When I was all of seven years’ old, I was treated to the following homily via the famous Carl Foreman-scripted western High Noon:
In the fifth century BC the citizens of Athens, having suffered grievously under a tyrant, managed to depose and banish him. However, when he returned some years later with an army of mercenaries, those same citizens not only opened the gates for him but stood by while he executed members of the legal government. A similar thing happened about eight years ago in a town called Indian Falls.
Well, move over, Indian Falls, because it’s the United States of America’s long night in the barrel, for at least the next four years.
It is “remarkable” how badly we have fallen since 2008, since the wheels came off our seemingly glorious “New Era” of global prosperity. The stresses were already very much in evidence: the growing problem of illegal immigration, which, in the U.S., had already become the obsession of the Republican Party—despite the numerous attempts of the Bush administration to stifle it; the enormous stresses thrown on the international system by the Bush administration’s utterly disastrous military interventions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, coupled with its compulsive “swagger” in Eastern Europe, constantly making implicit threats of actual intervention that it would never actually undertake; and the profound fears of “loss of control” developing among countries like China and India.
All of these “trends” were disastrously accelerated by the Great Recession, and Trump America is the result, a plurality of Americans welcoming a gangster in the White House as their “savior”. I’ll have all too much to say about Trump II in the future, presuming I live that long, but for the present I’ll simply link to what I had to say eight years ago, to wit: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump
