Among the biggest dreams that the Trump experience should shatter are
a. the idiotic idea popular in show biz, especially in Hollywood, that what the country really needed was a businessman to run the country like a business. Trump has run the country as our lax and corrupt laws allow a businessman to operate in, that it took one from the criminal gang dominated construction and real estate businesses of New York City to demonstrate to us the folly of thinking the commonwealth, the common-good could benefit from what human beings insult a nobler speices with the description "dog-eat-dog" is one of the stupidest ideas that people who have been to college have made the common currency.
But it's far from the only stupid idea including the idiotic ideas surrounding
b. the popularization and mainstreaming of University of Chicago, Stanford, Harvard, etc. nurtured ideas romanticizing markets and capitalism, as brought to the fore by Milton Friedman as anything but a benefit to the oligarchs who sponsored the academics and media figures who propagandized us into that last fifty year war against the rising of the middle class.
c. the even stupider idea that the mass media, freed of any restraint, even those against lying and slandering individuals such as that being practiced against Republicans following the law, much to their outrage and shock, would produce anything but a gulled and suckered Electorate who would vote for people who were actively killing even them and their families. The stories being told by nurses that FOX, Sinclair, the online fascist media being so effective in peddling the most transparent lies that even the experience of contracting and the process of dying from Covid-19 can't shake the belief of their patients in the lies peddled to them by the freest of all free presses in American history should be the end of that stupid, libertarian-"liberal" fantasy made law first by the Warren Court but preceded in the thinking of the vicious Oliver Wendell Holmes and his side kick who, I must admit, falls ever more in my esteem, Louis Brandise.
The list of things we should have learned, which this near brush with fascism should have made the common currency of anyone with an ability to learn from hard experience is longer than this but those are some of the most important ones.
However, the extent to which slogans such as "what this country needs is a businessman as president," "the market," "free enterprise," "freedom of the press". . . controls even, perhaps especially those with college credentials and others is a deeper, unheeded lesson from the hard school of experience.
The historical books of the Bible, the tales of the turn of the Children of Israel from the Mosaic ideal of egalitarian commonwealth in which even slaves and foreigners had more benefits than under the alternative, the turn to having a conventional king against the warning given to them by God, the serial disasters and the terrible corruption that comes with having rule by the gangster regime that all non-democratic, non-egalitarian rule is, and the near impossibility to return to the Mosaic ideal is a confession by the Children of Israel to their own weakness and folly even having The Law which is the start of what developed into egalitarian-democracy in the modern period. I think that record is one of the most impressive and honest things ever made Scripture by any People anywhere. It is certainly more honest than American history as commonly understood or written, it is infinitely better than the ersatz history most people get from movies and TV and Broadway rap and boogie extravaganzas. As Verna Holyhead pointed out, even as the Gospel of Jesus was fresh and strong, another essential component in the creation of modern egalitarian-democracy, it was no guarantee that the believers would overcome divisions that threatened the establshment of an alternative society, as well.
But it can't even get started with people believing lies, falling for sales pitches and slogans and buzz-words and fashion and misplaced standards of what is estimable. Lies and seductive slogans destroy it.
The deviation of American democracy from egalitarian common-good, including all of us was a planned one, the elements of it were embedded into the Constitution and the structure of the country by the slave-owners and their Northern financier allies and we have lived with it because the structure they set up to amend the anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian elements out of it was always going to be next to impossible, the strength they gave to small population states, the quick start they gave to white-male-property owners that still stands now was always going to make that impossible. The only way I think we'll get rid of the Electoral College is by larger states and those which favor democracy banding together and starving the smaller states into accepting the democratic election of presidents and vice-presidents, maybe the democratization of the Senate, as well. Not that there aren't dangers that come with those, the fact of the geographic distribution of population not being anything like evil is a fact that cannot be abolished by those democratic reforms that might save those of us living in small population states from anti-democratic, fascist domination as well as those who live in more diverse and much larger states. But either you accept the risks inherent in egalitarian democracy or you give up and live with the greater risks under gangster governance.
One thing that has to be done is that the self-given power of a majority of those on the Supreme Court to ratfuck democracy on behalf of inequality and oligarchy has to be removed. Amy Coney Barrett may have put above question the self-given, non-Constitutional power of judicial review of laws adopted by Congress and made law either by it being signed by the president or which becomes law by override of their veto but there is nothing in the Constitution or in reason that forces the Congress or The People to accept that self-given right by the totally non-democratic Court to itself. For the most part that self-given power has been used malignantly in exactly that way by the Court, increasingly, after the very rare use of it in the 19th century, it has become the go-to method of fascists to overturn even the honest-government laws adopted on a bi-partisan basis after the warning of the Nixon crimes were made public.
The Supreme Court's role in the corruption of American democracy doesn't require Constitutional amendment, it just takes the guts of those who favor egalitarian democracy and such benefits as universal health care and even keeping the American People alive and safe during a pandemic to say, no more. That's not something the benighted population of the Dakotas and Wyoming or Vermont or Maine, for that matter, need to approve of by a majority as expressed by their legislatures. It is something that may seem radical but it is essential to avoiding disasters of the kind the Roberts Court is going to bring with increasing frequency. We won't survive that assault on democracy, the ones they have brought through the slogans of "free speech" and "free press" have brought us to Trump as it is. That the "freedom" of words and the artificial entities of "the press" can destroy the equal rights of The People under that regime of thoughtless thought is one of the most astonishing features of modern life there is.
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