Trump has Lifted the Veil on our Cowboy Capitalism

This is our opportunity to bring democracy to life

One of my favorite SubStackers just published a post —on this anniversary of Trump’s January 6th coup attempt — to the effect that his coup has proven to have been a success. He concludes with the observation that Trump "successfully broke the system." There is a lot of such sentiment going around and I have a beef with these sentiments.

This is not what Trump did. To say so is, I think, terribly misleading and gets in the way of building the sort of opposition and new vision needed in this moment. The truth is that Trump tore the veil right off of the system. The point is that "the system" has been about oligarchic power and privileging the few all along.

Formalistic egalitarian ‘democracy’ has served as the cover for the hegemony of our Cowboy Capitalism for a couple of centuries now.

Trump didn’t ‘break the system.’ What Trump has done is to expose the actual nature and limitations of our "democratic" capitalist system of laws and norms.

What 99.9% of Americans view as democracy is but a formalistic potential precursor to actual, real democracy. Our egalitarian struggles have carved out a fine modicum of breathing room for those us lucky enough to be born into privilege or to get on the finely tuned and guarded pathways to "success." But in America, cowboy capitalism rules and always has.

It's just been a long time since white men suffered insecurity in the numbers that the Neoliberal version of economic policy wrought over the last 40 years.

Oh, and then there is the original sin, the scourge, of racism along with other populist bigotry triggers that the oligarchs so easily deploy to capture and divert the predictable popular anger and turn it into bigoted resentment.

We are obviously in a very fraught moment.

The Monocrats have seized the day.

There has seldom been a time like this that requires our absolute clearest thinking and collaboration.

Our society is built on quite a vicious cowboy capitalism that has always operated under an egalitarian veil or series of veils. Mainstream Reagan republicanism (Trickle-down Economics) — eventually signed-off on by us Democrats too — has driven our national economic policy for 40+ years.

This Neoliberal juggernaut is the first force since The Great Depression to do enough damage to the white working and middle class to threaten some sort of mass popular rebellion. Trump was able to step into the void of any sort of decent (let alone democratic) leadership and 'seize the day' for his own depraved purposes. And the Supreme Court now has a voting majority that’s every plutocrat’s fantasy and has already cleared much of the path to monocracy and/or plutocracy. And so now the Muskovites of our world are all over the opportunity for an outright power grab that Trump and SCOTUS has created.

If we adopt the perspective that Trump broke the system, how can we ever begin to formulate a meaningful opposition? What is the project in that perspective?

Build back better has been tried. And failed.

Instead, I we need to use this "opportunity" to put forth a different narrative and, especially, a better vision of a struggle and a future that is far more than simply 'restorative." I think FDR provided an overall guidepost when he is quoted to have said,

“If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”

Democracy needs to move forward as a living force!

We need to flesh-out what actual democracy can be in our thinking and in our actions. #BlackLivesMatter was beginning to move in that direction, which is why it has been so roundly attacked, vilified, and effectively strangled to death not long after birth including with helping hands provided by many staunch mainstream liberals.

But substantive (rather than formalistic) democracy is still the answer to the chant, “What do we want?!”

The skeleton that we have built to date can only really become a forward-marching life force when we put real substantive flesh on those bones.

Trump’s and the Musk’s respective maniacal and incompatible monocratic dreams will be a drag on their quests, at least for a while. The shock and awe campaign of actions planned for the new administration’s early days will likely prove both shocking and awful but also chaotic and off-putting to many mainstream Americans. There will be a lot of un-democratic actions and policies to for ‘the democratic resistance’ to expose and oppose. But restoration of formalistic rights is not the right goal.

And it’s especially not the goal that can bring together the needed ‘coalition of the aggrieved’ that stretches across the now large, diverse working/middle class of all races and ethnicities, etc.

The oligarchs, monocrats, and plutocrats are not the only actors with real opportunities in this environment.

Our biggest opportunity is to move democracy forward as a living force.

Setting out to settle for less could well mean that even the bare bones of democracy fought for to date could soon be reduced to little more than fossilized remains.