EXCELLENT! — Smothered by Riches: A History of the Powell Memo by Peter Coyote

This is an excellent, powerful, illuminating, and incredibly important documentary that I hope will be watched and shared widely. 

Smothered by Riches: A History of the Corporate Takeover That Came After the Powell Memo

Written by Peter Coyote and Steven Rosenfeld, and narrated by Peter Coyote. Edited by Camel Music by Greg Anton.

Smothered by Riches is a documentary. It's the story of a memo by U.S. President Richard Nixon that captured the attitudes of an establishment frightened of democracy, and was treated as a key blueprint by the ideologues and philanthropists determined to keep corporate power and elite interests on top.

Read Peter Coyote's written history of the Powell memo and its consequences, and help Smothered by Riches get seen by more people here: https://observatory.wiki/Smothered_by...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51KQNOy2Wpw.

* * * * *

It’s my belief that we are living in a time of the collapse of the American Empire. At the same time there is ever growing solidarity to birth a radically new nation. Certainly the crushing defeat of Andrew Cuomo by Zohran Mamdani — a Muslim progressive Democratic Socialist who stands courageously against the neoliberal status quo and for the actual needs of We the People and the planet, who isn’t in the pockets of any powerful wealthy interests, who would arrest Netanyahu if he steps foot in New York, etc., etc. — gives us a hopeful glimpse into the new world that is trying to be birthed.

What I witness is that there is a shadow side to our government and nation that stretches back decades. Trump is but a horrifying symptom of this long toxic process that has brought us to the precipice where we now find ourselves at.

Without diving deep into all of what has been in play related to the powerful moneyed interests that have taken over our political system and mainstream media, I don’t believe that there is any hope of finding our way out of the growing horrors upon us.

The genocide in Gaza, the dehumanization and deportations of immigrants, the endless wars, the burning of fossil fuels and obstruction of transitioning to renewables, the for profit healthcare system that leaves millions uninsured and dying, the prison industrial complex, the power of Wall Street and Dark Money, the millions who are homeless and living at or below the poverty level, the politicians and a mainstream media that act out of allegiance to AIPAC and other wealthy interests, the vast and ongoing criminal redistribution of wealth upwards, and on and on — all of this and more has continued regardless of which political party is in power.

Smothered by Riches illuminates all of this and more.

My deep dive into researching and seeking to understand the shadow side of my country began in the wake of 9-11. The horrors of that day have compelled me to embrace a profound commitment to truth — no matter where it led. There’s been so much that I did not know!

Today I personally also don’t believe that I can hope that our conservative sisters and brothers will look into the deep shadow side of the Republican Party if I am unwilling to do the same regarding the Democratic Party.

I also do not believe that radical changes and solutions will come into being as long as we remain in denial or unaware of the larger picture of the problem and the many layers and many decades that have brought us to where we are at today. Again, Trump is but a symptom of our collective long neglect of doing the shadow work that is essential for positive and urgently needed radical change.

Shadow work is incredibly disillusioning, painful, scary, and life changing. And yet my life would not have been so radically healed and transformed without my embracing and bringing to light my alcoholism and the many other symptoms of the deep ancestral and cultural trauma that I carried in my body.

And it is this deep dive into our collective shadow work as a nation that I believe is so incredibly needed. I love bell hooks and the wisdom she embodied when she illuminated this larger picture of what has impacted us all. She called it “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” This is what I believe needs to be seen, understood, and dismantled within our individual and collective psyche. It’s a much larger perspective that frees us from the polarization of democrats vs republicans.

So, yes, solidarity is absolutely essential. And what is it that we’re gathering in solidarity around? What are the values, the truths, the fierce love that we embody in our passionate solidarity?? 

Can it be to not just to get rid of Trump, but also to also dismantle the longstanding systems that have brought us into this fascist era, that have corrupted our political and media systems, that enable and fund the genocide in Gaza, that fuel endless wars and violence, that create excruciating poverty and suffering, that dehumanize and polarize and traumatize, and that have placed life on Earth on the brink of no longer sustaining a habitable planet due to the climate crisis? These are the thoughts and inquiries that I believe are so important for us to be asking ourselves.

It’s certainly a humbling experience and courageous lifelong process to do these deep dives into shadow work, both individually and collectively. There are so many layers to uncover. I feel so much compassion for us all. It is not easy to be human. And we need each other. We truly are all in this together.

Bless us all, no exceptions...

Molly

***

And deepest gratitude to Peter Coyote.

The Rise of Zohran Mamdani

I am so profoundly heartened by the rise of this courageous human being and the great solidarity that is building to bring about the radical changes in our nation that have been so urgently needed for so long! We also need to be acutely aware that the DNC will do everything in their power to subvert, sabotage, destroy anyone who threatens their neoliberal status quo — something that they have done repeatedly in the past and which helped ensure the rise of Trump. We must not buy the propaganda that corporate owned Democrats will inevitably spew. It has obviously already been happening regarding Zohran Mamdani. No matter the corruption of both major political parties, another world is possible — one that we must all work together to bring about! We are all in this together! — Molly

From Bernie to bodegas to Borough Hall: a ten-year organizing arc comes full circle.

By Waleed Shahid

On a cold February day in 2017, the gates came down on thousands of bodegas across New York City. Many were Yemeni-owned, family-run stores—places that almost never closed, not for a blizzard, not for a blackout, not even for Eid. But just this once, they did. The occasion was Donald Trump’s first Muslim ban. The owners shut their lights, locked their doors, and taped notes to the glass: “Closed in protest. Closed for dignity. Closed for America.”

That day, they gathered outside Brooklyn’s Borough Hall under a winter sky, praying in the cold and waving American flags. It looked like a protest, but it felt like something deeper. It was a collective act of defiance—and belonging. For years after 9/11, Arab and Muslim New Yorkers had lived under the long shadow of surveillance and suspicion, told to keep their heads down, stay quiet, and be grateful. The 2017 bodega strike broke that silence. Here were Muslim workers and small business owners—unapologetic, organized, and standing shoulder to shoulder—not asking for permission but asserting their place in the city they helped build. It wasn’t just about Trump’s ban. It was a rupture with the post-9/11 politics of fear. It marked the emergence of a new kind of Muslim American politics—rooted in solidarity, visible in public, and grounded in power, not just presence.

Few saw it for what it was. But that day was not only an end to hiding. It was the quiet beginning of a realignment that would take clearer shape years later, when New York Democrats chose Zohran Mamdani as their nominee for mayor.

New York City just got a huge step closer to electing its first Muslim mayor, its first South Asian mayor, and the first democratic socialist to lead a major American city since the Great Depression (the last was Milwaukee). But Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary isn’t just a series of firsts. It’s a break from the city’s entrenched political order. It’s a direct rebuke to the corporate-backed Democratic machine that propped up Andrew Cuomo’s comeback, despite his record of corruption and mismanagement, and a rejection of the kind of politics that prioritizes fear and donor appeasement over vision.

When Andrew Cuomo launched his comeback bid, the Democratic establishment seemed eager to pretend the last decade hadn’t happened. Cuomo ran as if it were still 2010, leaning on the same donors, repeating the same talking points, spending millions on television ads, and betting that a weary electorate would settle for the devil they knew.

But Mamdani saw something they didn’t. He recognized how much the ground had shifted. That shift began, in part, with the bodega strike in 2017. Some of the people who had organized or participated in that protest helped power his campaign. Others, who had been politicized by it or had been ignored since, joined his coalition. The memory of that moment—when immigrant communities stood up to say, “We belong here”—did not fade. It deepened. It matured.

Mamdani’s campaign grew from years of organizing, frustration, and grief, especially among young progressives, immigrants, and Arab and Muslim communities who had long been pushed to the party’s margins. He didn’t just run against Cuomo. He ran against the political amnesia that forgot the people who showed up when it mattered.

One of the biggest mistakes the Democratic Party establishment made was trying to smother their base’s outrage over US support for Israel's assault on Gaza. An outrage that felt like basic moral common sense. Mamdani gave it a voice. Without that, there’s no campaign. As a Bangladeshi Uber driver told me on election night: “Our entire community voted for Zohran. He’s for ordinary people. He’s for peace, not war. We don’t want more wars killing innocent people. We need help here in New York.” This voter, and countless others, heard Mamdani speaking not in the language of focus groups, but in the language of shared humanity and lived struggle. At a moment when the establishment flinched from even acknowledging the mass death in Gaza, Mamdani said plainly: solidarity is not a slogan. It’s a commitment. It means seeing Palestinians, not erasing them. It means listening to voters who are tired of being told their grief is too controversial to name.

Mamdani’s victory redrew the map of what’s possible in New York City politics. He didn’t win on the backs of white gentrifiers alone; he built a multiracial, cross-class coalition that reached from the brownstones of Park Slope in Brooklyn to the apartment towers of Jackson Heights in Queens. He ran up margins in progressive enclaves like Park Slope, East Village, and Cobble Hill, but also won working-class, immigrant-heavy neighborhoods across Queens and Brooklyn – Bangladeshi, Chinese, Latino, Arab, Indo-Caribbean. He was the highest performer in Queens among Latino and South Asian precincts and carried South Asian strongholds like Richmond Hill and Jackson Heights, and East Asian precincts like Sunset Park, Chinatown, and Flushing. Most strikingly, he flipped Oakland Gardens, a swing district in Queens that went from supporting Joe Biden in 2020 to Republican Lee Zeldin in the 2022 New York gubernatorial race to Trump last year, is majority Asian, and long seen as part of Cuomo’s base. Mamdani didn’t just activate the left; he broke into communities that conventional wisdom says don’t vote socialist. And he did it with a disciplined message on public goods and affordability, backed by a massive, relentless volunteer field operation.

The 2017 bodega strike was a turning point, but it wasn’t the last time immigrant New Yorkers reshaped the city by refusing invisibility. In 2021, a 45-day protest and hunger strike led by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance—composed largely of Muslim, South Asian, and Black drivers—forced the city to confront the medallion debt crisis it helped create. At the heart of the effort was Zohran Mamdani, then a freshman assemblymember, who didn’t just lend his voice but became an architect of the win. As the strike neared collapse, Mamdani and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer formed a rare coalition—grassroots urgency meeting institutional leverage. Schumer, whose father-in-law had been a cabbie, picked up the phone to pressure Mayor de Blasio directly. It worked. The city adopted nearly every element of the union’s debt relief plan. The result was something rare in modern politics: a coalition that turned protest into policy, and made a radical demand look like common sense.

Mamdani’s victory is not an isolated event – it’s the product of nearly a decade of sustained organizing that reshaped the political terrain in New York City. It began with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, which galvanized thousands, triggered explosive growth in the Democratic Socialists of America, and seeded a new generation of organizers who would go on to power campaigns across the city. Justice Democrats emerged from that wave, helping to elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 and Jamaal Bowman in 2020. At the same time, the Working Families Party and grassroots allies took on the Independent Democratic Conference, a coalition of Cuomo-backed Democrats who had empowered Republicans in Albany. Their successful ouster ​​showed the left could not only protest but also win.

By 2023, eight NYC-DSA–endorsed legislators held seats in the state legislature, forming the largest socialist caucus in New York in nearly a century. The group included Senators Julia Salazar, Jabari Brisport, and Kristen Gonzalez, and Assemblymembers Zohran Mamdani, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, Emily Gallagher, and Sarahana Shrestha. Alongside this rise in left electoral power, Bangladeshi and Muslim communities began building their own political infrastructure, culminating in Shahana Hanif’s groundbreaking win in 2021 as the first Muslim woman on the New York City Council. Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is the culmination of these efforts – a candidate forged in movement politics, buoyed by communities long pushed to the margins, and backed by an increasingly disciplined, electorally savvy grassroots left that has spent the past decade learning how to organize and win.

Solidarity across differences doesn’t happen by accident. Solidarity must be forged. It requires leadership, trust, and a willingness to step into uncomfortable terrain. The partnership between Mamdani and Brad Lander, the city’s progressive Jewish comptroller, was a conscious decision to reject the narratives that have long kept Muslim and Jewish communities politically estranged. In a climate where speaking out on Israel’s assault on Gaza is seen as a political risk, they stood side by side and said what too many others would not. Their alliance didn’t flatten their differences or ask either to compromise who they were. It demonstrated that a real coalition is not about agreement on everything – it’s about acting together with purpose, even when it’s hard. At a time when powerful interests insist that Muslims and Jews cannot share political space, Mamdani and Lander chose to prove otherwise. They showed that solidarity is not symbolic. It’s a practice, built through shared commitments, sustained by courage, and animated by a belief that politics can be more than fear management.

The same clarity and courage that defined Mamdani’s alliance with Lander also defined his campaign. He didn’t just model a different kind of politics – he ran on one. And his victory offers several practical lessons for how progressives can move from protest to power.

1. Know why you're running

Cuomo never made a case for himself beyond name recognition and experience. Voters couldn’t tell you what he’d actually do in office because he didn’t really care to tell them. Mamdani, by contrast, had a clear, repeatable agenda: freeze rents, make buses free, build publicly owned grocery stores. No jargon, no guesswork. He named those who were in the way – Cuomo’s billionaire donors, real estate PACs, and Trump-aligned backers – and laid out who he was fighting for. It wasn’t complicated. But it was grounded in his democratic socialist politics and searing critique of inequality. That’s what made it work.

2. Be who you are

Mamdani’s campaign felt like an indie breakout film, combining authenticity, democratic-socialist conviction, and pop-cultural fluency. He didn’t pretend to be a typical politician; instead, he presented himself candidly and humorously through TikToks and influencer collaborations, as well as platforms such as Gaydar and Subway Takes. Unlike the heavily staged approach of Kamala Harris in 2024, Mamdani’s integration of ideology and substantive policy with everyday culture built trust and genuine influence.

3. Be available

In the 19th century, political insiders used the word "available" instead of "electable" to describe a candidate who could bridge divides—someone open to different factions, ideologies, regions, and moments in time. It’s a richer term than electable because it emphasizes a candidate’s flexibility and usefulness to a coalition. Progressive campaigns often fall into the trap of rigidity, treating politics like a checklist rather than an invitation. Mamdani did the opposite, but mostly in tone and affect. He didn’t give up much of his core beliefs. He practiced availability, not just in showing up across neighborhoods, but in how he carried himself: open to disagreement, receptive to criticism, and genuinely curious about people who didn’t already agree with him. He didn’t demand ideological purity, even as he offered a clear political ask – support a rent freeze. It was, in effect, a litmus test, but it didn’t feel like one.

Framed through a charm offensive rather than a purity contest, Mamdani made his politics feel like common sense, not a checklist. He invited people in, not to agree with everything, but to agree on enough, and made them feel good about saying yes. He liked to quote Ed Koch: “If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree on all 12, see a psychiatrist.” It wasn’t just a good line. It reflected his whole approach: build coalitions through dialogue, not dogma.

4. Stay disciplined

Mamdani’s campaign avoided the classic traps that sink insurgents – overreach, overexposure, and endless side arguments. Even under heavy fire, from attacks on his economic agenda to smears over his stance on Israel, he stayed focused on the message: affordability, dignity, solidarity. He didn’t take the bait. He modulated some of the maximalist rhetoric from the activist left on economics, policing, and foreign policy. Instead of engaging in academic back-and-forths or overly defensive clarifications, he answered with clear, grounded language. That discipline denied his opponents easy headlines and made him look less like an activist and more like a mayor.

Substance Over Style.

Reducing it to “vibe” politics, a Cuomo collapse, or simply generational change erases what actually happened. Zohran Mamdani didn’t win on style alone, he won on substance. Rent freezes, free buses, public groceries, and a clear stand against billionaire politics and U.S. support for Gaza’s destruction. Journalists and Democratic pundits are right to identify this as a generational change election and right to note that voters are rejecting a tired political class that has overstayed its welcome. Mamdani’s campaign wasn’t cool for cool’s sake; it was cool because it told the truth, named power, and offered people a stake in something real.

Unfortunately, the DNC may see Mamdani’s win and think, “Ah yes, the secret was TikTok.” So now they’re workshopping a crypto-friendly, AI-generated meme about the “Opportunity Economy” set to a Lizzo song—sponsored by JPMorgan.

In 1935, at the end of NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's first year in office, the New York Times editorial board assessed him bluntly: “[He is] fond of toying with haphazard proposals that may be benevolent in intention but are dangerous or impossible in practice. He seems always to want to have in hand some socialistic plaything or other. Just now it is a municipal power plant.”

In a reflective moment in 1933, La Guardia lamented to the Times, "The worst part of the entire matter is that when anyone raises a question about the existing order, he is called either a reformer or a radical. It has been my lot to be called the latter. Why? Only because I have consistently objected to things which I believe unjust and dangerous." Such candor is rare among politicians, but La Guardia leaned into it. He owned the label of radicalism, famously declaring, "If fighting against existing evils is radical, I am content with the name."

Today, of course, La Guardia is remembered not as a dangerous radical but as perhaps the greatest mayor in American history, the archetype of bold and effective urban leadership. First, they call you radical. Then they name an airport after you.

The coalition that carried Mamdani to victory is the most politically significant aspect of his campaign. It brought together two forces that rarely align at scale: young Millennial and Gen Z voters, and working-class immigrant communities. Mamdani proved that a populist, common-sense agenda – rooted in material need and moral clarity – can win.

They remembered the bodegas. They remembered the prayers in the cold. They remembered what it felt like to be left out—and what it felt like to fight back. And this time, they didn’t just protest. They voted.

The question now is whether Mamdani’s coalition can govern. I think it can. And if it does, it might not just change New York. It might change what’s possible everywhere.

Please go here for the original article: https://open.substack.com/pub/waleedshahid/p/the-rise-of-zohran-mamdani?r=1ifxu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Is Zohran Mamdani Too Extreme? Or Just What NYC Needs?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

If fighting for housing, dignity, and a livable future is radical, then it’s way past time we all got a little more radical...

By Thom Hartmann

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life in New York City; I used to co-own a business in the early 1980s based in the Chelsea neighborhood. My best friend and business partner lived just around the block and I bought the fold-out couch for his living room that I’ve probably slept on cumulatively for two years or more over the past almost 50 years.

I remember Mayors John Lindsay, Abe Beame, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, and even Rudy Giuliani. New York has seen it all, mayor-wise, and survived it all.

So it’s particularly fascinating to see how right-wing pundits are panicking. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board is clutching its pearls. And New York billionaires worried about their taxes going up are pouring money into super PACs for this fall’s election faster than you can say “luxury high-rise tax abatement.”

Why? Because Zohran Mamdani — a Democratic Socialist running for mayor of New York City — is calling out the city’s oligarchy and offering a “radical” idea: maybe New York should work for everyone, not just the ultra-wealthy.

The billionaires and billionaire-owned media are calling him extreme, but let’s take a step back: is it really Mamdani who’s extreme? Or is it the status quo?

Let’s walk through their so-called “radical” accusations and see who’s really out of touch.

Is it too extreme to... freeze rents for working families?

Mamdani proposes a rent freeze for over 2 million tenants in rent-stabilized apartments. Right-wing critics cry: “That’s government overreach!”

But here’s the truth: Is it too extreme to stop pricing the poor and working class out of the city they built? Is it too extreme to say someone shouldn’t have to work 60 hours a week and still not be able to afford rent?

What is extreme is a city where landlords raise already profitable rents faster than wages, where gentrification becomes ethnic cleansing in slow motion. A rent freeze in New York City isn’t radical: it’s humane.

Is it too extreme to... make the subway and buses free?

They say free public transit is a pipe dream. But is it too extreme to believe that getting to work, school, or the doctor shouldn’t come with a toll? That a minimum-wage worker shouldn’t have to choose between a MetroCard and a meal? Particularly in a city where most residents don’t own a car?

Free transit means cleaner air, less traffic, more dignity. It’s what smart cities from Vienna to Tallinn already do. Public transit should be like the sidewalk, open to all, not just the privileged.

Is it too extreme to... raise the minimum wage to $30/hour?

Corporate media screams: “That will destroy businesses!” But what’s truly extreme is expecting a human being to survive in New York City on $15/hour while Jeff Bezos builds a $500 million yacht and billionaire high-rises grow like weeds across the cityscape.

Rising wages don’t destroy economies; they strengthen them. We’ve seen this repeatedly in cities like Seattle ($20.76/hour) and Portland ($16.30/hour), where minimum wage increases boosted economic vibrancy. It means fewer people in poverty, fewer families on public assistance, and more dollars flowing through neighborhood stores.

The real extremism is an economy that celebrates billionaires while criminalizing poverty.

Is it too extreme to... tax the rich to pay for child care and housing?

Mamdani wants to increase corporate taxes and tax millionaires to fund universal child care and build public housing. Wall Street calls it “socialism.” But let’s be honest: we already have socialism like Social Security and Medicare, but the truly massive socialist programs are reserved for the morbidly rich who typically pay less than 4% in income tax.

Is it too extreme to ask that Columbia University and NYU — who sit on billions in tax-free real estate — pay their fair share for CUNY students struggling to afford textbooks? Or is it more extreme to let billionaire’s hedge funds hide behind nonprofit status while the working class drowns in student debt?

Is it too extreme to... build public housing?

Right-wing think tanks say social housing is “anti-market.” But when the real estate market fails, who do they expect to fix it? When banksters like Stephen Mnuchin and others on Wall Street made off with billions in the housing crash of 2008, George W. Bush bailed them all out; not a single one went to jail (at least Reagan sent banksters — over 1,000 of them — to jail when they crashed his economy!).

Is it too extreme to build homes ordinary people can afford, or is it more extreme to let speculators sit on vacant luxury condos while 100,000 New Yorkers sleep in shelters?

Is it too extreme to... treat trans healthcare as healthcare?

Mamdani’s pledge of $65 million for gender-affirming care is derided as “woke politics.” But here’s the truth: denying someone healthcare because of their gender identity is extreme. Providing it is simply justice and respect for the privacy people should enjoy in their physician’s office making decisions together without interference from Republican politicians.

No one should have to flee their state or risk their life for basic medical care. If New York won’t be a sanctuary for the marginalized, what kind of city is it?

Is it too extreme to... rethink policing?

Mamdani proposes a Department of Community Safety, a model that emphasizes mental health, violence prevention, and de-escalation. It works great in Europe.

But the right calls that “soft on crime.” They’d rather keep funneling billions into broken and increasingly militarized policing than ask if it’s too extreme to treat addiction, poverty, and mental illness with compassion instead of a baton.

Is it too extreme to... believe New York belongs to everyone?

Zohran Mamdani’s critics would have you believe he’s a dangerous radical. But in reality, he’s doing something revolutionary in the years since the Reagan Revolution: he’s listening to working people.

He’s not promising empty hope: he’s offering a vision backed by data, economic modeling, and most importantly, moral clarity.

So let’s ask ourselves: Is Mamdani too extreme?

Or is he exactly the kind of “extreme” we need right now? And not just for New York City, but for the entire nation?

Because if fighting for housing, dignity, and a livable future is radical, then it’s way past time we all got a lot more radical.

Please go here for the original article: https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-zohran-mamdani-too-extreme-or-b3c

Something That Touches My Heart From an Immigrant Friend...

Photos by Molly

Look. It’s awful.

A lot of us expected this and had been warning about these escalations for years.

The problem is bipartisan and is deeper than just Trump.

We are living in an era of dehumanization and cruelty both domestically and in our imperialist foreign policy.

But don’t overreact today.

No need to have all the answers today.

No one does.

Don’t spiral.

Despair never helps.

Pause. Take stock of what you love. Do what you love. Be with those you love.

Center.

Breathe.

This love will be all the fuel you need for the coming fight.

***

Chris Hedges: The Rule of Idiots

Puppet Theater of the Absurd - by Mr. Fish

In the last days of all empires the idiots take over. They mirror the collective stupidity of a civilization that has detached itself from reality.

By  Chris Hedges

The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.

Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two million lives and revolution brewed in the streets.

In “Hitler and the Germans,” the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures,” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist, its collective departure from a rational world of verifiable fact.

These idiots, who promise to recapture lost glory and power, do not create. They only destroy. They accelerate the collapse. Limited in intellectual ability, lacking any moral compass, grossly incompetent and filled with rage at established elites who they see as having slighted and rejected them, they remake the world into a playground for grifters, con artists and megalomaniacs. They make war on universities, banish scientific research, peddle quack theories about vaccines as a pretext to expand mass surveillance and data sharing, strip legal residents of their rights and empower armies of goons, which is what the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become, to spread fear and ensure passivity. Reality, whether the climate crisis or the immiseration of the working class, does not impinge on their fantasies. The worse it gets, the more idiotic they become.

Hannah Arendt blames a society that willingly embraces radical evil on this collective “thoughtlessness.” Desperate to escape from the stagnation, where they and their children are trapped, hopeless and in despair, a betrayed population is conditioned to exploit everyone around them in a desperate scramble to advance. People are objects to be used, mirroring the cruelty inflicted by the ruling class.

A society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as Voegelin points out, celebrates the morally degenerate, those who are cunning, manipulative, deceitful and violent. In an open, democratic society, these attributes are despised and criminalized. Those who exhibit them are condemned as stupid; “a man [or woman] who behaves in this way,” Voegelin notes, “will be socially boycotted.” But the social, cultural and moral norms in a diseased society are inverted. The attributes that sustain an open society — a concern for the common good, honesty, trust and self-sacrifice — are ridiculed. They are detrimental to existence in a diseased society.

When a society, as Plato notes, abandons the common good, it always unleashes amoral lusts — violence, greed and sexual exploitation — and fosters magical thinking, the focus of my book “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”

The only thing these dying regimes do well is spectacle. These bread and circus acts — like Trump’s $40 million Army parade to be held on his birthday on June 14 — keep a distressed population entertained.

The Disneyfication of America, the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes, the land where everything is possible, is peddled to mask the cruelty of economic stagnation and social inequality. The population is conditioned by mass culture, dominated by sexual commodification, banal and mindless entertainment and graphic depictions of violence, to blame itself for failure.

Søren Kierkegaard in “The Present Age” warns that the modern state seeks to eradicate conscience and shape and manipulate individuals into a pliable and indoctrinated “public.” This public is not real. It is, as Kierkegaard writes, a “monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage.” In short, we became part of a herd, “unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization — and yet are held together as a whole.” Those who question the public, those who denounce the corruption of the ruling class, are dismissed as dreamers, freaks or traitors. But only they, according to the Greek definition of the polis, can be considered citizens.

Thomas Paine writes that a despotic government is a fungus that grows out of a corrupt civil society. This is what happened to past societies. It is what happened to us.

It is tempting to personalize the decay, as if ridding ourselves of Trump will return us to sanity and sobriety. But the rot and corruption has ruined all of our democratic institutions, which function in form, not in content. The consent of the governed is a cruel joke. Congress is a club on the take from billionaires and corporations. The courts are appendages of corporations and the rich. The press is an echo chamber of the elites, some of whom do not like Trump, but none of whom advocate the social and political reforms that could save us from despotism. It is about how we dress up despotism, not despotism itself.

The historian Ramsay MacMullen, in “Corruption and the Decline of Rome,” writes that what destroyed the Roman Empire was “the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection.” Power became about enriching private interests. This misdirection renders government powerless, at least as an institution that can address the needs and protect the rights of the citizenry. Our government, in this sense, is powerless. It is a tool of corporations, banks, the war industry and oligarchs. It cannibalizes itself to funnel wealth upwards.

“[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness,” Edward Gibbon writes. “Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”

The Roman emperor Commodus, like Trump, was entranced with his own vanity. He commissioned statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He fancied himself a star of the arena, staging gladiatorial contests where he was crowned the victor and killing lions with a bow and arrow. The empire — he renamed Rome the Colonia Commodiana (Colony of Commodus) — was a vehicle to satiate his bottomless narcissism and lust for wealth. He sold public offices the way Trump sells pardons and favors to those who invest in his cryptocurrencies or donate to his inauguration committee or presidential library.

Finally, the emperor’s advisors arranged to have him strangled to death in his bath by a professional wrestler after he announced that he would assume the consulship dressed as a gladiator. But his assassination did nothing to halt the decline. Commodus was replaced by the reformer Pertinax who was assassinated three months later. The Praetorian Guards auctioned off the office of emperor. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted 66 days. There would be five emperors in A.D. 193, the year after the assassination of Commodus.

Like the late Roman Empire, our republic is dead.

Our constitutional rights — due process, habeas corpus, privacy, freedom from exploitation, fair elections and dissent — have been taken from us by judicial and legislative fiat. These rights exist only in name. The vast disconnect between the purported values of our faux democracy and reality means our political discourse, the words we use to describe ourselves and our political system, are absurd.

Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940 amid the rise of European fascism and looming world war:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Our decay, our illiteracy and collective retreat from reality, was long in the making. The steady erosion of our rights, especially our rights as voters, the transformation of the organs of state into tools of exploitation, the immiseration of the working poor and middle class, the lies that saturate our airwaves, the degrading of public education, the endless and futile wars, the staggering public debt, the collapse of our physical infrastructure, mirror the last days of all empires.

Trump the pyromaniac entertains us as we go down.

Please go here for the original article: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-rule-of-idiots