The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice.

Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are justified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. Clinton, when he signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, promised “NAFTA means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs.” George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Clinton did not continue to pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.

The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of “fake news.” They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted to them with the revoking of net neutrality. The iron refusal by those who engage in the permanent lie to acknowledge reality, no matter how transparent reality becomes, creates a collective psychosis.

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

Two million acres of public land, meanwhile, are handed over to the mining and fossil fuel industry as Trump insists the transfer means that “public lands will once again be for public use.” When environmentalists denounce the transfer as a theft, Rep. Rob Bishop calls their criticism “a false narrative.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, after ending net neutrality, effectively killing free speech on the internet, says, “[T]hose who’ve said the internet as we know it is about to end have been proven wrong. …We have a free internet going forward.” And at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phrases such as “evidence-based” and “science-based” are banned.

The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true on the Christian right, which is filling the ideological vacuum of the Trump administration, as it is for the corporatists that preach neoliberalism and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.

“The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”

When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day often becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s belief in threats and force. This is why the Trump administration disdains diplomacy and is dynamiting the State Department. Totalitarianism, wrote novelist and social critic Thomas Mann, is at its core the desire for a simple folktale. Once this folktale replaces reality, morality and ethics are abolished.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire warned.

The corporate elites, who even in the best of times stacked the deck against people of color, the poor and the working class, no longer play by any rules. Their lobbyists, bought-and-paid-for politicians, pliant academics, corrupt judges and television news celebrities run a kleptocratic state defined by legalized bribery and unchecked exploitation. The corporate elites write laws, regulations and bills to expand corporate looting and plunder while imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public, including college graduates burdened by huge loans. They ram through austerity measures that dismantle state and municipal services, often forcing them to be sold off to corporations, and slash social programs, including public education and health care. They insist, however, that when we have grievances we rely on the institutions they have debased and corrupted. They ask us to invest our energy and time in fixed political campaigns, petition elected representatives or appeal to the courts. They seek to lure us into their schizophrenic world, where rational discourse is pitted against gibberish. They demand we seek justice in a system designed to perpetuate injustice. It is a game we can never win.

“Thus all our dignity consist in thought,” wrote Pascal. “It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.”

We must pit power against power. We must build parallel institutions and organizations that protect us from corporate assault and resist corporate domination. We must sever ourselves as much as possible from the vampire state. The more we can create self-contained communities, with our own currencies and infrastructures, the more we can starve and cripple the corporate beast. This means establishing worker-run cooperatives, local systems of food supply based on a vegan diet and independent artistic, cultural and political organizations. It means obstructing in every way possible the corporate assault, including the blocking of pipelines and fracking sites, and taking to the streets in sustained acts of civil disobedience against censorship and the attack on civil liberties. And it means creating sanctuary cities. All of this will have to be done the way it has always been done, by building personal, face-to-face relationships. We may not ultimately save ourselves, especially with the refusal by the elites to address the ravages of climate change, but we can create pods of resistance where truth, beauty, empathy and justice endure.

 

Paul Street TruthDig- Dec 11, 2017

The archplutocratic tax cut Washington politicians are working on this holiday season ought to be a call to arms for the United States’ populace. The nation’s economy is already so savagely unequal that the top 10th of its upper 1 percent owns as much wealth as its bottom 90 percent. Its corporations are raking in record profits. Half of its citizens have no savings. Half its population lives in or near poverty. Twenty-one percent of its children are growing up at less than the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level, and 41 million Americans—12.3 percent of the population—are “food insecure.”

It is against the backdrop of this shocking disparity and related want that one should try to comprehend the regressive and malignant sociopathology of a Republican tax “reform” that:

● Drastically slashes the corporate tax rate without closing loopholes and deductions that allow the nation’s already cash-flush corporations to register their profits overseas.

● Does nothing to switch corporations’ focus from maximizing short-term returns to investing in the creation of more jobs and higher wages.

● Encourages corporations to invest in automation without offering any assistance to displaced workers.

● All but eliminates the estate tax for the nation’s richest families.

● Adds $1.5 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next decade, setting the stage for major slashes to the nation’s three biggest social insurance programs—Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare (they will be cut back in the name of “scaling back” so-called entitlement programs to “reduce the deficit”).

● Gives a major tax cut on profits multinational companies have stashed in offshore tax havens.

● Cuts taxes on “pass-through” businesses—a benefit that will be disproportionately enjoyed by the rich.

● Makes it easier for rich people to classify themselves as businesses to get a tax break.

● Increases the complexity of the tax code.

● Tightens deductions for lower- and middle-income wage-earners.

● Subsidizes private and religious schools, a boon to corporate school privatizers and the religious right.

● Repeals Obamacare’s individual mandate, which will leave millions without health insurance and raise the cost of health insurance.

The GOP tax “reform” rewards the already rich and punishes the poor at a time, The Atlantic notes, “when post-tax corporate profits have hovered at a record-level high for the last seven years, and the 1 percent’s share of total income is higher than at any time in the second half of the 20th century.” The just-passed Senate bill, likely to be “reconciled” with the right-wing House version and signed by Donald Trump before Christmas, grants what New York magazine calls “a huge windfall for the wealthiest Americans.” It is “certain to exacerbate income [and wealth] inequality at a time when the playing field is already heavily tilted towards the rich.” The New Gilded Age is slated to become yet more grotesquely unequal.

As some GOP congressmen have acknowledged, Republican legislators are acting at the command of their billionaire and millionaire “donor class.” “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,’ ” Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., candidly told The Hill.

Adding authoritarian insult to plutocratic injury, the Senate tax bill was rammed through the upper chamber with brutal speed and barely a speck of public input. As John Cassidy notes in The New Yorker, “the process … [has] … been a travesty of the legislative process. … [T]here have been no public hearings, and the measure is being rushed through in a few weeks, with virtually no transparency.”

The speed-up and smash-through reflects Republicans’ awareness that a significant majority of the populace rejects the tax “reform” (it’s curious how commonly regressive measures are sold as “reforms”). A Nov. 15 Quinnipac poll found that just 25 percent of U.S. voters approve of the Republican tax plan. More than half (52 percent) disapprove. By a 59 to 33 percent margin, voters said that the plan “favors the rich at the expense of the middle class,” and 61 percent believe “the wealthy would mainly benefit.” Just 36 percent believe the plan will lead to an increase in jobs and economic growth.

This makes the Trump-GOP House and Senate tax bills “among the least popular pieces of major legislation in modern history, with the public rejecting it by a two-to-one margin,” Derek Thompson wrote.

So why don’t we see millions of Americans in the streets protesting the brazenly oligarchic tax heist being perpetrated in the name of “fairness,” “simplicity” and even “democracy”? I can’t answer that question in full here. The forces and factors that have turned tens of millions of Americans into an inert mass are numerous and complex. They deserve book-length treatment and have received it: See, for starters, Alex Carey’s “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty”; Sheldon Wolin’s “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism”; Chris Hedges’ “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”; Henry Giroux’s “Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy”; and my own “They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy.”

Part of the answer lies in the pervasively disseminated belief that we the people get meaningful say on the making of U.S. policy by participating in the “competitive” biennial major-party and candidate-centered elections that are sold to us as “politics”—the only politics that matter. Showing how and why that’s a false belief was the mission of my last Truthdig essay, titled “U.S. Elections: A Poor Substitute for Democracy.”

A second populace-demobilizing form of n thinking that is keeping people quiescent in the face of abject racist, sexist, ecocidal and classist-plutocratic outrage is the belief or dream that Russiagate special prosecutor Robert Mueller will save us and our supposed democracy by putting together a slam-dunk case for impeachment and removal on grounds of collusion with Russia and/or obstruction of justice.

A remarkable 47 percent of the electorate already supports impeachment less than a year into Trump’s first year. But so what? There is an outside chance that the malignant quasi-fascist tumor that is Donald Trump can be cut out this way. As liberal commentator Peter Beinart notes in The Atlantic, however, the odds of impeachment are poor. This is because “impeachment is less a legal process than a political one,” and the partisan alignment in Congress favors Trump in ways that appear unbreakable, given Republicans’ control of Congress and the dogged determination with which Trump’s white nationalist base is deplorably determined to stand by its man, no matter how low he sinks. As Beinart explains:

Passing articles of impeachment requires a majority of the House. Were such a vote held today—even if every Democrat voted yes—it would still require 22 Republicans. If Democrats take the House next fall, they could then pass articles of impeachment on their own. But ratifying those articles would require two-thirds of the Senate, which would probably require at least 15 Republican votes. …That kind of mass Republican defection has grown harder, not easier, to imagine. It’s grown harder because the last six months have demonstrated that GOP voters will stick with Trump despite his lunacy, and punish those Republican politicians who do not. … Among Republicans, Trump’s approval rating has held remarkably steady. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans has not dipped below 79 percent since he took office. None of the revelations from Mueller’s investigation—nor any of the other outrageous things Trump has done—has significantly undermined his support among the GOP rank and file.

Meanwhile, Arizona’s Jeff Flake and Tennessee’s Bob Corker, the two Republican senators who have had the decency to openly challenge Trump, have lost much of their support from GOP voters in their states.

Also rightly skeptical about prospects for Trumpeachment is Newsweek’s liberal political editor Dalia Lithwick. She finds it distinctly possible now that the purported “rule of law” has become “a relic” in “our ongoing nightmare of creeping authoritarianism.” She says we may have to shed the “magical thinking” that tells us that the U.S. “is a nation of laws, not men” as we behold “the shocking norm-and-truth defiance of the GOP tax bill, the refusal of the GOP leadership to criticize or even comprehend the enormous violence done by Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets, the president’s staggering support for the candidacy of Roy Moore, the silent Republican collusion to the seating of demonstrably unfit judges, and the virulence of the White House’s attacks on the press.” As one Trump outrage has piled up on top of another this year, Lithwick reflects, “it’s become clear that absolutely nothing will persuade Trump supporters and Republicans in Congress that it’s time to disavow the president. Given that reality, it often feels like it wouldn’t be enough for Mueller to hand us a smoking gun and an indictment. What if they threw a conviction and nobody came?”

The Mueller investigation, Lithwick writes, has helped “numb us, and leads to a declining sense of agency. … So long as Mueller is working, filing documents, and convening grand juries,” we are lulled into believing that “nobody has to take to the streets.”

The chances of Mueller or some journalists coming up with blockbuster revelations powerful enough to shake Trump’s hold on the GOP and his white-nationalist base are low. Most Alabama Republicans still back alleged child molester Roy Moore. The great majority of conservatives get their news from the pro-Trump, right-wing media ecosystem, led by Fox News, talk radio and Breitbart. As Beinart notes, that media can be counted on to “downplay or distort virtually anything Mueller or the mainstream press discovers” and to depict any push for Trump’s removal as a provocative “ ‘left-wing coup.’ ”

It seems more likely that Trump will be removed from the White House by his insane, cardiology-defying McDonald’s diet than through constitutional defenestration.

Forget for a moment the fact that establishment liberals like Beinart and Lithwick likely exaggerate the significance and degree of Russian intervention in the 2016 election (a drop in the bucket compared with the influence of U.S. corporate and financial money). Forget also that impeachment would place the right-wing Christian Mike Pence in the Oval Office; that the tax bill is slated for Trump’s signing long before he could be gotten rid of through impeachment or—another fantasy—ejection on the grounds of the 25th Amendment; and that U.S. plutocracy reigns with corporate Democrats in office, too (review the neoliberal records of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presidencies). Those key points aside, Beinart and Lithwick offer wise and informed counsel on how impeachment is a pipe dream that helps keep citizens passive and, as Lithwick notes, off “the streets.”

Here I might add that the nightly roster of talk-show hosts and comedians making endless fun of the ridiculous bad grandpa in the White House (Trump is a truly a gift that keeps on giving for late-night comedy) may help feed the fantasy that Trump is just a passing dream and not a clear and present danger to democracy and life on earth.

In an important commentary in The New York Review of Books in March, Russian dissident Masha Gessen tried to warn U.S. liberals and progressives against putting their anti-Trump eggs in the Russia basket. Gessen felt that the Russiagate gambit would flop, given a lack of smoking-gun evidence and sufficient public interest, particularly among Republicans. Gessen also worried that the Russia obsession was a deadly diversion from issues that ought to matter more to those claiming to oppose Trump in the name of democracy and the common good: racism, voter suppression (which may well have elected Trump, by the way), health care, plutocracy, police- and prison-state-ism, immigrant rights, economic exploitation and inequality, sexism and environmental ruination—you know, stuff like that.

Some of the politically engaged populace noticed the problem early on. According to the Washington political journal The Hill, last summer, “Frustrated Democrats hoping to elevate their election fortunes have a resounding message for party leaders: Stop talking so much about Russia. … Rank-and-file Democrats say the Russia-Trump narrative is simply a non-issue with district voters, who are much more worried about bread-and-butter economic concerns like jobs, wages and the cost of education and healthcare.”

Here we are now, half a year later, careening into a dystopian holiday season. With his epically low approval rating of 32 percent, the orange-tinted bad grandpa in the Oval Office is getting ready to sign a viciously regressive tax bill that is widely rejected by the populace. The bill will be sent to his desk by a Congress whose current approval rating stands at 13 percent. It will be a major legislative victory for Republicans, a party whose approval rating fell to an all-time low of 29 percent at the end of September—a party set to elect an alleged child molester to the Senate.

The dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats, the party of “inauthentic opposition,” are hardly more popular. Their approval mark was 37 percent in a recent CNN poll, their lowest level in 25 years. Pervasive scorn for the party is richly appropriate, given its role as “the graveyard of social movements” and its long history of serving the nation’s financial, corporate and imperial ruling class. As the venerable progressive hero Ralph Nader recently told The Intercept:

There are some people who think the Democratic Party can be reformed from within by changing the personnel. I say good luck to that. What’s happened in the last twenty years? They’ve gotten more entrenched. Get rid of Pelosi, you get Steny Hoyer. You get rid of Harry Reid, you get [Charles] Schumer. Good luck. … Unfortunately, to put it in one phrase, the Democrats are unable to defend the United States of America from the most vicious, ignorant, corporate-indentured, militaristic, anti-union, anti-consumer, anti-environment, anti-posterity [Republican Party] in history.

“Unable” or unwilling? As two sharp Canadian correspondents recently wrote me in response to Nader’s reflections:

“ ‘Unable?’ No. Unwilling? Absolutely. The Democrats are ‘history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party,’ in the words of Richard Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips. They are dive artists. This is what they do: provide the illusion of opposition. “They are unreformable. Workers need their own party” (Matt Gardner).

“It is worse than merely being unable to defend working people from the Republicans. The Democrats are serially complicit in these multi-level attacks and the wars launched on the outside world” (Gabriel Alan).

The plutocratic tax “reform” right now is a perfect example. The GOP is likely to pass this epic fiscal robbery in the next few weeks—Merry Christmas, 1 percent—and the inauthentic opposition party, which essentially elected Trump last year (see this remarkable new volume) are blathering on endlessly about Russiagate while pathetically bemoaning that Trump is not being more “bipartisan,” on the model of the malicious right-wing president Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax bill. MSNBC’s rambling rock star Rachel Maddow is a ferocious lioness on Russiagate and a whiny kitten on the arch-corporatist, Putin-like tax bill.

It’s surreal. An explosion of sex scandals, the interminable Russia madness, a bizarre embassy move in Israel, an Alabama freak show, a prolonged game of bizarre verbal-thermonuclear chicken between the insane clown president in Washington and the dear leader in Pyongyang combine with the National Football League, Netflix, online shopping and porn, endemic video-gaming, epidemic mass shootings and the mindfulness and happiness industries to run diversionary interference for the evermore drastic and dangerous upward concentration of “homeland” wealth and power. Meanwhile, the death knells of the coming environmental catastrophe Trump is dedicated to accelerating—with unmentionably climate change-driven “wildfires speaking apocalyptic destruction” across Southern California this week—ring across the land and the world, barely breaking into the presidentially obsessed news cycle.

Welcome to the de facto banana republic that is, as Noam Chomsky said, America’s “really existing capitalist democracy—RECD, pronounced as ‘wrecked.’ ”

Revolution, anyone?

Dec 6, 2017

Henry Giroux / Salon

Just one year into the Donald Trump presidency, not only have the failures of American democracy become clear, but many of the darkest elements of its history have been catapulted to the center of power. A dystopian ideology, a kind of nostalgic yearning for older authoritarian relations of power, now shapes and legitimates a mode of governance that generates obscene levels of inequality, expands the ranks of corrupt legislators, places white supremacists and zealous ideologues in positions of power, threatens to jail its opponents, and sanctions an expanding network of state violence both at home and abroad.

Trump has accelerated a culture of cruelty, a machinery of terminal exclusion and social abandonment that wages a war on undocumented immigrants, poor minorities of color and young people. He uses the power of the presidency to peddle misinformation, erode any sense of shared citizenship, ridicule critical media and celebrate right-wing “disimagination machines” such as Fox News and Breitbart News. Under his “brand of reality TV politics,” lying has become normalized, truthfulness is viewed as a liability, ignorance is propagated at the highest levels of government and the corporate controlled media, and fear-soaked cyclones of distraction and destruction immunize the American public to the cost of human suffering and misery.

Under the Trump administration, culture has been weaponized and is used as a powerful tool of power, misinformation and indoctrination. James Baldwin, in a 1979 New York Times essay titled “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” wrote, “People evolve a language … in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.”

This is certainly true for Trump, who recognizes that the normalization of state-sanctioned lying kills democracy, and destroys the capacity to produce informed judgments. Trump’s serial lying is daunting in that it normalizes discourses, “actions, and policies exempt from moral evaluation [and] treated as beyond good and evil.” As Hannah Arendt argues in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the erasure of truth, facts and standards of reference furthers the collapse of democratic institutions because it is “easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which have become pious banalities. Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it the worst … and [is] easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life.”

As language is emptied of any meaning, an authoritarian populism is emboldened and fills the airways and the streets with sonic blasts of racism, anti-Semitism and violence. New York Times columnist (and former Salon reporter) Michelle Goldberg rightly observes that Trump makes it difficult to hold onto any sense of what is normal given his relentless attempts to upend the rule of law, justice, ethics and democracy itself. She writes:

The country has changed in the past year, and many of us have grown numb after unrelenting shocks. What now passes for ordinary would have once been inconceivable. The government is under the control of an erratic racist who engages in nuclear brinkmanship on Twitter. … He publicly pressures the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents. He’s called for reporters to be jailed, and his administration demanded that a sportscaster who criticized him be fired. Official government statements promote his hotels. You can’t protest it all; you’d never do anything else. After the election, many liberals pledged not to “normalize” Trump. But one lesson of this year is that we don’t get to decide what normal looks like.

There is more at work here than the kind of crass entertainment that mimics celebratory culture. As Byung-Chul Han argues, “every age has its signature afflictions.” Ours is an unprecedented corporate takeover of the U.S. government and the reemergence of elements of totalitarianism in new forms. At stake here is the power of an authoritarian ideology that fuels a hyperactive exploitative economic order, apocalyptic nationalism and feral appeals to racial cleansing that produce what Paul Street has called the nightmare of capitalism.

Trump engages in a culture war that militarizes the social media and in doing so creates a politics of diversion while erasing memories of a fascist past that bears an uncanny and terrifying resemblance to his own worldview. As Zygmunt Bauman observes in “Strangers at Our Door,” Trump’s endless racist discourses, taunts and policies cast blacks, immigrants and Muslims as “humans unworthy of regard and respect” and in engaging in the dehumanization of the Other shifts major social problems away from the “sphere of ethics to that of threats to security, crime prevention, and punishment, criminality, defense of order, and, all in all, the state of emergency usually associated with the threat of military aggression and hostilities.”

Trump makes no apologies for ramping up the police state, imposing racist-inspired travel injunctions, banning transgender people from serving in the military, and initiating tax reforms that further balloon the obscene wealth gap in the United States. All the while using his Twitter feed to entertain his right-wing, white supremacist and religious fundamentalist base at home with a steady stream of authoritarian comments, while showering affection and legitimation on a range of despots abroad, the most recent being the self-confessed killer, Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines.

According to Felipe Villamor of the New York Times, “Mr. Duterte has led a campaign against drug abuse in which he has encouraged the police and others to kill people they suspect of using or selling drugs.” Powerful authoritarian leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping appear to pose an especially strong attraction to Trump, who exhibits little interests in their massive human rights violations. Trump’s high regard for white supremacy and petty authoritarianism became clear on the domestic front when he pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, a vicious racist who waged a war against undocumented immigrants, Latino residents and individuals who did not speak English. Arpaio also housed detainees in an outdoor prison that he called his personal “concentration camp.”

As Marjorie Cohn observes, Arpaio engaged in a series of sadistic practices in his outdoor jail in Phoenix that included forcing them “to wear striped uniforms and pink underwear,” “work on chain gangs,” and be subjected to  blistering Arizona heat so severe that their “shoes would melt.”  There is more at work here than Trump legitimating the practices of a monstrous racist; there is also expressed support for both a culture of violence and state-sanctioned oppression.

Trump’s authoritarianism cuts deeply into the fabric of both government and everyday politics in the United States. For example, despicable and morally reprehensible acts of collaboration with an emergent authoritarianism have created a Republican Party that echoes an eerie resemblance to similar flights of moral and political corruption that characterized the cowardly politicians in power in Vichy France during World War II.

Former conservative talk-show host Charles Sykes is right to argue that members of the current Republican Party are “collaborators and enablers” and as such are Vichy Republicans who are willingly engaged in a Faustian bargain with an incipient authoritarianism. Corrupted by power and willing to turn a blind eye to corruption, stupidity, barbarism and the growing savagery of the Trump administration, Republicans have surrendered to Trump’s authoritarian ideology, economic fundamentalism, support for religious orthodoxy and increasingly cruel and mean-spirited policies, which “meant accepting the unacceptable [all the while reasoning] it would be worth it if they got conservative judges, tax cuts, and the repeal of Obamacare.”

Alarmingly, they have ignored the criticisms of Trump by high-profile members of their own party. For instance, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, accused Trump of “debasing the nation” and “treating his office like a reality show.” Corker warned that Trump may be setting the U.S. “on the path to World War III.”

Egregious examples of political barbarism, state violence, the morally reprehensible and the utter corruption of politics and democracy have become all too familiar in the first year of Trump’s presidency, and the list just keeps growing. Trump’s hatred of Muslims and undocumented immigrants is visible in his call to build walls rather than bridges, to invoke shared fears rather than shared responsibilities, to destroy all the public institutions that make democracy possible, and to expand a culture in which self-interest, greed, militarism and repression expand the ideology, social relations and practices that breathe life into what might be called gangster capitalism, rather than the less odious notion of a Second Gilded Age.

Trump has no shame and seems to delight in a pornographic display of moral indiscretion that produce waves of not only moral outrage but a constant theater of distraction. Against growing concern over his connection with the Russians, he fires James Comey as head of the FBI. In the face of his failure to pass any of his regressive legislative policies, particularly around healthcare reform, he insults fellow Republicans in Congress. As Robert Mueller’s investigation heats up, he publicly humiliates Jeff Sessions, his own attorney general.

In the interest of political expediency, both Trump and presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway have called for the election of Roy Moore, Republican nominee for the Alabama Senate seat abandoned by Sessions. Moore is a theocratic extremist, religious fundamentalist, homophobe and accused sexual predator. More than a half dozen women have now accused him of various forms of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s. Trump and Conway’s defense rested on the morally vacuous claim and obscene rationale that it was necessary to elect Moore to the Senate so Trump would have another Republican Senate vote to pass a tax bill that functions as a wet kiss and wedding gift for the rich. It gets worse. This is not simply politics without a moral referent. It is a politics that embraces civic regression, and represents a form of evil one associates with the forms of domestic terrorism that characterizes totalitarianism.

Trump is the apostle of moral blindness and unchecked corruption. He revels in a mode of governance that merges the idiocy of a never-ending theatrics of self-promotion with a deeply authoritarian politics of contempt, punishment and humiliation free from any kind of self-reflection or moral evaluation.  One under-analyzed example can be seen in his contempt for young people, whether expressed through his attempt to expel more than 700,000 Dreamers from the United States, sanction a budget that eliminates or cuts major social provisions for poor and vulnerable youth, or advocate a tax reform billthat will impose massive suffering and hardships on minorities of class and color.

Trump has given new force to the rise of the punishing state with its obsession with security, incarceration, public shaming and the resuscitation of debtor prisons and the school-to-prison pipeline. Trump’s contempt for the lives of young people, his support for a culture of cruelty and his appetite for destruction and civic catastrophe is more than a symptom of a society ruled almost exclusively by the logic of the market and a “survival of the fittest” ethos, with its willingness if not glee in calling for the separation of economic, political and social actions from any social costs or consequences. It is about the systemic derangement of democracy and the emergence of a politics that celebrates the toxic pleasures of the authoritarian state.

While there is much talk about the influence of Trumpism, there are few analyses that examine its culture of cruelty and politics of disposability, or the role that culture plays in legitimating intolerance and suffering. The culture of cruelty and mechanisms of disposability reach back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial society.  How else does one explain a long line of state-sanctioned atrocities: the genocide waged against Native Americans in order to take their land, enslavement and breeding of black people for profit and labor, and the passage of the Second Amendment to arm and enforce white supremacy over those populations? The legacies of those horrific roots of U.S. history are coded into Trumpist slogans about “making America great again,” and egregiously defended through appeals to American exceptionalism.

More recent instances indicative of the rising culture of bigoted cruelty and mechanisms of erasure in U.S. politics include the racially motivated drug wars, policies that shifted people from welfare to workfare without offering training programs or child care, and morally indefensible tax reforms that will “require huge budget cuts in safety net programs for vulnerable children and adults.” As Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when millions of American children “are suffering from hunger, homelessness and hopelessness. Nearly 13.2 million children are poor – almost one in five. About 70 percent of them are children of color who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”

Trump is both a symptom and enabler of this culture, one that enables him to delight in taunting black athletes, defending neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and mocking anyone who disagrees with him. This is the face of a kind of Reichian psycho-politics, with its mix of violence, repression, theatrics, incoherency and spectacularized ignorance. Trump makes clear that the dream of the Confederacy is still with us, that moral panics thrive against a culture of rancid racism, “a background of obscene inequalities, progressive deregulation of labor markets and a massive expansion in the ranks of the precariat.”

In an age of almost unparalleled extremism, violence and cruelty, authoritarianism is gaining ground, rapidly creating a society in which shared fears and unchecked hatred have become the organizing forces for community. Under the Trump regime, dissent is disparaged as a pathology or dismissed as fake news, while even the slightest compassion for others becomes an object of disdain and subject to policies that increase the immiseration, suffering and misery of the most vulnerable.

Under the shadow of 9/11, fear has gained a new momentum as more and more individuals and groups are denigrated, labeled as disposable, subject to forms of social and racial cleansing that are in accord with the force of a resurgent white supremacy emboldened by the fact that one of its sympathizers is now president of the United States. Rejecting the most basic elements of a sustainable democracy, Trumpism has unleashed a rancid populism and racially inspired ultra-nationalism that sustains itself by looking everywhere for enemies while occupying the high ground of political purity and an empty moralism.

In the past, racist Democrats and Republicans did everything they could to cover over any naked expressions of their racism. This is no longer the case. Under Trump, both racist discourse and the underlying principles of white supremacy are both encouraged and emboldened. In the midst of the collapse of civil society and the public spheres that make a democracy possible, every line of decency is crossed, every principle of civility is violated, and more and more elements of justice are transformed into an injustice. Trump has become the blunt instrument and Twitter preacher for displaying a contempt for the truth, a critical citizenry, and democracy itself. He has anointed himself as the apostle of unchecked greed, unbridled narcissism and limitless militarism.

Wedded to both creating a culture of civic illiteracy and the plundering of the planet for both his own personal gain and that of his corporate cronies, Trump has done more than assault standards of truth, verification and evidence. He has opened the door to the dark cave of moral depravity, political corruption and a dangerous right-wing nationalist populism that, as Frank Rich observes, threatens to have “remarkable staying power” long after Trump is gone.

Gangster capitalism under Trump has reached a new stage, in that it is unabashedly aggressive in mounting a war against every institution capable of providing a vision, a semblance of critical agency or a formative culture capable of creating agents who might be willing to hold power accountable. The American public is witnessing a crisis not merely of politics but of history, vision and agency, or what Andrew O’Hehir more pointedly called the acts of a domestic terrorist. This is a politics of domesticated fear, manufactured illusions and atomizing effects. Trump is the product of a culture long in the making, one fueled by the triumph of finance capital, the legitimation of a rancid individualism and a crippling notion of freedom. In this age of precarity, infantilizing publicity machines and uncertainty, a sense of collective impotency and fear provides the breeding ground for isolation, the corporate state and the discourses of inscription, demonization and false communities.

A culture of immediacy, an economy of profound boredom, instant gratification and spectacularized violence, has created a society of deliberate forgetting and a sadomasochistic culture that thrives on humiliation, revenge, a culture of punitiveness and an aesthetics of depravity. Trump signifies the death of the radical imagination and the apotheosis of its opposite: a lackluster hatred of thoughtfulness, creativity and inventiveness. Trump makes clear

I think the artist Sable Elyse Smith is right in arguing that ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge or the refusal to know. It is also a form of violence that is woven into the fabric of everyday life by the power of massive “disimagination machines.” Its ultimate goal is to enable us to not only consume pain and to propagate it, but to relish in it as a form of entertainment and emotional uplift. Ignorance is also the enemy of memory and a weapon in the politics of disappearance and the violence of organized forgetting. It is also about the erasure of what Brad Evans calls “the raw realities of suffering” and the undermining of a politics that is in part about the battle for memory.

Trump within a very short time has legitimated and reinforced a culture of social abandonment, erasure and terminal exclusion. Justice in this discourse is disposable along with the institutions that make it possible. What is distinctive about Trump is that he defines himself through the tenets of a predatory and cruel form of gangster capitalism, while using its power to fill government positions with what appear to be the walking dead and at the same time produce death-dealing policies. Of course he is just the overt and unapologetic symbol of a wild capitalism and dark pessimism that have been decades in the making. He is the theatrical, self-absorbed monster that embodies and emboldens a history of savagery, greed and extreme inequality that has reached its endpoint — a poisonous form of American authoritarianism that must be stopped before it is too late. Trump makes clear that democracy is tenuous and has to be viewed as a site of ongoing contestation, one that demands a new understanding of politics, language and collective struggle.

Trump’s reign of terror will come to an end. But the forces that made Trump possible will not end with his political demise. This means that in the ongoing struggle against authoritarianism, progressives need a language of critique and possibility. This suggests the need for a new vocabulary that refuses to look away, refuses to surrender to either the dictates of consumerism, fear or bigotry. It also suggest a left/progressive movement that does more than say what it is against. It also needs a vision and an ongoing project that enables it to say what it is for. This could take the form of creating a political, economic and social platform rooted in the principles of democratic socialism.

Ariel Dorfman, drawing upon his own memories and experience of authoritarianism under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, speaks to the need for such a language. He writes: “It brings back to me the imaginative enormity that every true demand for radical change insists upon. It catches a missing feeling of our age: the belief that alternative worlds are possible, that they are within reach if we’re courageous enough, and smart enough, and daring enough to take control of our own lives.”

We get a hint of such a language in the words of the writer Maaza Mengiste, who calls for a discourse of passion, power, responsibility and justice, one that “will take us from shock and stunned silence toward a coherent, visceral speech, one as strong as the force that is charging at us.” In the age of Trump, we need to take seriously the notion that education is at the center of politics — that, as Stuart Hall has consistently stressed, “politics follows culture.” For Hall, this meant that addressing oppression cannot rest with an emphasis on economic structures, however important. What was also needed was recognizing how domination worked at the level of belief and persuasion, which suggested that education and consciousness-raising was at the center of politics.

As Hall puts it, “You can’t just rest with the underlying structural logic. And so you think about what is likely to awaken identification. There’s no politics without identification. People have to invest something of themselves, something that they recognize is of them or speaks to their condition, and … you won’t have a political movement without that moment of identification.”

This suggests a politics that begins both with a vision of what a democratic socialist society might look like and a narrative that makes power visible. This implies a language that is both rigorous theoretically and accessible. Moreover, it means developing a vocabulary that moves people, speaks directly to their problems, allows them to feel compassion for the other and gives them the courage to talk back. This suggests forging the appropriate pedagogical and symbolic weapons that make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. Rethinking politics means creating a vocabulary that enables us to confront a sense of responsibility in the face of the unspeakable, and to do so with a sense of dignity, self-reflection and the courage to act in the service of a radical democracy. It also means providing the theoretical tools that enable people to connect private problems with wider social issues.

In the face of Trump’s brand of authoritarianism, progressives need a vocabulary that allows us to recognize ourselves as agents, not victims, in the discourse of a radical democratic politics. We need a politics that addresses systemic problems and refuses gangster capitalism’s insistence that all problems are personal, an exclusive matter of individual responsibility and privatized solutions. This is not to underplay how difficult it is to acknowledge any viable sense of the outrage and struggle in an age when the power of culture, new digital technologies, social media and mainstream cultural apparatuses seem almost overwhelming in their deleterious effects on shaping agency, desires, values and modes of identification. But rather than surrender to such forces, they need to be reworked in the interest of a set of collective and emancipatory modes of communication, social relations and forms of resistance.

At the same time it is crucial to remember that there is more at stake here than a struggle over meaning. There is also the struggle over power, over the need to create a formative culture that will produce new modes of critical agency and contribute to a broad social movement that can translate meaning into a fierce struggle for economic, political and social justice. Power is never entirely on the side of domination, and there are numerous examples of resistance cropping up all over the United States. Not only it is evident in youth movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Dreamers, but also middle-aged women in the red states fighting over what Judith Shulevitz calls “the big issues for the resistance [such as] health care and gerrymandering, followed by dark money in politics, education and the environment.”

Activists are also mobilizing over immigrant rights, mass incarceration, police violence, abolishing nuclear weapons and environmental justice, among other issues. Facing the challenge of fascism will not be easy, but Americans are marching, protesting and organizing in record-breaking numbers. Hopefully, mass indignation will evolve into a worldwide movement whose power will be on the side of justice rather than impunity, bridges rather than walls, dignity rather than disrespect, and kindness rather than cruelty. What is crucial is that these discrete movements come together under a larger political and social formation in order to develop alliances capable of developing into a democratic socialist party, one willing to make resistance a necessity rather than not an option.

This world is one great battlefield,
With forces all arrayed;
If in my heart I do not yield,
I’ll overcome some day.
—Charles A. Tindley, 1901

The vultures have started circling. In a sane world, legislation that adds $1.5 trillion to America’s debt ($20 trillion and rising by the second) would not be celebrated as “just what the country needs to get growing again.” Yet here we are.

The new U.S. tax plan is a scam—a corporate coup—that benefits a few rich and powerful Americans that make the most and want to pay the least. They are the owners of our country, the plutocrats and oligarchs that run this nation and tell politicians what to do, such as increase the military budget from $793.7 billion in 2017 to $824.6 billion in 2018. We, the 99 percent, are not in the club. Anyone who wants a fair and just society becomes an enemy of the state.

The story of income inequality in the United States is as old as the republic itself. But the latest tax-cut measure takes capitalist greed to a new level of inhumanity. The bill has the potential to destroy life for millions of working families, women, children, the sick, old and poor. That sound of doomsday you hear in the distance is not “ka-boom.” It’s “ka-ching.”

As George Carlin said “The owners know the truth. It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Well, America, we are long past due to wake up and stop being slaves to a system that does not care about the greater good. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are complicit and responsible for our unequal present and uncertain future. Neither has a path toward freedom and equality for all. The liberal vs. conservative paradigm is a dirty trick, meant to divide the American people and maintain the illusion of democracy while neoliberal oligarchs and corporatists have looted the public for the past 30 years without conscience or consequence.

History offers a strange parallel to modern times. According to NPR, in 1933, with the U.S. facing a financial crisis that threatened the monetary system, a group of right-wing financiers plotted to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt and create a fascist military government. They reportedly recruited Smedley Butler, a retired Marine general, to lead the coup, which was known as the Business Plot, or Wall Street Putsch. Butler, the epitome of a soldier and veteran, “saw it as treason, and he reported it to Congress,” said Sally Denton, who wrote a book on the conspiracy called “The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right.” While the conspirators denied the plot and the media dismissed it as a “gigantic hoax,” Butler testified under oath before a special House Un-American Activities Committee (the McCormack-Dickstein special committee). His account was confirmed in a final committee report, though no one was ever prosecuted.

Before Christmas will be the culmination of America’s imperial robbery—one last score before the owners retire. This means war, the declining empire against the rest of us, and war is a racket. A few profit. Many suffer. In 1935, Butler wrote a book on the subject and explained how to end the racket:

1. Take the profit out of war.

2. Let youths who would bear arms decide whether there should be war.

3. Limit military forces to home defense purposes.

Butler added:

The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the [nation’s] manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation — it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages—all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers—yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders—everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!

Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.

Why shouldn’t they?

They aren’t running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren’t sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren’t hungry. The soldiers are!

Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket—that and nothing else.

Of course, we haven’t followed Butler’s advice. Although the draft ended in 1973, the volunteer military became the new American segregation. The media, military, policymakers, political leaders and even the public propagate dangerous myths and platitudes that enable perpetual war. And now the empire has brought war home, to our doorsteps, with a corrupt, duplicitous tax bill that could leave many people hurting for years to come.

But it’s not too late to learn from Butler and smash the war racket. All Americans who oppose the tax bill need to act fast. The first step is reconciliation. Groups that have been fighting each other need to come together. People who experience oppression have to stop with the divisive identity politics, stand as one and accept that some pseudopopulist leaders, and most political leaders overall, in reality are false prophets and common enemies: the .1 percent and those who do their bidding. They don’t give a damn about anyone who is not in the club. All they care about is money and power. And they will do whatever is necessary to get—and keep—as much as they can of both.

Once the 99.9 percent recognizes we share the same enemy, we can mobilize a united front and perform consistent acts of civil disobedience. We can return to a grass-roots mentality of cooperation and revive the civil-rights, injustice-fighting spirit of the 1960s on a local, regional, state and national level. We can revive sit-ins, protests, strikes, marches and boycotts. We can shut down businesses and make corporations feel the pain in their bottom lines. We can disrupt the system and change the status quo. It may be our only hope.

Coordinating a massive civil disobedience movement will require leaders to step up. These leaders will need to rise from outside the mainstream, perhaps from underground resistance groups already in existence.

We are not just talking about reform. We need revolution. Be revolutionary. Only revolution makes reform durable. This will take courage, sacrifice and organization. Achieving economic justice won’t be easy. But a better future for future generations—ending the never-ending cycle of poverty and providing a path to financial survival—is possible if people muster the will to put aside their differences and fight for what is right together.

Start this Christmas, or whatever holiday you celebrate, and spend less money this season. Instead of buying tons of gifts from Amazon or another corporate store, support a mom-and-pop shop. Do something that doesn’t cost a thing: Write a poem, draw a picture, cook a meal. Give from the heart.

Start small. Stop buying that daily cup of coffee. Make your coffee at home. Give up fast food. Bring lunch from home. Tell a friend and family member to do the same. A handful of companies control all the world’s major brands. Organize a boycott of corporations that do harm.

Then, we can work on creating a stronger, democratic, economic system. Economist Richard Wolff advocates for worker cooperatives and democratic workplaces. He believes the solution for capitalism’s brutalities is easier than you think.

Whatever you do, get informed by trusted sources.

Don’t believe the lying spin doctors, political hucksters and fearmongers.

Don’t listen to the greedy thieves, warmongers and profiteers.

Stop following the misleaders and wolves in sheep’s clothing.

They are all bastards. And don’t let the bastards get you down.

With 90 percent of all media controlled by six corporations, finding trusted sources can be challenging. But the truth is out there. Make those media outlets your news sources. Get rid of all the other noise, misinformation and disinformation.

Read Wolff’s book, “Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism.” Visit his website, Democracy at Work.

Listen to Jimmy Dore. Read Chris Hedges, Black Agenda Report and Consortium News.

Be critical and skeptical. Provide alternatives. Don’t wait for someone else to develop the mass of people we need for change to come. Take the initiative. Be the change. Be a connector. Be an agitator for justice. Contest elections. Build mass movements. Elevate underrepresented voices.

Together, we can take the profit out of war and start a massive anti-war movement.

Do whatever good you can to help redeem America.

Start today.

“Insubordinate elites,” as the distinguished American foreign policy historian Alfred W. McCoy calls them, have long been a problem for the United States empire. They privilege their own personal interests and/or concept of serving their own nations above fealty to the United States, its allies and the Western-based multinational corporate and financial interests that reign behind the shield of U.S. power.

Over the years, these disobedient foreign leaders have come in different forms. Some have been men of the socialist, populist and nationalist left—actors like Mohammad Mossadeq (Iraq), Jacobo Arbenz (Guatemala), Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Fidel Castro (Cuba), Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Sukarno (Indonesia), Salvador Allende (Chile), Michael Manley (Jamaica), Maurice Bishop (Grenada), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua) and Hugo Chavez (Venezuela). Washington has responded to the defiance of these and other “left” Third World and “developing nation” actors with assassinations, assassination attempts, coups, coup attempts, invasions, counterinsurgency campaigns, espionage, propaganda and the cultivation of political and military opposition and influence within the noncompliant states.

But you don’t have to be on the anti-imperial left to become what the U.S. ruling-class and imperial establishment considers an insubordinate elite and get put on Washington’s shit and target lists. The South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem was considered Washington’s man in Saigon until his refusal to roll back corruption and make any concessions to reform turned him into an embarrassing obstacle to U.S. control. The John F. Kennedy administration approved a CIA-assisted coup that murdered Diem and his powerful brother.

Panama’s dictator Manuel Noriega was on the CIA payroll during most of the 1980s. After he stole yet another election in 1989, however, he faced withering criticism from Washington and the U.S. media. “In the interim,” Noam Chomsky observed five years later, “Noriega had shown improper signs of independence, offending the master by lack of sufficient enthusiasm for Washington’s terrorist war against Nicaragua and in other ways.” The U.S. invaded Panama, killing thousands and taking Noriega away to rot in a federal prison.

For those of you looking for a legal avenue to cut short the tenure of the 45th president of the United States—our very own real-life madman in the high tower—I have some good news, and some bad.

Starting with the upside, your ranks are growing. According to a Public Policy Polling survey conducted in late September, 48 percent of American voters want Trump impeached. A Harvard-Harris Poll conducted a month earlier pegged support for impeachment at 43 percent.

You can also take comfort in the fact that you’re right to regard Trump as a unique threat to democratic values and institutions, not to mention world peace. From his almost-daily diatribes against the “fake news” media to his Twitter taunting of Kim Jong Un, he’s proved as much over the past nine months.

Although I’m about to drop some bad news as well, let me add first that I’m with you. I have been a “never Trumper” ever since the trash-talking real estate mogul descended an escalator at his midtown Manhattan headquarters in June 2015, with a vacuous-looking Melania by his side, to announce his bid for the presidency, pledge to “make America great again” and denounce undocumented Mexican migrants as criminals, rapists and purveyors of drugs.

Throughout the long and bizarre campaign that followed, I warned in multiple Truthdig pieces of the grave dangers a Trump presidency would pose in such areas of law and policy as freedom of the press, birthright citizenship, immigration enforcement and travel bans, climate change, abortion rights and future appointments to the Supreme Court.

I also was among the first to sound the alarm about Trump’s emotional stability, in a column titled “The Psychopathology of Donald Trump,” published in July 2016. The subject is now the focus of a best-selling book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” featuring essays written by 27 distinguished mental health experts.

Since the election, rather than mourn the defeat of Hillary Clinton, I’ve looked ahead, not back. Eyes fixed on Trump, I’ve explored the actual prospects for impeaching the president, as well as indicting him for obstruction of justice, stemming from the firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

But now for the downside: There is no quick legal fix for removing Trump. As long as the GOP controls Congress, impeachment remains a long shot, as it requires a majority vote in the House in favor of articles of impeachment and a two-thirds vote in the Senate to obtain a conviction and removal from office. Two House Democrats—Al Green of Texas and Brad Sherman of California—have introduced impeachment resolutions, but at present they’re going nowhere.

And while Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the election and the dismissal of Comey may result in the prosecution of such former Trump associates as Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and even Donnie Jr., it’s premature to think that the president will find himself in the crosshairs of a grand jury any time soon. Although the issue remains unsettled, the weight of scholarly opinion is that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

The same, unfortunately, holds true for invoking the 25th Amendment—the latest deus ex machina championed by leading Democrats as a means for sacking Trump. If anything, the amendment is a more implausible vehicle than impeachment.

Ratified in 1967, the 25th Amendment was crafted in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy to clear up ambiguities and fill gaps in the Constitution’s original provisions on presidential succession.

The Constitution, as it emerged from the founding convention of 1787, addressed the issue of succession in Article II, Section I, which stipulates:

In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the case of removal, death, resignation, or inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what officer shall then act as President and such officer shall then act as President and such officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed or a President shall be elected.

The rule of vice-presidential succession was restated by the 12th Amendment, which dealt primarily with the Electoral College and was ratified in 1804. The 20th Amendment, ratified in 1933, offered more clarification, stating that if the president-elect dies before being sworn into office, the vice president would be sworn in instead.

However, not until 1947, with the passage of the Presidential Succession Act, did the current line of succession take shape, extending from the vice president through the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, the secretary of state, and then to other Cabinet officials.

Still, questions about succession remained—among them, how to define a president’s inability to serve, particularly when the inability is mental or emotional in nature. Who gets to make the determination that such an inability exists? And can the president resist efforts to have himself declared unable to serve?

This is where Section 4 of the 25th Amendment comes into play in the debate over Trump’s mental fitness to hold the most powerful office in the land. The first paragraph of Section 4 advises:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments [the Cabinet] or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

The second and final paragraph of Section 4 instructs, in so many words, that the president can attempt to override a declaration of inability by notifying the Senate and House leadership that no such inability exists. Thereafter, the vice president, with the support of a majority of the Cabinet, or “the other body” referred to in the first paragraph, can contest the president’s override. To resolve the conflict and place the vice president in charge, a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress is required to confirm that the president, in fact, is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

The procedures outlined in Section 4 have never been invoked, and it is unlikely that they will be used against Trump. The amendment simply contains too many moving parts and depends on too many external contingencies to make it a viable option.

First and foremost, only the most cockeyed optimists could believe that Vice President Mike Pence would lead what would amount to a de facto palace coup against Trump by initiating the procedures outlined in Section 4. Nor, as an aside, would the nation be better off by having Pence—a religious fanatic—take charge of the federal government.

Second, it is doubtful that Congress, acting without Pence, would enact legislation creating another body that would make a finding of presidential incapacity. To be sure, two bills are pending in the House to do just that. Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin introduced one to establish an oversight commission on presidential capacity, staffed largely by physicians and psychiatrists. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., authored the other bill, which would create an oversight body composed of all former living presidents and vice presidents.

Neither measure, however, has shown any sign of progressing to a committee hearing. Even assuming, improbably, that either could win approval by both the Senate and the House and become law, they would have to be passed by a two-thirds supermajority in each chamber to withstand an inevitable presidential veto.

This does not mean, however, that it is pointless to agitate for impeachment or call for the removal of Trump via the 25th Amendment, or that it is a waste of time to discuss the possibility that Mueller and his colleagues will conclude they can prove an obstruction case against the president. Rather, it means that progressives and never-Trumpers should view the avenues for creating an early Trump exit not just as ends in themselves, but as organizing tools that can draw increasing numbers of Americans into a wider political effort to build a new progressive movement aimed at sweeping the GOP (and eventually, center-right Democrats) from power.

In the final analysis, and most importantly, dumping Trump and ensuring that no one like him ever accedes to the presidency again will require the promotion of an alternative to oligarchic corporate capitalism. As I have written in this column before:

Every major movement of social and political transformation, in addition to championing specific short-term reforms, has been animated by higher principles promising both solidarity and liberation. The American Revolution was moved by the demand for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The French version was driven by the ideals of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” The civil rights movement was propelled by Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream” of racial harmony and justice. Even Obama’s 2008 presidential run was keyed by a single word of inspiration: “Hope.”

What, then, in this critical hour, is our shared vision of the future? I don’t pretend to have the answers, except to say that in the broadest terms it will be communitarian, diverse, inclusive, respectful of democratic institutions and the environment, and welcoming toward individual freedoms. It will not, if it is to succeed, call for a restoration of the hierarchical neoliberalism of the recent past.

The outcome is uncertain, which only makes the undertaking all the more necessary.