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There, provocative title out of the way.
I'm a big picture/longue durée type. I want to figure out the patterns, the trends, where everything is going, etc.
I don't think anything I say here is going to be novel, but the way the pieces fit together construct a narrative I haven't really seen much of, and certainly not in major news outlets.
The Trump administration is obviously taking a wrecking ball through major institutions (every institution, honestly), threatening long-held diplomatic relationships, and unleashing general chaos and uncertainty. The media report on these things piecemeal, giving the impression of an administration that's trying everything to see what sticks. But what if this is part of a broader strategy? What if the flood of seeming chaos is helping obscure their true aims?
Some have said that Trump's assaults on transgender rights, DEI, etc. are "distractions." But they aren't: they are key planks of the overall agenda. Yes, we can say "fascism," we can say "white supremacy," but what are the nuts and bolts? What are they really trying to build on top of all this destruction?
The threads, as I see them: - Systematically undermine civil, labor, and human rights to demoralize the population
- Eliminate all watchdog institutions so people have no recourse against the above agenda
- Impoverish most of the population by gutting public services (healthcare, food stamps, Medicaid, etc.)
- Replace as many well-paying jobs as possible with AI, so that one of the few paths to class mobility in this country is cut off for good
I don't want to do a blow-by-blow of everything that's happening. We have a thread for that. So, what's the endgame?
I think the best way to frame it is in terms of winners and losers. What does future America look like, if these people succeed?
The attacks on the rights of women and trans people are obviously about enforcing cisheteronormative patriarchy. You can expect anything that stands in opposition to that to be challenged. Going after "woke" and "DEI" and migrants shores up the white supremacist side of the equation. The over-arching goal of all this is to create systems of control by establishing a clear hierarchy. Under a gender and racial hierarchy, everyone has a place, and those not at the bottom of it will have incentives to police everyone beneath them, and aspire to climb the hierarchy up to whatever ceiling might be in place for them. That way, even if people have mobility of a sort, they will still be controlled, and they will also have something to lose.
Why is all this necessary? Because our fraying economy is just a harbinger of the next phase: the elimination of anything other than poverty-wage jobs. Capitalists have always hated having to deal with labor--having to pay human beings to work, to make things. The transition in the latter half of the 20th century was to send once well-paying factory jobs to overseas sweatshops, orienting the US economy more around services and finance. But the only new sector to spring up and offer people upward mobility is information technology.
What's interesting is that the tech boom over the past 40-50 years has generated enormous amounts of wealth but also a lot of disruption to older industries, as they had to adapt to the environment built by computing technology. This power shift hasn't been taken kindly. You can get a sense of it from how right-wingers--and Trump himself, at times--talk about Big Tech as this unaccountable mass of DEI influence that's also holding everyone's most private data.
I think what locked the full agenda into place was generative AI bursting onto the scene. It doesn't matter that it sucks. It matters what capitalists believe it will do.
See, the whole problem with Big Tech was that you had this handful of companies creating services and software, making a killing, hoarding data... the rest of the business world wasn't getting a share of the pie, creating a lot of friction between "old economy" and "new economy" adherents. Generative AI is a way for Big Tech to say: we're giving you the means to eliminate almost every job you could possibly think of. Nothing in the world could speak more loudly to capitalists than that promise.
Fascists understand the implications, too, or at least the more clever ones do. What this enables is a squeezing of the working class that hasn't been possible since the early days of the Industrial Revolution.
We're getting rid of migrants, because we're going to force poor and sick people to work--until they die, most likely. We'll force them by stripping their SNAP, their healthcare, whatever you got. Uppity tech workers will be increasingly replaced by AI tools, even though they suck, which will allow tech companies (and every other company which adopts this junk) to dramatically slash payroll and not have to deal with pesky things like workers, who need food and air and humane treatment. The drive to replace creative jobs with AI, I think, is not so much aimed at ensuring the future of those industries but rather putting them on a kind of autopilot until they disintegrate, or at least reducing them to a background noise of formless sludge that will be the only type of entertainment or leisure available to working people. Movie industry? Music industry? TV? Meh. Rich people don't really care about those things, not in a way that requires there to be any kind of mass market. No, they will pay to have unique things made for themselves, and that will be that. Everyone else gets slop generated as cheaply as possible and you'll consume it because it'll be your only choice.
So, that really brings together the two big elements: the systems of control, and why they will be needed so desperately.
People talk about "techno-feudalism" and figure tech CEOs envision themselves as ruling over fiefdoms but it's all so much drearier than that. They just want to be rich like every other cohort of rich people has been, and not have to bother with pesky things like "my employees need to eat." Humans will be needed to do what few jobs are left--all menial ones, only the ones that can't be more cheaply automated. Some jobs that could be automated might be kept in human hands just to keep people tired and complacent. A lucky few will have rich patrons. The rich will never have to interact with the poor masses. The only purposes of the government will be to keep the poor under heel and the rich, safe.
The cishet patriarchy, the white supremacy, the Christian Dominionism--I hesitate to call those things window dressing, but I'd argue that they aren't the point of all this. They are ways of asserting control and dominance, but it's the purpose of the dominance that's the overriding concern for those executing this agenda. I suppose it's the oldest plot there is: subjugating everyone who could possibly be a threat to you, and ensuring they never have the means to rise up or fight back. To do that, you always need a decent share of the population to help you police the rest, giving them just slightly better conditions for their loyalty.
(As an aside, I do think guys like Elon Musk and Trump, and many many many members of his administration, actually are raging misogynists and racists, so they don't foment such ideas as cynical manipulation, but first and foremost they are rich or cronies to the rich, and staying rich and getting richer is always job #1.)
Ignoring climate change, depriving people of healthcare, these are all cruel measures designed to keep people so desperate they'll agree to almost anything for even a small measure of relief.
In short, this is capital's final, most far-reaching gambit to crush worker power that they will ever have attempted. And they've gotten a lot of the public to support them simply by promising to hurt the right people, never mind that Trump voters will be consigned to the same fate, too. I believe at least some of them also understand that what they are doing to the Earth's biosphere is unsustainable, and they want to be sure their defenses are erected and the people disarmed before things get too bad, so they can ride out an indefinite period of utter misery and chaos.
What's stupid is that this is all so predictable and so obvious as exactly what a bunch of scumbag money grubbers would come up with as their master plan to "rule the world." It wasn't enough to be unfathomably rich. They want to be sure they stay rich, and will sacrifice just about anyone and anything to do that.
If they manage to succeed here, of course, they will execute the same template everywhere else, starting with countries the US has long propped up, and any other country vulnerable to this kind of takeover and transformation.
I don't know what I'm looking for in terms of discussion. Am I off-base here? Am I missing some key facts? Do you think there's a different endgame in store other than "rich people fuck over workers once and for all"?
(Before I end this post, I want to be clear that I'm not arguing there won't or can't be concentration camps, mass murder, etc., just that those things would occur in service to the primary goal of controlling the masses to protect the rich, without having to get too expensive about it. Industrialized mass murder is astonishingly expensive and logistically difficult, and part of the Nazis' downfall was having to devote so much to the project of extermination that they ended up neglecting their capacity to make war. At the end, they were fully prioritizing just killing as many people as quickly as possible in the camps. I think the people running the show at this stage have grasped that they don't need to systematically mass murder people, just kill some and cause enough suffering in others to exact control and compliance.)
Wow, this was all really depressing and unpleasant to write. Someone with journalistic chops should write a more coherent version. Or maybe they already have.
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