Political Theater to Promote Oligarchy

Is Promoting Oligarchy the Real Goal? 

What if promoting oligarchy is Trump's real goal, and his other policies are just political theater that he uses to build and maintain his power? I have said in past posts that Trump’s populism is fake and that his real goal is promoting an oligarchy in order to reduce taxes and reduce regulation of business. He works primarily to strengthen the control of our country by the rich. 

However, Trump does many things that do not appear to have any relation to his desire to build an oligarchy. What is the point of those actions? Perhaps, they are theatrical performances designed to keep his MAGA voters happy and to justify limiting freedom of speech and of the press.  

Keeping the MAGA voters happy is important to Mr. Trump because his power depends on them, but he does not want to do anything of real substance for them that might damage the interests of his oligarchic supporters. He solves this problem by doing dramatic things that the MAGA folks love, and he thereby strengthens his hold on power. Thus, the actions that appear to be unrelated to the promotion of oligarchy are in fact important parts of the drive toward it.

A Performative Effort to Deport Immigrants

Consider for example his program of arresting and deporting undocumented immigrants. In another post on this blog, I showed that the methods he is using will not allow him to deport more than a small fraction of our undocumented immigrants, and I warned that we should expect him to resort to methods that are more violent and oppressive. 

But what if the point is not really to deport the immigrants at all but instead only to give the impression that he is deporting them and to promote protests that will justify the use of troops on American streets? Millions of MAGA voters voted for Trump because he promised to rid the country of undocumented immigrants. To maintain the loyalty of those voters, he must have a deportation program. On the other hand, some of the profits earned by his oligarchic supporters depend on the labor of undocumented immigrants. How can he please both groups in his coalition? 

He can do so by having a theatrical but limited program of deportation. He appears to be very tough on immigrants, but he actually deports only a small fraction of them. Thus, he keeps both his MAGA supporters and his oligarchic supporters happy. 

In addition, his theatrical use of masked thugs outrages his opponents and promotes resistance that justifies the restriction of freedom of speech along with use of military forces in places like Chicago or Los Angeles. Thus, the oligarchy is strengthened while relatively few immigrants are deported. All of Trump's supporters are pleased, and the oligarchy is strengthened.

We saw a great example of a performative raid recently in New York. According to the New York Times, 

More than 50 federal agents fanned out in the heart of Lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, brushing past confused tourists and pedestrians to detain several men near Canal Street and quickly drawing dozens of protesters to the streets.

The article went on to say, 

The operation appeared to lead to at least four detentions, according to witnesses, with the sight of dozens of masked agents descending on the edge of TriBeCa making for a visible display of force by the Trump administration in the streets of Manhattan.

Yes, it took 50 agents to arrest four people! This does not look like a part of a real attempt to deport our millions of undocumented immigrants. It looks more like a public display of force designed to make our president look tough in order to please his MAGA voters.

Sinking Boats in the Caribbean

Consider also his recent program of sinking Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean Sea. He says that the reason he is doing it is to combat what he calls narco-terrorists and to stop the flow into our country of the drugs that are killing Americans. However, that explanation does not really make sense. The drugs that are killing Americans are mainly methamphetamines that do not come from Venezuela. They are manufactured in Mexico, which means that his actions cannot achieve what he says he wants to achieve.

On the other hand, if his real goal is to give the impression of fighting the drug trade, to please the MAGA folks and to provide a smoke screen for his oligarchic program, his theatrical and flamboyant actions in the Caribbean make sense. They strengthen his contention that we are in a state of national emergency that justifies his use of troops on American streets as well as his limiting freedom of speech.

Peace-Making as Theater

Then there is the cease fire that he managed to arrange in Gaza. He and his supporters claim that he has brought peace to the Middle East, but anyone who knows a little of the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians can see that is nonsense.  At best, he has brought about a brief pause in the conflict. However, his action in the Middle East works well as political theater. His MAGA supporters are thrilled, and members of the oligarchy may get opportunities to make profitable real estate investments in Gaza. Thus, Trump's drive toward oligarchy is strengthened.

Theater as a Political Tool

Mr. Trump is a master of the use of theater as a political tool. It has allowed him to hold together his fragile coalition of the business Republicans and the MAGA Republicans. He has also used theater very effectively to trap American liberals into protesting against his theatrical presentations instead of protesting against his efforts to help the rich and entrench an oligarchy. Fortunately, the current budget fight gives liberals a chance to focus their efforts on preserving affordable healthcare, which is something that really matters to millions of American voters. Let's keep our eyes on the ball.

Taking Back Our Country: the Next Steps

The Next Step

The No Kings rallies across the country were inspiring, and if you attended one as I did, you probably feel energized and ready to do what you can to take back our country. At the same time, you may wonder what you can do. Can you really make a difference and if so, how? The answer is a definite and unequivocal “Yes!” You can make difference, and the time to do it is coming up fast!

Elections Are Coming Up Soon

The Grifter in Chief's ability to do the awful things that he does depends on his control of both houses of Congress, and that control rests on razor-thin majorities. According to an article written in January of this year,

 If all members of the House are present and voting, and if the Democratic minority is unified, then Republicans can afford to lose two defectors and still win an otherwise party-line vote, 218-217. 

There are elections coming up in 2026, and if the Democrats can flip only 3 of the Republicans’ 220 seats, the Democrats may gain control of the House. It is likely that this will happen. Historically, the president’s party almost always loses congressional seats in midterm elections. In addition, Trump’s tariffs and his immigration policies have caused considerable harm to farmers and rural businesses and have upset a lot of people. Finally, there are many swing districts. So, winning a few seats for Democrats is very do-able, but it won’t happen unless Democrats work to make it happen.

What You Can Do

Here is what you should do:

• Go on line and learn all you can about Democrats who are running to unseat Republican representatives.
• Pick a few candidates whom you want to support. Go to their websites and donate money to their campaigns. Give what you can. Even small gifts can make a big difference.  Think of AOC’s trademark requests for $3 donations.
• Go the office of the Democratic Party in your county and offer to volunteer to help. There is work to do in the office; there are envelopes to stuff; there are phone calls to make; there is canvassing to do.
• Visit the website of at least one candidate who is running in your home district or a nearby district.  Donate money to his/her campaign. Offer to volunteer.
• Spread the word. Help to build a movement.
• Share this blog post on your favorite social media to spread the word to as many people as possible.
• Email or text a link to this blog post to your friends.
• If you live in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, where I live, you should attend a meeting on October 28 at the office of the local Democratic Party to learn more about how you can help. Details about the meeting are available on the WisDems website.

Act Now

Don’t sit and fret. Do some of the things listed here. Act now! You have an opportunity make a real difference, and you should not miss that opportunity. We can take back our country. Let’s get busy!

Using the Constitution to Frame Progressive Values and Political Proposals

Reclaiming the Constitution For Social Justice

A few weeks ago, in a post on this blog, I said that we who work for social justice in the United States should use basic long-standing, America values to frame our goals. In this post, I want to go further and say that we should root our values explicitly in our country's Constitution. Struggles for social justice in the United States have always been struggles over the meaning of our Constitution. Americans have argued about what the Constitution permits our government to do, and more importantly, they have argued about what the Constitution requires our government to do. In recent decades, we progressives have forgotten how to use the Constitution to argue for social justice, but The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution by Fishkin and Forbath tells us how to reclaim that knowledge and how to use it in the political battles of our time.

Fishkin and Forbath show us that the Constitution is not merely – as most liberals now see it - a set of limits on the powers of government. The Constitution also sets out affirmative duties for the Federal Government and especially for its elected branches. The big conflicts of the past including those of the Populist era or those of the New Deal were seen by the people of those times as conflicts over the meaning of the Constitution and were fought out on those grounds in the political arena and not just in the courts.

We must reclaim the tradition of framing political goals like universal healthcare or affordable childcare in terms of values that are rooted in an interpretation of the affirmative duties of the federal government and especially of Congress. We should claim that the policies we recommend ought to be supported by all patriotic Americans because those policies flow from and are required by the basic principles of our Constitution. There are two approaches that we can use: the textual approach and the structural approach.

The Textual Approach to Framing Policy Proposals

The textual approach consists of interpreting the text of the Constitution in a way that stresses underlying values. The affirmative duties of the Federal Government come from several sources. First, the Constitution’s Preamble tells us that it was established in order to “…promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” The powers enumerated in the body of the Constitution should thus be interpreted in a way that is consistent with its purpose of promoting the general welfare. For example, Congress might establish a national healthcare system on the grounds that it promotes the general welfare. 

The Preamble is not the only source of affirmative duties. Section 4 of Article IV says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government ….” This clearly means that Congress has a duty to make sure through appropriate legislation that no state turns its democratic government into an oligarchy through restrictions on voting rights or through corruption.  But Congress's duty may extend much farther. For example, Congress may have a duty to prevent our current administration from using the threat of invasion to bypass a state's democratic procedures and guarantees.

The Structural Approach to Framing Policy Proposals

The structural approach relies on the idea that the democratic political system established by our Constitution can survive only if certain structural conditions are met. The founders of our republic believed that democracy requires a broad, stable and secure middle class and an economy that gives members of the middle class opportunities to improve their condition. The founders also believed that democracy is incompatible with the concentration of wealth in an oligarchy that can use its wealth to control the legislative process and generally to subvert democracy. 

Throughout American history, progressive reformers have argued that for these reasons, Congress has a duty to enact legislation to prevent the rise of an oligarchy and to provide security and opportunity to the middle class. The protection of voting rights and campaign finance reform may obviously be justified in this way, but Congress’s responsibility to maintain a broad middle class and to prevent the rise of an oligarchy could also provide a basis for enacting a wealth tax or for expanding Social Security. 

The same logic may be used as a part of the justification for a national healthcare system. Today, healthcare emergencies are the most common cause of personal bankruptcies in the United States, and even in the absence of bankruptcies, the cost of health insurance weighs heavily on our middle class and limits the ability of middle-class people to take advantage of opportunities to get ahead. Thus, the lack of a national healthcare system threatens the structural foundations of our political system, and therefore, our government must provide a national healthcare system in order to preserve the structural conditions without which the democratic political system established by our Constitution cannot survive.

The Constitution and Inclusion

Both the textual and the structural approaches may be used to support policies of inclusion. The general welfare should be seen to include the welfare of women and of racial and religious minorities, and we must see that if oligarchy is incompatible with democracy, an oligarchy of white men is unacceptable.

American Patriots Should Join Us

Thus, progressive values and progressive social and economic policies may be linked explicitly to the affirmative duties placed on Congress and the President by the Constitution. That is the way that fights for social justice were conducted in the Progressive Era and in the New Deal Era, and we can use the Constitution in today’s fights, too. If we do that, we will strengthen the appeal of our demands, and we will be able to say that supporters of our Constitution and all patriotic Americans should join us in making those demands.

What Should Americans Learn From the Holocaust?

 What Can We Learn?

The Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered by the Germans between 1932 and 1945 is one of history’s great crimes, but what can it teach us? What can we learn from it that we can apply to our own country?

Ordinary People Can Do Great Evil 

One lesson we can learn is that ordinary people will do awful things to protect themselves and their families and to advance their careers. Most of the officials who carried out the Holocaust were not ideologically committed Nazis. They did not hate the Jews enough to kill them. The perpetrators of the Holocaust were just soldiers or civil servants who followed orders. That does not absolve them from responsibility, but it helps us to see that as individuals they were not all monsters. They were mostly people who were trying to pursue their own interests in an evil system.

Today, in the United States, we can see a similar process at work. The masked ICE thugs who sweep people up off the streets of American cities are probably not exceptionally cruel or brutal individuals, but ICE offers them a chance to advance their careers and to provide for their families. When they find themselves on a street in Los Angeles or Chicago, they do what the German soldiers did. They cooperate with the orders of their commanders, and they help their comrades to carry out the task they have been assigned. They follow orders. Our people are not different from the Germans. Ordinary Americans caught up in an evil system are capable of doing awful things.

Great Evil Develops Gradually 

Another lesson that we can draw from the Holocaust is that that extreme evil develops gradually. Over time, people come to support more and more extreme policies of violence. When Hitler was elected in 1932, most of his supporters probably did not envision the violence of 1938’s Kristalnacht when synagogues all over Germany were attacked. Those who participated in those attacks cannot all have envisioned the murders of tens of thousands of Jews in Poland, Ukraine and Russia by the Einsatzgruppen after 1939, and even most members of the Einsatzgruppen did not foresee the deadly efficiency of the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem as carried out from 1942-45. Those who voted for Hitler in 1932 certainly did not foresee Auschwitz, Treblinka or Sobibor.

We should apply this lesson to the violence currently being perpetrated by ICE in the United States.  ICE started out by arresting people at the border who had crossed into the United States illegally. They then progressed to conducting street raids using masked gangs of agents in cities far from the border. Then the masked gangs started to raid workplaces. A recent raid on a construction site in Georgia netted hundreds of people. Then, a few days ago, a masked gang of Border Patrol agents conducted a raid at night on an apartment building in Chicago. According to Time magazine,

At around 1 a.m. on Tuesday morning, armed federal agents rappelled from helicopters onto the roof of a five-storey residential apartment in the South Shore of Chicago. The agents worked their way through the building, kicking down doors and throwing flash bang grenades, rounding up adults and screaming children alike, detaining them in zip-ties and arresting dozens, according to witnesses and local reporting.

This raid was a textbook example of the unreasonable searches and seizures that are banned by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Apparently, the raid was conducted without a warrant. Our government is using a claim that national security is endangered and that therefore, the president may take such extraordinary steps to protect the country. However, the claim has never been substantiated, and it appears to be no more than a pretext to ignore the Constitution. 

We Should Expect an Escalation of Violence

We should expect that, unless the national security claim is rejected by the Supreme Court, the use of unconstitutional violence will grow because the method that Trump is currently using to arrest and deport immigrants is far too slow and requires far too much manpower. He cannot achieve his goal by using the method he is now using. He will have to escalate to more extreme methods just as the Nazis did.

The gradual escalation of violence leading to the death camps of the Final Solution came about because eliminating millions of people is not easy. Shooting people - even in fairly large groups - is much too slow and requires far too much manpower. So, the Nazis invented an efficient industrial solution: Jews were shipped to the death camps by trainloads, and they were gassed and cremated when they arrived.

Trump's program of deporting undocumented immigrants faces the same problem that the Nazis faced. He cannot achieve his goal of deporting all of our undocumented immigrants by the end of his term using the method he is currently using. There are estimated to be at least ten million undocumented immigrants in the United States. How can so many people be arrested and deported? Can the president's current method achieve his goal? A little arithmetic will show that the current method cannot succeed.

The raid in Chicago mentioned above netted 37 people, and some of those were American citizens who had to be released. If the raid netted 30 candidates for deportation, how many such raids would be needed to deport all of our undocumented immigrants?

If we divide our 10 million undocumented immigrants by 30 (the number netted in the raid), we will see that at least 333,000 such raids would be required to arrest and deport all of our undocumented immigrants. However, Trump will continue as president for only a little more than three years - let us say 1200 days - and if ten such raids were conducted every day, he would have carried out only 12,000 raids by the end of his term, and he would have arrested only about 360,000 immigrants. Even if we doubled that number to 720,000, he would still have deported less than 10 percent of the undocumented immigrants in the United States. 

Clearly, he will have to find a more efficient solution to his problem. He will have to resort to more egregious violations of our constitutional rights, and he will have to use more extreme violence to achieve his goal. His policy of replacing officials who question his methods with people who are loyal to him is designed to facilitate his use of ever more extreme methods, and he will find as the Nazis did that plenty of good people trying to advance their careers will be available to carry out his program. We cannot allow that to happen.

We must resist!