The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Belacqua]

The mechanism is already in place.

Yeah, I think the mechanism we're seeing has been in place for a while now. Trump is the latest, the most erratic, and the least aesthetically pleasing of its representatives, but this is a difference of degree and not kind. The government serves well-connected rich people, and doesn't mind at all making life harder for everyone else. 

This is bipartisan, and has been going on for a long time. 

For example, research done at Princeton published 12 years ago shows that the US is not a democracy -- if by "democracy" we mean a government which works for its people. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

And several astute observers have described the kind of oligarchy that's in place. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

similarities to classical totalitarian regimes include using fear,[6] preemptive wars[7] and elite domination.[8]

Powerful people in the US largely opposed Trump's election because they see him as unpredictable, which is a reasonable thing to conclude. The Democrats are much more reliable in the work they do for the banks, the insurance companies, and the corporate giants. But once Trump is gone, and we get someone more normal in office, it'll be back to business as usual. 

Meanwhile these corporate masters are squeezing more and more cash out of US citizens who are finding that their quality of life is not improving. The big Internet operators, for example, have discovered that they can make more money by making their service worse, and giving the customer less of what he wants. The kind of capitalism we learn in kindergarten -- where the consumer buys from the company offering the best deal -- no longer holds in many important areas. 

https://www.amazon.com/Enshittification-...525&sr=8-2

the tech bosses turned on us, relying on our dependency to keep us using the services even as they got worse and worse. The platform bosses did the same to the companies that had flocked to their services to sell stuff to us. Once we were all locked in―businesses and users―the tech companies stripped out all utility, save the bare minimum needed to stave off total collapse.

So Trump is a particularly unpleasant and, for the moment, particularly dangerous product of this environment. But focussing too much on him, as if he's the sole cause of our current fiasco, makes him into a sort of lightning rod, drawing all the ire and blame which in fact should be spread far and wide, and should be maintained at a high pitch whoever the next president turns out to be.