This essay expresses a mixture of hectoring and hand wringing over Trump! An impotent cri de cœur ? Too little too late? To paraphrase Goya, the sleep of reason brings forth monsters.
The Republicans have been engaging in, and or, flirting with political necromancy since their ‘Generation of Treason’ sloganeering of post World War two. The McCarthy/Nixon/McCarren/Mundt political alliance used this as a political war cry against The New Deal. Then came Goldwater quickly followed by the Dixiecrat migration of 64 and 65. The election of Nixon and the ‘Southern Strategy’ followed by States Rights advocate Ronald Reagan.Then Came Bush I and his Willy Horton race baiting , and then Neo-Reaganite Bill Clinton whose ‘Welfare Reform’ and ‘Financial Reform’ and ‘Crime Bill’ were monuments to Republican political and moral paranoia, and cemented the fact that the New Democrats were betrayers of the New Deal, in the name of scheming ambition.The New Democrats as the not so sub rosa allies of the Republicans. And don’t forget Bush II and his unalloyed economic incompetence wedded to an irrepressible war mongering.
After the economic collapse of 2008, as the watershed of the Neo-Liberal ascendancy, an utterly failed Austerity, followed by the dismal economic present: why is the rise of the dreaded Populists of both Left and Right such a surprise? That rise chronicled in the pages of the two most prestigious journals of Capitalist Apologetics, The Financial Times and The Economist. My above ‘history’ inconvenient to the current political orthodoxy: the ‘as if ‘ that Trump appeared out of a political nowhere. The facts, the ‘Laws’ of history suspended in the interest of those who placed their faith , not to speak of their political power, behind and into a Neo-Liberalism that didn’t just founder but collapsed in a deafening crash. Which brings this comment back to Goya’s observation that can can stand as an admonition!
Almost Marx
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