling their untaxed profits into bank vaults. Anti-trust laws were repealed in the 1990’s which has seen further divergence between the super-rich and the growing poverty of the middle class. It is a return to the gilded age that so many American political leaders fought to dismantle at the beginning of the 20C. Woodrow Wilson would be turning in his grave.
Selling Your Soul For The White Man’s Pie
Those who vote for GOP candidates in America are either incredibly stupid or truly believe that they will benefit from a slice of the white man’s pie. All this hogwash about communism is the biggest bunch of baloney served up to a nation of haves and many more have nots. America was a slave nation for its first centuries and fought a Civil War over it. This cost some 625, 000 lives between the north and the south. It freed the black Africans who had been chained up in police states and whipped to work harder on plantations. It did not deliver these African Americans to a level playing field, however. White men in the north actively voted against any policies mooted to distribute economic wealth to those now suffering from apartheid and black codes in the south. In the west, where real men were cowboys, Native Americans were enslaved and were exploited by white property owners there. All those stories about the frontiersmen of the wild west, like Davey Crocket at the Alamo, are in fact about the right to enslave Indians in places like Texas. The Mexicans had outlawed slavery in 1829 and the Spanish empire long before that. The lies spun via patriotic interpretations of American history are many and major.
Today’s America Trumps National Disgrace
We get to an America today that voted in a fraudulent celebrity billionaire as president in 2016. This resulted in a million people dying from Covid in the supposed economic superpower of our time. The US was shown as a country riven by ideology and unable to coordinate under Trump to save American lives. It was a national disgrace.
GOP’s Zero Sum Game
Americans have been fed feel good stories for lifetimes if you are white and male. The public buy into narratives which bear little relation to reality. Marvel studios have been churning out scores of super hero movies and they have been largely successful. This tells us a lot about the intelligence level where the country is at. The GOP sets up its zero sum game, where the price of fairness, according to them, costs the white majority. This is crap but all too many Americans are willing to believe it. They have been told this for decades – that providing a level playing field economically will detract from their own wealth. Too many Americans believe this lie.
Prison Or The Presidency?
Trump is a crook and has been so for decades. The fact that he has gotten away with it for so long is a testament to the state of America. Rich people are above the law in many instances. The powerful in the political sphere do not pay the price for their transgressions of the law. Nixon, Oliver North, Steve Bannon, and the hundreds of criminals who are pardoned by the president – make the judicial system in the US a bad joke. Trump is either going to jail or returning to the presidency in 2024. That Trump incited a coup on January 6th2021, where violent Trump supporters stormed the Capital and killed police defending it, is a wake -up call to America and the world. Stupid and violent are apt descriptions for the most virulent Trump supporters. American politics is so full of shit.
“Everyone who makes the argument that January 6 was, you know, an unguided tour of the Capitol is lying to America. Everyone who says that the prisoners who are being prosecuted right now for their involvement in January 6, that they are somehow political prisoners or that they didn’t commit crimes, those folks are lying to America.” – Ken Buck, Republican Congressman.
Americans like the illusion of the confident cowboy taking on the world, as their archetypal leadership story. Many Americans are traditionalists in their attitudes to life and voting habits for presidents. They have never elected a female president in a couple of hundred years. Hillary got close and actually won the popular vote. That says something about the place. Biden is a good guy but he is no spring chicken. The electorate wants someone vigorous. There are way too many old white men in Congress. If it comes down to it I am concerned that the people will vote in a bad man with balls over a desiccated one with good intentions. Really, the Democrats are going to have to find a candidate from another generation, at least, and someone who has vigour and sparkling wit.
The American population is not going to look in the mirror for much longer and put up with seeing old Joe staring back at them.
“In the article, title “The World Again Needs American Leadership”, Truss cited Ronald Reagan and the end of the cold war.
“The world would benefit from more of that kind of American leadership today,” Truss wrote. “I hope that a Republican will be returned to the White House in 2024. There must be conservative leadership in the US that is once again bold enough to call out hostile regimes as evil and a threat.” “
The Trump Allure For Americans
What is the allure of Donald J Trump for Republican voters in 2024? Trump is no mythical cowboy. He is vigorous and seemingly passionate about his cause. Narcissism works that way. Trump promises retribution for those who feel let down and left behind by the times. He is a white supremacist and appeals to those many Americans in that camp. Trump’s celebrity status as a loud, brash, billionaire brought him to the attention of the American people in the first place. His orange skin and dyed hair mark him as equally tacky as those he professes to represent. Trump’s bombastic approach to campaigning, somehow, makes him their defender of white entitlement. These people may not be the finest examples of humankind but they reckon they’re better than blacks, Asians, queers, and Mexicans. This is the populist political fuel that propels the Trump juggernaut and aligned with this are those at the top who can benefit from the GOP policies economically. The billionaires and their ilk who lobby tirelessly for their interests via reducing taxes and removing pesky legislation designed to hamper their self-aggrandisement.
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt, and Financial Freedom.
©MidasWord
Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt & Financial Freedom PDF format
Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt & Financial Freedom is the new book by Robert Sudha Hamilton PDF
This book is a collection of pieces written by me on specific aspects of our economy and community, especially as it pertains to credit and debt. The data and information quoted in this book is correct and true, as of the date of composition. We live in an age of credit, where our personal economies and the economies of our nations are deeply dependent upon credit. Getting to grips with the ramifications of debt and credit in the wider context of our financial sector is paramount if you want to maintain your financial freedom and lessen the pain of the ups and downs inherent within the capitalist cyclical system. Knowledge is power.
This book will help you understand stuff like the high inflation we have been experiencing. Get to grips with some economic knowledge and the social ramifications of the current financial system. Is it fair? No, it is not. Can we change that? Only by first comprehending how it works.
Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt & Financial Freedom.