History Repeats

Will the American public have an uprising?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you think the American public will have an uprising against their government if their freedoms begin to get stripped away?”

I believe this is a game of Jenga… the more protections their Project 2025 strips away from the people, the closer all the shenanigans push the artifice of civilized society toward a complete collapse.

If Trump’s team succeeds in completely dismantling the social safety net while the cost of living skyrockets and people start losing their homes and livelihoods by the hundreds of thousands in the middle of a measles pandemic (that’s already at an outbreak level) coupled with an out of control bird flu outbreak that starts killing people by the thousands, then people will reach their breaking point.

So far, the American people have demonstrated a remarkable capacity for adjusting to gruesome realities without being moved into action. Why Americans haven’t gone into mass riots over their children getting gunned down in their schools, not once or twice, but repeatedly is a friggin’ mystery.

The breaking point will occur when people become more afraid of the status quo than of changing from the familiar and embracing the unknown. All that’s required is for the right conditions to light the right match that burns the right pile of kindling blown by the right breeze into a widespread conflagration.

Something will eventually break the inertia. It will be relatively small and generally innocuous on any other day. Still, one day, when the conditions are ripe for a perfect storm, one tiny spark will become a raging wildfire before anyone can catch their breath and realize what happened.

Why fascism always appears in economically struggling countries.

Freikorps members flying the flag of the German Empire during the Kapp Putsch, Munich, 1920.

When people suffer from economic struggles, particularly over a prolonged period, they become desperate for someone to step up to the plate and offer solutions they cannot devise for themselves. People become conditioned through desperation for a strong leader to take charge and “lead the way to prosperity.”

Desperation causes people to lose perspective, while critical thinking skills suffer from a need to quell the pain. Anyone who can convincingly present themselves as a saviour will be welcomed with open arms.

Even though the solutions to economic problems may be obvious, they’re also too far out of reach of hope to implement them.

In today’s world, we are dominated by a handful of wealthy people who control all our systems with deaf ears to the cries of the suffering. Most of their focus is on their well-being, fortunes, and plans for their futures and legacies. The rest of us matter only insofar as we can be useful to them.

As our economies have become global and our economic infrastructures have become multinational entities, we have lost our communities.

Only a few decades ago, our communities thrived by our connectedness to each other.

We have lost that, while those who have been the greatest beneficiaries of a global economy have lost their sense of community attachment because the entire globe is their playground.

The plutocrats among us who are most responsible for the economic hardships suffered by millions are entirely due to their wins at the expense of the millions suffering today. Their goal has never been to raise humanity out of poverty, even though that has been the promise of capitalism.

They have their armies of servants at their disposal to secure themselves against resistance and to continue reshaping the world into their image. They are perceived as being too far beyond the reach of laws to allow the little people any sense of hope for justice.

Anyone who can present themselves as a leader capable of alleviating their suffering is welcomed with a total investment of all their hopes and dreams, while a widespread perception of one capable of rising to that need is one from among the untouchable class. That’s why someone like Donald Trump can succeed in assuming control of an entire party through a cult level of worship.

The trouble is that leaders who claim to be their solution also demand their unquestioning loyalty and obedience. That’s the key which opens the door to fascism because the only way for a single leader to wield enough power is to align themselves with the existing status quo of power.

Donald Trump — “Nobody know the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”