United States Politics Thread 47

[Ahzoh]

Relating to linguoboy's observation though, it's always surprising to us foreigners (especially those of us not familiar with federal systems) how much happens at the state level, and that the President has little power domestically compared to what we'd expect.

The Republicans have all been in an utter frenzy to make the citizens of their states as miserable as possible.

Frankly, people are now speculating if the Trump regime is trying to create unrest so that they can justify the use of the Insurrection Act and impliment martial law.

Also, it's an utter nightmare that the Trump regime is making it so that bird flu outbreaks are not reported. And the republicans are trying to pass so many anti-vaccine laws.

They are actively trying to make Americans immediately sicker. Possibly we may have another epidemic of some kind of disease before end of this presidency.

[jcb]

A man that was pardoned by Trump for J6 stuff was shot and killed by police while resisting arrest.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/us/p ... -stop.html
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuxnLNhc46c

It's almost as if he saw himself as above the law, and was emboldened by his pardon or something.

Frankly, people are now speculating if the Trump regime is trying to create unrest so that they can justify the use of the Insurrection Act and impliment martial law.

Let us not forget that Trump will absolutely try to stay in power again 4 years from now when his term is up (regardless of any term limits or electoral outcomes), as he tried to do in January 2021. After all, he is a billionaire who has nearly always gotten his way at every point in his life.

[Linguoboy]

They are actively trying to make Americans immediately sicker. Possibly we may have another epidemic of some kind of disease before end of this presidency.

I think it's more or less a guarantee at this point, particularly if Kennedy gets confirmed today. They're gutting the NIH which (among other things) funds a lot of research on infectious diseases and they've muzzled all agencies in the Department of Health and Human Services for the next three months. This is how you lay the groundwork for a pandemic.

I confess, this has always been one of the most perplexing aspects of GOP ideology for me. All of their policies are calculated to increase death and suffering--not just of their opponents but of their nominal constituents as well (who are often disproportionately affected by their harshest proposals). But to what end? Wouldn't plutocrats want the labour pool to grow rather than shrink in order to keep wages low? Who are they going to squeeze for subsidies if they keep killing off taxpayers? Is there some eschatological angle here I'm missing?

[rotting bones]

I confess, this has always been one of the most perplexing aspects of GOP ideology for me. All of their policies are calculated to increase death and suffering--not just of their opponents but of their nominal constituents as well (who are often disproportionately affected by their harshest proposals). But to what end? Wouldn't plutocrats want the labour pool to grow rather than shrink in order to keep wages low? Who are they going to squeeze for subsidies if they keep killing off taxpayers? Is there some eschatological angle here I'm missing?

Disaster encourages hysteria. A far right party is basically a hysterical mob.

(Note that hysteria is in no way incompatible with intelligence. Many highly intelligent people are the most sublime hysterics. I think this is in some way connected with Freud's observation that free association has a therapeutic effect on the mind. This could be why people who are good at calculating are often bad at sticking to the facts.)

[alice]

I confess, this has always been one of the most perplexing aspects of GOP ideology for me. All of their policies are calculated to increase death and suffering--not just of their opponents but of their nominal constituents as well (who are often disproportionately affected by their harshest proposals). But to what end? Wouldn't plutocrats want the labour pool to grow rather than shrink in order to keep wages low? Who are they going to squeeze for subsidies if they keep killing off taxpayers? Is there some eschatological angle here I'm missing?

This puzzles me a lot too. At the most basic it's probably nothing more than:

Code: Select all

Us ----> $$$$$ -> Them

with shortsightedness invoked to explain away obvious inconsistencies and points of failure, perhaps with "feelings of great power over others" in there too.

[zompist]

I confess, this has always been one of the most perplexing aspects of GOP ideology for me. All of their policies are calculated to increase death and suffering--not just of their opponents but of their nominal constituents as well (who are often disproportionately affected by their harshest proposals). But to what end? Wouldn't plutocrats want the labour pool to grow rather than shrink in order to keep wages low? Who are they going to squeeze for subsidies if they keep killing off taxpayers? Is there some eschatological angle here I'm missing?

I wouldn't minimize the death cult aspect— ¡Viva la muerte! This was particularly evident during Covid— you got GOP dudes gravely insisting that the elderly should just die.

But more important than that is mere misinformation. The right has been telling itself for fifty years that Those People are getting all the benefits of government and they aren't. It's BS— red states get more federal money than they supply— but that's the lie they've been fed.

Plus I don't think plutocrats are in control any more. It's all culture war all the time.

[jcb]

I confess, this has always been one of the most perplexing aspects of GOP ideology for me. All of their policies are calculated to increase death and suffering--not just of their opponents but of their nominal constituents as well (who are often disproportionately affected by their harshest proposals). But to what end? Wouldn't plutocrats want the labour pool to grow rather than shrink in order to keep wages low? Who are they going to squeeze for subsidies if they keep killing off taxpayers? Is there some eschatological angle here I'm missing?

My thoughts:
(1) Conservatives just don't think that far ahead, in the same way that they don't bother to think about who will buy their goods if everybody makes a starvation wage (or who will buy their house that's going underwater because of rising sea levels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-w-pdqwiBw ).

It's simpler to think that people should just die, as Zompist also mentioned: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 905990001/

(2) Conservatives see public healthcare as a competitor to private healthcare that could be doing the same job, but with them scraping and squeezing profit out of it for themselves, of course.

(3) Conservatives have a strong urge to make sure everybody "deserves" what they get, and therefore seeing the government just providing healthcare for free particularly angers them. (Of course, they never bother to ask whether kids inheriting billions from their parents deserve it: https://www.forbes.com/profile/walton-1/ )

(4) Conservatives would rather be king of a mole hill, than just another fellow citizen of a mountain.

[Linguoboy]

I wouldn't minimize the death cult aspect— ¡Viva la muerte! This was particularly evident during Covid— you got GOP dudes gravely insisting that the elderly should just die.

But at least there was a point to that. The argument was "We can't halt the economy merely to save lives" (the assumption being, of course, that only "nonproductive" folks--like elderly retirees--would do the dying). This is more like "We need to actively ensure that more people die", with no real payoff.

But more important than that is mere misinformation. The right has been telling itself for fifty years that Those People are getting all the benefits of government and they aren't. It's BS— red states get more federal money than they supply— but that's the lie they've been fed.

I guess I thought wrongly that conservative politicians were simply lying: They didn't get where they are by not knowing how money works, they knew who was benefitting from what, they just pretended otherwise because of the inconvenient necessity of getting folks to vote them into to office and not being to manage that any other way. But, like you say, we've had have a century of this so maybe the current crop actually believe the nonsense they've been spreading despite all obvious evidence to the contrary.

If that's the case, then we're well and truly fucked. As a friend of mine put it, the Republicans are behaving like children: They're going around breaking what they can in the hope that the adults in the room will keep them from doing any real irreparable harm. But there simply aren't any adults any more. They've been pushed out or marginalised and now there's nothing to keep the GOP from fucking around and finding out on a truly horrific scale.

[rotting bones]

What's more scary is that the far right is self-sustaining. E.g. After Modi crashed India's economy, his popularity increased. Google terror management theory.

We might have to teach materialism in school. E.g. Defending Materialism by Cockshott or Being and Motion by Thomas Nail.

[jcb]

I plan on considering it a shibboleth and assuming the worst about anyone who calls it the Gulf of America.

To be honest, I'm surprised that Trump hasn't tried renaming some island after himself yet.

Perhaps I spoke too soon. A bill was just introduced that would add Trump's likeness to Mt Rushmore. It's not an island, but it's something to soothe his enormous ego.
- https://san.com/cc/republican-lawmaker- ... -rushmore/

[Ares Land]

A bill was just introduced that would add Trump's likeness to Mt Rushmore.

Classic supervillain move !

---

I confess, this has always been one of the most perplexing aspects of GOP ideology for me. All of their policies are calculated to increase death and suffering--not just of their opponents but of their nominal constituents as well (who are often disproportionately affected by their harshest proposals). But to what end? Wouldn't plutocrats want the labour pool to grow rather than shrink in order to keep wages low? Who are they going to squeeze for subsidies if they keep killing off taxpayers? Is there some eschatological angle here I'm missing?

The important bit is that right-wing ideology on economics and more largely the way society ought to work is simply wrong. They're working with a broken ideological framework; so no matter how smart they may be, they just don't have the intellectual tools to understand that.

A lot of their understanding of economics relies on (to oversimplify matters) the Chicago school and Austrian economics; those are mostly crankery. Trump actually shows a modicum of original thought with his tariffs (though he doesn't understand them; he's missing most of the basics.)
Right-wing thought, these days, is at heart the belief that government and more generally the public sector can only handle stuff that involves guns and generally things that go boom. Anything else they will mangle for magical reasons.

They just can't even conceive of a way in which the government could help with public health, except by closing the borders. You'll note that during the pandemic, conservatives were very interested when closing the borders was an issue and lost interest ever since. They just don't see how they could prepare for epidemics or help with public health. They feel that the markets and human ingenuity will figure this out. They do not and cannot see the Department of Health and Human Services as anything but socialism (which in turn they cannot conceive as anything but ultimate evil.)

Still, they are smart people; or rather, there are smart people among them. No matter how mistaken their education was, at some point they must see the problem. Two things:

• The US is a very wealthy country, and people are smart. It can weather a crisis, even with the government actively making things worse; with much suffering of course.
• On the suffering: at the heart of right-wing thought is the idea that suffering is part of the human condition and that some amount of hardship is desirable.
• More darkly, it's not necessarily bad for capitalist if workers are struggling a bit. In Marxist terminology, the lumpenproletariat and the reserve army of labor serve a function, and you need hardship to produce these. It's altogether more comfortable if the peons suffer a bit, because happy and prosperous serfs get ideas. Post-WWII, in the west people were reasonably, if not always prosperous, at least hopeful. And look what horrid things happened! The rich paid taxes, and we won't even talk about the sixties.

I think conservatives would be happiest with Franco's Spain. Pretty miserable, but stable, with rich and poor both neatly in their place.

[Ares Land]

Oh, another thought that occured to me...
I work in IT, and the mood around here in France is 'let's bug the fuck out and get away from American products as fast as humanly possible.'

I don't know if that current panic will last, but if it lasts, that's terrible news for American business. (Though I tend to think it won't last.)

[zompist]

The important bit is that right-wing ideology on economics and more largely the way society ought to work is simply wrong. They're working with a broken ideological framework; so no matter how smart they may be, they just don't have the intellectual tools to understand that.

A lot of their understanding of economics relies on (to oversimplify matters) the Chicago school and Austrian economics; those are mostly crankery. Trump actually shows a modicum of original thought with his tariffs (though he doesn't understand them; he's missing most of the basics.)
Right-wing thought, these days, is at heart the belief that government and more generally the public sector can only handle stuff that involves guns and generally things that go boom. Anything else they will mangle for magical reasons.

They just can't even conceive of a way in which the government could help with public health, except by closing the borders. You'll note that during the pandemic, conservatives were very interested when closing the borders was an issue and lost interest ever since. They just don't see how they could prepare for epidemics or help with public health. They feel that the markets and human ingenuity will figure this out. They do not and cannot see the Department of Health and Human Services as anything but socialism (which in turn they cannot conceive as anything but ultimate evil.)

Some of this is a bit out of date, I think: we're not dealing with conservatives any more, but fascists. Reagan was a conservative, and by modern standards a wimp: he left state institutions in place, he didn't reduce government, he didn't steal elections or attempt a coup. He vanquished the labor movement and instituted plutocracy-- classic conservative pipe dreams which haven't been undone. Conservativism could have taken a victory lap and enjoyed a center-right country for decades. He talked a tough foreign policy, but his big war was invading... Grenada. I think he was enormously destructive-- but he knew when to stop.

The current GOP likes the super-rich as much as ever, but they're not stopping at plutocracy. Notice who's bowing to who: the plutocrats are to be like Russian oligarchs, acknowledging Trump's rule and being punished if they do not.

The GOP is not tearing up the government, or deporting immigrants, or terrorizing trans people, or outlawing abortion, or trying to oppose renewables, because of plutocracy. Plutocrats didn't care about all that. As I said, it's all culture war now, and entrenching their own power.

An article I read the other day made the point that fascists are stupid, but still dangerous. They're not playing 4-dimensional chess. They're upending government because they convinced themselves that the "deep state" was a problem and they want political appointees to do what they want. They're likely to cause a depression (if it's not that, it'll be the tariffs), or face another natural disaster like Covid, and they won't know how to fix it.

More darkly, it's not necessarily bad for capitalist if workers are struggling a bit. In Marxist terminology, the lumpenproletariat and the reserve army of labor serve a function, and you need hardship to produce these. It's altogether more comfortable if the peons suffer a bit, because happy and prosperous serfs get ideas. Post-WWII, in the west people were reasonably, if not always prosperous, at least hopeful. And look what horrid things happened! The rich paid taxes, and we won't even talk about the sixties.

Yup. The problem for them is that if you go back to 1800s rentier capitalism... you probably get socialism and communism again. Ideologies produce their own opposites, because they can't leave well enough alone.

I think conservatives would be happiest with Franco's Spain. Pretty miserable, but stable, with rich and poor both neatly in their place.

Franco was a bastard, but he too knew when to stop. He refused to get involved with WWII and he didn't create a mass movement... the Falange was mostly for show. The GOP loves Orbán. Hungary is falling behind other Eastern European states, but as you say, the right doesn't care about that.

[Ares Land]

No great disagreements here! I may be a bit more optimistic than you are -- it might be that Trump, or rather whoever happens to be actually in charge at some point down the road does figure out where to stop.
Though the main worry may well be that Trump is obviously unfit and nobody's really in charge (unfortunately a very common fascist trope; the same was true of Hitler and Mussolini)

The current GOP likes the super-rich as much as ever, but they're not stopping at plutocracy. Notice who's bowing to who: the plutocrats are to be like Russian oligarchs, acknowledging Trump's rule and being punished if they do not.

Looking at Trump and Musk, I'm not sure. It's really not clear which of those bought the other, and which one is using the other. I'm thinking Musk is the sockpuppet, but who knows?

The GOP is not tearing up the government, or deporting immigrants, or terrorizing trans people, or outlawing abortion, or trying to oppose renewables, because of plutocracy. Plutocrats didn't care about all that. As I said, it's all culture war now, and entrenching their own power.

Okay, here's a bit of wild speculation! Let's look at this from a cultural materialist standpoint. The culture war is the emic explanation.
On the etic level, though -- all of these serve plutocracy. Tearing up the government is an obvious one; what remains of government serves to enforce order; the other services can be sold for a profit; also less taxes.
Deporting immigrants is partly because they serve as a scapegoat; it also keeps the immigrant that will inevitably stay or come anyway as an underclass sub-proletariat.
Outlawing abortion is one move towards enforcing strict gender roles again. Traditional gender roles are great for capitalism -- single-income households makes labor a lot more tractable. Another bit: women under the conservative fantasy of traditional roles (aka tradwives) handle precisely the work capitalism can't handle: care, for children, the sick, the elderly. I don't think conservatives will succeed in getting all women back to the kitchen, but generally treating women as an underclass works too.
As for the whole moral panic with trans people; first, scapegoats and moral panics help sell the regime; second, it serves to enforce traditional roles again. (Women that happen to fall outside expected norms can be 'transvestigated'. See theories about Michelle Obama or about any female athlete.)

TLDR; I don't believe the GOP or plutocrats are really aware of it, but as it happens the culture war fits plutocratic interests perfectly.

Yup. The problem for them is that if you go back to 1800s rentier capitalism... you probably get socialism and communism again. Ideologies produce their own opposites, because they can't leave well enough alone.

And fascism was arguably reaction against socialism and communism.
There was, interestingly, a lot more interest into socialism and communism starting with the 2008 crisis and getting really noticeable some time before 2016. I hope we settle this without a war this time.

[Ares Land]

On second thought -- this was bleaker and more pessimistic than I intended!

Conservatives are onto some kind of fascism revival -- but people know history, they know the signs, are aware of how totalitarianism works, they're also aware of more positive models.
I don't think history repeats itself, and it certainly won't this time.

[Otto Kretschmer]

There is a reason why throughout history the rich tolerated (and even supported) Fascism but never Socialism.

[malloc]

Yup. The problem for them is that if you go back to 1800s rentier capitalism... you probably get socialism and communism again. Ideologies produce their own opposites, because they can't leave well enough alone.

Not necessarily. The current wave of reactionaries has some impressive propaganda skills and is only getting better at the propaganda game with every media outlet they purchase or bully into conformity. When everyone from twitter to CNN proclaims the MAGA regime infallible and denies any problems, most people will accept it because there simply isn't anyone saying otherwise. The situation is rather like 1984 where everyone believes obvious falsehoods because propaganda is so pervasive.

[Ahzoh]

There is a reason why throughout history the rich tolerated (and even supported) Fascism but never Socialism.

That reason is also why the phrase "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" exists.

[Ahzoh]

On second thought -- this was bleaker and more pessimistic than I intended!

Conservatives are onto some kind of fascism revival -- but people know history, they know the signs, are aware of how totalitarianism works, they're also aware of more positive models.
I don't think history repeats itself, and it certainly won't this time.

Except People(tm) DONT know their history and as time progresses and people die, the atrocities of the past become dull and less impactful. Hence, history repeats. Of course it's never in the exact same way. But we're too short-lived and too short-sighted to not repeat the same mistakes over and over.

Only some people will know their history and you damn well hope the right people in the right places know their history and are making the crucial decisions, in a manner like that one submariner who prevented the nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War by trusting his gut feeling and disregarding a false alert.

[keenir]

When everyone from twitter to CNN proclaims the MAGA regime infallible and denies any problems,

...and meanwhile, everyone from twitter to CNN (and far more places in and out of the country) points out problems and contradictions in the Trump regime and MAGA plans.