Baked America

The halls of power have been stormed by the people countless times in history, but never have the people gained so little as a result as on January 9. It remains to be seen just how much they have lost. A small but representative handful of actors have managed to provide our enemies in power a world-historic windfall–just as they were consolidating their power.

As a last-ditch effort to stop that consolidation of power it’s defensible. But it seems if you’re to storm and occupy the people’s legislature you had better have a plan. The chaos and stupidity of the event make laughable charges of sedition and insurrection; the imagery, ironically, will be pretext for making final and official the real insurrection–and the long project to create a post-Constitutional post-white America. The halls and icons the Bold and Baked desecrated the other day were long ago severed from their historical connections and meaning by the same people who–many or most of them at least–have spent their lives alienating them from their historical connection, meaning and reality. Indeed, people who have nodded in approval at mobs pulling down statues of Jefferson, Lincoln, Washington. Does anyone think that, in their hands over the next decades, the icons inside the building were going to be safe, not from desecration, but from erasure?

They’re angry–I’m angry–as they would be at the desecration of great religious art–it doesn’t make them religious.

Now, none of this has anything to do with the justice of Trump’s cause, which we’re all about to follow off a cliff like train cars. A disciplined, united media (this America, at least, is not “divided”), controlling the treatment of, and fabricating outright, all concerns, controls the context in which all concerns are considered. In this controlled environment focusing on the integrity of the election, necessary as it was, distracted from the greater and grander crime, an open four year campaign on the part of powerful interests to disenfranchise Trump voters and frustrate popular will that culminated in the violence and murder of last summer’s BLM riots.

Election fraud, real or not, distracts us from the fact elections don’t matter. The last four years have demonstrated that, along with the malice that enforces this reality.

Any election fraud pales compared to four years of Russiagate, the Ukraine impeachment “scandal”, Covid crackdowns, the murder and mayhem of BLM. These components of the grand campaign have destroyed countless livelihoods and lives, bringing the nation to its knees and humiliating it before the world; they have gotten people killed, set crime and criminals loose–and promise, gleefully, to release more.

While the part about setting criminals loose is an end in itself, all of this has been part of a sustained effort to depose Trump and negate any populist impulse–and if populism has no place at all, you can’t have genuine democracy. Not that anyone is fighting for democracy. Nor should they. But the powerful understand–despite the hypocrisy (which, like democracy and Trump the man, is beside the point); it’s time for the rest of us to come to that understanding.

I suspect Trump, whatever his flaws or virtues, didn’t understand either. In his titanic vanity Trump thought he was going to make even his enemies love him, and that elusive love may be the ultimate goal of his ambition. He is us–he is even his enemies. What makes him unique is not the vanity but the honesty and transparency of it.

Not despite but because of his ego, he will likely be the last man to hold genuine faith in the popular will and the last genuine democrat to become President of the United States.