Reversing gun control, overturning Roe v Wade, and now curbing the Environmental Protection Authority’s capacity to curb carbon emissions from coal-fired plants: the United States Supreme Court has in rapid order made three key decisions creating an American dystopia — or a utopia if you’re a religious fundamentalist, a white supremacist or a fossil fuel executive.
It will only be the beginning of what could be decades of such decisions from a Supreme Court stacked by Donald Trump with right-wing and fundamentalist lawyers.
The ultimate goal of any state capture process, and where it intersects closely with the core tenets of applied neoliberalism, is not merely to control government to ensure it operates in your interests but, if possible, prevent it from ever operating in any other manner, regardless of whether your preferred politicians are in power. The side of politics you’ve invested in most will at some point lose power in a democracy, necessitating some investment in their opponents as well. But it’s better yet if you can hobble the system so that government, no matter who is in charge, can’t act against your interests.
(That’s the rationale for investor-state dispute settlement clauses in trade agreements, as well — which can act to generate compensation for policy changes that, no matter how much they’re motivated by the public interest, harm the bottom lines of corporations.)
Curbing the power of the EPA — which was created by none other than Richard Nixon — to restrict the emissions of fossil fuel companies is a perfect example of this stage beyond state capture: it’s a form of state annihilation.
The actions of Trump-appointed judges to deliver such a verdict don’t merely reflect that Trump, for all his posturing as a political outsider, was ultimately elected to do the will of US corporate elites, and gave them the gift that will keep on giving in the form of a stacked Supreme Court. It gets at something more fundamental to the Trump project.
Trump’s goal wasn’t really a reformed government, not even a purified one that would emerge from the drained DC swamp. His project was the destruction of government. Those who criticised his failure to make key appointments across his administration missed the point that the effective operation of his administration was of no moment to him. His purpose was to permanently incapacitate the US federal government from being able to do anything — to discredit it, to disempower it, to degrade it.
This went beyond traditional neoliberal hostility to government and corporations preferring deregulation. It went somewhere more nihilistic, to a hatred of the very concept of government. For many Trump supporters, government in the US is no longer anything to be viewed positively. Government, in their eyes, is obsessed with being “woke”, pursuing a liberal agenda, helping women, immigrants, atheists, people of colour, and a long list of hated minorities. Government no longer serves them — mainly white, working-class and middle-class men. They feel they have no stake in government, which should exist only to reinforce their economic and social supremacy, but which only seems now to exist to help the people who they feel have been undermining their economic and social supremacy for far too long.
That’s why the profound contradiction between the libertarian rhetoric of many right-wingers in the US and their hostility to abortion rights doesn’t trouble them. They oppose government because government no longer serves them but when it does serve them by curbing the rights of those they regard as their inferiors, they welcome it as preserving the natural — even divine — order of things, and laud those who help achieve that.
This nihilistic hostility predated Trump, who merely exploited it. It was there in the Tea Party movement: they hated government but they also had strong connections with the Birther movement, which saw a Black president as fundamentally illegitimate.
And it goes beyond economic anxiety to resentment about the undermining of white heterosexual male supremacy in a myriad of ways. The entire agenda of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News from its establishment in the 1990s has been to stoke that anxiety and resentment and channel it into political action — including ever more aggressive, anti-democratic and violent rhetoric. Should Trump vanish tomorrow, Fox News would continue to stoke and exploit that resentment, and simply transfer its favour to someone else who could effectively exploit it — someone perhaps more presentable, and smarter, than Donald Trump.
The nihilistic sense of white economic and social grievance, fueled by the most powerful media company in the world, won’t be going away any quicker than the far-right judges on the Supreme Court. This crisis has a long way to run.
Hell, it was there with Ronald Reagan: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
It’s sad to see the US fall apart like this, but not wholly unexpected. When Obama was making overtures for bipartisanship and the Republicans were so openly and vehemently rejected, the notion of any chance of functioning government was dead. It’s been a cynical exercise of power, especially by the right for as long as I can remember, and this is the consequence of that effort.
The trick will be to not let that affect Australian politics too much. We’ve got enough to worry about without joining in zero-sum politics of the USA.
We’ll put. I hope it’s citizens wake up in time to see what is happening. I am hoping when Murdoch shuffles off, the new management may actually decide to unite the country, or at least be genuinely balanced in its reporting. There are way too many echo chambers in the US.
Don’t bet on it. New Management is Lachlan , who is further right than Dad .
I take heart in the fact despite how hard the newspapers went after Labor, the Greens, and the so-called teals, they were still voted for. Newspapers are a dying medium, kept alive by appealing to the prejudices of a dying generation.
I keep hearing the analysis that Labor formed government, therefore Murdoch and other right-leaning media had no effect. I disagree. The LNP government had more than its share of apparently corrupt shills, and had Morrison at its head. Morrison! It should have been a landslide, and wasn’t.
The American empire is in a death spiral now. Trump and the Christian right are destroying the USA. The minority terrorising the majority of citizens.
With all the guns in play – the possibility of a short, sharp civil war is a possibility. – a reverse purge if you will.
Putin’s useful id.io.t.
Trump promised American carnage, and it’s being delivered.
Of all the anti-US measures that KGB Agent Putin ever took, getting Trump into the White House is far and away his most effective.
It hasn’t cost Russia a single missile to achieve this result. Trump has been a gift to Putin.
Hi team, I am a little lost about this so I would be happy to know is there any evidence/proof on how the Russians actually got Trump the Presidency? I have read innuendos etc but no actual proof.
I must confess I am not a Hillary fan as I thought of her as a war mongerer. I was hoping for Bernie because I believed he had a much younger ad new blood following. Something I believe the US needs.
I believe Hillary’s selection had more to do with her connections than her ability to lead the nation.
Happy to be educated.
But it has appeared that The Radge Orange Bampot, as the canny Scots have it, is appearing to be more and more like a Putin version of The Manchurian Candidate…with the Russian interference in the 2016 Election…those siloviki style Russian and Ukrainian enablers of Giuliani et al. and now with the use of The Big Lie, concerning the so called stolen election.
You’d have to read a book: “Collusion”, by Luke Harding, ISBN9781783351503
https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/academic-professional/media-communication-studies/Collusion-Luke-Harding-9781783351503
Excellent, well written article Bernard. One of your best. State capture 101, explained succinctly, as well as the underlying imbalances inherent in our social evolution.
Yes excellent and unfortunately so true.Surely sometime in the future Trump will be rated alongside Hitler and the likes for long term damage caused.
If Hitler had Murdoch on his side there probably wouldn’t have been a D-Day, or a Battle of Britain, no one would ask where those missing Jews, gays, lefties and Gypsies went, and we’d all be singing Deutschland Uber Alles. I hope Putin isn’t reading this.
Not that others had tried as British newspapers were fairly sympathetic to Hitler when he took power. Lord Rothermere the owner of the The Daily Mail and other titles was a supporter of the Nazi government
On 30th January 1933, Rothermere produced a series of articles supporting the new regime. In his publications he criticised “the old women of both sexes” who filled British newspapers with rabid reports of Nazi “excesses.”
Instead, the Daily Mail claimed, Hitler had saved Germany from “Israelites of international attachments” and the “minor misdeeds of individual Nazis will be submerged by the immense benefits that the new regime is already bestowing upon Germany
As well Lord Beaverbrook the owner of the Daily Express was also friendly towards Hitler and throughout the 1930s promoted both appeasement and the Munich Agreement.
Geoffrey Dawson then editor of The Times was another supporter of the Nazi regime. He was a member of the right-wing pro-Hitler group, the Anglo German Fellowship.