Our society will always remain an unstable and explosive compound as long as political power is vested in the masses and economic power in the classes. In the end one of these powers will rule. Either the plutocracy will buy up the democracy, or the democracy will vote away the plutocracy.

Irving Fisher

Under Trumpism, we have entered a new age, but it’s a peculiar one — not quite fascism, not quite oligarchy, not quite theocracy, and not exactly crony capitalism (that last one was Steve Bannon’s greatest enemy… until his guy got in — then it just seemed to mysteriously vanish from view).

Even MAGA people aren’t quite able to understand what they’ve got on their hands with their own ascent, what exactly this new American entity is, which is why liberal attacks on Trump always fall on deaf conservative ears. MAGA people aren’t really comfortable talking about what they hope to achieve. They are more defined by what they are against than what they are for.

Every time MAGA people try to explain what they believe in, it doesn’t quite make sense. Or, more accurately, they don’t really know what steps need to be followed to actually bring about what they say that they want. For example, most MAGA folk are staunchly “Christian,” but not because they embrace the empathic, peacemaking, wealth-condemning, underdog-supporting teachings of Jesus, but rather because they’re on Team Christ, and everyone else not on that team is their sworn enemy. So living out their Christianity is just kind of making sure that they’re punishing their heathen foes at every opportunity, instead of creating something positive.

They are adamantly “pro-life” and ostensibly pro-child, but any programs or policies that have the government helping those kids are anathema, viewed as enabling handouts for lazy losers. They’re pro-marriage, pro-family, and more terrified of declining (white) birth rates than almost anything else. But they won’t support any policies for higher minimum wages, for guaranteed paid maternity and paternity leave, for daycare assistance — basically, anything that would actually make family formation and family life easier to sustain for all parts of the population. Again, because many of those policies would help people who aren’t on Team Christ (i.e., Team Trump), they are seen as indefensible handouts for undeserving freeloaders.

All of this MAGA non-cognitive dissonance slots into the overall refusal to recognize that it is our crony plutocracy itself that has done all the damage to individuals, families, intermediate institutions, small businesses, and communities of all types. In the MAGA-verse, the federal government is the tool of liberals, not of plutocrats. This is the central lie/blind-spot (lie for the plutocrats, blind-spot for the rank-and-file) of conservatism.

The proper understanding of the US government is simply that it primarily serves the interests of the wealthy (that is, after all, the very definition of plutocracy) — and then all the “entitlements” handed out are the absolute minimum price that those plutocrats pay to keep enough money in the pockets of consumers to keep buying stuff, and to keep (most) people out of the torch-and-pitchfork business.

But the unusual nature of Trumpism has resulted in a yawning sense of vertigo that has become our American identity under the Orange Julius Caesar. At this point, even die-hard MAGA folk and steadfast GOP congresspeople must be looking around and saying, “Is this really what we signed up for? A guy building gold statues of himself, charging taxpayers a billion bucks for a gilded ballroom, an endless parade of foreign regime changes, soaring gas prices, and an exploding cost of living crisis that Trump himself said he doesn’t think about at all?” When Trump visits China flanked by billionaires and some other Trumps who don’t even technically work for the US government, it’s hard not to see the current regime as a pure example of crony plutocracy.

Now, regular readers of this blog might be aware that I am not fond of describing Trump supporters as “cult members,” mostly because I think that this actually undersells the religious nature of this group. Yes, they certainly idolize and adore Trump, no question. But Trumpism will certainly outlive the man himself, because there is a sturdy, religiously dualistic worldview underneath it all. When Trump dies, the hatred of the Other will not go away, mostly because the self-destructive nature of crony plutocracy will not go away. Trumpism doesn’t solve any of the implosive and explosive defects of capitalism: it doesn’t heal the ecosphere; it doesn’t eliminate profiteering and economic inequality; it doesn’t make people’s lives more secure, dignified, and stable. All of our structural defects will still be there, so exploitation of those fault-lines will continue.

Let’s try one more description of the weirdness of Trumpian crony plutocracy. Building off the previous two posts on this blog, we can see the MAGA-verse as an extremely bizarre combination of a small group of crony plutocrats and kleptocrats — who are living in the best of all possible real worlds, where the federal government is a huge money spigot, creating massive fortunes built largely off taxpayer dollars — and then a huge group of “marks,” who can see all this gilded fortune-making, but who still live in a delusional fantasy world of conspiracy and theocratic aspiration, a world that never actually intersects with the plutocratic sphere, a place where they just need to be faithful foot soldiers in the battle against the demonic forces of wokeness and liberalism.

Looked at in this way, Trumpism is one enormous stress-test of cosmic dualism, a faulty way of thought that serves as bedrock for Western civilization, and that drives rock-hard wedges between flesh and spirit, good and evil, believers and infidels, and forces of light (i.e., white) and forces of darkness (i.e., everybody else). The question becomes: How long can you keep exploiting people into forging their own chains, distracting them with foreign, exotic, swarthy enemies, while looting their people and communities of their lives and treasure? Unfortunately, the answer supplied by much of our history is, “a pretty fucking long time.”

As usual, we’ve kind of come full circle, like most posts on this blog, back to the need for a completely new, real, ground-level infrastructure for our civilization. Our current societies, especially the crony plutocracy that rules the US, are full-spectrum megamachines that destroy anything that blocks the road to expansion, power, and wealth. Our only alternative is a new household format that starves these destructive societal machines, by withdrawing labor, consumption, and attention.