Member-only story
- Democracy is probably the most misused word in the American vocabulary — because America simply does not have one. Democracy — from demos — essentially means decision-making by the people. This is not what we have; what we have, instead of a democracy, is a highly corrupt, facile republic.
- The idea that Trump was going to come in and blow up the country or the world or both was always highly sensationalistic; Trump is really just one symptom of a slow, uneven, decentralized, decades long shift in political power towards corporate interests. The recent Supreme Court decision in favor of American Express — gutting anti-trust laws — is a rational outcome of Trump’s election: which swung the Supreme Court away from a moderate majority. The sensationalism of the— ‘is everything falling apart?’ — post-election vibes (which I bought into) really distracted us from the rather pragmatic institutional changes that were already underway. Scott Pruitt, Jeff Sessions, and Neil Gorsuch might be greater enemies of the public good than Donald Trump, even while they are a direct outcome of Trump.
- We simply need to pivot away from the operating assumptions that we are free, equal, at liberty — all of that is nonsense. We are living in a highly stratified, rigid, controlled, albeit passive, fascist (in the sense of a governmental alliance between industry and military) state. The first step in changing it, however incrementally, is to acknowledge it.
