Manipulative power brokers are axing what makes America special – from sensible trade to personal rights, academic freedom, justice and due process to functional government, all to exile its former role as mediating, class leveler
When the blinkered Supreme Court handed over a free presidential pass to escape accountability, an already broken dam became a floodgate sabotaging hard-won rights and Constitutional government. After all, the Court had already endorsed campaign dependence on dark money with Citizens United, then betrayed elections by failing to stop government abuses of voter, procreative, and human rights – exactly opposite to any original judicial mission. Rolling over is not only for servile dogs. The outcome was inevitable – a rampaging, criminal government run by a convicted billionaire who contorts Stop signs as permission to “accelerate to top speed, anything goes.” Until greater forces step in.
MAGA Trump never wanted to restore some fabricated past greatness. Instead, its mission is to dictate the future so that an authoritarian government corruptly serves key supporters, spanning libertarian super-richies and diverse fundamentalists on Biblical literalism, abortion, intellectual tolerance, guns, anti-immigration and racial segregation. This herd of deplorables, despite its overall minority status, defines a gang of spoiled brats, outraged whenever told NO! What extremist doesn’t want the power they think will serve selfish, private, undemocratic needs, values and interests? The right rejects intrusive government except when furthering its bigoted agenda; liberals hold that good government is a social and moral necessity.
Unfortunately, like post-Revolutionary slaveholders seconded by rebel Confederates violently protecting their plantation economy, let alone later brutal Robber Barons and racist KKKlanners, they all represent a self-entitled, self-righteous minority demanding special treatment, legal restraints and common welfare be damned. Just like prior disruptors, MAGA Trump lacks the clout to do proper, mandated reforms so they poison the well with appalling propaganda and illegal executive orders – playing out their delusion they’re ordained by higher power to be the ruling elect, criminalizing dissent as treason and opponents as state enemies.
Checks and balances – not just metaphors
The greatest achievement of America mediates without violence the competing class, ethnic, regional and religious differences via elections, legislation, and court action – the three obstacles Trumpers can’t stand. Before and after losing the fraud-free 2020 election, Trump’s evil crusade had to impugn elections as rigged by nefarious foes. That meant usurping the rigging himself, dictating who should vote and who decides outcomes.
Poisoning elections was only the start as the Constitution more clearly stood in MAGA’s way. That mandates corrupting the entire justice system, not only by packing the courts with radicals but scheming every which way to avoid actual trials after formal indictments. Next up, displacing and neutering Congress first by gerrymandering its membership and now by with endless Executive Orders. MAGA disdains competing balances, needing only pawns to pass spending bills to pay for the authoritarian takeover. Rightwing Trumpers now seek to eviscerate the authority of court decisions by axing its contempt leverage. Likewise, Trump now blackmails top law firms with punitive, forced agreements that squander their independence and integrity. These actions feed on each other.
That’s how MAGA Trump not only reverses the New Deal but refights the Civil War and with inexhaustible bad faith abuses the Constitution – scoffing at mandates, laws, elections, or our core blueprint besieged in its third century. That defines the MAGA Trump assault as the most abusive, most comprehensive threat to America since the Civil War. How does chronic lawlessness make America anything but degraded? Further, by shredding policing power (the FBI, IRS, CIA and security agencies), MAGA sets up a next round of insurrections that will dwarf Jan. 6 horrors (with martial law looming were dissent to go violent).
Here’s the perfect authoritarian storm: less control on government abuses, plus permission for enablers to violate rules, the MAGA-ization of local prosecutorial enforcement, plus ready WH pardons for violent insurrectionists – topped by looming martial laws were the disempowered majority to rear its head in protest. Watch out for false flags. That’s how you not only strip the New Deal by wiping out staff and funding for positive agencies, you ignite a new Civil War. That’s how the “obsolete” Constitution (and basic rights like habeas corpus) fall by the wayside.
Thus, we are beyond axing the New Deal and great Democratic Party-driven advances of the last century. We confront the calculated amplification of high tensions that erupted into Civil War. As before, cultural differences between the rural, small-town, religious, class-rigid conservative south vs. the secular, urban and more worldly, tolerant, economically mobile north predominated before 1861, with eerie parallels today. Sure, slavery and white southern supremacy were critical but larger regional conflicts mattered, the stress between producing farmers (cotton, tobacco, and foodstuffs) vs. tech-superior manufacturers whose northern factories fabricated salable products.
The New MAGA revives the Old South
The Civil War started because the South could not abide the idea of a Lincoln presidency so with insurrectionist zeal chose violence after what they deemed a lost, “illegitimate,” rights-stealing 1860 election (sound familiar?) Thus the MAGA election rejection – because Trump the bad loser failed to win and get his way. Jan 6 was simply the Fort Sumter shot across the bow, proving that whenever denied, MAGA favors violence when its lawless demands for total control shipwreck.
In sum, like MAGA, the Confederate rebellion came down to refusing majority rule. Thanks to libertarian billionaires (parallel super-rich plantation and slave profits), and the manipulation of less-educated, socially conservative believers (few of which owned slaves), the South defied both federalism and a more tolerant, anti-slave majority, still upholding law, procedure and the Constitution. What the South wanted, paramount states’ rights control of their “peculiar institution” (with multiple efforts at expansion west), MAGA demands on abortion, control of women and minorities, book banning, and forcing Biblical literalism on everyone (like the Ten Commandments in every school room). The separation of church and state is just one more revelatory victim.
So, if you stir in anti-federalist white supremacy (or racist denigration of dark-skinned minorities) plus regressive social values (“entitled” males rule “lesser” women), fundamentalism that denies complexity (on the Bible, history, science, trade, educational openness, procreation) and benighted, anti-intellectual rejection of expertise, parallels shine forth between the South in the 1850s and America in 2025. What’s at risk, again, is whether the majority rules and whether violence (including police brutality, anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant abuses) are legitimized by a president ready to use every instrument of intimidation and control he can muster, as if his election verified his dictatorial agenda.
That Trump is himself a multiply-convicted felon (and illegitimate trial deflector) makes this Criminal-in-chief the perfect figurehead and power broker for a movement out to reverse losing the Civil War. Thus, while New Deal advances are the immediate focus, behold the far greater, elemental threats to what has defined American greatness. The outrage of aggrieved deplorables demanding full control again rears its ugly head – and there will be blood and further government abuses before this rebellion is squashed.
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