John Wayne and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

There is one common reason for the collapse of democracy: capitalist society has outlived its strength. The national and international antagonisms which break out in it destroy the democratic structure just as world antagonisms are destroying the democratic structure of the League of Nations. Where the progressive class shows itself unable to seize power so as to-reconstruct society on the basis of socialism, capitalism in its agony can only preserve its existence by using the most brutal, anti-cultural methods, the extreme expression of which is Fascism. That historic fact appears in Hitler’s victory

– Leon Trotsky, March 1933, written on the occasion of Hitler’s victory

We are in an intensely good guys/bad guys cultural mindset. I describe it as a cultural imaginary because how we see our enemies is more of how we imagine them than how we’ve experienced them. We don’t hang with those living differently than we do so we have little firsthand knowledge. But we read, listen and see representations of what we do not have firsthand knowledge. But it’s a passionate seeing and hearing in that we are already responding within a space in which everything is already tagged. There’s no neutral position outside anything because we are always already positioned in mind and heart someplace.

Right now, there’s a contesting of narratives going on at an intense level but one that has sidelined the classic Capital vs. Labor struggle, as well as another chapter of the Civil Rights movement that was heating up after George Floyd, as well as the Reaganomics of the Chicago school of economics, as well, and the neo-liberal regime change policies of the G. W. Bush circle. These have all been overwritten and vacated by our pro and con Donald J. Trump cultural imaginary.

Whether you choose to be somewhere else, if you are in the U.S. right now, you are in a place Trump is creating for you. By a flurry of executive orders, he is upending the world you knew.

Those who believe that ask how has a personality ascended to the U.S. presidency twice without offering any credentials beyond destructive and vindictive intentions? He hasn’t written a Mein Kampf, or opposed Marx with National Socialism. There’s no “Quotations from Chairman Mao.” No Little Red Book. MAGA is a campaign slogan, like Obama’s ‘Yes, we can,” neither a political ideology. But he is effectively trying to replace a Constitutional balance of powers with himself. Autocracy, not electoral democracy.

Those who hold that Trump is turning the world right side up after the ruinous Biden presidency as he did after the ruinous Obama presidency, do not cherish a........

© CounterPunch