5 January

For well over a year, many have said America’s democracy is being taken over by a totalitarian regime, the Trump regime. But America has always been a plutocracy, a country run by its economic elites. It’s never been a democracy in the way countries in the European tradition use that word. It’s run by business, now mostly northerners, the victors in the Civil War. Gone with the Wind is about that changeover in America, the country used to be run by slave-owning elites in the South. Many don’t know that the Democrats, one of the two main parties in America, were the party of these slave owners, opposing the new economic and industrial elites in the North. Today those southern States are the heartland of the Republicans. How did that change come about? Always follow the games of the rival elites. They won the war against the slave-owning South, but Republicans, who mainly represented the new business interests in the North, victors in the Civil War, still had to now win the votes of these defeated southern voters. So they used racist anti-black politics to win them. Those same commercial/business interests in the North have run America ever since. It’s a plutocracy, a country that has always been run by business. (Note that the fight over slavery wasn’t itself some noble thing. There wasn’t much appetite in the North to get rid of slaves either. But the slave owners in the South were in control of the country, and business interests in the North wanted that control. As always, elite rivalries determine what happens in a country, the content of political debates is meaningless, it’s all just spin to fuel elite rivalries. The same parties can stand for completely opposite things, at different times, if it gives them some strategic advantage in their rivalry with other elite groups.) Trump is nothing different at all. It’s just that he’s come at a time when there are an explosion of rivals amongst that economic elite for control of the country. Do people not notice the vast numbers of candidates now for President at each election? That’s the elite rivalry in plain view. That always triggers populism, as different rivals whip the population into continuous anti-establishment frenzy, to try to win their vote.  As George Carlin quipped, for the past 150 years America has been a giant oil company, with an army. It’s a plutocracy – a country run by economic elites. It always has been.