Fools or Bastards?

A while ago, I wrote in this space, “Trump’s beloved rural “uneducated” are overwhelmingly the base for the dumbing-down of the Republican Party and they are undeniably the people Trump can ‘fool all of the time’ in any subject. Based on their current ownership of the Republican Party we should all be calling them “the Know Nothing Party,” because they proudly know nothing of use about any subject and their wishes and dreams exactly mirror the ‘policies’ of that mid-1800s political movement/religious nonsense.  You might notice a conflict between #1 and #10 in their platform which also includes  ‘Americans must rule America’ (and they don’t mean native Americans), states’ rights (except when the states disagree with the Know Nothings), increased naturalization obstacles, and the usual goofy white male ‘supremacy’ (aka “white mediocrity”)  crap.  Living in rural America has biased me toward believing that the majority of the Trump and Republican voters are inbred morons and unknowing Know Nothings.

Closer to the Edge, a Substack page that I follow regularly, had a different take in an essay titled “The Idol of Rot”: Trump “does not lead his followers; he reflects them. Every jeer, every chant, every violent outburst is the sound of America talking to itself through a mouthful of glass. They don’t worship him—they worship the permission he grants to stop pretending they care. He offers absolution for hatred, indulgence for cruelty, and calls it patriotism. He is the unholy child of greed and grievance, the mascot of a generation allergic to shame, the influencer of an empire addicted to attention. He takes their hate, repackages it with a logo, and sells it back to them at a profit. And while the cameras roll, democracy gasps for air, dying not with a bang but with a brand deal.” I recommend that you read the whole essay and if you have a different opinion, I would welcome hearing it. 

I’m not sure which perspective is more harsh: 1) Americans have downbred into a nation of gullible fools or 2) we’ve finally shown ourselves to be the vicious, heartless, greedy sons-of-bitches the rest of the world has always known us to be?  And if you don’t believe the rest of the world has long despised, feared, distrusted, and even hated what the United States of America has come to stand for, you don’t get out much. 

Trump’s 2024 election cemented those feelings from one end of the globe to the other.  countries that might have once imagined the United States had a chance of being something at least a little bit of what we’ve claimed, now think we’ve lost the formula.  As Rufus Wainwright sang in “Going to A Town,” “You took advantage of a world that loved you well. I’m so tired of America.”  After World War II, it seemed, from outside of the United States (and less so from the inside), that we might become a role model for the parts of the world that still needed role models.  From the inside, our fascist countrymen started working immediately to dampen those hopes.  Joe McCarthy was the poster child for driving that disappointment, but Donald Trump’s vicious mentor, Roy Cohen, kept at it his whole life and he had plenty of help.  Nixon and that branch of the Republican Party made treason into a political tool and those same awful people populated Ronald Reagan’s pack of incompetent criminals and started the disassembly of anything resembling democracy and progress on those “American Way” ideals. 

G.W. Bush set new records in political corruption but he was a piker compared to Trump I and, now, Trump II.  Today, corruption is the primary function of all three branches of the federal government and they have plans to expand those activities into every aspect of life in this country.  If The Mob had taken over Washington, D.C. the effect would be no different than what Republicans have done. 

As a friend of mine observed on November 5, 2024, “The country will never recover from this or be the same place, at least in our lifetimes.”  Someone at NASA said the mass, uninformed firings at that institution were “an extinction event” for American space science and much of Musk’s damage to the FDA, CDC, and the rest of the federal government’s scientific and healthcare agencies would take several generations to repair, if we were inclined to be a serious nation again.  The damage to our national security and national law enforcement agencies has to make the country’s enemies practically delirious with the possibilities for terrorism and cyber-crime, and China is moving quickly to replace the US as the dominant world power.  Catching up would take a concentrated national effort and I don’t think we have that in us today. 

The question I wanted to ask with this essay was “Are we a nation of fools or evil bastards?”  Thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion that is a false choice.  We could be both. 

We had it so good?

 A recent article about generational wealth stated that “reasons listed in the report for higher boomer net worth include how this generation was in the ‘right place at the right time.’ By definition, boomers were born after World War II, allowing them to enjoy the economic boom post-war: falling tax rates during their lifetimes, generally healthy stock market with rising values, relatively affordable housing prices, and since the 1980s, falling loan interest rates. In contrast to pre-boomer generations, boomers have benefited from 401(k) retirement plans and associated tax breaks.”  When I read crap like this, I wonder what world the author is living in.  Boomers lived through at least 5 recessions, including a “Great” one that bankrupted somewhere between 6 million to 10 million households who lost their homes to foreclosure and millions more who emptied their savings and sold their possessions to avoid bankruptcy. 

That so called “World War II boom” lasted until most of my generation were about to enter the job market in the 1960s.  First, the Vietnam War draft removed 2.2 Americans from beginning of their work lives to pump up the wealth of that group of Robber Barons who would go on to rape and pillage our economy for the next 80 years.  There is are several reasons that the often quoted “average (mean) net worth” of Boomers is over $1.5 million while the real average (median) is somewhere between $200,000 and $400,000.  Not enough for a secure retirement, by a long shot.  There are 11 million 65+ Americans working past their retirement age, 20% of that age group, and many are living paycheck to paycheck. 

Nixon started the shift, especially by encouraging health insurance companies to become for-profit institutions with the s Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) Act of 1973.  That set the stage for an annual half-million Americans going bankrupt due to medical bills.  41% of working-age Americans—72 million people—are paying off medical debt and on the verge of bankruptcy.  7 million 65+ adults are also in the same sinking boat.

Most of that huge income inequality gap is due to tax policies enacted during the Reagan years that transferred nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% by 2025 and has all but eliminated the US middle class in the process.  Reagan and his goons launched a propaganda parade against the “unearned income tax” rates and that set us up for the hedge funds, vulture capitalists, and the billionaire class that the USA is probably permanently cursed with today.  Every tax cut since has widened the gap, increased economic inequality, decreased working class security, and lowered the quality of life in this country. 

 

In 2011, my grandson and I took a motorcycle tour of the Black Hills, the Utah and Colorado Rocky Mountain range, and the spaces between Minnesota and those destinations.  We camped almost every night in state and federal campgrounds.  Every single campground was hosted by people from my generation and all of them had lost everything except the trailer they were living in and the vehicle that pulled it from campground to campground.  Several of them admitted that they didn’t really own the camper or the vehicle, either.  They were on the move to avoid the repo man, since they couldn’t afford the payments on the remains of their life before the Crash. 

There is no generation alive today who had it easy.  But there are generations of the inherited rich who have passed on entitlement, wealth, power, education, and opportunity to their offspring.  Thomas Jefferson wrote, ““… there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.”  While Jefferson didn’t live up to many of his own ideals, he proposed a “law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature,”  Reagan’s goons convinced voters that an inheritance tax was a “death tax,” which is ridiculous but was effective.  Trump’s goons are trying to eliminate public education and to dumb-down the nation to prevent an outbreak of democracy, justice for everyone, and the kind of giant leap in technology, culture, cooperation, world peace, and stability that might allow humanity to solve the real problems, like global warming, that will end our species if allowed to go unchallenged.  Pitting generations against each other is key to preventing anything good from rising from the ashes of our current decline.