Politics comes down to profits versus people. For forty years straight, since the 1980 Reagan revolution, profits have been winning the battle. In the event, Democrats were dragged far to the right as well, as economic McCarthyism became the order of the day. The bastardized term "socialism" has become a useful and yet meaningless pejorative to mean anything that would rebalance the economic equation back to people. Wealth inequality itself is not necessarily bad, UNLESS the system turns into a zero sum game, which the U.S. economy devolved into decades ago.
Under Trump, the GOP made a whiplash U-turn away from their failed policies of free trade and mass immigration. Both of which have been highly accretive to corporate profit. Now they've become the party of trade wars and closed borders. To be sure, not all factions were onboard. Libertarians and many conservative media outlets found their traditional messaging was now deeply out of synch with the new paradigm. Nevertheless, synthetic prosperity via monetized deficits got them onboard as well.
Of course it was all a scam. The populist president has spent half of his first term eliminating healthcare coverage for working people, and the other half taking wealthy inequality back to 1929 levels by plundering the Treasury. Once again, the GOP successfully figured out how to put profits ahead of people via their Manchurian Candidate.
Be that as it may, we now find ourselves at an interesting juncture in which Bernie Sanders is powering ahead in the polls even as Trump maintains his loyal base. A right-left political divergence unprecedented in U.S. history.
This election will be entirely about putting people before profits. One of these candidates has a proven track record for putting people first, and the other has a track record for putting profits first. Trump's biggest asset is also his biggest liability - human history's biggest mega bubble. Ticking away like a time bomb ahead of the election.
It's interesting that the people who got Trump elected under his fake populist message have not even the slightest clue what it will cost them in the end to believe that delusion. They are after all his greatest supporters. Value voters who are cleft of values and can no longer tell fact from fiction. Which was the ultimate Pyrrhic victory of Faux News, to replace fact with opinion, until such a time as the masses would clamor for opinion over fact. A lethal addiction.
The lesson to put people before profits was overdue a decade ago, but for some reason we had to spend another decade pretending the system works, despite the fact that it had already clearly failed. At this late juncture, Trump's masses are living under the delusion that his Twitter bullshit has fixed the underlying problem. The belief that his soothing lies could repair four decades of criminality by taking criminality to new and unthinkable levels.
America's conservative movement is a spent force, ideologically, politically, and economically. Only they don't understand this. Yet. The fact that they are 90% bought into human history's biggest mega bubble will close the gap on that final conceit.
It's too bad no one could warn them. They don't trust anyone who can be trusted.
They are the party of Trump after all.
It's too bad no one could warn them. They don't trust anyone who can be trusted.
They are the party of Trump after all.
