17 August

American culture has always been hostile towards the very idea of government. Watch all those old Western movies where the Sheriff is the tiny line between gangland and civic life. Not much has changed. Puritans founded the nation with an anti-establishment obsession. More than that though, America is hostile to the very idea of a public. It replaces that with the idea of ‘the people’, which is fundamentally different to what other nations mean by a public. A public for other countries means a collective grouping of all people, organised by public institutions, mutually supportive. For America, that’s rank communism. ‘The people’ is several hundred million individuals, who fight for their fight to remain individuals. So what fills the void, what organises the inescapable collective aspects of everyday life of those hundreds of millions of people? Money. America is a plutocracy. Always has been. It’s a factory for the production of billionaires. Americans treat the public services of other countries as consumer goods, that you then have to buy from plutocrats, who get fabulously rich providing the things other nations offer as public services. Many Americans, and people outside America who live on social media, an invention of American plutocrats to replace public life, say America is being taken over by fascists. It’s a trending meme. It’s alarming how many people even in this country have adopted all of this as reality, because our own culture was hijacked by social media. Americans who say that, you have to remember, think of democracy as ‘the people’, not as a public. The same revolutionary framing that created their revolution 250 years ago, and the countercultural revolution in the 1960s. Always the same anti-establishment schtick. Fascism is the use of government to implement an ideology. Trumpism is the continued dismantling of government, to enrich plutocrats. They’re chalk and cheese.