And then we had the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. On one side we had the angry young voters with strong views of the Vietnam War and whose two remaining national leaders had been recently assassinated. On the other side were the "law and order" forces of the Republican Party and the conservative factions of the Democratic Party in the person of Mayor Daily of Chicago who sent his police in to break up the demonstrations and this quickly turned into a police riot. We all know the results. A perfect storm for the Republican Party and the economic aristocracy to build on.
The Quiet Coup begins:
So, we got Nixon and "law and order". By 1971, we got the American Chamber of Commerce entering politics under the direction of the Lewis Powell Memorandum, a call to arms for corporate political domination. Business would soon dominate the political field and Powell would be given a seat on the Supreme Court.
By 1973 we saw the political overreach of Nixon trying to manipulate the 1972 election and being exposed by the Watergate fiasco.
But the new direction of the American nation was now being established and soon would be institutionalized with new laws and ways of being American. That new direction was that of an economic focus. If America would just turn its decision-making power over to the economic leaders, they would assure us of a prosperous and happy future. Just trust them.
Now, with economics being the measure of all things, it formed the basis upon which to co-opt all the instruments and institutions of power. The goal of the economic aristocracy was to get rid of regulation, oversight, taxation and to give those with the money and power pretty much a free hand in the future of the nation. So, the era of consolidation into bigger entities, eventually led to the "too big to fail" and "too big to jail" descriptions of untouchable entities.
This was followed by corporate control of the media, a war on unions and public services, and a new world of privatizing public functions. It was a time for the apostles of Ian Rand and Libertarianism. We codified all that with Milton Freidman and a new ideology called neoliberal economics which operated much like an extreme form of economic Darwinism, with the success of those who were economically strongest and the demise of those who were weaker - ultimately Trump's winners and losers.
Since economics is primarily about abstractions and numbers, the age of technology and manipulation was at its height. We were fed a steady diet of manipulated information to keep us focused on the rightness of our progress.
It was the long con. We were being taken for a ride at the expense of our financial futures and our natural resources. Only too late were we beginning to see where this was headed and what it would mean for the ordinary folks; but by then the system was so entrenched that it was made to look like we could do nothing to stop it. We seemed to be at its mercy. The economic aristocracy controlled all the levers of power which seemed to preclude any successful attempts at changing the system back toward democracy.
As the manipulation continued and the illusions continued to be propped up, we sank further and further into powerlessness as all of the control and wealth was being consolidated in the hands of fewer and fewer. A few large financial agencies, corporations and entities seemed to control how everything was to work. The Republican Party had been totally co-opted and was now a tool of the economic aristocracy, and the Democratic Party had followed the lure of corporate backing into the same swamp. People were left with no apparent alternatives.
A Democratic Challenger but the Coup is Nearly Finalized:
Bernie Sanders offered a viable alternative in 2016 and again in 2020, but the power structure of the Democratic National Committee would not allow outside voices to gain strength, regardless of popular support for a new vision. The national party accepted the inevitability of the neoliberal economic system that was the bedrock of that economic aristocracy, the Party wanting to preserve their place at the economic table.
The final result was to take the system to its logical conclusions. After deregulation, destroying accountability, preventing community action by destroying unions and public services and then pretending that rugged individualism had any hope against corporate or state power, by defunding public services and social justice and by channeling all wealth and power into the hands of that economic aristocracy, we end up with an all-powerful oligarchy supported by an uncaring government, a complicit military, police and legal system and secret agencies to watch and control our every move.
Completing the Coup:
Trump was the logical solution as leader, as the one who only cared for power and wealth, the one who made decisions based on economics and the one who was willing to do anything to accomplish his own goals. It was the beginning of authoritarian rule supported by that economic elite who wanted to make it impregnable.
We all saw the result of Trumpism, the chaos, the loss of any believable reality, the loss of civility and the unleashing of violence, the dominance of an unregulated economic elite and an end to any resemblance of a democratic society.
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