Interesting article in the magazine Dissent, “Trump’s Antisocial State” by Melinda Cooper. In it, Ms. Cooper looks at the ways Trump and his minions are transforming the American government and comes to some distressing conclusions.
As everyone knows, or should know, the government of the mid-twentieth century (after FDR) at least tried to make things a bit better for the average American. It was redistributive, meaning it took a small percentage of the wealth of the very rich and injected that back into the society as a whole.
But, at the end of the twentieth century, a new generation of “libertarian” populists and conservatives reversed that, and we saw instead a system installed by which money was taken from the middle and working classes and transferred to the vastly wealthy.
Cooper argues that we are in the next phase of that process. Now, the systems and institutions that were originally set up to protect American citizens and immigrants have themselves been reversed. In the American Government v.2, those systems are meant to coerce and control the population, not keep it safe.
Thus we come to a new and fascinating phase in American history. This will be remembered as the age in which our guardians become, instead, our guards…and our nation a prison.
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