This sane-washing is driving me crazy.
I get that there’s some confusion in the public about where we are at the moment, most of our media have fully transitioned to State TV, and the rest have become so willing to play along that they are forgetting to state the obvious.
So let’s clear a few things up.
Are we in a dictatorship now?
Yes. A definitive yes, it’s just a hard thing to grasp, especially with all of the sane-washing. And let’s face it, this is America, we’re pretty susceptible to our own propaganda. So, to clarify, here’s the deal, the former Republican Party is now the MAGA regime, and they have captured the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court. And yes, they achieved this through what appeared to be fair elections, but as I’ve often pointed out, we likely fell into an oligarchy around 2012 in the aftermath of Citizens United, and since then our elections have been heavily compromised by dark money and disinformation. Now MAGA is securely in place and in control of each branch of our government, and in the past year, the regime has conspired to allow the Trump administration to act as a dictatorship. Everything from dismantling entire government agencies, issuing tariffs to threaten and coerce our former allies, sending masked thugs into the streets to kidnap and kill our people without any accountability, building concentration camps, and invading Venezuela and kidnapping its leader are all unconstitutional and have no bearing on any reality-based interpretation of what our constitution allows. So we’re a dictatorship now. If you want to split hairs, you can say a one-party rule. Maybe that has a softer appeal for some people.
Quick aside about Maduro, it doesn’t matter that he stole the 2024 election, and that a bunch of Venezuelans are cheering this on. What was done signals the end of the international order of the last 80 years and places us squarely in a world where might makes right. And that’s a shitty and very dangerous world to live in—more on that later.
So, if we’re a dictatorship now, will there be fair elections this year that could pull the MAGA regime out of power?
Unlikely, it depends on our enthusiasm and willingness to fight. But all of the decks are stacked against us. We were already an oligarchy before, and we will be contending with more dark money than ever, a drastic increase in disinformation, a captured media (thus the sane-washing), Silicon Valley skewing the algorithms in favor of autocracy, an army of disengenuous local officials, and on top of all that, the MAGA regime will do anything to stay in power. There’s about a zero percent chance that this regime is suddenly going to stand down because they lost an election they couldn’t rig.
Also, who are we going to vote for? A bunch of milquetoast morons who keep asking us for five dollars and tell us that there’s some semblance of normalcy left? Let’s get real, if the Democrats want to get people out to vote, they have to prove that they’re willing to fight. They’re not going to win the info wars by playing like there’s some way out of this that doesn’t require something akin to the Nuremberg trials. And unless a few of them are ready to jump on a tank and roll down Pennsylvania Avenue like, Yeltsin in 1991, I don’t see them being much of a help. I mean, even if they win the next election, will they fight when the MAGA regime just disregards the results and shuts them out of power? Honestly, at this point, they’ll probably just send another fundraising email asking for five more dollars.
Are the institutions established after World War II now proven moot?
I told you I’d come back to this, and this is an important point. Yes, they’re practically gone. The US was instrumental in defining the rules of the game for the past 80 years. Rules that we’re designed to maintain international peace and security through cooperation in solving global problems and conflicts. And yes, we often broke our own rules, but until now, we always still kept the rulebook. Under the MAGA regime, however, that’s over. There’s a tattered rulebook out there somewhere, but there’s no one left to enforce it, and the regime with the most guns—that’s us—isn’t interested in a rules-based world order.
Okay, and now the fascism question. Is this really fascism?
Yes, this is fascism. If you’ve read my stuff, you’ve heard all of this before. Mussolini didn’t invent fascism, but he did give it a name. Here’s how he defined it:
“Fascism should more properly be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
Is that clear enough? So let’s take Venezuela as an example. I know, it’s confusing because we’re surrounded by a bunch of sane-washing, but basically, the MAGA regime just kidnapped a foreign leader and threatened the next in command that if they want to live, they better fall in line. And then they said, ‘Hey, American oil companies, you want the oil, come and get it.’ By Mussolini’s definition, that is fascism 101. Will American oil companies indeed partake? We’ll see, I think they’d want to ensure that their investments will be safe, and therefore that would require some safeguards that this new fascist order can remain in place. That’s also how it works, corporations want assurances that their investments are safe, and then they will support whatever maintains that order and whatever serves their ability to profit. Another example is Silicon Valley being given a free pass to build unregulated, environmentally destructive data centers wherever they want, all while driving up electricity costs for average Americans. That’s how state power and corporate power come to depend on each other in a fascist state. We’ve already been living in a lighter version of it, one that was willing to entertain some semblance of democracy and the protection of human rights. The only reason that has been the case is because of the safeguards we put in place after the last time fascism almost destroyed the world. But those safeguards have been largely dismantled, and the new regime isn’t interested in human rights or democracy anymore. Otherwise, corporations would be speaking out against what’s happening instead of placating the MAGA regime. They have power and influence, but instead of standing up for democracy, they seem to be betting that this new fascist world order will survive and thrive all over the globe.
So what’s next?
War. Within America, all of this could trigger some sort of civil conflict as local municipalities try to fend off the well-financed police state being constructed by DHS. We’re already seeing flare-ups, such as Minnesota calling for the National Guard to be ready to rein in what they’re calling rogue federal agents who are kidnapping and murdering civilians at will. Only, those agents aren’t rogue; they’re doing what the MAGA regime wants them to do. Or here in Chicago, where people are starting to ask the police department to defend beleaguered neighborhoods from the daily intimidation and violence that is destroying our local economy. And globally, we could see a war big enough to stake the claim of being a world war. For better or for worse, the international order of the past 80 years, even with its insane amount of bloodshed, has kept us out of a third world war. And now that MAGA has embraced a return to imperialism, we’re now in very dangerous waters. Especially with calls to overthrow governments in Cuba and Colombia, and openly declaring that they want to take Greenland. This week, Trump has said he wants to increase the military budget from almost 1 trillion this year to 1.5 trillion in 2027.
I think it’s important to add some more historical context here, because since we’re witnessing the dismantling of the world order all of us have been living in for the past 80 years, it helps to understand what brought it about. One way to look at some of the causes of World War II is through the lens of the effects of industrialization. The industrial age introduced a whole new cadre of dangerous weapons, making war much more deadly. But there was also a global reaction to the exploitation of labor and the environmental destruction that came with unfettered capitalism. Capitalism was becoming incredibly unpopular. Mussolini’s answer was to construct a police state to suppress labor rights and civil unrest. By contrast, in America, Franklin Roosevelt set out to save capitalism—from itself—by putting guardrails around it. His answer, mostly out of the fear that Americans would embrace communism, was to wrap enough socialism around a capitalist system to keep capitalism from blowing itself up again. As it always does when left to its own devices. So internally, we created the New Deal, meant to create a social safety net to keep our citizens from feeling the need to form an uprising. And a whole new slew of regulations to keep corporations in check. And then came the UN Charter, meant to be a set of internationally agreed-upon rules to prevent the rise of fascism, you know, the marriage of corporate and state power, as Mussolini called it. Now both the New Deal and the UN Charter are in tatters after being whittled away at for decades by fascists, or by people who forgot that fascism was a problem—and what comes next is extremely predictable.
And this is what’s so crazy making. Most everyone in positions of power today should know this. The sphere of influence game, the Great Powers world order, Imperialism, and the unfettered capitalism that existed before Mussolini gave it a name, all of these systems share a core ideology that only leads to war and misery for the masses. If the people in charge of our government can’t see it, or the people in our corporate boardrooms who control our now state-run television can’t see it, well, they must be blinded by something. Some sort of hubris that makes them think that they’re exceptional and won’t suffer the consequences of their very predictable actions. Especially today, when we have nukes, and AI, and drones, and vulnerable power grids, and on top of all that, we have a looming environmental crisis that requires global cooperation to prevent what will surely make life very miserable for future generations. You’d think that reasonable people who hold power and understand history would be able to make better decisions. But apparently, they can’t.
In any case, we’re a dictatorship now. I wish I could sum this up on a positive note, something like, don’t worry, it’s all going to work out. But when we examine the outcomes of previous dictatorships, especially fascist regimes, it seems to be the case that they don’t end well. But, in general, they do end—after a lot of grief.
So in that sense, there is some good news. We have already tried a lot of things. We built a strong middle class, improved the environment, and made gains in advancing human rights, so we have a track record that we can examine to see what worked and what didn’t. We’ve taken fascists to task before, and we can assess what allowed them to return to power, so we can make sure it doesn’t happen again. In general, we need to take a hard look at what went wrong in the past century and what went right, and then decide what kind of world we’re going to leave for future generations.
But first, we have to get out from under this dictatorship. And like any problem, the first step to recovery is recognition. So can we stop the sane-washing already? It’s driving me crazy.