Empires rise and fall throughout history: the Romans, the Mongols, the British and now, the Americans.
It was a good run while it lasted; we put half of the western hemisphere under our boot, roared through the 1920s and lost it all, then came out of World War II to build the greatest economy the world had ever seen. Ever since the 1980s, we have been on a slow decline into oblivion.
The rise of the moral majority and the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s led to a hyper-individualistic look at society paired with religious overtones and neoliberal policies. In this 40-year period of time, the socioeconomic standing of your average American has deteriorated so deeply that millennials and zoomers are having a fundamentally different experience with social benchmarks like homeownership and family goals.
History
The authoritarian tendencies of the capitalist class were quelled for merely a moment. They created one of the single most financially oppressive systems in American history during the Gilded Age, running sweatshops, making poor men, women and children their wage-slaves. A prominent feature of the U.S. economy at the time was numerous tariffs and isolationism. U.S. foreign policy featured continuations in the exercise of imperial authority throughout our hemisphere, with the Monroe Doctrine at the forefront.
During this time: the U.S. annexed the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War and Hawaii in 1898; facilitated the secession of Panama from Colombia and the occupation of the Panama Canal zone with the Hay-Bunua-Varilla Treaty of 1903; created the Republic of Cuba as a protectorate state giving the U.S. the ability of direct intervention in the Cuban government in 1903 via the Platt Amendment and started a long term campaign in Central America of overthrowing governments in a period that would later be known as the Banana Wars.
President Donald Trump fawns over William McKinley, whom he says is his favorite president in U.S. history and was the leading figure in most of these policies. McKinley oversaw the expansion of U.S. imperialism and the height of Jim Crow; a bleak outlook for modern America when Trump’s presidential idol was objectively bad for everyone who was not rich or white. In James Whitman’s book “Hitler’s American Model,” he dives into the Third Reich’s fascination with Jim Crow laws that systematically subjugated people of color in the U.S. as second-class citizens. The America that Trump wants to return to is not the one of “Happy Days,” but one where American apartheid was in its perfect form.
The Fourth Reich
The Trump regime is actively trying to drive the U.S. into a ditch of epic proportions; there is no other way to describe it; unless they somehow think their actions will work, which is terrifying in itself. He has been applying tariffs to countries, especially our most vital trading partners, China and the European Union, using tariffs as a bludgeon to get what he wants. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the current shift in global paradigm a “rupture,” not a “transition.” The Danish pension fund AkademikerPension has said it will be selling all of its $100 million in U.S. Treasury securities, citing fiscal mismanagement by the U.S. This is while the U.S. dollar has lost 10% of its valuation in exchange markets since Trump was re-elected.
My point is this: over the past year of the second term of the Trump regime, he has taken openly imperialist and fascistic policy stances. When MAGA ran on making America great again, I genuinely think that while some were talking about the economic opportunities that were had in the post-WWII generations, it has become inextricably clear that whoever is still in the movement is supporting fascism and a restoration of American apartheid.
Trump has openly remarked about making Canada the 51st state, has called Carney “governor” instead of prime minister on multiple occasions and is currently trying to find a way to acquire Greenland. He is utilizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to brutalize citizens which has led to the death of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. He ordered the illegal strikes on boats in the Caribbean, leading up to the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, openly stating it was to take their natural resources. Regime officials have been openly citing the Monroe Doctrine and arguing that America First means the whole western hemisphere now.
It seems as though Trump is the culmination of 40 years of neoliberal and corporatist policy into a neofascist dumpster fire and seems to fit quite nicely in that awful little box. Benito Mussolini viewed fascism as a marriage between the state and business; corporations and government working together for imperial ends.
In the post-Reagan Revolution, U.S. corporations have slowly but steadily become more and more intertwined with government interests. There has been a loosening of campaign finance law that makes it incredibly easy for corporations to make large donations to political campaigns. Growing have been these artificial market bubbles that have only gone to benefit the wealthy and elite, increasingly building our economy as a house of cards. Soon, that bubble is going to pop and the corporate vultures will be able to pick the carcass of America clean. But we would not even have the privilege of being wage-slaves in this new Gilded Age, as artificial intelligence (AI) is being developed to take people’s jobs; nearly 35% of all entry-level jobs have already been replaced with AI, according to CNBC.
That leaves us in our current state of being, a blossoming neofascist pariah state. ICE has become the new Gestapo, trading in the Hugo Boss uniforms for tactical gear, balaclavas and cell phones to record their crimes in 4K. All so Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem can tell us to not believe our lying eyes.
Greenland has become the new Sudetenland, a larger part of Trump’s territorial ambitions to intimidate those into acquiescing. NATO allies have recently stationed troops on the island, which is a Danish territory, to dissuade the U.S. from using military action that has been threatened and actively endangering our strongest military alliance.
It seems as though the days of treating Trump like a Make-A-Wish kid are over. Global leaders are standing up to Trump and drawing red lines for him to mind, because it seems there are some recurring themes and lessons from nearly a century ago. The most important lesson seems to be that while Trump may be echoing Hitler and building off of Jim Crow America, nobody wants to be the next Neville Chamberlain in this tirade, and if that means letting the U.S. implode, then so be it.
Timothy Fitzpatrick can be contacted at
tfitzpatrick@kscequinox.com
