How could this happen? Again? On what planet, in what parallel universe does it make any logical sense for Donald J. Trump, the ghastliest beast to ever stalk the West Wing, to return to power in a veritable landslide victory? Didn't we learn our lesson the last time? It feels like it was just yesterday that they were carting that orange lunatic away in a bronzer soiled straitjacket, babbling rabidly about insane conspiracies against his precious bodily fluids while his flailing personality cult swarmed the Capitol like insulin starved insects in a parallel hissy fit.
I honestly believed that the imbeciles who vote in this country collected a few of their senses and swore on a stack of John Grisham novels that they would never try a crazy fad like Trumpism again. And on a normal planet, in a sane universe, that would be the end of it. Orange Nixon would be pardoned from the Arkham Asylum by some mild-mannered GOP yes man to play golf in the obscure wilds South Florida and America would collectively convalesce on a steady diet of quaaludes and Fleetwood Mac while the war machine ferried out their atrocities to some second-rate Suharto for a while.
But this is not a normal planet. This is not a sane universe. This is Babylon during the end times. Rome is burning, so Caligula gets a second term while Nero plays "Rhiannon" on the violin. The craziest thing is that Trump didn't even really win. The motherfucker actually got two-million fewer votes than he did in 2020 when he got his ass whooped by a Dixiecrat sarcophagus on life support. Kamala Harris just lost that badly, by five-million votes to be precise, and it's actually not really all that hard to see why if you just take the 3D glasses off. The woman had all the warmed-over charm of a Rust Belt ghost mall renovated into a cut-rate casino. She had virtually no ideology to speak of other than being just slightly more animated than the dead man from Delaware that the Democrats tried shove down our throats until July.
And it would be pretty easy to blame this on Joe Biden, God knows that career criminal deserves to die in shame. But the bitter truth is that the rot runs much deeper than that. The Democrats made the rise and return of Donald Trump inevitable the same way that every centrist bourgeoise liberal government has made fascism inevitable going back to Weimar Germany; by tainting anything to the left of Genghis Khan with their own clueless venality while transforming the nation state into a juggernaut. The Democrats have always been frauds, but their scam began to get sickeningly obvious under the reign of the Clintons when every crony capitalist atrocity from outsourcing the middle class to expanding NATO to the Kremlin gates got stamped "liberal."
Every state ends in fascism sooner or later. This tragic fate becomes inevitable the moment that you sanctify power by monopolizing the use force in the hands of the few and it usually plays out the same way. A plutocracy masquerading as a democracy becomes increasingly authoritarian as its veneer of legitimacy begins to disintegrate. Once this farce fails and words like 'left-wing' and 'liberal' lose all meaning in the mouths of elitist oligarchs, the masses flock to more brazenly authoritarian solutions because that is precisely what the state has groomed them to do. This didn't begin with Trump. It began with Lincoln's evisceration of habeas corpus to preserve an imperial union and continued with a thousand other revisions to this empire's trappings of civil liberties, from the dissolution of the War Powers Act to the rise of the surveillance state.
So, yes, dearest motherfuckers, I must conclude with my more hysterical colleagues on the far left, this is indeed the end of the world as we know it. However, there is good news, and that good news is the very fact that this is indeed the end of the world as we know it. If you are a straight white liberal, this may be of little comfort to you, but for anyone outside of the margins of the mainstream this world has sucked pretty hard for a very long time. Just ask an Indian if you can find one.
Fascism is the final stage in the state's life cycle after the orgy of imperialism, and the American Empire couldn't die soon enough. Even under the tutelage of the neoliberal insiders of the Biden-Harris Administration, we are currently tempting fate every day by playing nuclear football in both Ukraine and the Middle East while we melt the ice caps and hand the Button over to Skynet with AI.
This doesn't mean that Trump and whichever cabal of Christian-Zionists who actually manages to pull his strings for fifteen minutes shouldn't be opposed with every fiber in our beings, but we can't oppose fascism with the very state that birthed it. We must reject this system entirely and resist it with something totally untainted by its tentacles. Otherwise, we're just handing the Reichstag Death Star back to the Social Democrats until Hitler can make another comeback.
As ugly as this picture promises to get, true antifascists do have a few things working in our favor historically speaking, the best actually being the sheer size of the American Empire itself. Hitler wasn't done in by any one nation, he was done in by dozens of them because he tried to take them all too fast. Donald Trump will be tasked with controlling more territory than Hitler could ever dream of from day one, along with a massive Byzantinesque federal bureaucracy.
This is what kept Orange Man Bad from blowing up the world during his first four years and a number of ambitious think tanks like the people behind Project 2025 are jockeying to fix that problem by offering to do the big picture work for Trump. Whether that man's massive ego will even offer these mincing Little Eichmann's with the opportunity to do this remains debatable but what doesn't is the fact that America's sheer size, even if you don't count our bankrupt phalanx of imperial quislings, makes successful German-style consolidation highly unlikely.
What we are far more likely to encounter is the kind of violent Balkanization encountered by the similarly monolithic Soviet Bloc as their power began to disintegrate. This will also very likely lead to a great deal of chaos and violence, but I believe that at least some of this turmoil can be circumvented if the various colonized peoples of America choose to embrace our tribal diversity rather than clinging desperately to dated government solutions. There are a lot of ways to achieve this, and we should probably try all of them.
We should try agorism by building extensive black market economic networks beyond the reach of the federal government and its corporate masters. We should try panarchism by creating totally stateless communities capable of governing themselves without outside interference. We should do what the Amish do and grow our own food, build our own schools, and create our own networks of social services that can coexist with the "English World" without having to rely on it. And we should do what Hezbollah does and build well-armed, well-trained, and well-organized civilian militias prepared to defend those communities when the collapsing Cthulhu of the fascist pig state catches on that they're losing control.
What we definitely shouldn't do is allow our communities to be preyed upon any longer by failed agents of a failing state like the Democratic Party. These are the Weimar nitwits that idiot-proofed a death machine for a fumbling manchild like Trump to commandeer and now they actually have the nerve to try to guilt trip us into investing even more of our time and energy into another billion-dollar swindle like Kamala Inc.
They actually have the gall to blame trans kids, Muslims, and Black men for their failure to sell Fascism Lite as salvation with rainbow colored Oprah telethons. These are the same people who used to share teenage prostitutes with the current Orange Further elect back when he was still funding their campaigns. We are not going to slay this monster by getting back in bed with Doctor Frankenstein. Our best hope of surviving this failed state is by divorcing ourselves from it entirely and building a society that will never have to rely on its filthy favors again.
It's hard fucking work and it might fail but what other option do we have besides looking on the bright side of the apocalypse? This crisis can still become an opportunity for those of us brave enough to fight for it by every means necessary. So, what do you say, dearest motherfuckers, let's get creative and knock this motherfucker we call fascism on its orange ass once and for all.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post
* London Calling by the Clash
* Rhiannon by Fleetwood Mac
* The Mess Inside by the Mountain Goats
* Last Monkey by Buffalo Tom
* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones
* Slow Dog by Belly
* It's the End of the World as We Know it (and I Feel Fine) by REM
* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey
* Suppose by Buffalo Tom
* California Uber Alles by Dead Kennedys
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