8 May

For those who don’t follow American politics, Trump’s Supreme Court, in an act of ludicrous overreach, overturned a voting rights decision from about 60 years ago, that stopped States using openly racist methods to restrict votes from some groups. Some States there now are rushing to implement openly racist restrictions again in time for the mid-term elections in November. The wider point here is that this isn’t fascism. Democracy didn’t invent the law, it was invented by elite rivals to kings and emperors, to control and curb their power. Trump’s absolute disrgard for law doesn’t make him Hitler. It makes him Henry 8th. Or Caesar. He wants to be a king. The world was run by kings for most of its history, only in the past 300-400 years has that changed. It’s the resurgence of royalism. Not the return of fascism. And while I think Trump would be a terrible king (he’s useless at just about everything), the brutal reality is that actually societies in history have done much better under kings, than they have as democracies. Rome was a bloody sewer of violence when its people-power Senate was in charge. Monarchies are the embodiment of status as the central operating principle in all human life. If you don’t have a monarchy, people will invent a woeful populist equivalent. Like Trump.