Where we are
The chaotic, cruel actions of the Trump administration are designed to obscure the real shifts taking place in our country. It should be obvious that Trump, with the aid of Elon Musk, has staged a coup, rendering the congress, courts, and constitution meaningless. In the pursuit of “government efficiency” the necessary functions of collective life are being destroyed.
No one should think this is because Trump and Musk want to make the lives of ordinary people better. Rather, this chaos is designed to obscure their efforts to reshape government as a means to channel public wealth into the pockets of a small elite. Everything from soldiers to park rangers will become new sources of profit. Public lands will be plundered and public safety and health available to only those who can pay for them. The lives of most people will get worse.
Those of us who live in Michigan can say this with certainty. We have seen the first act of the shift from elected democratic governments to unchecked authoritarian control. We have learned that democracy, even the weakest form, is incompatible with capital.
Under the name of emergency management, beginning in 2000, cities throughout Michigan saw their local governments replaced with appointed officials who had the power to set aside elected officials, void existing contracts, and violate the constitution. By 2017, 56% of all African Americans in the state lived under emergency managers. We saw schools closed, fire departments reduced to pick-up trucks with water cans, and an entire city poisoned by their drinking water. In Detroit we experienced massive water shut offs, illegal home foreclosures, and the transfer of massive public lands to rich developers.
We know where Trump and his billionaire buddies are headed. They really do imagine Gaza as the Riviera of the Middle East. Already the three richest men in the country Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg increased their wealth by $232 billion dollars in the first two weeks of the administration. These three men have a combined wealth of $920 billion. To keep that in perspective, that is more than the wealth held by the bottom half of our country. That means 170 million people, struggling to get by, together share the same amount as these three men who now appear to be taking control of all aspects of public life.
Our experience in Michigan helps us understand that Trump and his billionaires are not the cause of the problem, but its symptom. They are what William Robinson, distinguished professor of sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara has described as the logical extension of a crisis in capitalism that has been evolving for half a century. He explained:
Trumpism 2.0 represents not a break from what has been happening for the past half century but its logical end point, removing any remaining barriers to the unbridled accumulation of capital and culminating the neoliberal counterrevolution. Trump’s team has promised to do away with any remaining regulations on capital, to massively cut social spending, including social security (pensions), to reduce taxes on capital and the rich, to expand the state apparatus of repression and surveillance, and to override the few remaining mechanisms of democratic accountability. The incoming government proposes to achieve this by restructuring state power so as to bring it under the more direct control of capital, that is, to consolidate the dictatorship of transnational capital through new political dispensations, including a vast expansion of the powers of the presidency and the concentration of powers in the executive.
Among his 13 billionaire advisors we see the consolidation of representatives of war industries, technologies, pharmaceutical companies, big oil, real estate interests, and finance capital. These forces recognize the world is changing and they are determined to protect and expand their own wealth.
Such an imbalance cannot be sustained. The question is what values and visions will replace it?
We learned in Detroit that authoritarian rule must be contested in every sphere. We need to be on the streets, in the courts, in the offices of legislators. We need to act in organized, intentional ways. Our actions need to be rooted in the kind of future we want to create. That future will be created through collective efforts to provide new ways of living and being. Now more than ever we need to work where we are, in every way we can, to establish new lives of meaning, care, and joy. Time to “wage love.”