At The American Prospect, Ryan Cooper writes that Musk and Trump Are Causing the Dumbest Imperial Collapse in History. Empires tend to collapse when they lose wars, or are attacked by barbarians, or suffer a series of debilitating crises, or maybe just stagnate over a period of years. What we’re seeing now, he says, may be the first time in history that an empire in “splendid condition” chose to deconstruct itself.
America suffered no military defeat. We were not outstripped economically by a bigger or better-organized competitor. Rather, we elected an insane tyrant who is blowing up the foundation of our international power for no reason, all while he lets a South African immigrant ultra-billionaire and his crew of teenybopper fascists tear the wiring out of the federal government—again, for no reason.
Never underestimate the destructive power of stupidity.
Certainly much stupidity is involved here, but there’s another factor. See David Kurtz at TPM, Trump Must First Destroy The Gov’t In Order To Corrupt It.
Trump II’s opening month blitzkrieg has wreaked all manner of damage and destruction – some of that undoubtedly for the pure sake of doing it – but the real power dynamic is in converting the vast array of government goods and services into a political currency that Trump can exchange for favors, leverage, control, and obedience.
What were democratically agreed upon government programs now become baubles to be awarded friends and denied foes. Congress is reduced to a supplicant trying to secure exceptions, carveouts, and special treatment for themselves and their constituents. Even if Trump succeeds ultimately in wrecking only a portion of the federal government, he will have accrued vast new power not just by stripping it from Congress but apportioning the spoils back to individual members at the time, place, and manner of his choosing, on his terms, however corrupt they may be.
There are multiple reports out today saying that Republicans in Congress, while publicly praising Musk/Trump for whatever it/they are doing, are privately calling the White House and begging Trump to not freeze or cut funds that Congress has already appropriated for their states. Because they can do the math. A great many jobs and revenue streams flowing into their states are being shut off. Their constituents will feel the pain, sooner or later. Maybe they’re sorry they let him take over the power of the purse. But not yet sorry enough.
And then there’s the Putin factor. Many eyebrows were raised last night when Trump posted some rant that blamed Volodymyr Zelenskyy for starting the war with Russia.
On Tuesday night, the U.S. president claimed that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a poor negotiator, saying it’s his fault that his country — which Russia has been attacking for a decade now, including a full-scale invasion in 2022 — is being left out of negotiations over a potential peace deal.
“Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it — three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal,” Trump said. The U.S. president also reiterated his interest in forcing Ukraine to hold elections as part of a deal to end the war.
I don’t know where “there” is, other than Ukraine. Trump also leaned heavily on Zelenskyy to hand over rights to half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals — estimated value #11.5 trillion — to the U.S., in exchange for … well, nothing specific. Such a deal. Remarkably, Zelenskyy said no. Trump seems to think that Ukraine owes us for the military assets sent to them by the Biden Administration. Trump still thinks of strategic alliances as something like protection rackets.
I don’t know why blaming the war on Ukraine surprised anybody. Trump has said things along that line before. It’s such a colossally stupid thing to say that I don’t think Trump is gaslighting here. I think, on some level, he believes it. And why would he believe it? Do you think Vladimir Putin put some ideas in Trump’s head about why Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine? Hmm.
But then there’s Trump’s Wishful Thinking tendency; he says things he wants to be true whether they are true or not. As in Covid will just go away. Trump’s reasons to dislike Zelenskyy go back to his first term, and his first impeachment. So Trump is calling Zelenskyy all kinds of names and raving that he needs to be voted out of power. And Zelenskyy has had a few things to say about Trump. This is from today:
In a post on his Truth Social account, Mr. Trump responded with a scathing attack on Mr. Zelensky.
“Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle,” Mr. Trump wrote.
As he did in making his assertions a day earlier, he misrepresented verifiable facts. The United States, for instance, has allocated $119 billion for aid to Ukraine, according to a research organization in Germany, the Kiel Institute, not $350 billion.
Mr. Trump also suggested that future security of Ukraine would not be an American problem. “This War is far more important to Europe than it is to us,” he wrote. “We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.”
Somebody might explain to Trump that oceans aren’t the buffer against aggression they used to be — and they were never perfect — but I doubt he’d listen. Europeans are, um, not happy about any of this.
Anyway, as I’m sure you know, negotiators from the U.S. and Russia are now meeting in Saudi Arabia to work out a “peace deal” that I bet will pretty much rip off Ukraine, which isn’t represented. I understand there’s an emergency summit of European powers going on in Paris to come up with a counterplan.
But back to the domestic front. People are already talking about a “Musk brain drain” of our best scientists and other bright folks losing their jobs. Other governments and private industries abroad might be sending recruiters over here already. Musk is disassembling agencies and programs that took years to reach standards of excellence and will take years to put back together, if they ever are. We’re losing everything that really made America great. MAGA is bent on turning America into a third-world shithole, but of course they can’t see that.
I have been thinking of the great American historian Richard Hofstader. Back in the mid-1950s he wrote an essay for The American Scholar called “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.” He was writing about the hard-right McCarthyites of his day, but there are a lot of parallels to MAGA.
There is, however, a dynamic of dissent in America today. Representing no more than a modest fraction of the electorate, it is not so powerful as the liberal dissent of the New Deal era, but it is powerful enough to set the tone of our political life and to establish throughout the country a kind of punitive reaction. The new dissent is certainly not radical — there are hardly any radicals of any sort left — nor is it precisely conservative. Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for non-conformism, but is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality published five years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence.
From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative. The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. . . . The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”
Possibly nothing summed this up better than the J6 rioters who assaulted Congress yelling “1776!” while they waved Confederate flags and tried to tear apart the constitutional processes that the real Revolution of 1776 was fought to establish. These are people who are terribly alienated from modern society and culture and want to destroy it and “restore” something that never really was. And in their minds Trump is some kind of colossus who can give them what they want, even though he’s really a corrupt and feeble-minded puppet of a foreign power. Possibly the only reason the destruction of America that’s going on now didn’t happen sooner was that it was waiting for a Trump to lead it.
