The Next Target of Trump and His Reactionary Confederates is Us — the Managerial and Professional Elite

We must prepare ourselves for this fight.

The US attack on Iran is classic Donald Trump. Why bomb Iran with the largest non-nuclear weapons in the American arsenal?

• Imminent threat to national security? Nope.

• Critical element of a new geopolitical strategy or mandate? No, no talk of that.

• Highly classified evidence of crossing the nuclear weapons threshold? Not according to Trump’s National Security Advisor.

• Treaty or negotiated agreements violated? Nope. The existing agreement was summarily canceled by Trump in his first term.

• Only option left after exhausting all further negotiations? No.

So then, what?

As usual, it’s just Trump being Trump; so it’s whatever suits his mood and personal goals best, which amounts to:

• If it feels good, do it.

• They’re rude and ungrateful.

• They had it comin’.

• I have cards. They have no cards.

• Someone called me TACO.

• I’m building my case for the Nobel Peace Prize

And indeed, Trump does take the prize. Again and again. For being the world’s most insecure, erratic, self-serving, and manipulable leader the ‘free world’ has ever seen.

And yet, Trump’s already accomplished a great deal.

• Trump has unleashed a blitzkrieg of political and martial ‘shock and awe’ that has already done significant damage to our nation’s Constitutional and civic order.

• He has succeeded in turning the presidency itself into a personal profit center — and the home base of a worldwide shakedown racket — amassing great wealth and promises of further wealth-building development projects.

• He has succeeded in cracking open and revealing the paper-thin facade of liberal norms and order — and the institutions built to institutionalize them since Franklin D. Roosevelt and the beginning of the New Deal era.

• He and the Neo-Confederates who have coalesced around him have come out of their caves and have seized the formidable agencies and levers of political and police-state power.

• What many thought might be just another term of Trump doubling-down on a national and global self-gratifying and self-enriching shakedown, quickly became a monumental national and global geopolitical shake-up. He launched major attacks on the norms of international trade, the utility of ‘soft’ power, the integrity and utility of our alliances, and an aggressive and open embrace of the likes of Vladimir Putin and the politics of one-man rule, nationalism, and the virtual and sometimes actual erasure of tolerance for racial, religious, and ethnic minorities.

Altogether, Trump. Is leading the deconstruction of the bulwarks of liberalism at home, while initiating the break-up of the bulwarks of the post-WWII and post-Soviet Union/Cold War bi-polar world order. He and his Ne0-Confederate coalition are forcing our nation and our world into a radical reset. It’s a reset that appears to mimic the Cosa Nostra model of major crime syndicate dividing-up hostage territories.

A Major Geopolitical Reset was Inevitable

There’s good reason to believe that we have been due for a major geopolitical reset regardless of who was now in the White House.

It’s our collective misfortune that this reset is being initiated by the narcissistic and depraved Donald Trump — and a cabal of opportunistic right-wing Neo-Confederates — rather than by a more enlightened leadership.

As George Friedman, of Geopolitical Futures, has been describing, the bi-polar world of the Cold War era is well behind us in years but not in much of our geopolitical policy or practice.¹ Much of our domestic and foreign policy, both economic and military, remains rooted in outworn Cold War assumptions, agreements, institutions, and technologies. A geopolitical reset has been building for some time due to forty-plus years of Neo-Liberal globalization, the rise of China, new geopolitical dynamics and popular aspirations, emerging technologies, and the resulting emergence of all sorts of new conflicts.

Based on our ongoing dominant economic and military might, our nation was always going to be a major factor in how our world moves forward through this global reset.

Which brings me to the point of this post:

We, the managerial/professional elites, have to do more to meet the challenges of this geopolitical reset — the pivot to a genuinely new era — and to get our country back on its founding democracy-building mission.

Liberalism is under a fierce attack. Not just liberals, but liberalism itself.

Trump 2.0 is not about simply reasserting white male power and/or bigotry against certain people, races, ethnicities genders, etc. It’s about a far more comprehensive project: To deconstruct and excise the ideas and institutions of the liberal state from the life and governance of our nation — and, eventually, from the world.

And that means we of the managerial and professional elite — not immigrants or black- and brown-skinned people — are the primary targets of the authoritarian white Christian nationalist agenda of the Neo-Confederate coalition that has coalesced around Trump 2.0.

Yes. I mean you and me — and just about everyone we know.

These Early Days of this second Trump Presidency is simply the Prelude to this Regime coming after Us — the Liberal Elites

Here’s the prelude:

• The destruction of our liberal state’s administrative agencies being carried out by DOGE and the rest of Trump’s cabinet of consiglieri;

• The cancelling and erasing of Black and Native American history;

• The demonization and round-up of non-white immigrants;

• The denigration and roll-back of women’s rights;

• The seizure of all of the agencies of policing and ‘homeland security;’

• The denigration and demoting of the judiciary;

• The SCOTUS role in disregarding and overturning settled law;

• The mocking and flaunting of norms of decency, honesty, and empathy;

• The comprehensive attacks on voting rights and the integrity of our electoral processes;

• The deployment of military forces to ‘police’ American cities;

• The empowerment and encouragement of the rogue ‘constitutional sheriffs’ movement and armed right-wing militias and lone wolves — and the blending of these into federal immigration and homeland security forces;

• The commissioning of ‘Musk bros’ and other tech and AI billionaires as senior officers and leaders of a new “Detachment 201: The Army's Executive Innovation Corps with a mandate to integrate civilian and military information systems;”

• The coddling of foreign tyrants and alienation and even threatened annexation of longstanding liberal state’s administrative agencies allies;

• The transformation of the Office of the Presidency into a corrupt profit-making operation;

• The creation of a ‘unitary executive’ and an imperial presidency where the law is whatever the leader says it is . . .

All of this and much more marks the beginning of the main act: the destruction of the administrative state within which the managerial and professional elite sustains and expands the liberal order.

And this destruction of the liberal state is being conducted with as much cruelty, arbitrariness, and disdain as possible. That’s because the purpose of all of this is to strip us, the managerial/professional elite, of our influence, power, dignity, prerogatives, and privileges; and to humble us socioeconomically, such that most of us are reminded of the actual precariousness of our social status and of our economic security.

This is meant to cause most of us, for the first nerve-wracking time, to realize that we are not welcome at the Court of Trumpism. We are now going to be subjects, like everyone else.

We are meant to be subject to Trumpist whims and humiliation for as long as it takes to neutralize, shatter, and scatter us.

Let’s Face it: We ‘Own’ Liberalism

We teach it. We preach it. We share it and build it into our families, communities, and institutions. We are the prime keepers of the flame of liberty that was bequeathed to us by (some of) our Founding Feuders. We work to elaborate liberty and liberalism (most recently, e.g., via Climate Justice, BLM, DEI, identity politics, etc.). And we endeavor to propagate it through moral suasion, cultural profusion, and law.

And yes, we are too the face and force of the recent decades of rapacious Neo-liberalism that tens of millions of Americans blame for the precariousness of their lives and livelihoods, their lack of agency in public policy.

Our accumulated privilege in no small part accounts for why a favorite MAGA sentiment is ‘Stick-it to the libs!’

And, given the frontal assault on the Capitol on January 6th and the subsequent love Trump expressed for them and their efforts, and then the blanket pardons issued for these crimes, the worst of the MAGA mob is already acting out at a much more menacing level — with many likely having been enrolled in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secret police who are wreaking havoc in families, communities, and businesses all around the country.

Which brings me to the biggest development I didn’t mention above:

• The mounting attacks on managerial and professional elites.

Trump’s utter silence and public indifference to these attacks is worrisome in the extreme.

• He has been silent about the murder and attempted murders of Democratic legislators and their families in Minnesota.

• He has been silent about the escalating DHS assaults on and arrests of state and US congresspeople and senators.

• He has been silent about the promulgation of new DHS policies defying and denying the explicit Constitutional authority and oversight role of the US Congress.

Trump’s silence in all of these things is deafening because it is broadcasting his approval of the attack on ‘liberal’ elites. And so the brutish and lawless treatment of state and federal legislators, governors, and other officials by DHS — or whoever those masked thugs are — will only escalate.

With the Iran Attack, the Trump Regime will Escalate Domestic Militancy and Militarization

All of the domestic actions beginning to target elites occurred before the news of Trump’s attack on Iran employing perhaps our most powerful conventional weapon.

The Neo-Confederate coalition that has come forward with Trump to seize this moment, after more than a century in the shadows, is ecstatic right now.

All of their networks are abuzz with the prospect of taking advantage of this moment to double down on The Project, including the Big Beautiful Bill, that includes $23 Billion to hire 10,000 more ICE agents and more than $40 Billion to build massive new detention centers.

And that’s just the tip of what that ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is designed to set in motion to curb our rights and undermine our welfare.

Depending on how Iran and others react both internationally and domestically, there may well be a suspension of civil rights in our near future.

In the meantime, there will likely be increased DHS-sponsored brutality in the streets and in and around statehouses and the Capitol. And with the press. And with any others of us, in our managerial/professional class, that the regime chooses to make an example of.

I’m not trying to panic anyone. And I’m not panicking. But we need to be very clear-headed about our situation. We are now in the hands of an autocrat. He doesn’t yet have a really firm or iron grip — a death grip — but there is a great deal of pain in the offing if we do not deftly resist this hand we’ve been dealt.

“Our Huddled Masses will Defeat your Fascist Asses.”

I saw this quote from a poster last night that I believe is appropriate here.

We are part of the vast majority of Americans and immigrants who are on the side of liberty and justice for all.

Our nation and our people have a long history with what it takes to stand-up to injustice, defeat tyranny, win liberty, and secure rights. That’s how we’ve managed to create the world’s most robust civic sector full of people and institutions engaged in bettering lives and communities.

And, of all the people in our nation, we as a class, are best resourced by our many harvests of the fruits of the American Dream to take initiative and provide resources to prevent the iron grip of autocracy from taking hold. We have a grave responsibility to devote ourselves and our resources to the fight for democracy’s preservation.

And there are a couple of hundred million Americans from every walk of life, in 50 different states, in thousands of cities and towns, and in many more thousands of communities throughout the land who do not abide lawlessness and who will not accept the imposition of arbitrary or tyrannical power over their lives.

We need to ally and work together with all of these people for the common good.

We Must Prove that Liberty and Democracy are the Greater and Better Forces by which to Meet this Fraught Moment

We have to have at least one clear requisite in our hearts and minds: that we pledge to reignite what Franklin Delano Roosevelt once described as the power of liberalism/democracy to “. . . move forward as a living force, seeking by day and night . . . to better the lot of our citizens . . . Lest fascism grown in strength in our land.”

By day and by night, we have to work to make democracy a living force that betters the lot of all of our people.

There are hundreds of lawsuits pending against the Trump Administration and Trump himself. Thousands of demonstrations have occurred nationwide since the Administration began its assault on the liberal state. Until the attack on Iran, Trump was steadily losing support for the brutish ways that his henchmen and -women are rounding-up, mistreating, and ‘disappearing’ both immigrants and citizens. Trump is failing to deliver on any of his campaign promises.

The war-mongering high will wear off and then there will remain much chaos, dissent, and many unmet promises. This entire administration, starting with Trump himself, consists of people grossly unqualified to lead or to manage anything in our government, to grow our prosperity, or to maintain and respect our Constitutional order. All they know how to do is to bully and intimidate people to get their way.

And lie, lie, lie to keep their Foxed-in masses befuddled.

The American people do and will continue to see these things. The vast majority of the American People will not go quietly into the purgatory of government by corruption and tyranny.

We will resist.

But we need to do more than resist.

We must rebuild trust and confidence in the capacity and resilience of democracy to deliver on the promise of ‘making it in America.’

And that means we must rebuild trust in us as truly committed small-d democrats. We need to rebuild solidarity with the millions of heartland and inner-city Americans who have watched for decades as our elite status and privileges have grown, while their lives and livelihoods have become ever-more more precarious and marginalized.

There must be ongoing massive demonstrations and also discreet direct, highly symbolic and impactful actions. There must be ongoing efforts to wrangle from what’s left of our judiciary

All of this will take a lot of people from all walks of life. It will take thousands of civic organizations and philanthropies. It will take vets. It will take time for actions, meetings, and electioneering. It will take leadership. And so it will also take resilience, patience, discipline, humor, music — and courage. And, of course, it will take money.

And it will also take free and fair elections.

The Democratic Party, as the only major party still committed to representative democracy and the ideals of liberty, equality, and justice for all, is going to have to step-up and do a whole more and a whole lot better.

Leaders must step-up and articulate forward-looking agendas for democratic action that ‘center’ those of our people who have been left out of —or purged from — the ability to ‘make it in America.’ Democrats, democrats, and freedom-lovers of all sorts must champion and win a proud portfolio of achievements equal to the challenges in this difficult national and geopolitical moment.

As we know from history and from the current examples of states like North Korea, Russia, most of China, and so many, many other needy nations, that widespread prosperity and the general welfare is not something autocrats and tyrants can or want to achieve.

What autocrats prize most is absolute power and great wealth — and the ability to lord it over people and to do whatever the hell they want.

We must deny our home-grown autocrats that prize.

We, the managerial and professional elites need to understand the realities in front of us. We need to get back to basics: back to the mission of moving democracy forward as a living force.

A new national and geopolitical era is being conceived all around the globe. It can emerge in America as the spawn of brutes and tyrants or it can emerge as descendants of Lady Liberty. Let’s do what it takes to ensure that it’s the progeny of Lady Liberty there at the creation.

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Jon

1. https://geopoliticalfutures.com/americas-sixth-socio-economic-cycle/