The most astute commentaries in it:
5. As I've been arguing for the last 3 years, Trump wasn't created out of an immaculate conception but is the true heir to generations of bad politics, notably GOP "Southern Strategy" of race-baiting.
7. Beyond the Southern Strategy & Palin, think of all the other elite choices that led to Trump: the lies of the Iraq war, the mainstreaming of Islamophobia, the casino economics that led to the 2008 meltdown, Obama's failure to prosecute bankers.
10. The message of the funeral was "The American establishment has a bipartisan contempt for Trump." What was missing was any sense of responsibility by that establishment for creating Trump.
11. The failure of the elite to come to terms with its own responsibility vitiates everything at the funeral -- Meghan McCain's righteous anger, Obama's eloquent thoughtfulness, Bush's cutesy candy-sharing.
13. "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" -- Anton Chigurh. That's the question we have to ask the establishment. The rules they followed brought us here, and now they want us to return to those rules.
The most frustrating phenomenon of the past three years has been the bipartisan/establishment push to define Trump as the cause of problems. Everybody, and I mean everybody, from your surgeon to your broker to your kid's college professor to your drunken goateed brother in law on a lawn chair, with his life laid out before him like a thundercloud, knows this:
Trump is the end result of an underlying disease. He is not what is ruining America. He is what you get in an already largely ruined America.
When confronted with this, everyone will agree to an extent. But when you get a bunch of people together who all have something to lose if the status quo is upended a bit (i.e., people who are in the top 15%), they all agree to observe the fiction that Trump is the problem, and all we have to do is get rid of him.
These people - people we hang around with, people in our social strata - will happily go along with narratives that paint rosy pictures about our economy. Narratives we know are false or obscure the truly bleak character of life in this country for those outside the top 15%. "Unemployment is at an all time low!" "The market is rocking!" "Look at housing! Millenials are going to drive it even higher!"
The reality is, it sucks to live in this country if you're not in the top 15%. Your life's trajectory will become increasingly uncertain as you move forward. Labor has no power anymore. We know this lopsided favoring of capital will end badly, but we don't know any other way to create growth besides financial alchemy. Financialization has ruined this county. Our courts and legislatures are controlled by corporate interests. Our health care system and college tuition increases are stealing enormous amounts of money and providing lousy multipliers.
No sane person can defend Donald Trump. But equally, no sane person can defend the policies that led to Donald Trump. If you run a country so that a very thin slice of us near the top cream off all the gains, and you make it near impossible for people outside the top to reach the top, and if you lie to the 85% below the top endlessly, and you pretend everything is fine and just keep kicking the can down the road, you will see some awful result. Donald Trump is just the beginning of a terrifically awful situation. Heer nails it in his last tweet:
13. "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" -- Anton Chigurh. That's the question we have to ask the establishment. The rules they followed brought us here, and now they want us to return to those rules.
I would add this: A man with no hope, who thinks the deck is stacked or that forces are aligned against him (and I think this describes most Trump voters and populists, the latter group including a ton of Bernie and Warren voters) might as well vote for a fascist or candidate offering debt relief unlikely to be passed by Congress. Why? Because it can't get any worse for him. Whether its protection of a status quo that fucks him (and whether Ds or Rs are in power, the 85% below the top gets fucked), a fascist lunatic fucking him, or disappointment when debt relief does not come to pass, he's still pretty much getting fucked the same way. It's entirely rational for him to vote for anyone seeking to "burn it all down," anyone seeking to do something radical.
Populism isn't the problem. Trump isn't the problem. Our systems and their corporate masters, which created both, are the problem.
