The Man Behind The Curtain
During the first Trump administration, a common thread that was repeated was some version of the idea that his election was an anomaly, an odd reactionary blip in a trajectory towards a “more perfect union” as Barack Obama would say. Well-meaning liberals and progressives wanted to believe that Trump got lucky, that it wasn’t any more complicated than that, that there was nothing else at play here, and that if we held on long enough, we could easily course-correct.
It was easy to give almost half the country a pass back then, convincing ourselves that they were duped or that they didn’t know better. This was an easy pill to swallow because Trump was a bit of an unknown in a political sense. He spent most of his life as a New York Democrat, spent most of the campaign criticizing both Republican and Democrat establishment types, and seemed genuinely surprised himself when he pulled it off. We sought refuge in the idea of his political vagueness back then reasoning that surely once the public experienced the brunt of four full years of his presidency, warts and all, they would never invite him within a stone’s throw of the office again.
It’s almost criminal how naive many were back then because the truth is that what many voters wanted back then is exactly what they want now.
They want their money back.
And depending on who voters think is the culprit will determine which way the general electorate votes.
The only way powerful political parties control the “mob” is to otherize some other group as the source of one’s illness. This other group is taking your money and it’s because of them that you are having problems. Demonization is what gets people heated. Conflict is animating. Look to social media if you want an example of this.
The question for voters then has to be who is at fault for stealing their money. Republicans have always had an answer to that question and for the longest time, Democrats did too. But somehow in the last decade or so Democrats went from having a culprit to being the party trying to convince an angry electorate that actually everything is okay and nobody is really at fault. And as we’ve seen, this waffling has had somewhat catastrophic results on a national level.
Space has been ceded for Republicans to fill in the gap, and what that looks like can vary but the result is the same
For men, the culprits are often women, people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, and undocumented immigrants. For women, it’s often men and undocumented immigrants. For white people, it can be people of color and LGBTQ+ people. For people of color, it can be white people. For LGBTQ+ people, the culprit is straight people. The list goes on and on. Groups of people accuse others of oppressing others, taking jobs, and siphoning away their hard-earned money. The more granular you go the more true it becomes. Each one accuses the other of making poor choices or claiming that whatever job they work or role they play is infinitely more valuable than the chosen profession of some other faraway person.
I’m generalizing a bit here, but my point is that people of all sorts often think that some faraway group that they rarely if at all interact with are the source of all their economic woes. Liberals and left-leaning folks are just as guilty of this as right-wing folks. We all do it. It’s a fact. And I say this not to diminish or dismiss the validity of some of these claims. There are well-documented reasons why the black-white wealth gap exists. There are well-documented reasons why the gender pay gap exists. The rate at which trans folk our scapegoated when compared to their actual percentage of the population is astounding. History is littered with examples of economic terrorism perpetrated by one group against another.
That said, in the coming years it will become more important than ever to think about the best use of one’s energy when it comes to resisting because there will be a firehose of objectionable content vying for your attention. And my humble suggestion is that it might be a worthwhile endeavor to ignore a lot of the tripe thrown your way by simpletons on Twitter and YouTube and instead focus your attention on the true culprits, the ones who have stolen your money and have kept you so distracted this whole time that they’ve made it almost impossible for you to recognize their culpability in all of this.
The corporations.
They are the ones who extract your time, energy, and your hard-earned dollars from you. They are the ones who nickel and dime you when it comes to buying essentials like food and gas. They are the ones who charge you absurd prices for healthcare and ensure that you will seldom get a raise. They will price you out of the housing market and ensure you are up to your eyeballs in debt so you have no room to negotiate for yourself.
The greatest trick they ever pulled was convincing the populace that their bad behavior as corporations is inevitable. They will tell you they have to raise prices, pay their CEO exorbitant wages, desecrate the environment, not give you a raise, and partner with sweatshops all in the name of infinite growth because that’s capitalism, baby. You can’t get mad at us, and if you do we’ll label you a communist scum and send an army of economists on our payroll to tell everyone that the morally correct thing to do would be to pay the CEO even more money while our workers remain on food stamps.
It’s absurd because the truth is that these corporations are filled with people who make decisions. In a just society, these people would be held accountable for their choices instead of being given a blanket pass to enact their worst impulses. Those choices impact millions of people across the globe. Instead of ceding our power to those who could not care less, we must make our intention to hold them accountable known. It is a fact that the government has power they can leverage here over corporate decision-making, and exercising that power is a good and reasonable thing to do only if they are willing to do so.
What I’m trying to say is that the incoming administration is going to be chock full of toadies who are willing to do anything to satisfy corporate interests no matter what the cost or who it hurts. Pair that with a conservative judiciary dead set on bootlicking for private interests and the results will be unlike anything we’ve seen yet. From the president on down, we are likely to have the most corporate-friendly administration we’ve seen in modern history. And if they had their way, they would much rather you be mad at the likes of Ben Shapiro or Joe Rogan or some other inane media personality or random talking head on Twitter than be mad at them.
What we need to do is look past all of that noise and focus our attention on the true culprits. We must devise ways to resist them, and think about new ways of protesting their influence. We must make our power known. And the one thing we know for sure is that money talks. If we can target that, they will surely notice. It animates them but it can also animate us. This is a good start.