Thanks, Dad
The idiot bastard sons have taken over
Donald Trump decided who she was at age 13, and has not matured one day since. Angry at her mother for not protecting her from her father, yet desperately seeking his approval, nonetheless. She learned to create fantastical realities of “alternative facts” and found that with enough insistence, she could live in a world she much preferred to the real one.
Warren Buffet recently announced he is passing the torch of his Berkshire Hathaway empire to his son, Howie, who has waited dutifully into his seventies to finally have a chance to make a name for himself. Unlike Trump, the Buffet boy was never in the public eye. His father famously lives in the same house he bought in 1958, and it would not surprise me to find the son still lives there, too, in the same bedroom.
Social classes require reproduction—and not just biological, though that has traditionally been the means. The accumulation of wealth (or lack thereof) over multiple generations, passed through inheritances, remains the primary source of social class location. Preventing groups of people from accumulating wealth is just as important as ensuring avenues of wealth accumulation (and upward social class mobility) are reserved for a minority.
While social mobility is personally possible—though rare—social class mobility as a class cannot happen. Ever since we invented surplus, we have had the challenges of managing it, and in every social location that has evolved or been absorbed into a dynasty, realm, or empire we have seen complex social stratification. The administrative/political class has traditionally used their control of social surplus to grant themselves inordinate power.
This is the “Deep State” the Libertarians are convinced actually runs the world. Under capitalism, however, the economic and political spheres have been institutionally separated enough that the Bourgeois—the social class that lays claim to all the natural resources and means of production—hold more power than the administrative/political class. Evidenced by the influence purchased by a collection of information barons who have had no place in the administrative/political class until very recently.
Avoiding direct control of politics has helped insulate the Bourgeois from accountability, while it has given them cover to accumulate a greater degree of wealth than in any prior social order.
[n.b.: The feudal French suffered less wealth disparity between the monarch and the paupers—they kicked off their revolution at U.S. 2012-levels of inequality.]
Still, the Libertarian reification of power leaves them philosophically incapable of critiquing any form of power, and they are utterly useless to a Project for Human Liberation. Their open preference of a conspiracy of owners belies their objection to conspiracies of the State.
Running parallel to economic Libertarianism are the 2A True Believers, who swore up and down the second amendment exists for the sake of killing tyrants. They are watching the wealthiest guy in the world steal their private property and are cheering him on.
Democrats play Corporate Capitalist Good Cop to the (Republican) MAGA Bad Cop—check out Shaming Chuck Schumer, offering up smugness in the face of our government being violently raped by white supremacist and Fascist Elon Musk:
Oooh, boy! That will show THEM. Whoever the fuck THEM are.
The thing is, none of what is being done to the federal government appears to be necessary for the ruling class to maintain their rule. They are fucking with it just to fuck with it.
There is NO philosophical foundation located between the ears of the President. There is merely the singular motivation: What’s in it for me? The Heritage Foundation and Musk kept her out of prison, so they may do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t step on any of her grifts.
And here is where the proverbial rubber meets the road: Having inherited their social position and done nothing special in particular to make themselves, they fail to appreciate the complexity of their undertaking.
One cannot dismantle a major social institution without affecting all other social institutions of similar proportion. As they strip the government of support roles, they strip themselves of the hegemonic support offered by the government. Clear the way for the beneficiaries of economic stratification to be the ones responsible for governance and the “disruption” the tech bros love so much puts a target on their backs.
There will be rising calls for a constitutional convention, once MAGA believe they have enough state legislatures under control. Numerically, this will give them the power to rewrite the organizational structure of the nation. However, all the maps show us the nation as it exists relies proportionally more on Blue states’ economies.
We saw in the past few days that economics still drives policymaking, with Trump having lost the Trade War with Canada and Mexico before she had the chance to levy a penny’s-worth of tariff. That will provide some insulation against a wholesale rewriting of the constitution any time soon, but it is definitely in the works.