Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
The fascist takeover of the United States government is on. The violence that has always been used against the colonized and oppressed nations is now being aimed squarely at members of the oppressor nation. The Trump administration has replaced liberal news outlets at the Pentagon with far-right mouthpieces sympathetic to the administration, transferred trans women to men’s prisons, granted Elon Musk access to the federal payroll office, paused all payments to third-party contractors, begun to push federal employees en masse toward a buyout, and eliminated federal legal recognition of transgender people. Some items on the docket include an attempt to undo the Obergefell vs. Hodges Supreme Court decision (guaranteeing the right to marriage for LGBTQ couples), elimination of the Department of Education, and expansion of Guantanamo Bay military facilities to imprison immigrants.
Through it all, the Democratic Party and its cowardly leadership has done nothing apart from throwing out a few vacuous platitudes and empty threats on Sunday morning talk shows. And how could they do anything else? The thread of oppression runs throughout the history of the republic, back through the Biden and Obama administrations, back through Reagan and Carter and beyond living memory. Deportations, the “tough on crime” agenda of the Clinton 1990s, concentration camps along the border — all featured heavily in Democratic administrations, despite hypocritical screeching about the supposedly unique evils being visited upon their fair land by the Trump administration. The legacy of the Democratic Party — even among liberals — is far more than tarnished; it is irrecoverably soiled. Whatever shred of decency Democrats could clutch to themselves has vanished.
Two groups are facilitating this hostile takeover: fascist Christian nationalists and the highest ranking members of the capitalist class. The former hungers for cultural domination and the chance to establish a religious nation based on vaguely representative and specifically theocratic principles, while the latter thirsts, as it always has, for astronomical profits and oligarchy. They have already solidified their control of the state (they were voted in), and now they are moving to install as many party loyalists as they can in government positions until the sheer mass of fascist flunkeys is too great to oppose. Behind the wave of functionaries march the new-generation propagandists, proclaiming Trumpian visions in both official and unofficial outlets, and shouting down any opposing views. The old order is dead and dying; career politicos and CIA station chiefs, newspaper editors and diplomats, graduates of prestigious universities and longtime regulars at the most prestigious parties are all being muscled unceremoniously out the door. The most rightward agents of capital, working side-by-side, are systematically dismantling the last vestiges of the post-WWII white settler coalition.
As numerous U.S. backed coups show, what will follow the fascist takeover is a wholesale pillaging of everything that isn’t nailed down. The hyperrich have their eye set on the biggest plunder imaginable: that of the imperial core itself. The core is the last orange that hasn’t been squeezed — the petit-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy have grown fat and happy off their share of the spoils extracted from the rest of the world, and they’re about to be put in the juicer. Every service, agency, function, apparatus, every conceivable benefit given to everyone from the settler “middle class” on up will be sold at auction to the highest bidder (see former Soviet government enterprises) or simply eliminated (see the post-coup killing of the Guatemalan land reform initiative). Every shred of value that can be appropriated will be appropriated, and the capitalist ruling class, together with its church-and-state allies, will rise to dominate the United States like the United States has dominated the rest of the world since the end of the Second World War. The boot of oppression is coming for all who thought they were comfortable, secure in an idyllic existence, sure the class struggle would never reach them, insulated from all upheaval and tumult.
The recently-passed Trump administration policies are very unpopular now, and their unpopularity will only grow as the months and years pass. So this new ruling class coalition has ensured that units of force stand by to enforce the will of the state wherever the will of the masses is found lacking. Local police departments have been equipped with military grade weaponry and tactical assault vehicles, massive training complexes have been built to train them in their use, and multiple letter agencies have been deployed with specific instructions to wear insignias and identification on flak jackets at all times during an operation. ICE and Border Patrol are arresting entire families, congregants during a church service, legal residents who were simply overheard in public speaking Spanish, and even Indigenous people. The message being sent is loud and clear: this is the way things will be, and these are the consequences for those who don’t obey.
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