It is the most obvious take that the Trump administration is both unconcerned with, and incapable of, actual governance. The agenda and the incompetence that comes with a group pathologically unable to think of anything other than their own interests, whose only collective compulsion is running up the scoreboard on their delusional metrics of imagined self worth at the expense of reality itself is well documented and cannot be ignored.
But while this is the apotheosis of the inherent narcissism at the heart of both the Right and Capitalism as a system, the reasons why the Right can never govern anywhere, at any point, is more complex than the idiot reduction to toxic personal compulsions that is fascism. So let’s go through some core actionable policies of the Right, and see why they conflict directly with any attempt at real governance.
At their most basic, governments across human history are the expression of collective will in order to solve problems that affect the general populace, and demand more than individual resources to tackle. They are the agents of our collective responsibility to survival, each other, and the community at large. I’m sure this sounds pithy, but this is the actual reason why collective action – hominids’ adaptive superpower – has kept us in the evolution game for hundreds of thousands of years. The power of friendship. Team work making the dream work. We are not evolved to live as the idealized rugged individualists the Right would have you believe we are. Every truly great advance in human history has come through necessity driving collective action. Even da Vinci needed patrons, resources, staff, infrastructure, people making paints, paper, canvases, hammers, etc.
Everything is part of a larger system that demands agreements that are universally agreed to, with some type of enforcement. Now, this sounds a lot like the Libertarian ideal of “government exists solely to enforce contracts”, but it’s just the core idea, not the expressed implementation. Participation in the health and management of the collective is the implicit responsibility of every member of that system. We generally do that through taxes, but it has taken myriad forms throughout history, from military conscription to collective farming, mandatory public service to terms of community participation. Even in the most repressive, regressive forms of governance, these are still basic tenets of any cooperative civilizations, whether empires of conquest or communal utopias.
This brings us to the first barrier the Right has to effective, positive governance. They hate effective, positive governance.
The Right is inherently hierarchical, and they want the power to reinforce and protect their place in that hierarchy. They want control to be out of the hands of the population, so that their imagined supremacy can be exerted through force, resource control, and economic or cultural dominance. This is the fuedal system in a nutshell, where generations of the children of violent psychopaths who murdered anyone in their way draped themselves in the mantle of Divine Right, which bears a striking resemblance to American Prosperity Gospel today – acquisition and dominance are proof of God’s favor, ergo, proof that God Himself bestows the right to rule. This idealized, delusional vision of supremacy is as relevant to Elon “Mass Murderer” Musk and Leonard Leo as it is to the dynasties of the inbred royals of Europe.
When we look at the leveraged power of the Right, we see three major pillars of power: economic, cultural, and religious. None of these are democratic, all are hierarchical, and all resist State power to limit, even in the most toxic or dangerous extremes. The ideological ideas of economic deregulation, cultural and religious freedom, and the diminishing of State power support this feudal view of inherent superiority of the Epstein class. Deregulated markets make them rich, and they spend that money on media and propaganda that enforces and collates their cultural and religious power. Again, worked for the Crusader Kings as well as it does for Republicans. Government is nothing but interference in their wielding of outsized and unfair power.
The second barrier to effective, positive governance is related: the only role government does have is to increase their wealth and power.
This is most clearly seen in their support of “free market” economics, a toxic wasteland of bad ideas so disastrous it would be hilarious if it weren’t so damaging. Imagine losing your house because some other dipshit believed in ghosts. That how fucking stupid this idea is. We’ve covered this ad nauseam, so I won’t reiterate anything except to point out that every time these idiots get a hold of the economy, they crash it. But this is also why their framing of what “freedom” is remains a patchwork of tunnel visioned interests, and not a larger framework. They want rights for themselves, and oppression for everyone else. In Jefferson Cowie’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Freedom”s Dominion: A Saga Of White Resistance To Federal Power“, numerous examples are given that lay bare the “rights for me, none for thee” framing of the Constitution, a document and ideal that the Right in the US supposedly reveres, but absolutely fucks in the ass every chance they can to forward their agenda. The Roberts Court is literally the most corrupt and illegitimate SCOTUS in our history, with such obviously partisan decisions made by the Conservative majority – the Simp Six – that the basic framework of rule of law has been all but destroyed by their craven kowtowing to the Epstein class.
The only agenda the Right has is to remove any and all impediments to their acquisition of power and wealth. It’s important to realize that this includes the working and professional class Conservatives willing to trade cultural and religious identity supremacy for the consequences of Right Wing rule. These are not brainwashed serfs, these are people with an emotional need to feel the supremacy in their own imagined hierarchies, as important to them as the larger hierarchy is to the apex predators. They aren’t divided by the Right Wing propaganda, they are validated in their hierarchical identities by Right Wing propaganda.
They were addicted to “pwning the Libs” long before Trump. They were Right Wing because of the addiction to hierarchy, not the other way around. The cultural and religious hierarchical systems in place where the Right controls those systems grow people who are groomed to develop an externalized, idealized identity based on some kind of supremacy, whether being a cool kid at school, one of God’s perfect angels at church, or other lionized groups – law enforcement and the military come to mind, the feeling of “heroism”, even if all you do all day is murder non-whites for fun.
ICE is the perfect storm of this. Loser shitbags desperate to feel the power of superiority and the validating cruelty of performing their supremacy in the hierarchy. That some many of the Right Wing terror gangs have always been military is no accident – what’s a more hierarchical system than the military? The idealized, external, delusional identity of a Patriot Herotm sure makes up for being a traumatized, manufactured psychopath cast out of the one place they felt they belonged into a world that doesn’t care about them enough to fully fund the VA, much less ease their transition back to civilian life. There’s a reason why so many veterans are unhoused, struggling with mental health and substance abuse issues, with a shockingly high suicide rate, exceeded only by their rates of domestic violence and assault charges.
The real solution to this is to provide far greater services to military personnel after discharge or retirement, to make sure that general health care, mental health care, job training/further education along with cost of living grants and transitional housing with a focus on reintegration to civilian life are available, and utilized to make sure that every soldier becomes a positive, healthy, contributing member of society, with both te economic and emotional skills to be successful. That’s what real governance looks like.
Giving them a furtherance of a toxic, murderous, racist identity so that they’ll vote to lower your taxes if it means they can terrorize literally anyone in the streets is fucking diabolical. But that’s exactly what the Right does. ICE and ISIS serve the exact same purpose. Hierarchical power. Just because people are on the lower rungs doesn’t mean they don’t get huge emotional utility from not being on the bottom.
The third barrier is the culmination of these, really: all their ideas are dogshit, because they refuse to help anyone but themselves.
I have probably 20 or so books written by Ph.Ds in Economics that completely dismantle Right Wing economics. You can read my own writings on the subject after this. No one takes “free market” capitalism seriously, they just leverage it to get government out of their way. But Capitalism is just feudalism that concentrates wealth the same way Kings concentrate power. The most efficient form of market entity is monopoly. That’s inarguable. Monopolies not in the public interest are inexorably extractive. Capital doesn’t flow to the most innovative, it flows to the most profitable. So instead of cancer research to save children, we have tax cuts for the Epstein class. The public good simply isn’t profitable, and there’s no real emotional utility in benevolence that isn’t completely eaten by hierarchical cruelty. Why have public utilities when Enron can joke about freezing little old ladies to death as they cook the books to shove handfulls of cash into their pockets from people trying to keep the lights on?
Capitalism can never work for the public good. Policy that transfers responsibility from government to the “free market” will never, ever, ever solve a single fucking problem ever. And don’t get me started on religion – how many churches are there in the US? Between 350,000 and 400,000, apparently. How many unhoused folks? About 771,000 according to this. Do that math. Do it in your head, cuz it’s easy. If private interests and charity solved this problem, literally everyone would be ok with it. But they don’t. Why? Because they don’t have to, and that’s the point.
Look, these are really just a few ingredients in the toxic stew that is Right Wing ideology, but the basic idea is there: not only do they not fix any of our social issues, they depend on them to perpetuate the system of acquiring wealth, power, and emotional identitarian supremacy upon which their entire sense of self rests. They cannot govern, because the very idea of governance is anathema to the project. They will only ever use government to enforce the oppression that strengthens their positions in the hierarchy. They will never use government to make a single person’s life easier outside of the Epstein class.
The global Right is both unwilling and functionally incapable of governance, and no one should ever vote for them again, or give them power, anywhere, ever. They will make any promise they can to get those desperate for change to give them power, but they will never, ever help you. And that’s as true in some Cro-Magnon tribal group where Thagg convinced the hunters that they could just keep all the mammoth meat unless everyone else bowed to them, and then they all starved to death because no one wanted to go hunting when they could get their furry feet rubbed, as it is today as the dumbest, most sociopathic motherfuckers on the planet speedrun country after country into genocidal fascism.
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