Among the best responses to the election as far as I am concerned, the small post by Anna Kornbluh on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/annakornbluh - seemed to be the most sensible, contextualizing the Shithead's election in the context of global inflation and the neolib globalized fallout. Inspired, I wrote out something that makes sense, to me, of this election and its air of farce. Inflation has to be an important factor in the story. But I think there's another part, which begins with COVID, and it is this:
The Covid interval passed like a long nightmare, but strange and miraculous things happened in that nightmare. Among them was the U.S. response, under Trump. For fifty years we have been told that the welfare state is evil morally and economically disastrous. And then, in the space of two months, prodded by the Dems in congress and his treasury, the U.S. expanded its welfare state on a scale and at a speed it had never done before. It was like three great societies all crammed together. I can never get over marvelling at it: the charts are here:
Besides which, Trump also signed off on a vacinne project that was, to my mind, as impressive as the Manhattan project.
Given these pluses, Trump should easily have been re-elected in 2020. But here's another kicker, a dialectical joke in the jokefest: Trump ran against his own record. He ran against the vaccine. He ran for school openings and said nothing about the numerous ways in which money flooded in to help working parents. A clever politician, a Richard Nixon, who also shredded GOP verities when it served his interest, woulda done it. But Trump is an entertainer. I don't think he even now knows what he did, titularly. In any case, as Covid closed, so too did the welfare state. Without discussion. In the course of twelve years, we have seen the system totally collapse - in 2008 and 2020 - and the state, which every book says is now on the wane, cause we got us these multinationals and financial capital and everything, the fading state - well, it just opens up shop, pays for everything, and people watch it in awe until the show is over and the bigwigs forget, or keep trying to make us forget. So Trump won his second term because of the things he did in his first term that he still doesn't know he did. I love the vaudeville act of history. Except when it stomps on my face.
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