Billionaire Capitalism is inimical to democracy, so scenes like the storming of the Capitol—and worse—will continue until Billionaire Capitalism is defeated as a political movement.
This isn’t about Trump. Mitch McConnell says he is devoted to the Constitution and free elections, but he’s either dissembling or suffering from cognitive dissonance; it wasn’t that long ago that he threatened to dismiss impeachment charges against Trump without debate or calling witnesses, on a simple voice vote! This was clearly contrary to the “original intent” of the Founders.
Furthermore, McConnell never opposed Trump’s false claims of electoral fraud or his efforts to undermine democracy until he himself was put in the position of voting for an absurdity: to reject certified election results from the states, results that had been exhaustively litigated in the courts. McConnell’s policy is to relentlessly undermine democracy while appearing to be a Constitutional purist—much like Alito or Thomas. The semblance and outward forms of democracy must remain, but Billionaire Capitalism must win nearly every election.
Remember, it’s been clear for four long years that Trump would never accept election results that went against him, and yet when Trump was impeached for abuse of power, McConnell was outraged. If Moscow Mitch had really cared about the integrity of the 2020 election, he would have gotten rid of Trump when he had the chance, and voted to convict him.
But maybe McConnell suffers from cognitive dissonance; maybe he thinks that billionaires can continually grow richer and more powerful while the Constitution still guides our politics. But as Woodrow Wilson said, “if there are men big enough to own the US government, they will own it.”
You might think that the storming of the Capitol was too stupid to flow out of an otherwise successful political movement like Billionaire Capitalism. Surely they must be smarter than that? But it was no more stupid than the Beer Hall Putsch, and the Nazis went on to destroy much of the world despite that fiasco.
More to the point, the limitations of Billionaire Capitalism are the limitations of billionaire socialization. Billionaires are not socialized to deal with any sort of resistance from others, and since they have no political principles (other than increasing their own wealth and power) they are profoundly clueless when dealing with people who do.
Having surrounded themselves with sycophants, people with healthy self-esteem seem like monsters to them.
In many areas of life, billionaires are profoundly clueless. When Trump disinvited the Golden State Warriors from the White House and singled out Stephen Curry as the cause, of course other NBA players pushed back on Twitter. Most memorably, LeBron James addressed Trump as “U bum.”
But what did Trump expect? Quite simply, he expected no resistance, because when billionaires humiliate people their victims almost never strike back. Likewise, when Trump incited the mob to storm the Capitol, he assumed—without thinking too deeply about it—that Congress would be too frightened or disorganized to complete the vote, that the storming of the Capitol would be as decisive as the storming of the Winter Palace, or the Bastille.
But of course the Winter Palace and the Bastille represented thoroughly discredited regimes, while American democracy retains credibility, to the extent that even those who attack it claim to be defending it.
Only when we think carefully about billionaire socialization do we see how catastrophic Billionaire Capitalism is and will be for civilization and the well-being of our people. The ultra-rich rarely deal directly with difficult truths, and so their reality principle is in shreds; if they want something, ordinarily it just happens. This socialization cannot prepare people to govern.
If Billionaire Capitalism triumphs, we will lurch from disaster to disaster, with a collapsing climate and plunging life expectancy. This will be due to their absolute incompetence as much as their profound indifference to human life.
An immediate example being Trump’s response to COVID-19. How many more such botched emergencies before America finally collapses?
The Socialist Investor 