We Won't Get Fooled Again, Really?

At the age of a 11 years old, I remember a Memorial Day parade in my little town. Most of the people who lived there were somewhere along the parade route. This was 1973, and we were still quagmired in Southeast Asia. There was a hopeful innocence, even though the crowd was peppered with veterans of both World War II and Korea.

Recently, in 2015, I attended a Fourth of July party on the East Coast, and the place was filled with fire engines and flags, hot dogs, kids with families, on a happy summer day. I was relieved to see Americans behaving like Americans.

But does that actual America really exist? Or is it just a figment of our imaginations? Or is it an echo that continues to clap against the purple mountain majesties?

As Jeffrey Sachs, a politically-connected economist and commentator recently pointed out, in 1947, the “US abandoned the republic and became an empire.”

This is no surprise to anybody who actually looks. That said, I don't remember anyone voting to be an empire. The problem is that the American people were not told until recently that they were living in one, even though it became publicly visible in the 1890s.

This abandonment of pretense signals the end of American innocence.

For a long time, I have been treating the Democrat hyperbole coming from the Congress about Mr. Trump being authoritarian and trashing the Constitution as nothing more than outsider rhetoric. But we now see Mr. Trump and his secretary of war plowing ahead with major military engagements with no resolutions or declarations from the Congress. They called him a king. But what is the presidency anyway? Is it Kingly?

Most people would be surprised to discover that Thomas Jefferson had the answer two centuries ago. When he returned from France to New York in November 1789 and analyzed the Presidency, he described it as a time-limited, tightly-shackled monarchy. This has always been true. But I do not believe that we have seen such monarchical behavior since FDR.

The long-term risk is that American’s love affair with their aspirational, meritocratic, wonky and half-insane system will end. My guess is that the reason why we don't see Trump rallies anymore is both the continued protection of the president and that not as many people would be showing up enthusiastically.

As I observed from the 1980’s until 2016, the United States hollowed itself out by shipping its wealth engine offshore. I watched a speech by a high official of a New York bank in 1987 where he described how American’s standard of living was going to continue to decline and we were gonna just have to deal with it. I feel safe saying the American people are done dealing with it.

For too long, the American people quietly paid the bill, offset by cheap debt and the productivity gain of the computer revolution. We began to see after 2008 that Americans were no longer willing or able to let things slide. It was hard to see that it was a broad-based dissatisfaction and that obfuscation was by design. There is no left right divide on this basic issue. But it is so hard to see that through the fog of propaganda.

In 2010, we saw an acceleration in divisionist politics with Mr. Obama, even though the left and right populous factions both see the same basic facts in The Great Ripoff. The plan of the Beast system was to keep the country divided, and the problems left unsolved, by twisting the language of the left so much so that political opponents could no longer understand each other, like America's own political tower of Babel moment.

I have literally spent the last year and a half building bridges with people who see themselves “not as my political allies”. My strategy has always come back to the basic facts. I make sure to talk about basic needs. As Mr. Kennedy pointed out 62 years ago, we all breathe the same air.

But this new development is stunning. Historian Tierry Miessen, who has always had a keen eye for political developments, has sussed out that Mr. Trump is doing everything he can to prevent American-born Israeli Prime Minister, NuttinYahoo from setting the entire world on fire. The writer points out how Mr. Trump has quelled the tragedy in Gaza. Mr. Trump is now making sure that 4200 trucks of food are making it into Gaza every day. Perhaps we will come to see his actions in Iran, as also curtailing some of the insane ambitions of the Philadelphia-born Prime Minister, and quelling the reactionary mechanisms of the Iranian machine.

In any case, I think many of us feel like we're on a ride we didn't select, don't want, and can't stop. Perhaps we will come to understand that this highly questionable move made sense all along. Right now it doesn't.