It’s like the malabar front in 1984, It’s not about what’s actually happening It’s about creating an identity through social engineering, making an attack on the ideology an attack on your idea of your place in the world.
Very helpful if your goal is to impose increasingly draconian state security measures and tighten control over the economy from the executive level. Economic manipulation becomes a carrot-and-stick tool for compelling private adoption of public policies.
Trump’s done an excellent job of enriching the friends in his immediate social circle, so from their perspective (and the perspective of their associated industries) the economy is “doing great”. Then the outside groups get labeled as “Gone Woke, Go Broke” failures and Trump leverages public discontent to intercede in their industries, buy out private firms, force out C-levels and managers under the auspices of “fighting DEI”, and replacing them with cronies he can then lard up with federal money.
This isn’t a novel strategy, either. American liberals sought to open up business leadership to minorities and women with a similar set of carrot-and-stick regulations, contracts, and subsidies. Reagan-Era conservatives employed similar strategies to force Evangelical Christian groups into big law firms and onward to the courts, as well as stacking them on the board rooms of big businesses.
Trump’s adopted the playbook to force a more explicit form of fascism across the Military Industrial Complex and the associated network of (already heavily reactionary) public-private partners.
One would like to believe this alarming tilt towards Barbarism would wake Biden-Era liberals up to the dangers inherent in the heavily privatized economic model they’ve championed. But all I’m seeing is ambient smugness, followed by ineffectual liberal reforms insisting people are “getting what they voted for” when the rotten economy beings to crumble in earnest.
It’s like the malabar front in 1984, It’s not about what’s actually happening It’s about creating an identity through social engineering, making an attack on the ideology an attack on your idea of your place in the world.
Very helpful if your goal is to impose increasingly draconian state security measures and tighten control over the economy from the executive level. Economic manipulation becomes a carrot-and-stick tool for compelling private adoption of public policies.
Trump’s done an excellent job of enriching the friends in his immediate social circle, so from their perspective (and the perspective of their associated industries) the economy is “doing great”. Then the outside groups get labeled as “Gone Woke, Go Broke” failures and Trump leverages public discontent to intercede in their industries, buy out private firms, force out C-levels and managers under the auspices of “fighting DEI”, and replacing them with cronies he can then lard up with federal money.
This isn’t a novel strategy, either. American liberals sought to open up business leadership to minorities and women with a similar set of carrot-and-stick regulations, contracts, and subsidies. Reagan-Era conservatives employed similar strategies to force Evangelical Christian groups into big law firms and onward to the courts, as well as stacking them on the board rooms of big businesses.
Trump’s adopted the playbook to force a more explicit form of fascism across the Military Industrial Complex and the associated network of (already heavily reactionary) public-private partners.
One would like to believe this alarming tilt towards Barbarism would wake Biden-Era liberals up to the dangers inherent in the heavily privatized economic model they’ve championed. But all I’m seeing is ambient smugness, followed by ineffectual liberal reforms insisting people are “getting what they voted for” when the rotten economy beings to crumble in earnest.