Is Trump a Threat to Democracy?

He most certainly is if 'democracy,' as per the woke Orwellian switcheroo -- to give it a name -- refers to plutocracy, rule by the wealthy. The plutocratic elites of the present time, unlike those of yesteryear,  are woke open-borders globalists with no commitment to their countries of origin. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton are good examples. You will recall Hillary's endless mouthing of 'our democracy,' not that it has stopped. The superannuated and hyper-mendacious cow has been put out to pasture, thanks to DJT, but the attention-obsessed greed head won't stay there.

That the USA is a plutocracy is convincingly argued by Peter Turchin in End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (Penguin, 2023). When Turchin, no conservative, tells us that the USA is a plutocracy, he means that ". . . at the top of the power pyramid in America is the corporate community: the owners and managers of large income-producing assets . . . ." (124-5) The economic elites rule America indirectly by dominating the political class by lobbying and the like. (125) "The two power networks, economic and administrative, are jointed at the hip" with the economic network in the dominant position. (125) "The corporate community also controls the ideological basis of power through the ownership  of mass media corporations . . . ." (125)

In nuce: Hillary is homo mendax, and not just her: we do not have a democracy, but a plutocracy, and Trump, billionaire that he is, is a threat to it in his role as populist.   

Comments

[Michael Brazier]

I would have to disagree with Turchin - we don't have a plutocracy; in fact, we'd be better off if we did. Plutocrats would be happy with open borders, and with finance wholly unbound by national loyalties, but they wouldn't tolerate Critical Theory in any of its variations. The Woke nonsense is so great an impediment to getting any work done and making money that a ruling class which sought profit would never adopt it.

No, what we have is a technocracy, rule by self-proclaimed experts. It's the administrative network, not the economic, that dominates - the corporate lobbies exist, not to set policy, but to beg the indulgence of the regulators to be allowed to use their assets to produce income, instead of for the regulators' ineffable conception of The Public Good. The project to remake the economy to serve Critical Theory's definition of justice comes from the technocrats.

[James Soriano]

Somebody coined “MICIMATT” to describe the nexus of America’s ruling elite. It could have been former CIA official Ray McGovern, but I can’t remember.

That would be the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academic-think-tank complex.

[BV]

Plutocrats love wide-open immigration, legal and illegal, not only because it depresses wages, but also because it sets native workers against the illegals. Their fighting with each other keeps them weak and disorganized which accrues to the benefit of the plutos. Trade unions have opposed illegal immigration for that very reason. Case in point: Cesar Chavez's United Farm Worker's protest in 1969 against illegal immigration. The Hispanic Chavez was opposed to an influx of illegal Hispanics.

The power of unions varies inversely with the supply of labor. The more people who are willing to work for chickenfeed, the less the power of the unions. Open borders and mass immigration redound to the benefit of the plutocrats.

It would seem, then, that the plutos would be on board with CRT and wokery inasmuch as this ideological bullshit ignites "antagonism between native-born and immigrant workers" and impedes the former's ability to organize. See Turchin, p.134.

[Michael Brazier]

If immigrants were the chief beneficiaries of Critical Theory, the adoption of wokery would make sense as a plutocratic ploy to weaken workers' bargaining position. But wokery doesn't hit the part of the economy that employs immigrants - manual labor and the skilled trades are how most immigrants earn their living, and those are too close to physical facts to be seduced by Critical Theory. A plutocratic ploy to divide the workers has to be preached to workers to have any effect; wokery isn't aimed at workers, so it's not such a ploy.

Instead, wokery prevails within the administrative cadre; subscribing to it is the price one pays for admission to the ruling class. It's an ideology in the exact sense Marx gave that word: a doctrine held because it justifies one's social position, regardless of its actual truth.

There's much food for thought on this subject in a series of essays, Worshipping the Future, published on Substack over the past year (and not yet complete.)