The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald T

In the “developed world”, the neo-liberal bourgeoisie ruled without much opposition from the late 1970s to the financial crash a dozen years ago. That rule was possible because strong economic growth – largely due to the digital revolution – allowed enough trickle down of wealth to content the working classes. And it was assisted by electronic propaganda swamping people’s minds. A new mass medium has a stunning effect (see Marshal McLuhan), and that was the case with video images, especially when they achieved credible colour and definition at about that time. The fantasy of ever more wealth for everyone wavered at the turn of the century, and barely avoided total collapse in 2008/9. Since then it has been proven a downright lie, with wage stagnation/regression and huge accumulation for the richest minority out there for all to see. The banking crash of 2008/9 should have been a golden opportunity for the opposition to impose a redistribution of wealth. But all that came out of it was a middle-of-the-road sham wholly preoccupied by the rescue of his big money friends/donators. Meanwhile millions of people were losing their jobs, their homes and often everything they owned.

Tyranny creeps in when the opposition fails in its task of bringing equal opportunity and the free choice that goes with it. Time and again they have wasted occasions, when the system was cracking everywhere and, instead of giving it a final kick, they did all they could to bolster it up until a strong man came along and blew them all away. It is the opposition’s incapacity to fulfil the popular demand for more equality and freedom, or even to recognise those demands, that makes the people place their hopes on the crudest, loudest demagogue on offer. They are tired of intellectual trickeries and of promises not held, and end up falling for the bluff of the highest bidder. By this time next year, the world will know if it was already too late to turn back the steamroller of oppression. After all, Louis Bonaparte was elected before staging his coup. And there are hundreds of thousands of combat troops that have been training to fight civilians for quite a while, alongside foreign and local mercenaries. They may finally be brought home as promised, in a sort of blowback. It seems as though 2020 will be a crucial year in the annals, and not just because of its slick numbers.

The 18^th Brumaire corresponds to November the 9^th