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Life During Wartime; Or, The Road to Nowhere [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-21
WELL, AMERICA HAD A GOOD RUN, I GUESS… The truth is that America has only survived this long because during the make-or-break moments of its history, it lucked out with an Imperfect Leader who was Perfect for his moment. No one but George Washington could have united a new nation and then stepped aside instead of becoming a king. None of Lincoln's contemporaries could have won the Civil War and navigated the Machiavellian politics of the era like he did. Only FDR and his progressives could have created a visionary socialist infrastructure to combat the Great Depression AND kept domestic fascism at bay AND defeated fascism abroad.
Now, at the precise moment when we are at the knife edge of history (climate change, the rise of China, rise of tech oligarchy), we finally got our Paul von Hindenberg: Joe Biden. The Democratic party answer to John McCain, which I mean in the most pejorative manner possible. If you look past his personal mythology and actually stop to review his record, you’ll see he was on the wrong side of a whole lot of issues in his long career (Anita Hill, the 90s Crime bill, the Iraq War, the War on Terror, the Bankruptcy Bill, making Delaware the Cayman Islands tax shelter of America, utterly inadequate leadership on the climate crisis, refusal to reign in Netanyahu, refusal to step down despite his rapid deterioration until it was too late, etc). IN FACT, Biden only got to be President because in 2007 the Democratic party leaders wanted to assure voters that an experienced (white) politician would be in the room to make sure an inexperienced (black) Barack Obama didn't fuck everything up.
And now here comes Donald Trump, our Game Show Anti-Christ who has arrived to finish us off and to make sure the world dies with him.
How’s our business guru President doing, anyway?
Oh, right.
WE ARE KIND OF AT WAR RIGHT NOW, OR AT LEAST AT THE START OF ONE. Am I being dramatic? Possibly. But, short of launching nuclear missiles or deploying troops on American soil (give it time), I’m genuinely not sure what else our current government could be doing to actively destroy the United States of America as we know it.
Some, but not all, of these actions include: Pulling out of major international agreements, antagonizing and threatening our closest allies, destroying legal and consumer protections, gutting all environmental laws and probably dooming us to an unlivable future by 2050, firing tens of thousands of leading government scientists and setting back research for a generation, defunding universities and persecuting students, dehumanizing and persecuting trans people, purging the military of non-loyalists, alienating foreign scholars and artists and creating a generational brain drain, kidnapping legal residents and torturing and deporting them to dystopian fucking mega-prisons without trial, and, of course, obliterating the global economy with tariffs.
The last of these, depending on who you ask, is either a decision based on rank stupidity, or a deliberate attempt to “Shock Doctrine” the crisis needed in order to finally end democracy. It hasn’t occurred to Chuck Schumer that they won’t be able to sit back and wait for the midterms, because there may never be elections again. It’s not like Trump literally told a crowd of voters that he would be the last candidate they ever had to vote for.
IT’S KIND OF “FUNNY,” TOO, BECAUSE the entire post-World War 2 global order was specifically established to keep America on top. And it’s worked pretty well! Perhaps the dim-witted thugs running the government now think that organizations like the multi-pronged USAID and other forms of “soft power” exist because of liberal weakness—because the U.S. is just that nice. NOT because of a time-tested and calculated plan to exert influence around the world.
USAID financed local opposition to the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, priming the pump for Nixon and the CIA to help fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet overthrow Allende in a coup, at the behest of Western mining interests. Fifty years later, Elon Musk defunded the organization because it provided medical aid to black people in sub-Saharan Africa.
All the U.S. President has to do is sit behind the desk and push a few buttons! You already won! The machine runs itself! The fact that they are dismantling it means that they are too stupid to understand how things work, or-just as likely- the men who already have everything don’t feel that they have enough. This is a common problem in history.
SO…I DO NOT WANT TO UNDULY ALARM YOU, BUT THE VERY BLEAK REALITY staring us in the face right now, which everyone is too polite to say, is that the ruling class may be intentionally destroying and dismantling everything because they: 1) do not believe that there is going to be a future; 2) don’t care if there is a future; or, 3) do not believe most of us will be a part of the future they are planning. They have read all of the good dystopian sci-fi books and decided that these have some good ideas.
And this would explain why they are coming for everything, with private equity and AI, destroying whatever they take. Art, film, publishing, science, Red Lobster, democracy, unions, journalism, love, sex, human connection, human emotion. All of it plundered and ruined and owned by them, then rented back to us. They want to make our lives cheap, our dreams small, and our interactions with one another minimal.
This ain’t no foolin’ around.
Frankly, if you are angry and scared, that is good because you SHOULD be angry and scared. But this is not the same thing as paralysis. It’s readying yourself to make a difference when the opportunity presents itself. This may be something as simple as making your voice heard or even just showing compassion for another person. Rejecting the precepts of the immoral culture they are trying to impose on us; the one which claims that “this world is dying and you can’t save it, but through cruelty and obeisance to power, you can earn a place in the new one we’re building.”
Sad to say, theirs is a raw deal. You might as well reject it. Because the truth is, unless you’re already a billionaire, their new world is not designed for your happiness or even your survival. You can’t make it in a world without human rights, healthcare, safe food and drinking water, public sector law enforcement, or a plan to address climate change beyond “take the helicopter to your private island.” Why would you want to?
They will never give you the good leads
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